Toronto's suburbs have often been dismissed as bland and banal. A closer look, however, reveals a diverse, complex landscape whose rapid changes have profound implications for the metropolis as a whole.
"In contrast to the central city—a bastion of progressive urbanism which, under the intellectual and moral guidance of Jane Jacobs, avoided the meat ax of modern postwar urban renewal," write geographers Jean-Paul Addie and Rob Fiedler, "Toronto’s suburbs have tended to be dismissed in pejorative terms as gray, flat sprawl."
This view drastically oversimplifies life outside of the downtown core, however. From the creation of dense satellite downtowns to shifting immigrant settlement patterns, dramatic changes are transforming the city's suburbs and leading to new questions about their relationship to Toronto as a whole.
The authors present six case studies of suburban sites that illustrate how some of these issues are playing out.
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