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Political Science City Planning & Urban Development

Suburb, Slum, Urban Village

Transformations in Toronto’s Parkdale Neighbourhood, 1875-2002

by (author) Carolyn Whitzman

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
Jan 2010
Category
City Planning & Urban Development, Urban & Land Use Planning, Urban, Ontario (ON), Post-Confederation (1867-), Social History
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780774858830
    Publish Date
    Jan 2010
    List Price
    $125.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780774815369
    Publish Date
    Jan 2010
    List Price
    $29.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780774815352
    Publish Date
    Apr 2009
    List Price
    $95.00

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Description

Suburb, Slum, Urban Village examines the relationship between image and reality for one city neighbourhood – Toronto’s Parkdale. Carolyn Whitzman tracks Parkdale’s story across three eras: its early decades as a politically independent suburb of the industrial city; its half-century of ostensible decline toward becoming a slum; and a post-industrial period of transformation into a revitalized urban village. This book also shows how Parkdale’s image influenced planning policy for the neighbourhood, even when the prevailing image of Parkdale had little to do with the actual social conditions there.

 

Whitzman demonstrates that this misunderstanding of social conditions had discriminatory effects. For example, even while Parkdale’s reputation as a gentrified area grew in the post-sixties era, the overall health and income of the neighbourhood’s residents was in fact decreasing, and the area attracted media coverage as a “dumping ground” for psychiatric outpatients. Parkdale’s changing image thus stood in stark contrast to its real social conditions. Nevertheless, this image became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it contributed to increasingly skewed planning practices for Parkdale in the late twentieth century.

 

This rich and detailed history of a neighbourhood’s actual conditions, imaginary connotations, and planning policies will appeal to scholars and students in urban studies, planning, and geography, as well as to general readers interested in Toronto and Parkdale’s urban history.

About the author

Carolyn Whitzman is a senior lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne. She is also author of The Handbook of Community Safety, Gender, and Violence Prevention: Practical Planning Tools (Earthscan 2008), and previously worked for the City of Toronto on healthy-city initiatives.

Carolyn Whitzman's profile page