This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

All countries have distinctive urban regions, but Canadian cities especially differ from one another in culture, structure, and history. Anthony Perl, Matt Hern, and Jeffrey Kenworthy reveal that despite the peculiarities and singular traits that each city embodies, a common logic has guided the development of transportation infrastructure across the country. Big Moves analyzes how Canada's three largest urban regions - Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver - have been shaped by the interplay of globalized imperatives, aspirations, activism, investment, and local development initiatives, both historically and in a contemporary context. Canadian urban development follows a distinct pattern that involves compromise between local viewpoints and values and the pursuit of global capital at particular historical junctures. As the authors show, the success or failure of each city to construct major mobility infrastructure has always depended on the timing of investments and the specific ways that cities have gained access to necessary capital. Drawing on urban mobility history and global city theory, this book delves into the details of the big moves that have affected transport infrastructure in major Canadian cities. Knowing where urban development will head in the twenty-first century requires understanding how cities' major mobility infrastructures were built. Big Moves explains the shape of Canada's three biggest cities and how their mix of expressways and rapid transit emerged.

Rising income inequality and concentrated poverty threaten the social sustainability of North American cities. Suburban growth endangers sensitive ecosystems, water supplies, and food security. Existing urban infrastructure is crumbling while governments struggle to pay for new and expanded services. Can our inherited urban governance institutions and policies effectively respond to these problems? In Shaping the Metropolis Zack Taylor compares the historical development of American and Canadian urban governance, both at the national level and through specific metropolitan case studies. Examining Minneapolis–St Paul and Portland, Oregon, in the United States, and Toronto and Vancouver in Canada, Taylor shows how differences in the structure of governing institutions in American states and Canadian provinces cumulatively produced different forms of urban governance. Arguing that since the nineteenth century American state governments have responded less effectively to rapid urban growth than Canadian provinces, he shows that the concentration of authority in Canadian provincial governments enabled the rapid adoption of coherent urban policies after the Second World War, while dispersed authority in American state governments fostered indecision and catered to parochial interests. Most contemporary policy problems and their solutions are to be found in cities. Shaping the Metropolis shows that urban governance encompasses far more than local government, and that states and provinces have always played a central role in responding to urban policy challenges and will continue to do so in the future.

The Public Metropolis traces the evolution of Ontario government responses to rapid population growth and outward expansion in the Toronto city region over an eighty-year period. Frisken rigorously describes the many institutions and policies that were put in place at different times to provide services of region-wide importance and skilfully assesses the extent to which those institutions and policies managed to achieve objectives commonly identified with effective regional governance. Although the province acted sporadically and often reluctantly in the face of regional population growth and expansion, Frisken argues that its various interventions nonetheless contributed to the region's most noteworthy achievement: a core city that continued to thrive while many other North American cities were experiencing population, economic, and social decline. This perceptive and comprehensive examination of issues related to the evolution of city regions is critical reading not only for those teaching and researching in the field, but also for city and regional planners, officials at all levels of government, and urban historians. The research, writing, and publication of this book has been supported by the Neptis Foundation.

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.