Debunked Assumptions About the GTA (and City-Regions in General)
Prior to last week’s class, in which we turned our attention to studying urban policy from a regional lens, I was operating on two assumptions that are, in hindsight, overly simplistic and completely baseless. First, as someone who has lived in downtown Toronto for the last few years and been a front-row witness to the seemingly inexorable rise of new condo towers, I believed that population growth in metropolitan/city-region areas like the Greater Toronto Area was primarily centred in urban cores. (Articles like these only cemented this belief). Second, as someone who has also lived in suburban neighbourhoods outside of Toronto for most of his life, I figured that these areas were — with some significant exceptions — broadly middle class in nature. However, this week’s lecture and readings make one thing acutely apparent: I could not have been more wrong on both counts.
David L.A. Gordon debunked my first assumption through his article in The Conversation. His research presents a far different picture of metropolitan population growth than I had expected: From 2006 to 2016, so-called “active cores” (i.e., areas like downtown Toronto) grew by 9% — a far cry from the national growth rate of 15%. Meanwhile, suburban neighbourhoods, by which I mean Gordon’s “automobile suburbs,” grew at a much faster rate of 17% in the same period. And in specific regard to Toronto, its metropolitan area “saw 3.4…times as much population growth in auto suburbs and exurbs compared to active cores and transit suburbs.” These sorts of statistics make it clear that a vertical deluge of new condo towers does not tell the whole story about regional population growth.
My second assumption was also without merit, as was made clear by United Way Greater Toronto’s maps of income inequality in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA). The 2010 and 2015 maps in particular show that the suburban regions surrounding Toronto proper—which, again, I thought were generally middle-class areas—are anything but; rather, these areas are actually high-income neighbourhoods relative to the CMA average (see the bluer areas in the image above). Per United Way Greater Toronto’s maps, my preconceived notion on the economic character of Toronto’s suburbs was only accurate in the 1980s—a fairly damning indictment on the antiquated nature of my assumption.
In last week’s post, I wrote about how I looked at urban policy in a new way. But now, with two assumptions debunked, I find myself looking at my city (and the suburbs I have lived in) in a similarly novel manner.
