Toronto Book of Everything: Everything You Wanted to Know About Toronto and Were Going to Ask Anyway

Somewhere off the Southern State Parkway in Nassau County, NY is the thown of "Waterfield" and in it is Waterfield High School, attended by, among others: Ro-Anne Sommers, crowned Little Miss Eastern United States, now ponytailed and prettiest-girl-at-school-best-cheerleader, at fifteen making out in a Chevy backseat with...Corky Henderson, his father's little man since age three, now star quarterback, king of the jocks, with only those between-game nightmares threatening his future perfect, the subject of the special dreams of...Amy Silverstein, not-so-lovely to look at, smart, the flip side of Ro_Anne, a born late-blooer, partner in spirit of...Guy Fowler, brainy, pint-sized, the flip side of Corky...or so it would seem...

Five years later, at the class of '59's reunion, you can hardly tell the players by their names. What happened, how and why is the story of Yearbook. It is also the story of anyone who has ever been young, who remembers his or her senior prom with its "shining, mirrored ball, spinning, fragmenting rality." It is a story of growing up in America.

With a landmass of approximately 7000 square kilometres and a population of roughly five million, the Greater Toronto Area is Canada's largest metropolitan centre. How did a small nineteenth-century colonial capital become this sprawling urban giant, and how did government policies shape the contours of its landscape?

In Toronto Sprawls, Lawrence Solomon examines the great migration from farms to the city that occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century. During this period, a disproportionate number of single women came to Toronto while, at the same time, immigration from abroad was swelling the city's urban boundaries. Labour unions were increasingly successful in recruiting urban workers in these years. Governments responded to these perceived threats with a series of policies designed to foster order. To promote single family dwellings conducive to the traditional family, buildings in high-density areas were razed and apartment buildings banned. To discourage returning First World War veterans from settling in cities, the government offered grants to spur rural settlement. These policies and others dispersed the city's population and promoted sprawl.

An illuminating read, Toronto Sprawls makes a convincing case that urban sprawl in Toronto was caused not by market forces, but rather by policies and programs designed to disperse Toronto's urban population.