URD1031H F
Instructor: George Baird
Meeting Section: L0101
Friday, 9:00AM - 12:00PM

This course will present a history of the development of the urban form of the city and the urban region of Toronto from the late eighteenth century to the present.

In each session of the course, a presentation will be made by the instructor (sometimes by a guest lecturer instead), and this will be followed in each session by class discussion. It is hoped also that it will be possible to organize a series of walking tours of significant parts of the city, but the tours in question will need to take place outside the regular times of the sessions of the course, and will depend on the availability of students to participate in them.

The course will explore the characteristic relationships that have grown up over the years between the distinctive topography of the city; it’s pre-settler indigenous patterns, early European settlement, and the evolution over time of its successive infrastructures, including railways, port facilities, expressways, transit lines and pedestrian walkway systems. These characteristic infrastructures will be described in terms of their gradual, systematic impact on the evolving form of the city.

At the same time, the architecture of the city will also be described, but this description will demonstrate primarily how buildings became typological in the historical evolution of Toronto. One might say that the buildings will be depicted to the extent that they demonstrate the typical relationships of the city’s building typologies to its emergent urban morphology.

The course has been conceived to be of particular interest to urban design and planning students, but it is open as an elective to students in the architecture and landscape architecture programs as well.