Imagination and the modern city : Reform and the urban geography of Toronto, 1890-1929

Imagination and the modern city : Reform and the urban geography of Toronto, 1890-1929

imagination, urban planning, urban geography

The moral injunctions about beauty and order that attach to turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban reform and city planning derived from the era's concern with Domesticity and evangelicalism. Evangelical Protestant women believed they could protect their homes and children by creating, safe, orderly, aesthetic--"homelike"--environments in the home and in the city. This environmentalist city milieu hummed with ideas appropriated from the Decorative Arts--the social necessity of art, the practicality of beauty, the beauty of practicality--and millennialism, namely the social, moral, and Christian efficacy of environmental perfectionism. Little wonder that city planners created perfectionist plans for the comprehensive implementation of beauty in the city. City planning emphasised parks, parkways, artfully designed roadways, and "street furnishing" to create cities that abated congestion and exuded probity in what planners saw as over-populated and immoral modern cities. In Toronto, parks and even asphalt pavement were conveyors of municipal beauty, dignity, and art, and could lend moral influence to a city under the weight of size, density, and heterogeneity. The creation of parks and diagonal roadways in both the 'Plan of 1909' and the 'Plan of 1929' were intended to add not only beauty through decorative design, but also practicality, by relieving the city of population and traffic pressures. The bicycle, too, was seen by Torontonians as means of beautifying the city; the creation of noiseless, clean, and smooth pavements would entice handsome bourgeois riders into the streets and effect the beautification of the human space of the city. Ultimately, this manifestation of "social environmentalism" signifies the organisational proclivity of reformers' geographic imaginations.

Mackintosh, Phillip Gordon

Queen's University - Kingston

2001

Goheen, Peter. Supervisor

en

Thesis

http://amicus.collectionscanada.ca/s4-bin/Main/ItemDisplay?l=0&l_ef_l=-1&id=724139.474946&v=1&lvl=1&coll=18&rt=1&rsn=S_WWWlaaXm2ItG&all=1&dt=26189254

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/items/show/946

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