Issue 2: Planning
The Inevitability of Life
March 5, 2025
Since urban planning first emerged as a discipline, in the 1950s and ’60s, a fierce debate has been waged between its practitioners and adversaries over what makes a city great. Those invested in the planning paradigm, the belief that cities should be “designed” by planners, see their discipline as the only way to ensure a city can flourish. The work planners do — rationalizing and modifying the use of space for residential, commercial, and industrial needs while building desired infrastructure — is, in their view, indispensable.
Their opponents — an eclectic collection of localists, community activists, and urban economists — believe that such “planning” achieves the precise opposite of its aims. This group argues that by deciding, from a removed vantage point, how a city should be used, planners force residents into Procrustean living patterns and prevent organic, human, modes of urban life from emerging. They artificially constrict housing supply, prevent neighbourhoods from self-organizing to support the retail and amenities they need, create a financially unsustainable reliance on city services, and enforce rigid street patterns that make travel a pain. The planners’ plans look good on paper, but in the real world, they simply distort and damage the natural solutions that would emerge to serve residents’ needs. This debate has, in the decades since, persisted unresolved: we continue to live in a world where some believe that planning will save us while others believe it will condemn us.
The truth is more nuanced than either party would have us believe. Planning matters and has a huge effect on our cities. But planners can never have the final say over how a city will evolve. Plans are subject to the same dynamic forces as everything else: the economic trends that plans were devised to respond to reverse; the political winds that favoured one kind of plan shift; second order effects arise that were impossible to predict. Planners may believe they are setting a city up for one kind of future, but given the fullness of time, we inevitably see these plans become something else. As a tool, planning can neither save nor condemn us. As the history of Toronto shows, it is just one more part of how a city evolves.
Following the Second World War, North America underwent a highway craze. The baby boom, coupled with mass production of the automobile and the beginnings of serious suburban sprawl, meant that there was suddenly huge pressure to configure cities to accommodate a commuter class aiming to travel daily to the downtown core. Toronto — a smaller and, at the time, less important city — came to this trend relatively late, but it was no exception.
In the 1950s, a new tier of municipal governance — the precursor to the later amalgamated Toronto City Council — was formed to plan major infrastructure projects that would affect the whole region. It was believed that a combined organization of this kind would be best suited to represent both the interests of the old City of Toronto and its then-suburbs: Etobicoke, North York, East York, York, and Scarborough. To meet suburban demands for easier commute times, Metro Toronto drew up a plan for a series of highways that would crisscross the city, including, among others, the Lakeshore Expressway, the Don Valley Parkway, and the Spadina Expressway.
Both the Lakeshore Expressway (later the Gardiner Expressway) and the Don Valley Parkway faced relatively few obstacles. There were only a few communities along the waterfront that would be affected by the Lakeshore Expressway, and these were mostly less affluent and less politically vocal. The Don Valley project essentially disturbed no one; the ravine meant there was no housing and no people to contend with. So the first sections of these highways were completed fast, opening in 1958 and 1961 respectively.
Following the perceived success of these projects, Metro Toronto approved the plans for the Spadina Expressway, in 1962; work began almost immediately. Unlike Lakeshore Expressway’s path, however, the proposed route for the Spadina Expressway ran directly through some of the more densely populated and wealthy residential areas in the city, including Forest Hill and the Annex. The other expressways had been mostly unopposed at the outset, but the residents in these areas had had more time to see the disruption and decrease in quality of life that ensued in the areas surrounding the new expressways, as well as following the construction of similar expressway systems in other North American cities, and they were determined to stop the development. As one notoriously vocal Torontonian, Marshall McLuhan, opined at the time: “planners treat people like hardware — they haven’t the faintest interest in the values of neighbourhood or community. Their failure to learn from the mistakes of American cities will be ours too.…The Spadina Expressway is an old hardware American dream of now dead cities and blighted communities.”
Pushback materialized through coordinated political action, petitions, and protests, with the Stop Spadina Save Our City Co-ordinating Committee as the central force. This group brought together many of Toronto’s powerful policy influencers, many of whom lived in the affected areas — including newly minted Torontonian Jane Jacobs, fresh off her work protesting similar expressway projects in New York. Her presence, along with the general prestige of many of the participants, brought an air of celebrity to the proceedings. The activity culminated in major political changes at both the municipal and provincial level. Eventually, Bill Davis officially halted plans for the expressway after he was elected to be premier of the province, in 1971.
By the time the decision was reversed, the city had already dug up a portion of the proposed route, leaving a dangling half of an expressway, today called the Allen Road, extending down from Highway 401 and ending abruptly at the then-four-lane Eglinton Avenue. The section through downtown was no more, ensuring a future for many beloved Toronto institutions, like Spadina House, the UofT Daniels Building, and the McDonald’s at Queen and Spadina. But this did not mean that the city was left unchanged. Toronto was left with a fast way to get halfway into the city from the north, a series of above-ground subway stops on islands, and one of the most painful left turns in the city (if not the world): from the Allen Road onto Eglinton. It was a result that neither the planners nor their opponents had intended — somewhere halfway between both parties’ visions for the future.
Right around the same time, a similar battle of competing visions was unfolding farther downtown. In the early 1960s, the major Canadian railways that own the lines going in and out of downtown Toronto were asked by the municipal government to relocate their tracks: the lines took up a huge quantity of prime real estate and were a significant nuisance for anyone trying to navigate the city’s core. Apart from a handful of major roads and pedestrian bridges that spanned them, the lines essentially made the entire waterfront inaccessible. Many other large waterfront cities, including Montreal and New York, faced with analogous issues, had already pursued similar moves to great success.
The railways said no. The lines were much too profitable where they stood, and the cost of shifting them would be steep. So city planners decided to go over the rail executives’ heads — literally. They developed a plan to erect a vast A-frame structure over the rail lines, one that would hold walkways, parks, and even new offices and apartment buildings.
As this plan progressed, the railways woke up to the value of the land they held and decided to propose an alternative of their own. They had realized, they said, that there was in fact a way to move the rails further out. In their stead, the companies would create a new urban paradise dubbed “Metro Centre,” complete with a new, defining landmark for the city as a cornerstone of the development — one that would not only distinguish the new development area but also solve some of the radio-communications issues that were starting to plague the city as it grew.
Today, we know that landmark as the CN Tower.
The plan that Canadian National Railway came up with was sufficient to appease the wild ambitions of Toronto’s planners. As with any project of this scope, though, it took a few years to gain momentum; crews finally broke ground in February 1973. By that time, there had already been a sea change that would end the hopes for the new downtown development the tower was intended to anchor.
In the December 1972 Toronto municipal election, the pro-development (and anti-hippie) New Democratic William Dennison was ousted in favour of the more conservative David Crombie, who had a very different agenda. Crombie’s vision for Toronto was heavily influenced by the trend for community-led urbanism, later typified by the renovated St. Lawrence Market area. His government was not roused by the bold ambitions for the dramatic new urban core of Metro Centre. In fact, he had originally argued that the height of the CN Tower should be cut down by two-thirds over the risks it posed to migratory birds.
The tower was completed, at full height, in 1976, but none of the broader views of what the railway lands could be transformed into came to life. The original plans, complete with models of the gleaming towers that were intended to adorn Metro Centre, remained in the archives, but the political alignment that had been necessary to achieve that vision was no more. The CN Tower is best known neither as the landmark anchoring a new downtown nor as a piece of communications infrastructure; its most important contribution to Toronto is symbolic: the CN Tower defines the city’s skyline, and its distinctive shape has appeared in everything from company logos to tourist T-shirts and the occasional tattoo, an instantly recognizable synecdoche.
It is, of course, impossible to know how things would have turned out if the full plans had been built. But my guess is that it is precisely building the tower without the surrounding Metro Centre development that allowed it to play this iconic role to a degree that neither supporters nor opponents could have imagined.
It was an accident that Toronto became the economic centre of Canada. For the first 200 years since Canada was colonized, that honour belonged to Montreal. When Europeans first arrived in this part of the world, they sailed up the St. Lawrence River. The island of Montreal was one of the first natural stopping points on this journey, and as a result, the city that developed there quickly became the largest and most important. In the early 1900s, even as the English-speaking parts of Canada were gaining prominence, Montreal’s position remained secure, driven in large part by the fact that it was also the country’s busiest port. Large commercial ships were unable to navigate beyond the island and farther up the St. Lawrence, so the port of Montreal was central to the Canadian economy.
This seemed poised to change by mid-century. The St. Lawrence Seaway, one of the largest canal projects ever undertaken, opened in 1954, allowing for a great deal more shipping traffic to access the Great Lakes. Toronto believed that because of this change it was set to become a new industrial hub and, to take full advantage of this anticipated future, began to build a harbour and industrial centre — what we now know as the Port Lands — in the first half of the 1900s.
Though this area seems like a natural part of the landscape, it is entirely man-made: it’s conspicuously absent from 19th and early 20th century maps of the city.
Shipping traffic in the Great Lakes did increase significantly — but this didn’t transform Toronto’s fortunes to the extent that planners had expected. Over the second half of the 20th century, most shipping into and out of Canada shifted west, as more and more goods were made in Asia and entered the country through Vancouver. At the same time, the new technology of containerization meant that ships grew even more than the designers of the St. Lawrence Seaway had planned for; most cargo vessels were unable to navigate to Toronto.
The Port Lands developments, created for this now non-existent shipping traffic, started languishing within decades of being built. Over the years, many plans were proposed for making use of the land, and there were a variety of attempts to use the space for film studios, parks, and more, but nothing came of them. The current crop of city planners has started a new project to completely transform the area — including the creation of a new urban centre on Villiers Island. There are currently many arguments about the details of this plan. Is the housing dense enough? Is the transportation sufficient? Regardless of how these debates turn out, what we can be sure of is that this man-made island is going to be transformed into an essential urban node, home to thousands of people. It is almost undoubtedly one of the largest central urban development opportunities in North America — a fate that no planner who originally built the space could have imagined.
Planners have a significant and enduring impact on the cities they work on. Their projects can carve up communities, transform transportation, define the symbolism for a city, and create new neighbourhoods out of whole cloth. However, once plans released into the world, planners inevitably lose control of them. Projects can be stopped in their tracks or modified as political conditions change, producing strange outcomes that no one asked for. Even when plans are completed exactly as intended, their impact can only be understood in the fullness of time, once the trends and conditions they were built in have run their course.
This does not mean either that planners should despair of having any impact or seek additional powers to better implement their plans. Equally it does not mean we should rejoice that planners are not as powerful as they seem or scoff at the ability of planners to get anything done. Instead, this complexity invites us to treat our planners and their plans with a little more humility and openness.
Planners do not have a crystal ball. They are participants in the unfolding of the city just as its residents are. This means that, yes, planners should plan less and be less certain of the plans they make. However, every resident needs to recognize that they do not know what the full impact of a particular set of plans will be. We should all — especially developers and community organizers — think a little bit harder about how we might be able to work with a particular plan to contribute to the flourishing of our cities.
We should leave the abstract high-level disagreement of whether the discipline of urban planning is good or bad behind. Instead, seeing the history of the first 70 years of what urban planning has achieved, and failed to achieve, should encourage us all to take both more tentative and more concrete steps to determine our city’s future. UP
