This dissertation explores human interactions with Toronto’s Don River Valley from the late eighteenth century to the present, focusing on the period of intense urbanization and industrialization between 1880 and 1940. Its concentration on the urban fringe generates new perspectives on the social and environmental consequences of urban development. From its position on the margins, the Don performed vital functions for the urban economy as a provider of raw materials and a sink for wastes. Insights derived from the intersections between social and environmental history are at the heart of this project. The dissertation begins by documenting the industrial history of the river and its transformation from a central provider in the lives of early Toronto residents to a polluted periphery in the latter half of the nineteenth century. An analysis of the valley’s related function as a repository for human “undesirables” reveals connections between the processes that identified certain individuals as deficient “others” and similar imperatives at work in classifying difficult or unpredictable environments as “waste spaces.” Efforts to “reclaim” and improve the river are the subject of the remaining chapters. A series of initiatives between 1870 and 1930 aimed at reconfiguring the lower Don as an efficient corridor for transportation and industrial development reveal in their shortcomings and unintended consequences a failure to accommodate dynamic and often unpredictable ecological processes. Reclamations of a different kind are explored in the conservation movement of the twentieth century, through which the valley emerges as a valuable public amenity. The dissertation concludes by investigating how the valley’s history informs current plans to “renaturalize” the river mouth. Throughout, the Don functions as an autonomous and causal force in the city’s history. On this small river on the urban fringe, nature and society worked in mutually constitutive ways to shape and reshape the metropolis.

The diasporic resources and transnational flows of the Black diaspora have increasingly been of concern to scholars. However, the making of the Black diaspora in Canada has often been overlooked, and the use of sport to connect migrants to the homeland has been virtually ignored. This study uses African, Black and Caribbean diaspora lenses to examine the ways that first generation Caribbean-Canadians use cricket to maintain their association with people, places, spaces, and memories of home. In this multi-sited ethnography I examine a group I call the Mavericks Cricket and Social Club (MCSC), an assembly of first generation migrants from the Anglo-Caribbean. My objective to “follow the people” took me to parties, fundraising dances, banquets, and cricket games throughout the Greater Toronto Area on weekends from early May to late September in 2008 and 2009. I also traveled with approximately 30 MCSC members to observe and participate in tours and tournaments in Barbados, England, and St. Lucia and conducted 29 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with male players and male and female supporters. I found that the Caribbean diaspora is maintained through liming (hanging out) at cricket matches and social events. Speaking in their native Patois language, eating traditional Caribbean foods, and consuming alcohol are significant means of creating spaces in which Caribbean-Canadians can network with other members of the diaspora. Furthermore, diasporas are preserved through return visits, not only to their nations of origin, but to a more broadly defined homeland, found in other Caribbean countries, England, the United States and elsewhere in Canada. This study shows that while diasporas may form a unified communitas they also reinforce class, gender, nation and ethnicity hierarchies and exclusions in diasporic spaces. For example, women and Indo-Caribbeans are mainly absent from or marginalized at the cricket grounds, which celebrates a masculine, Afro-Caribbean culture. Corporeal practices such as sports, and their related social activities, can be deployed as diasporic resources that create a sense of deterritorialized community for first generation Caribbean migrants.

The Canadian firm of Jacques & Hay was in business for fifty years, during which the company, if The Globe (Toronto) is to be believed, furnished the Province of Canada. This was a stunning and largely undocumented success. Jacques & Hay was one of the largest employers in the province and dominated the cabinet-making trade from 1835 to 1885. In 1871, Jacques & Hay employed 430 men and 50 women in a vertically-integrated operation that included a sawmill, two factories and a showroom. Jacques & Hay produced abundant furniture at reasonable prices. The availability of such household furnishings greatly enhanced domestic life in nineteenth-century Canada, providing scope for a more elaborate social life and allowing more people to achieve a greater sense of comfort and decency in their living arrangements.

This case study explores public order policing at the Vancouver Olympics and G20 Summit in Toronto. The source material is drawn from media coverage of these events. These cases are analyzed using prior theoretical works in order policing in order to achieve two research goals: to discover which theory best explains police actions and the extent of and reasons explaining the involvement of other government agencies in securing protest events in Canada. Using pattern matching methodology, it was found that no one particular theory is best at explaining events at the two cases, rather components of various theories provided the most useful insight. The components of these theories that need to be amalgamated through analytic induction are: the use of intelligence functions; police flexibility; as well as paramilitarization tactics. Finally, it was found that there was a noticeable presence and integration of other government agencies involved in securing both events.

This thesis examines the problems of building on Toronto’s main streets. These arterial mixed-use corridors that define much of the public face of the city are the subject of ongoing residential intensification efforts through the Official Plan policies of the City of Toronto. The form that this new development takes can either reinforce and improve existing streetscapes and housing stock, or it might –as is already happening– replace the long-established vital urban patterns of main streets with very different, less versatile, and less diverse building forms with a diminished standard of both urban and interior living space. Part I considers main streets at the urban scale, while Part II is a discussion of housing quality and architectural aims that informs a series of proposed prototypical building designs to be located on a site on Queen Street West as an example of site conditions found on main streets in a variety of locations throughout the city. To understand the urban implications of main street building, this study looks at the specific historical factors that have shaped Toronto’s main streets, and looks at why they continue to have value and have become a focus for intensification today. It revisits key episodes in Toronto’s redevelopment planning over the last four decades, particularly the St. Lawrence Neighborhood Plan, the Ataratiri Plan, and the Housing on Toronto’s Main Streets Initiative. The precedent historical research points to the need for small increments of development on main streets in order to maintain the economic, social, and visual diversity that have made them such a vital and dynamic component of the city in the past. This scale of development calls for new building types to respond to the very particular site conditions of main streets. Modern building types that are typically used in these situations are ill suited to respond to these conditions, provide a limited range of unit types, and are leading to compromises of urban and interior spatial quality when applied to these sites. The architectural discussion centers on the observation that traditional main street lot patterns, despite inherent rigidity and rationality, have nonetheless proven to be a functionally flexible urban structure that has accommodated and encouraged a remarkable diversity of uses, architectural forms, and individual interpretations over time. Comparable complexity and diversity of spatial qualities can be found in a variety of architectural design approaches, including those of Adolf Loos’ ‘Raumplan’, Rudolf Schindler’s ‘Space Architecture’, or Herman Hertzberger’s concept of ‘Polyvalent Form’. The spaces created by these architects are an architectural analogue of the dynamic, richly varied urban characteristics of Toronto’s existing main streets. Both create the opportunities for individual expression and continually varied spatial experience that better reflects the complexity of both urban and domestic life. These precedents of architectural form -imbued with qualities of multiplicity, heterogeneity and reinterpretability- propose a counterpoint to the standard of functionally rigid, spatially limited and typologically predictable buildings and living spaces currently available. The proposed building designs are intended to widen the options for dwelling within the city, while offering an update and intensification of main streets that reinforces rather than replaces desirable existing urban patterns.

The intensification of existing urban areas has become a common strategy used by planners to combat the negative aspects associated with unrestrained urban growth. This paper investigates the cultural and socio-economic characteristics of higher density households and residents of both owned and rented tenures in the Greater Toronto Area’s three constituent urban zones, the central city, the inner suburbs and the outer suburbs, between 2001 and 2006. Canada census data at the dissemination area level is used to produce descriptive statistics for the 100 variables included in the analysis. Although research relating to higher density housing is abundant, the consideration and affirmation of higher density housing sub-markets in the Greater Toronto Area based on location and tenure makes this study unique. It becomes clear that the diversity of the higher density housing market must be regarded during the planning process. The findings will be useful to planners for the purposes of infrastructure planning, community planning and aid in the implementation of urban intensification strategies in the Greater Toronto Area.

Canadian society is facing a marked demographic shift as the baby boom generation ages. By 2031 almost 25 percent of Canadians will be over sixty-five; many of those will be north of eighty and the oldest boomers will be turning eighty-five. One person in four will be a senior. The lack of acceptable intermediate solutions between independence and institutionalization has been pointed out as one of the significant problems facing elderly persons; traditional ‘institutional’ care which keeps older people apart and medicalizes old age, is no longer desirable. Likewise, the ‘golden ghettoes’ model may be appealing to those who can afford it but does not contribute to producing diverse, inclusive urban places. This thesis is an exploration of an alternative strategy. It investigates how architecture can provide a platform for social connection in a residential environment that allows in equal measure both independence without isolation, and informal community with safety and security. The design proposal establishes five architectural strategies which address the fundamental spatial implications of encouraging aging-in-place. This exploration is supplemented with a cohousing strategy, providing a formal organizational tactic that encourages groups of residents to mutually support each other, strengthening social inclusion and reducing the use of formal care and support only where absolutely necessary. The methodology employed examines the mutually dependent and interactive scales of City, Neighbourhood, Building, and Dwelling in conceiving of housing for an aging population that becomes a catalyst of urban integration and community regeneration.

This thesis presents a portrait of cultural diversity filtered through a lens of memory, experience and architecture. What does diversity look like? Where do we experience diversity? How unrestrained is our experience of it? Although cultural identity is tied to both personal experience and memory, Toronto’s experience of diversity has evolved with the growth of the city. Consequently, Toronto’s cultural diversity is today experienced through a limited and problematic architectural and marketing-based framework. These frameworks make ethnicity more accessible, but also limit our experience of it. I propose to release these limitations by highlighting the frameworks within which we view our various ethnicities. These are 1) the marketing of ethnic products to consumers (specifically Loblaws Presidents Choice, No Name and Memories Of…products) and 2) architectural uniformity. I examine these issues by recounting personal experiences with my family in South Western Ontario; by conducting a typological study of Toronto’s storefront restaurants – a portrait of a city which expands on the representation of industrial landscapes made by Bernd and Hilla Becher and the study of social types made by August Sander; and through my own experience of the street food and outdoor markets of Thailand. However, to highlight such constraints did not seem enough. So I created a white, unmarked model of a typical Toronto restaurant façade (formerly a shop front.) This tabula rasa suggests the possibility for an alternative strategy by showing the limitations of the channels through which we are forcing cultural diversity. The blank shop front model brings us back to a starting point from which cultural diversity can be reconsidered.

This thesis examines the problems of building on Toronto’s main streets. These arterial mixed-use corridors that define much of the public face of the city are the subject of ongoing residential intensification efforts through the Official Plan policies of the City of Toronto. The form that this new development takes can either reinforce and improve existing streetscapes and housing stock, or it might –as is already happening– replace the long-established vital urban patterns of main streets with very different, less versatile, and less diverse building forms with a diminished standard of both urban and interior living space. Part I considers main streets at the urban scale, while Part II is a discussion of housing quality and architectural aims that informs a series of proposed prototypical building designs to be located on a site on Queen Street West as an example of site conditions found on main streets in a variety of locations throughout the city. To understand the urban implications of main street building, this study looks at the specific historical factors that have shaped Toronto’s main streets, and looks at why they continue to have value and have become a focus for intensification today. It revisits key episodes in Toronto’s redevelopment planning over the last four decades, particularly the St. Lawrence Neighborhood Plan, the Ataratiri Plan, and the Housing on Toronto’s Main Streets Initiative. The precedent historical research points to the need for small increments of development on main streets in order to maintain the economic, social, and visual diversity that have made them such a vital and dynamic component of the city in the past. This scale of development calls for new building types to respond to the very particular site conditions of main streets. Modern building types that are typically used in these situations are ill suited to respond to these conditions, provide a limited range of unit types, and are leading to compromises of urban and interior spatial quality when applied to these sites. The architectural discussion centers on the observation that traditional main street lot patterns, despite inherent rigidity and rationality, have nonetheless proven to be a functionally flexible urban structure that has accommodated and encouraged a remarkable diversity of uses, architectural forms, and individual interpretations over time. Comparable complexity and diversity of spatial qualities can be found in a variety of architectural design approaches, including those of Adolf Loos’ ‘Raumplan’, Rudolf Schindler’s ‘Space Architecture’, or Herman Hertzberger’s concept of ‘Polyvalent Form’. The spaces created by these architects are an architectural analogue of the dynamic, richly varied urban characteristics of Toronto’s existing main streets. Both create the opportunities for individual expression and continually varied spatial experience that better reflects the complexity of both urban and domestic life. These precedents of architectural form -imbued with qualities of multiplicity, heterogeneity and reinterpretability- propose a counterpoint to the standard of functionally rigid, spatially limited and typologically predictable buildings and living spaces currently available. The proposed building designs are intended to widen the options for dwelling within the city, while offering an update and intensification of main streets that reinforces rather than replaces desirable existing urban patterns.

The intensification of existing urban areas has become a common strategy used by planners to combat the negative aspects associated with unrestrained urban growth. This paper investigates the cultural and socio-economic characteristics of higher density households and residents of both owned and rented tenures in the Greater Toronto Area’s three constituent urban zones, the central city, the inner suburbs and the outer suburbs, between 2001 and 2006. Canada census data at the dissemination area level is used to produce descriptive statistics for the 100 variables included in the analysis. Although research relating to higher density housing is abundant, the consideration and affirmation of higher density housing sub-markets in the Greater Toronto Area based on location and tenure makes this study unique. It becomes clear that the diversity of the higher density housing market must be regarded during the planning process. The findings will be useful to planners for the purposes of infrastructure planning, community planning and aid in the implementation of urban intensification strategies in the Greater Toronto Area.