The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Neal D. Polhemus October 18, 1976, the date President Ford signed Public Law No. 94-545, is generally considered the birthday of Congaree National Park. But the campaign to save the rapidly disappearing old-growth forests across America, specifically those in the Congaree River floodplain, began much earlier.[1] A more fitting birthday would be October 25-26, […]
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We all tell ourselves that we do what we do, whatever it is one does, because we derive some level of satisfaction from said vocation. We don’t do it for glory or fame (or even a modest twitter following, I mean if we pick up a few followers in the process is that so wrong […]
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Benjamin Heber Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) 311 pp. $40, ISBN: 9780300115505 By Alan Lessoff Urban historians should take particular note of Benjamin Heber Johnson’s Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation, which returns the city to the center […]
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With September coming to an end, we bid farewell to Toronto. However, we would be remiss not to provide you with a quick review of our September 2019 Metropolis of the Month. The Indigenous City: Indigeneity and Toronto’s Past and Present Though we usually provide an overview of a city’s history, other times we focus […]
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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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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 […]
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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 […]
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