Planning Toronto is a comprehensive and lively exploration of how Toronto’s postwar plans came to be, who devised them, and how they shaped the city.

Paris is famous for romance. Chicago, the blues. Buenos Aires, the tango. And Toronto? Well, Canada’s largest urban centre is known for being a “city that works” – a remarkably livable metropolis for its size. In this lavishly illustrated book, Richard White reveals how urban planning contributed to Toronto becoming a functional, world-class city. Focusing on the period from 1940 to 1980, he examines how planners shaped the city and its development amid a maelstrom of local and international obstacles and influences.

Based on meticulous research of Toronto’s postwar plans and supplemented by dozens of interviews, Planning Toronto provides a comprehensive and lively explanation of how Toronto’s postwar plans – city, metropolitan, and regional – came to be, who devised them, and what impact they had. When it comes to the history of urban planning, the question may not be whether a particular plan was good or bad but whether in the end it made a difference. As White demonstrates, in Toronto’s case planning did matter – just not always as expected.

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[White’s] exhaustive account spans from the 1940s, when Torontonians embraced government-led solutions for servicing a rapidly urbanizing country, to 1980, by which time citizens were firmly entrenched at the centre of the planning process. Balancing academic rigour with readability, Planning Toronto is the definitive history of Toronto area urban planning. Teasing out remarkable nuance in some well-known events, White also pushes readers to reconsider what they already know—or don’t—about the city’s urban development in those decades.

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Planning Toronto is an extremely useful teaching tool for urban designers, planners, and administrators and for those doing more in-depth research on planning in Toronto.