Toronto Reborn: Design Successes and Challenges

by Ken Greenberg, David Crombie (Foreword), Zahra Ebrahim (Contributor)

Toronto Reborn covers a decisive period in the city’s evolution, capturing how Toronto truly becomes a new version of itself.

Genres: Architecture

351 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 11, 2019

Reviews

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

great info; dry writing

[Ravi Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Getting disillusioned and fed up with the city's extremely slow or non-existent efforts to make Toronto likeable, healthy, happy, and inclusive isn't hard to do if you've lived here a while.

Ken Greenberg, an urban planner, teacher, and activist with decades of experience in building this city doesn't seem to have lost faith in its potential. This is probably because of his deep involvement in efforts to revive dying industrial areas in the city into thriving communities like Wellington Place and Corktown as well as the transformation of Queen's Quay and what we now know as the Bentway from a forbidden wasteland to a multi-use cultural and recreational gems.

Greenberg's accounts actually brought me to the realization that for a city that is still young and grappling with its identity as it grows, Toronto has come a long way. Greenberg makes a compelling case that we can still go further and extend urbanist innovation to Toronto's inner suburbs and the surrounding 905.

There is a lot of planning lingo that went over my head in this book, but it still resonated as a love letter to cities as the ultimate champions of sustainability and vibrancy.

This book was written in 2018, and I'd be very interested in hearing Greenberg's insights into how financial and industrial centres can be reinvented post-pandemic.

[Monika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book soon after moving to Toronto to study urban planning because I wanted to learn about the city from a planning perspective. I was hoping for a bit more of a narrative, but the book more or less described a series of urban design projects, mostly related to public spaces, and organized thematically. This came with a decent amount of general discussion of urban design principles which is fair, particularly for readers without a background in the topic, but in my case was a bit repetitive. My favourite sections were those that dug into the city's history and politics and connected the current state of affairs with those important events. The projects themselves were interesting, but it quickly became clear that the author only described things he was personally involved in - which is good and bad, since it meant he could provide lots of detail, but also meant it veered towards being a bit self-congratulatory. That being said, I read this book while away from Toronto, and I finished it itching to go back and see the things he described for myself.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5