When manufacturers and retailers vacate traditional locations, they leave holes in a city’s fabric that signal a shifting urban-industrial terrain. Who should mend these spaces, and how should they approach the problem?

Using Toronto’s Dundas Square and surrounding area as a case study, Thinking Planning and Urbanism meticulously reconstructs the redevelopment process to explore the theories and practices used. It traces the labyrinth of competing interests that can sideline and nearly overwhelm the public planning function. In these circumstances, Moore Milroy concludes, practising planners are marooned by planning theories that begin from the premise that urban space is a social construction and only secondarily a function of technology and aesthetics.

This book makes plain the nature of the gap between the practice of planning and its theories, a gap that inhibits planners from effectively championing creative actions to deal with postindustrial problems. The findings drawn from this case will be widely recognized in redevelopment elsewhere and thus will be extremely useful to students and practitioners of urban design, public administration, municipal law, and urban and regional planning.

Beth Moore Milroy's profile page

Beth Moore Milroy, professor emerita, is former director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners.