Toronto provides good opportunities to explore a variety of themes in urban environmental history: sanitation problems, the search for technological solutions (through water supply and waste treatment systems) and the formation of the concept of municipal government, the larger agenda of reshaping nature to conform to the city, and evolving ideas, mainly based on experience elsewhere, about how to build cities: from Ebenezer Howard's "Garden Cities" of a century ago, to the formation of the postwar suburban ideal, debates about urban highways, and the influence of Jane Jacobs.
In short, in this class at least, the city became an arena for the interplay between material environmental conditions, economic and political interests, and various "visions" of future urban environments. The class also included study of several primary sources illustrating particular episodes in this history.
And wherever possible I made connections to this week's readings:
Ken Cruikshank & Nancy B. Bouchier, �Blighted Areas and Obnoxious Industries: Constructing Environmental Inequality on an Industrial Waterfront, Hamilton, Ontario, 1890-1960,� Environmental History, 2004, 9: 464-496
Mich�le Dagenais, �The Urbanization of Nature: Water Networks and Green Spaces in Montreal,� in Method & Meaning in Canadian Environmental History (2008), pp. 216-235.
Jay Young, "Filled with Nature: Exploring the Environmental History of Downtown Toronto," in: Sandberg et al., eds., Urban Explorations: Environmental Histories of the Toronto Region (L. R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History, 2013), pp. 19-39
H. V. Nelles, �How Did Calgary Get Its River Parks?� Urban History Review, 34(1), 2005: 28-45.
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