My first glimpse of Toronto was from an airplane window. My family had made the bold decision to leave Mother England to make a new start and we chose Toronto for our fresh beginning. Even at the tender age of seven, I could see stark differences between my newly adopted home and the city of London, where I had lived my first few tender years. Toronto did not seem like a real city. In the 1960s it was a sprawling low-density smear of detached houses, vacant fields and the occasional tall building. As we descended to an altitude where I could read the signs, I thought it curious that the country that I had learned in primary school to call the Dominion of Canada had big neon reminders of its political state (I had yet to learn of the then ubiquitous Dominion’s grocery store chain). One might argue that my early misconception was apocryphal: Toronto, perhaps more than any other city I have known or lived in, has had a long obsession with its status on the world stage of cities...
Colin Ellard is a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, where he focuses on how the organization and appearance of natural and built spaces affect movement, wayfinding, emotion and physiology. He wrote Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life (Bellevue Literary Press, 2015). Visit colinellard.com.
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