Dozens of major cities around the world have launched large-scale waterfront redevelopment projects over the past fifty years. Absent from this list of noteworthy achievements, however, is Toronto, a case of grand ambitions gone horribly awry. Despite three extensive revitalization plans in the second half of the 20th century, Toronto’s central waterfront, an area roughly double the city’s central business district, has remained mired in political gridlock for decades. The purpose of this dissertation is to explain why this came to pass. Informed by extensive archival and interview research, as well as geospatial data analyzed using Geographic Information Systems software, the thesis demonstrates that above and beyond political challenges typical of any major urban redevelopment project, in Toronto, issues of land ownership — specifically, public land ownership — were pivotal in defining the scope and pace of waterfront planning and implementation. Few, if any, waterfront redevelopment projects around the world have been attempted amidst the same degree of public land ownership and jurisdictional fragmentation as that which plagued implementation efforts in Toronto. From 1961-1998, no less than 81% of all land in the central waterfront was owned by one public body or another, dispersed across a patchwork of public agencies, corporations, and special purpose authorities nestled within multiple levels of government. Such fragmentation, specifically across public bodies, added a layer of complexity to the existing intergovernmental dynamic that effectively crippled implementation efforts. It created a “joint-decision trap” impervious to conventional resolution via bargaining, problem solving, or unilateral action. This tangled political history poses a considerable challenge to conventional liberal, structuralist, and regime-based theories of urban politics derived from US experiences. It also highlights the limits of conventional implementation theory in the study of urban development, and calls into question longstanding interpretations of federal-provincial-municipal relations and multilevel governance in Canada.

Dozens of major cities around the world have launched large-scale waterfront redevelopment projects over the past fifty years. Absent from this list of noteworthy achievements, however, is Toronto, a case of grand ambitions gone horribly awry. Despite three extensive revitalization plans in the second half of the 20th century, Toronto’s central waterfront, an area roughly double the city’s central business district, has remained mired in political gridlock for decades. The purpose of this dissertation is to explain why this came to pass. Informed by extensive archival and interview research, as well as geospatial data analyzed using Geographic Information Systems software, the thesis demonstrates that above and beyond political challenges typical of any major urban redevelopment project, in Toronto, issues of land ownership — specifically, public land ownership — were pivotal in defining the scope and pace of waterfront planning and implementation. Few, if any, waterfront redevelopment projects around the world have been attempted amidst the same degree of public land ownership and jurisdictional fragmentation as that which plagued implementation efforts in Toronto. From 1961-1998, no less than 81% of all land in the central waterfront was owned by one public body or another, dispersed across a patchwork of public agencies, corporations, and special purpose authorities nestled within multiple levels of government. Such fragmentation, specifically across public bodies, added a layer of complexity to the existing intergovernmental dynamic that effectively crippled implementation efforts. It created a “joint-decision trap” impervious to conventional resolution via bargaining, problem solving, or unilateral action. This tangled political history poses a considerable challenge to conventional liberal, structuralist, and regime-based theories of urban politics derived from US experiences. It also highlights the limits of conventional implementation theory in the study of urban development, and calls into question longstanding interpretations of federal-provincial-municipal relations and multilevel governance in Canada.