By Roger Keil The inner suburbs in Toronto are places of great contradiction: hyperconnectivity and total lack of connectivity; universities and strip clubs; airport runways and bicycle lanes; highrises and bungalows, oldtimers and newcomers. They are also the site of disaster and planning failure: Sometimes it is the catastrophic kind like the Sunrise propane fire […]
Suburbanicity Blog
What’s with all the hype about hipsturbia?
By Roger Keil Raw data. That’s all we want. When one of our research teams conducted expert interviews in the suburban municipalities of Barrie and Markham last year to study their identities in the global city region, one of the first common denominators we detected was the existence of vegan restaurants in both communities. The […]
New research: Markham as a multi-ethnic ethnoburb
By Roger Keil Arizona State University scholar Wei Li popularized the notion of an ethnoburb in her research on the St.Gabriel Valley in Southern California in the 1990s. The concept has since become a mainstay of (sub)urban research in the United States and to some degree in Canada. Recent Master in Environmental Studies (MES) graduate […]
The making of a multi-ethnic ethnoburb: A case study of Markham, Ontario
By Nishanthan Balasubramaniam New immigrant settlement patterns are directing newcomers into the suburbs, and as a result, Canadian population growth is occurring in the suburban areas of large metropolitan cities. Suburbs are becoming a mixture of conventional ethnic enclaves and a traditional suburb. Li (2009) has coined the term “ethnoburb” from her study on Monterey […]
Fixing the towers in the plains or building castles in the sky
By Roger Keil Kat Cizek’s NFB documentary One Millionth Tower won the Heritage Toronto Award 2012 in the media category on October 9, 2012. This is a major accomplishment, one in a long line of awards and prizes that the NFB’s Highrise project has already raked in. The project is relevant in many ways but […]
The urban future that cannot be made because (sub)urbanization is obdurate
By Roger Keil It had to happen one day. That day was yesterday. Buried under the ambient noise of sabre rattling in the Chinese Sea, the atrocities of Syria, royal wardrobe malfunctions, and traveling mayoral football coaches, three items arrived in my twitter inbox that, as I will explain shortly, signal the beginning of the […]
Boundaries: Shackling suburbia or outlining the post-metropolis?
By Roger Keil Thinking about suburbanization and suburbanisms can be an exercise in addressing ‘boundaries’. The transition from city to countryside has always been a critical interface of human existence. Since antiquity, the inside/outside problematic has been a central concern of urbanism: walls, moats, gates. Boundaries have forever defined the urban. I can think of […]
Time, space and the suburbs
By Roger Keil A new book by Nashville based writer, editor and photographer Rohan Quinby contains a thoughtful and inspiring essay on the possibilities for progressive, radical, democratic politics “where we live now”. That latter phrase refers to “these new postmetropolitan suburbs” that many North Americans call home (or place of work, consumption, education, play […]
Suburban politics in the 'regional city'
By Roger Keil I have argued in an op-ed with Matt Kellway in the Toronto Star that the recent budget by the Conservative government of Canada has done little for the needs of urban regions in Canada. Specifically, we noted for the Toronto case: "There is a public poverty that has settled across this urban […]
In-between Toronto Transit Commission
By Roger Keil The shake-up of Toronto Transit Commission membership on Monday, March 5 reveals an apparent shift to a more suburban focused body. No inner city councilors are now on the TTC. All but one represent the inner suburbs. Does that mean that the needs of Toronto's in-between city are finally getting recognized? This […]
