Refashioning urban space in postwar Toronto: the Wood-Wellesley redevelopment area, 1952–1957

Robert Lewis and Paul Hess

Planning Perspectives, 2016, vol. 31, issue 4, 563-584

Abstract: This paper considers the creation and the subsequent meaning of ‘redevelopment areas’ in Toronto in the 1950s. The city passed a bylaw in 1952 that defined blighted areas as suitable for redevelopment. One of these areas was the downtown district that runs between Wood and Wellesley streets. The history of the Wood-Wellesley redevelopment area between 1952 and 1957 was important in several ways: it built on but differed from similar activity in the USA; it discursively reflected the needs of the city to refashion itself as a modern landscape; it provided the city with the tools to turn planning ideas into action; and it gave developers the forum by which they could push for specific areas of the city to be opened up for investment. Politically calculated and heavily contested visions of urban space, redevelopment areas such as Wood-Wellesley were used by the state and developers to physically reconstruct Toronto’s downtown area for private capital, to create a new modernist landscape, and to reproduce new and to reinforce existing social inequalities.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2016.1174073

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