Downtown Toronto’s emergent properties: Exploring new methods for using port records to disaggregate urban metabolism in Toronto, Ontario, 1850-1926

Andrew Watson, Joshua MacFadyen and Hannah Willness

Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2024, vol. 57, issue 4, 267-282

Abstract: Between 1850 and 1926 Ontario’s capital city, Toronto, grew from a small colonial port to one of the largest cities on the Great Lakes. In this article we introduce a rich time series dataset of ships entering the city’s port and the commodities they carried, explore its potential for urban metabolism research, and consider some of its limitations. We argue that the detail recorded in the ledgers of the Toronto Harbour Master affords multiple temporal and geospatial scales of analysis to study the city’s urban metabolism (e.g. seasonality and consignees of specific commodities), which means historians can use these quantitative sources to move beyond simplistic input-output evaluations and consider the nuance and complexity that characterized the role of the port in the city’s social, economic, and environmental history. We demonstrate that the port was vital to the process of assembling the city even as the railways became dominant in Ontario during the second half of the nineteenth century. As the city grew, the data reveal that the port remained an important node within a broader Great Lakes socioecological system at the same time as it served the city’s downtown and discrete subsystems of its urban metabolism.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2024.2316032

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