Toronto Reborn

An incisive view of Toronto’s development over the last fifty years. In Toronto Reborn, Ken Greenberg describes the emerging contours of a new Toronto. Focusing on the period from 1970 to the present, Greenberg looks at how the work and decisions of citizens, NGOs, businesses, and governments have combined to refashion Toronto. Individually and collectively, their actions — renovating buildings and neighbourhoods, building startling new structures and urban spaces, revitalizing old cultural institutions and creating new ones, sponsoring new festivals and events — have transformed the old postwar city, changing it into an exciting modern one.

A full-colour guide to dozens of unique outdoor spaces that highlight Toronto as a sustainable, liveable city. Toronto is rich in public spaces — deeply incised ravines, lively neighbourhoods, lush gardens and parks, iconic bridges, even repurposed industrial silos and undercrofts of elevated highways. Urban designer Ken Greenberg and Toronto aficionado Eti Greenberg have combed the city on foot and by tandem bike, discovering some of Toronto’s best outdoor public spaces. In Exploring Toronto, they have gathered twenty-eight of their favourite spots, each offering something unique — a flash of ingenious design, a surprise vantage point, or simply relief from the hum of traffic. Ken and Eti bring their distinctive perspective, informed by years of work in urban design, to each of their choices, providing readers (and explorers) with the full story of the history, design, and appeal of each one-of-a-kind place.

When looking at old pictures of Toronto, it is clear that the city’s urban, economic, and social geography has changed dramatically over the generations. Historic photos of Toronto’s streetcar network offer a unique opportunity to examine how the city has been transformed from a provincial, industrial city into one of North America’s largest and most diverse regions. Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto studies the city’s urban transformations through an analysis of photographs taken by streetcar enthusiasts, beginning in the 1960s. These photographers did not intend to record the urban form, function, or social geographies of Toronto; they were "accidental archivists" whose main goal was to photograph the streetcars themselves. But today, their images render visible the ordinary, day-to-day life in the city in a way that no others did. These historic photographs show a Toronto before gentrification, globalization, and deindustrialization. Each image has been re-photographed to provide fresh insights into a city that is in a constant state of flux. With gorgeous illustrations, this unique book offers an understanding of how Toronto has changed, and the reasons behind these urban shifts. The visual exploration of historic and contemporary images from different parts of the city helps to explain how the major forces shaping the city affect its form, functions, neighbourhoods, and public spaces.

Condoland casts CityPlace – a massive residential development of more than thirty condominium towers just outside Toronto’s downtown core – as a microcosm of twenty-first-century urban intensification. Built almost entirely by a single private developer, this immense neighbourhood took decades to plan, design, and develop, but the end result lacks a sense of place and is not widely accessible to those who need homes: only a small number of its 13,000 units constitute affordable housing, and public amenities are limited. In this richly illustrated volume, James T. White and John Punter reveal the stories behind the design, architecture, and planning of CityPlace. They also consider the tools used to shape Toronto’s built environment and critically assess the underlying political economy of planning and real estate development in the city. Condoland raises key questions about the long-term sustainability and resilience of Canadian cities that acquiesce to the rapacious development industry.

The Rebirth of Revelation explores the different and important ways religious thinkers across Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism modernized the concept of revelation from 1750 to 1850.

Exploring Toronto’s history through the stories of its most fascinating and shadowy deaths. If these streets could talk... With morbid tales of war and plague, duels and executions, suicides and séances, Toronto’s past is filled with stories whose endings were anything but peaceful. The Toronto Book of the Dead delves into these: from ancient First Nations burial mounds to the grisly murder of Toronto’s first lighthouse keeper; from the rise and fall of the city’s greatest Victorian baseball star to the final days of the world’s most notorious anarchist. Toronto has witnessed countless lives lived and lost as it grew from a muddy little frontier town into a booming metropolis of concrete and glass. The Toronto Book of the Dead tells the tale of the ever-changing city through the lives and deaths of those who made it their final resting place.

Melnyk argues passionately that Canadian cinema has never been a singular entity, but has continued to speak in the languages and in the voices of Canada's diverse population.

The Toronto Carrying Place trail linked Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe, and helped shape the development of Ontario. Its influence is still felt today, though much of the original trail is obscured. Glenn Turner guides readers on a three-day journey that reconnects modern-day Toronto with its history, Native heritage, and the natural world.

For decades Mike Filey has regaled readers with stories of Toronto's past through its landmarks, neighborhoods, streetscapes, social customs, pleasure palaces, politics, sporting events, celebrities, and defining moments. Now, in one illustrated volume, he serves up the best of his meditations on everything from the Flatiron Building, Casa Loma, and the Cathedral Church of St. James to the Royal Alexandria Theatre, the Palais Royale, Union Station, and the Canadian National Exhibition, with streetcar jaunts through North Toronto and along the Danforth and ferry excursions in Lake Ontario, as well as trips down memory lane with the likes of Mary Pickford, Glenn Miller, Oscar Peterson, and Marilyn Bell, to name only a few. Filey recounts the devastation of city disasters such as Hurricane Hazel and the Great Fire of 1904 and spins yarns about the city's old water tanks, Easter in Toronto, the early Toronto Maple Leafs, the battles over the airport on the Toronto Islands, and how both world wars affected Torontonians.

Political Emotions explores the contributions that the study of discourses, rhetoric, and framing of emotion make to understanding the public sphere, civil society and the political realm. Tackling critiques on the opposition of the public and private spheres, chapters in this volume examine why some sentiments are valued in public communication while others are judged irrelevant, and consider how sentiments mobilize political trajectories. Emerging from the work of the Public Feelings research group at the University of Texas-Austin, and cohering in a New Agendas in Communication symposium, this volume brings together the work of young scholars from various areas of study, including sociology, gender studies, anthropology, art, and new media. The essays in this collection formulate new ways of thinking about the relations among the emotional, the cultural, and the political. Contributors recraft familiar ways of doing critical work, and bring forward new analyses of emotions in politics. Their work expands understanding of the role of emotion in the political realm, and will be influential in political communication, political science, sociology, and visual and cultural studies.