Toronto, Ontario

This article examines the uses of the term "diversity" in Toronto's oldest and largest public housing project, Regent Park. The revitalization plan emphasizes a diversity of use, diversity of income, and diversity of culture in the redevelopment of the neighbourhood. I argue the diversity of diversity serves as a legitimizing tool for the revitalization projects and draws from the cachet of Canadian multiculturalism. While both "diversity" and "mix" (mixed income or diversity of incomes, for example) are generally taken for granted terms in planning discourse, promoting more equitable planning practices requires analyzing them more closely in context. My analysis sheds light on tensions between various types of diversity, thereby challenging the potential for the framework to address structural inequality via revitalization.

This paper describes a unique seven-year program involving a business school, the Rotman School of Management and the development of entrepreneurs in a low-income community, Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood. The success of the program was a result of the breadth of involvement by a number of constituents of the business school including administration, faculty, and alumni. There is a diverse set of approaches to partnerships between business schools and local communities across the world.  The Rotman School of Management Small Business Program for Regent Park and surrounding areas was offered in the form of ten weeks of classroom lectures by business school faculty, combined with coaching support by business school alumni. The program ran for seven years, with an average of 25 students per class, on a total estimated budget of CDN $45,000. Based on breadth of participation by the business school; and the seven year iterative and continuous improvement process implemented for the program; the Rotman Small Business Program for Regent Park was successfully able to provide a high level of educational value for participants on a minimal total budget. Describing lessons learned from the seven years of the program enables business schools and communities with existing or potential partnership projects to optimize program decisions instead of repeating lessons learned in similar contexts. The primary lessons learned from the program include: first the need to modify business school course content to a small business context, and second the need to expand the metrics of success to include additional educational outcomes. The ultimate objective of this paper is to provide sufficient information for potential replication of all or part of the partnership program, for academics and practitioners interested in the interaction of business schools and local communities.

The paper “Gentrification in Ethnic Neighbourhoods in Toronto: patterns, features and impacts”
wants to investigate the phenomenon of gentrification in the city focusing in particular on the
neighbourhoods with a deep ethnical concentration. In this perspective, the aim of the research is to explore if the features of gentrification can be
modify by a strong ethnicity and then verify the intercorrelation between this two elements. Starting
from these assumptions, the relationship is verified not only theoretically - through a review of
international literature on the subject - but also practically. The outcomes of the research is to
provide some indications about patterns (actors and forms), features and impacts (direct and
indirect, high and low, positive and negative) of the two different “models of gentrification” in the
city of Toronto.

Members of OACUSA who employ Special Constables commissioned a report to examine the role and responsibilities of campus special constables in Ontario.  This report was prepared by George Rigakos, a professor of the political economy of policing at Carleton University in Ottawa. The goal of this report was to provide an up-to-date review of legislative, operational, training, and oversight mechanisms currently governing campus special constables in Ontario.

This report and its contents will be of assistance to universities, colleges, the provincial government and police services which are involved in discussions regarding the future of law enforcement and community safety on our campuses. We welcome any comments or feedback you have after reading the report.

The early 1920s was a crucial moment for the ethos of Pentecostalism in Toronto, with three primary impulses competing for prominence: (1) the revivalist fervour of independent traveling evangelists which were typically focussed on emotional appeals to stir people’s faith towards healing; (2) the "soft Pentecostalism" of the Christian & Missionary Alliance (C&MA) church in Toronto, which allowed for spiritual gifts including healing and tongues, but did not espouse the doctrines of denominational Pentecostalism about the baptism of the Holy Spirit; (3) denominational Pentecostalism, bringing with it general doctrinal uniformity and a global network of affiliated missionaries and evangelists. All three of these impulses served to propel Pentecostalism forward in Toronto, but steered it in slightly different trajectories. This paper will examine how each of these impulses fanned the flame of Pentecostalism, but that denominational Pentecostalism provided the means for its stability and longevity in Toronto.

This thesis explores the relationship between regional government structures in the Toronto and Vancouver metropolitan areas and the development of comparatively high post-war transit use. While local government reforms and the impacts of regional development on transit use following World War II have received much attention in isolation, they have rarely been analyzed together. This paper investigates how the unique regional governance structures in Toronto and Vancouver allowed both cities to counter North American transportation trends by facilitating the creation of policies that favored transit use. By analyzing the historic operating and financial data from the transit agencies in both cities within the context of legislative reforms to local government and the resulting transportation policies, the impact of regional governance structures on transit use is examined. This paper finds that the success of transportation institutions in achieving high regional transit use is closely tied to the extent that local government bodies have fiscal autonomy, jurisdictional flexibility and involve local transit operating knowledge in transportation policy formation. Finally, the cases of Toronto and Vancouver suggest that the presence and long-term sustainability of these three capacities is inversely related to the involvement of senior government in local transportation planning.

The city’s edge is a cultural landscape of conflicting and competing meanings. The visible, physical edge of rapidly urbanizing cities is emotionally charged, representing prosperity to some, and sprawl and environmental destruction to others. My dissertation is a cultural landscape study of city expansion at the edge of the Toronto-centred region, where urban growth pressures are as intense as anywhere in North America or Europe. My research reveals that ideas about the countryside are produced against the city, and these ideas are discussed in terms of ecology and natural heritage. This is a study of the cultural politics of landscape meaning in a contemporary planning process where local area planning comes face-to-face with the global environmental imagination.

In the Town of Oakville, a wealthy suburb in the Toronto metropolitan area, a planning process to urbanize the last remaining countryside of the town has been underway for the past two decades. In the end, the decision to urbanize has been in lock-step with the decision to conserve: through the creation of a large natural heritage system (almost 900 hectares or more than 2,000 acres), fully one-third of the planning area, development of the remainder of the lands can take place. While pastoral ideas of the romantic countryside underlie the valuation of this landscape, representations of ecological sensitivity by environmental science were politically the most successful. Local area politics have undergone a revolution resulting from the negotiation over the future of this countryside. Using discourse analysis (text analysis of public planning process documents and popular media), participant observation of public meetings, and interviews with informants, my research reveals that cultural attitudes toward growth and conservation are informed by symbolic landscapes of country and city and these are implicated in the production of real landscapes and places. As planning practitioners and academics involved in the political process of shaping landscape change at the city’s edge, it is difficult to represent those opinions of the public and other participants in the planning process that are not supported by scientific, empirical study. The lens of cultural landscape provides tools to understand and recognize cultural value, meaning and symbolism in edge landscapes and to engage with them in areas which are being planned for change.

Advanced accepted manuscript copy. Published formatted copy will be posted when available.  This research paper reviews the literature in an area of engineering heritage requiring further examination, the impact of climate change on historic urban water supply systems. Many opportunities exist to enhance the sustainability of historic water works still in operation, in order to help mediate climate change effects. This must include mitigating climate change impacts on sources of potable water, such as by implementing strategies for water efficient landscape design, while considering possible uses of the visible elements of the system, such as water treatment plants, to draw attention to this engineering heritage’s continued and critical role. The R.C. Harris filtration plant is the main water treatment plant for the Greater Toronto Area, drawing water from Lake Ontario. This iconic “Palace of Purification” has been in continuous use since 1941, and was declared a National Historic Civil Engineering Site in 1992. In 2013, it was still producing nearly 40% of Toronto's tap water. Examination of this plant serves to illustrate the interconnection of a system’s historic design and its water source’s watershed as heritage, to discuss expected impacts of climate change, and explain some of the possibilities for mitigation but also eventual necessary and challenging adaptations to changing treatment needs.

The shift away from population group (i.e. South Asian) and toward subjects (i.e. the model immigrant) is one possible pathway to the careful study of the context of diaspora. In this chapter, I argue that the context of the Punjabi-Sikh diaspora in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) is a spectrum of variegated memberships and self-perceptions of belonging that are inherently gendered. In my ethnographic research on transnational marriages and their breakdown, I discern three discrete yet overlapping subjectivities: the model immigrant and the multicultural citizen; the transnational competitive migrant; and, finally, the trans-local and sovereign subject. Through this spectrum of diaspora membership, I conduct a close analysis of gendered subjectivities in relation to their corresponding configurations of power in marriage and its breakdown. First, I provide overviews of the fieldwork, data, and subject groups the chapter is based on, and then I proceed to discuss local and transnational understandings of marriage and marriage breakdown. Then I discuss the spectrum of diaspora membership, addressing marriage and its breakdown in relation to the three above-mentioned groupings respectively.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. Cham: Palgrave, 2020. 4pp. Web.

Print Citation:
“Gentrification, Mobility, and the Representation of Toronto in Atwood’s The Testaments.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. Cham: Palgrave, 2022. 741-44. Print.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. Cham: Palgrave, 2020. 4pp. Web.

Print Citation:
“Citizenship, Diaspora, and Toronto in Bezmozgis’ Immigrant City.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. Cham: Palgrave, 2022. 402-05. Print.

Evidence-based transportation planning and decision-making relies on accurate data and analysis. In the Toronto context, the main source of data on the movement of individuals within the region is the Transportation Tomorrow Survey (TTS). The TTS, conducted every 5 years since 1986, is a large-scale household travel diary survey that relies on self-reporting of travel by telephone and, as of 2011, web. While a high-quality source of data overall, the TTS has well-documented limitations with respect to the incomplete recording of walk and bike trips, or active transportation (AT). The TTS also suffers from other issues related to the reliance on self-reporting travel surveys more broadly, such as systematic under-reporting of discretionary travel, proxy report bias and declining response rates.
This thesis explores the significance of not properly recording AT and other travel episodes, and presents solutions to cost-effectively collect multimodal travel data using a variety of methods. The thesis primarily describes a series of data collection projects undertaken from 2014 to 2017, each of which examines possible improvements to travel diary generation. Smartphone location logging apps and trace processing are explored first, where an assessment of the state of the art and 2 public-facing data collection projects were carried out. These led to an app template and app design guidelines being produced. Potential improvements to web survey questionnaire design and open data distribution mechanisms are then looked at, demonstrating potential value in terms of heightened relevance of the collected data and increased use. Finally, an in-person tablet data collection effort was carried out, demonstrating the feasibility of collecting data by combining door-to-door recruitment with internet-enabled tablets and a web survey. Methodological improvements and process-oriented lessons learned throughout are described, as are implications of alternative data collection methods for more accurately representing the demand for travel, active or otherwise.

In this paper we propose an empirically grounded theory of the relatively high level of intellectual attainment of Jews. Two main theories of Jewish intellectual attainment already exist, one genetic, the other cultural. Unfortunately, both theories posit causal mechanisms that change little and/or too slowly to account for variation in Jewish intellectual attainment over relatively short time periods, including the apparent decline that is now occurring in Western societies. In contrast, our alternative explanation highlights the causal importance of sociological circumstances. We contend that a population's intellectual attainment is proportional to the degree to which its members (1) belong to a first generation to enjoy relatively abundant opportunities for the intellectual attainment of their children and (2) possess sufficient resources to enable their children to effectively compete for these opportunities. Where these conditions weaken, so too does the observed level of intellectual attainment. We render our theory plausible by examining a century of change in the ethnic composition of graduates from the University of Toronto Medical School, one of the world's premier institutions for the training of physicians. While a rigorous test of our theory is beyond the scope of this work, we present evidence that is consistent with our theory and inconsistent with the genetic and cultural theories.

The decision to expand the urban boundary of a growing city into the adjacent countryside is always hotly debated, and the Toronto area is no different. At the edge of Canada’s largest city are some of the fastest-growing suburbs in North America. This paper discusses the current expansion of the Town of Oakville, a suburban lakefront community on the western edge of the built up area of Toronto. It focuses on the vociferous reaction of residents against urban growth at the edge of their town and how competing ideas about the past, existing and future landscape are negotiated within the planning process.

This Report is the culmination of a five-year statistical tracking
study of owners and employees of storefront businesses in the
Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area (DYBIA) that line
Yonge Street between College and Queen Streets in downtown
Toronto. The results are based on snapshot surveys using a
Merchant Safety and Satisfaction Survey (MERS3) conducted
in 2005, 2007, and 2009. There have been tangible changes in perceptions of fear, disorder, crime, and attitudes towards the police. With a few exceptions merchants in the Downtown Yonge BIA feel safer, are far less likely to believe things are getting worse in terms of criminality and have generally high opinions of the police foot patrol program and the continued use of CCTV.

This first report of the OME Community Talk Series chronicles the conversations, views, and experiences of four panelists at a public community event held by Ontario Multilingual Education (OME), and the open discussion with community representatives that ensued. It summarizes the panelists’ experiences with learning, teaching, researching, and governing languages, as well as the dialogue that occurred among community members surrounding issues related to the legalization of multilingual1 education in mainstream schools in Ontario.

This article explores human security from the perspective of those who live under the securitization and governance of Islam, i.e. Muslims themselves. I focus on one hand on the insecurities and threats that have been identified by Somali Muslims in the diaspora, and on the other hand on their means for managing insecurity and creating a sense of safety. The challenges, opportunities and experiences of the Somali diaspora are linked to the histories of immigration and race in different settlement countries, and also to global discourses and policies on Islam and Muslims. The experiences of Canadian Somalis will serve as a mirror on the situation in Europe, in particular the Nordic country of Finland, where both similarities and differences may be found. Keywords Canadian Somalis – Finnish Somalis – human security – Muslims

The wine industry in Ontario is relatively young when compared to many of the wine regions worldwide and in recent decades has working to improve their reputation on in the global market by improving the quality of their wines, developing wine tourism and, more recently, by working to reduce their environmental impacts (VQA Ontario, 2008).  In 2007, the Wine Council of Ontario (WCO) formalized their undertaking of an industry wide voluntary initiative aimed at improving environmental stewardship.  This culminated in the publication of the final documents in a series entitled Sustainable Winemaking Ontario: An Environmental Charter for the Wine Industry (SWO) (Martin, 2007a).  These documents form a support system for industry members by outlining industry best practices as well as regulatory requirements and provide a simple means of self-assessment to identify problem areas.  The WCO and many member have expressed interest in developing a certification program to help legitimize and strengthen the SWO program and to recognize and reward successful participation.  While much of the existing literature on eco-labeling for the wine industry focuses primarily on consumer interest in and acceptance of eco-labeling, this paper uses a qualitative approach to explore the motivations and deterrents influencing participation in the Ontario wine industry’s voluntary environmental initiative and a possible eco-labeling program from the perspective of key industry decision-makers.

Despite a significant number of tourism decisions being influenced by personal relationships, visiting friends and relatives (VFR) tourism has received relatively little attention, with the experiences of hosts considered even less. Immigration is a significant factor in VFR; as destinations benefit from increased touristic activity immigrants increase their own familiarisation with their new communities as their guide their guests. This paper initially offers a discussion on the limitations of traditional conceptualisations of VFR in understanding the volume of personal relationships between visitors and residents and applies alternative definitions of VFR to existing data on international leisure visitors to Toronto, Ontario.  Qualitative interviews are used to contextualise the hosting experience for immigrants, providing an understanding into what hosting means for individuals, with implications for community development and destination marketing presented.

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Written for The Soul of the City project this chapter focuses on Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The size and diversity of this city defy categorization, however focusing on diversity and transition and recognizing the importance of context (neighbourhood or network) provides opportunities for discernment. Shifting from suspicion of the neighbour to anticipating opportunities for engagement can adjust our perceptions as we discern The Soul of the City.

This thesis examines patterns in poliomyelitis mortality in Wentworth and York Counties of southern Ontario, Canada, from 1900 to 1937. This period marked polio’s shift from endemic to epidemic status. It was also a time of shifting social, cultural, demographic, and economic patterns. Contemporaries struggled to understand polio’s epidemiology, and even today, with the poliovirus on the verge of global eradication, models to explain its changing patterns and impact continue to be revised. This thesis uses both qualitative and quantitative data collected from a variety of archival sources, including death, birth, and marriage registrations, census records, and newspaper articles, among other records. This information was used to build a geodatabase which forms the basis for analyses of mortality patterns in relation to age and sex, illness duration, seasonality, nativity, birthplace, ethnicity, and religion. Further analyses included family size, birth order, socioeconomic status, and place of residence patterns. Examined in the context of Wentworth and York Counties in the early 20th century, the results both reveal a local pattern to polio’s epidemic emergence and provide a means to test broader hypotheses regarding polio’s epidemiological patterns. Specifically, results from this study were compared to the expectations of the intensive-exposure and cross -sex transmission hypotheses proposed by Nielsen and colleagues. Among the most important contributions of this thesis are the results showing a pattern of change over the study period, with two distinct stages. Stage One (1910 to 1927) is characterized by an equal sex ratio and a median known family size of four. Stage Two (1928 to 1937) is characterized by excess male deaths and a median known family size of two. These results link polio mortality patterns to demographic and ecological shifts in the early 20th century and confirm that there is still much to learn from the history of this disease.

In this paper, the author, Rebecca Casalino, proposes one solution to economic instability experienced in the arts with a current climate of job scarcity and financial anxiety. Specifically looking at the problems facing emerging and marginalized practices, she proposes a de-centring of hierarchical power structures that favour dominant voices and narratives. Speaking to art objects as commodities, as defined by Karl Marx, this paper proposes methods with roots in the Fluxus movement and strategies that are already being employed in Canada. Casalino uses Art Toronto and Edition as examples of toxic dichotomies and questions ingrained hierarchical systems of value. She moves unto a critique of current federal funding from the perspective of emerging and marginalized artists. Turning to successful models of a community based projects, such as the Westend Phoenix, the author draws comparisons between issues facing journalistic and artistic practices and possible solutions. Casalino uses Michel Foucault’s theory to explore ideas of value, wealth, and power to buttress previous arguments surrounding artistic hierarchies. She critiques and questions dominant systems in place as a method to improve the experiences of marginalized voices within that system.

This paper examines trends in comic conventions and festivals, using the opposition of FAN EXPO and the Toronto Comics Arts Festival in Toronto as an example. The organizational philosophies of these two events are then contextualized within the trend of transnational biennials in contemporary art.