Can a single building make a city? Perhaps for Toronto it is true. Christopher Armstrong, in Civic Symbol: Creating Toronto’s New City Hall 1952–1966, provides the evidence that the creation of New City Hall was the moment modern Toronto was born. He tells a fascinating story of how the Toronto of the 1950s—a reliably dull provincial city of no importance lost in the middle of a secondary country—transformed itself into a global…
Joe Berridge
Joe Berridge is a partner at Urban Strategies Inc. and the Bousfield Distinguished Visitor in the Program in Planning at the University of Toronto.
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Joe Berridge
Two new academic books about Toronto, one about the history of its waterfront, the other its treatment in literature, help explain in very different ways both the cacophony of daily headlines in this impossible city and our endlessly conflicted emotions about its qualities. And perhaps they give part of an answer to the more fundamental problem any citizen of Toronto tussles with every day: how is it possible that such an…