The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
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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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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“We had a beautiful day; the eagles came, and we couldn’t have asked for a better day to do what we had to do,” Konrad Sioui, grand chief of the Huron-Wendat Nation, told a 2013 audience after laying to rest 1,760 of the tribe’s ancestors in their final resting place at the University of Toronto. Dug […]
Read MoreOur fourth entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Ian Toller-Clark, takes us back to the Midwest to examine the life cycle of the Wisconsin School for Boys. In the 1950s, the prison fell into aged disrepair at the same time that Milwaukee’s suburbs were in their infancy. Would it be […]
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Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) XVIII, 1104 pp. $39.95. By John W. Steinberg Yuri Slezkine has written an extraordinary book. Building his epic around the lives of Soviet luminaries, he combines a host of topics ranging from intellectual to architectural history to reveal […]
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In this, our third entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Vyta Baselice takes us through the life cycle of concrete. To understand how this construction material moves from birth to death, Baselice has us travel from Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century New York City, before boomeranging […]
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