The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Featuring Toronto as The Metropole’s Metro of the Month was the perfect excuse to sit down and devour that city’s newest cultural export: Kim’s Convenience. The CBC Television show is now on Netflix, where blog co-editors Avigail Oren and Ryan Reft got down to the work of bingeing it over the course of a week. […]
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By Jennifer Bonnell Flying into Toronto, I am always struck by the density and reach of its urban tree canopy. In addition to the mature trees of its leafier, privileged neighborhoods, the city wraps itself around the forested, forking ravines of three major river valleys: from west to east, the Humber, Don, and Rouge River […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives, edited by Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Sixteen essays on Arabic poetry and prose which invite a literary exploration of Mosul, Cairo, […]
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By Mariana Valverde and Alexandra Flynn In May of 2017, Waterfront Toronto (WT), a tri-government agency, issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking an “innovation and funding partner” for a “smart city” plan on a small site on the waterfront. This RFP marked a major departure for a public agency that had long been assembling and cleaning […]
Read MoreVayne Ong Senior, History and Urban Studies Princeton University @vaynewyong Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? For my senior thesis, I’m researching the myths that emerged around which places were destroyed or preserved in the 1992 Rodney King urban rebellion. For example, why did a McDonald’s at the heart of the […]
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Last week we posted the sixth and final entry into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, whose theme was “Life Cycles.” Graduate students were invited to submit essays about the birth, death, or aging of institutions, neighborhoods, cities, or suburbs, as well as personal reflections about the focus of their particular research […]
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This piece by Lily Corral is the sixth and final entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. Corral takes on the life cycle of the media industry, and shows how the architecture built by newspapers reflects the industry’s birth, heyday, and now legacy. Daily news comes to us in all forms. […]
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Toronto’s suburbs have always been precisely the same as those of every other North American city: they have never conformed to stereotype. Now the stereotype – but do I really need to say this? – says that suburbs are low-density, white, middle-class residential environments. In varying combinations, however, Toronto’s suburbs have always included industry and […]
Read MoreBruno Ribeiro Oliveira Ph.D. Candidate Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa @ROBruno88 Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research is about the intellectual history of Kenya. More precisely, I study the works of the novelist and political thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. I try to reconstruct all the intellectual […]
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In our fifth installment of the 2019 UHA/The Metropole Grad Student Blog contest, University of Mississippi PhD candidate Monica N. Campbell explores the role of white women in pushing through urban renewal and slum clearance, advancing the “life cycle” of their cities. Through her essay, Campbell suggests that historical tropes about urban renewal, often seen as […]
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