Blots on the face of the city : the politics of slum housing and urban renewal in Toronto, 1940-1970

Blots on the face of the city : the politics of slum housing and urban renewal in Toronto, 1940-1970

housing, urban renewal, disadvantaged district, social movement, social housing, city centre, slum, history of urban planning

This thesis seeks to overcome the myopia of previous studies of urban renewal in Toronto through a historical approach to the interaction between state housing policy and community activism in the politics of urban renewal. First, it examines the continuities and discontinuities in the history of planning and social housing activity and activism in Toronto. In particular, the thesis examines the long history of community activism in Toronto, and how local residents resisted--sometimes successfully, most times not--the Haussmannization of inner-city Toronto. Vigorous community opposition to urban renewal, though only successful in the late 1960s was by no means a recent development in Toronto. Second, the thesis places the local politics of slum clearance and urban renewal schemes within the context of Toronto's chronic low-income housing shortage which conditioned how these programs played out and how Torontonians reacted to them in the ways they did. Third, and finally, it is a central contention of this thesis that the destruction of inner city neighbourhoods under the guise of renewal was due, in large part, to the way in which these neighbourhoods were portrayed in popular discourse. Thus, the thesis examines the idea of community as "contested terrain" in two different ways--physical and ideological. The battle for control over the renewal of Toronto's inner-city neighbourhoods concerned real spatial sites, the conditions of many of which were harmful to the physical and material interests of their residents. As a result, planners, politicians, and residents of inner-city Toronto neighbourhoods struggled daily to prevent further decay of individual and collective residential environments. Nonetheless, the primary battle waged over the control of inner-city neighbourhoods was ideological. Planners, politicians, social housing activists, the popular media, community activists, and inner-city residents aft struggled over the definition of inner-city neighbourhoods as "slums." All too often Toronto's working class neighbourhoods were viewed through the lens of the "Victorian slum" and universally portrayed as landscapes of disease, despair, and degeneracy--both physically and morally. The inability of Torontonians to move beyond a kind of "Victorian environmentalism" to comprehend the diverse realities of inner-city neighbourhoods led to the physical and social destruction of much of working-class Toronto. Ironically, wiping these "cancerous blots" from the face of the city through massive urban renewal and public housing projects was the most costly solution of all and undermined the nation's entire urban housing program. Indeed, the fundamental contradictions between the discourse and the reality of poor housing districts were vital to the struggle of politicalhegemonies that eventually brought slum clearance and urban renewal schemes to a halt by 1970.

Brushett, Kevin Thomas

Queen's University - Kingston

2001

Palmer, Bryan. Supervisor

en

Thesis

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