A citizen's guide to making the big city a place where we can afford to live. Housing is increasingly unattainable in successful global cities, and Toronto is no exception - in part because of zoning that protects "stable" residential neighborhoods with high property values. House Divided is a citizen's guide for changing the way housing can work in big cities. Using Toronto as a case study, this anthology unpacks the affordability crisis and offers innovative ideas for creating h...

An economist's version of The Way Things Work, this engaging volume is part field guide to economics and part expose of the economic principles lurking behind daily events, explaining everything from traffic jams to high coffee prices. The Undercover Economist is for anyone who's wondered why the gap between rich and poor nations is so great, or why they can't seem to find a decent second-hand car, or how to outwit Starbucks. This book offers the hidden story behind these and other questio...

The essential handbook for ending suburban sprawl and automobile-based settlement patternsFor a decade, Suburban Nation has given voice to a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and replace the last century's automobile-based settlement patterns with a return to more traditional planning. Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of the movement, and even their...

Updated with a new Introduction by the authors and a foreword by Richard Florida, this book is a comprehensive guide book for urban designers, planners, architects, developers, environmentalists, and community leaders that illustrates how existing suburban developments can be redesigned into more urban and more sustainable places. While there has been considerable attention by practitioners and academics to development in urban cores and new neighborhoods on the periphery of cities, there ...

From prominent political thinker and widely followed Slate columnist, a polemic on high rents and housing costs—and how these costs are hollowing out communities, thwarting economic development, and rendering personal success and fulfillment increasingly difficult to achieve.Rent is an issue that affects nearly everyone. High rent is a problem for all of us, extending beyond personal financial strain. High rent drags on our country’s overall rate of econom...

With a landmass of approximately 7000 square kilometres and a population of roughly five million, the Greater Toronto Area is Canada's largest metropolitan centre. How did a small nineteenth-century colonial capital become this sprawling urban giant, and how did government policies shape the contours of its landscape?In Toronto Sprawls, Lawrence Solomon examines the great migration from farms to the city that occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century. During this...

It is now impossible to understand major North American cities without considering the seemingly never-ending and ever-growing sprawl of their surrounding suburbs. In The Shape of the Suburbs, activist, urban affairs columnist, and former Toronto mayor John Sewell examines the relationship between the development of suburbs, water and sewage systems, highways, and the decision-making of Toronto-area governments to show how the suburbs spread, and how they have in turn shaped the c...

Canada’s cities are crippled by a lack of financial and governing clout. Their infrastructures are crumbling and their citizens are disaffected by the inability of municipal government—or any government, for that matter—to act on the issues that influence their constituents’ lives. Cities generate a disproportionate amount of Canada’s wealth and are home to the majority of the population, yet they have no means to control their own destinies.Alan Broadbent suggests that the problem...

Shaped by immigration, and demographics, our hub cities demonstrate what’s best about Canada: our commitment to education, tolerance, culture, and innovation. Since the early 1990s, however, troubling trends have threatened to undermine our much-envied quality of life. In The New City, award-winning urban affairs writer John Lorinc offers a compelling vision of how to make Canada’s metropolitan centres sustainable, livable, and competitive. Incisive and broad-ranging, this is a ti...

This hard-hitting but fair assessment of Nova Scotia and the Maritimes will shock and surprise many Maritimers who have been conditioned to think that the east coast of Canada is one of the most livable regions in the country. Author Peter Moreira, a native Maritimer who returned home after working overseas for more than a decade, offers a straightforward analysis of why the region has fallen so far behind the rest of the country in terms of most economic and social indicators. Backwater i...

2015 Speaker's Book Award — ShortlistedCity planning in the GTHA has been mired in political grandstanding for the past decade, The New Urban Agenda offers a plain language solution to the issues plaguing the GTHA.Politics in the Greater Toronto, Hamilton Area (GTHA) have become increasingly divisive over the past decade, and solutions to the city’s problems have become hot-topic issues debated in council and the press, but never finding r...

How to leverage existing resources to meet the current and future needs of citiesCrumbling streets and bridges. Poorly performing schools and inadequate social services. These are common complaints in cities, which too often struggle just to keep the lights on, much less make the long-term investments necessary for future generations.It doesn't have to be this way. This book by two internationally recognized experts in public finance describes a new way of re...