Condoland casts CityPlace – a massive residential development of
more than thirty condominium towers just outside Toronto’s downtown
core – as a microcosm of twenty-first-century urban intensification
that has transformed the city skyline beyond all recognition. Built
almost entirely by a single private developer, this immense
neighbourhood took decades to plan, design, and develop, but the end
result lacks a sense of place and is not widely accessible to those
who need homes: only a fraction of its 13,000 units constitute
affordable housing, and public amenities are limited. Casting an eye
toward the frantic vertical urbanization of Toronto, Condoland traces
the forty-year history of the city’s largest residential
megaproject. James T. White and John Punter summarize the tools used
to shape Toronto’s built environment and critically explore the
underlying political economy of planning and real estate development
in the city. Using detailed field studies, interviews with key actors,
archival research, and with nearly two hundred illustrations, White
and Punter reveal how a promise to reproduce Vancouverism, a
celebrated model of Canadian urban development, unravelled under an
alarmingly flexible approach to planning and design that is
acquiescent to the demands of a rapacious development industry.
Through a uniquely design-focused evaluation of a phenomenon
increasingly known as “condo-ism,” Condoland raises key questions
about the sustainability and long-term resilience of city planning.
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The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto’s CityPlace
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780774868402
Publisert
2022
Utgiver
University of British Columbia Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter