INTRODUCTION
Mississauga, one of the largest cities in Canada, did not exist when Jane Jacobs published her The Death and Life of American Cities in 1961. Frustrated with the battles with the city planners in New York she eventually settled in Toronto to continue her struggle to preserve lively communities in the downtown core from the hasty ideas of urban developers. Today, some forty years after the founding of Mississauga, we are asking what kind of city it is, and what kind of city will it become in the next few decades. Going back to its roots, we ask what kind of forces spawned this city on the western edge of Toronto, itself just a midsized city before WWII.
Mississauga was born at a time when large urban centres south of the border were going into decline and “the death of the city” was not just an academic topic. Barely a few hours’ drive away, cities like Buffalo and Detroit, once leading centres of the emerging industrial America, had been reduced to mere shadows of their former selves.
At the same time, people continued to flock to cities both in North America and worldwide. As the Economist magazine has stated, “Cities are becoming more important to the fate of the global economy. The proportion of the world’s population that lives in them has grown from 3% in 1800 to 14% in 1900 to more than 50% today. It could reach 75% in 2050: in the developing world more than 1 million people move to cities every five days.”1 Today, living in cities has become the dominant way of life not only in the developed countries, but increasingly throughout the world. In Western Europe and America the process has accelerated with industrialization, drawing increasing numbers of the rural population into the cities that grew around the newly built factories, mines, and iron smelters. From the 2nd half of the 20th Century on, we also register an explosive growth of cities in the developing countries that are trying to catch up with the industrialization of the Western world. Whether in China, South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent or Africa, cities of previously unimaginable size are springing up. Here in Canada we witness the continuing mushrooming of The Greater Toronto Area (GTA), now ranked as the fourth largest city agglomeration on the continent. 2
The rapid growth of large urban centres is a puzzling process in that it poses a wide range of questions as to the dynamics of their growth, the stage they have reached, and the prospects for the quality of life for their inhabitants, especially viewed in the context of the North American experience. More questions arise as to the significance of particular factors of growth and their mutual interaction. Perhaps most importantly, the question arises how these factors will play out in the context of accelerating societal changes as the 21st century progresses.
Just a few decades ago, in the 1970s, concerns were being raised about the decline of American industrial cities. As Glaeser says in his Triumph of the City, not only Buffalo and Detroit, but also Boston, Chicago, and New York, and a number of “rustbelt” cities such as Pittsburgh, were losing population due to a general industrial and economic decline.3 However, since the dawn of the 21st century the overall timbre of the discussion has been changing as the general outlook for life in the cities has been gradually improving, especially in some areas in the US, a country which in many ways serves as a reference point and yardstick for judging developments in Canada.
The revival of some of the large urban US centres that previously experienced prolonged periods of decline is taking place despite the fact that a number of ideas about salvaging them and building “ideal” cities did not withstand the test of time.
In this study we document the growth of the Toronto agglomeration from the perspective of the development of other North American urban centres, and with particular interest in the development of the new City of Mississauga. The Toronto Agglomeration has grown within the proximity of two of the largest US city agglomerations--New York City and Chicago-- and in its development is overtaking Buffalo and Detroit, once thriving cities just across the border. Despite the geographic proximity to these urban centres, Toronto has developed along a divergent path, emerging in a country with a distinct history and continued association with the British political culture.
Due to different immigration patterns, Toronto initially grew in the shadows of Montreal, and only after WWII did it secure a dominant position in the Canadian economic sphere. For this reason it has avoided the worst of the economic transformation of post-industrial cities on the continent. These also appear to be the reasons for the present astounding growth of the Toronto agglomeration.
Along this same developmental path appeared Mississauga, initially a Toronto bedroom community amalgamated from a collection of towns and villages that is transforming itself into a city with ambitions of its own. In the following pages we will look at the process of the formation of a large urban agglomeration on the North American continent from the particular vantage point of the city of Mississauga, which itself is now taking the shape of a major urban centre playing a visible role in the economy of the country.
In reviewing the theoretical perspectives on the growth of North American cities, we profit from a host of urban studies south of the border and some recent ones in Canada. One would still expect the US experience to be relevant for the development of Canadian cities in that their economies remain dependent on demand south of the border, and because of remnants of cultural similarities within the former British colonies of North America.
Although cities are experiencing unprecedented growth throughout the world, and especially in the developing countries, they currently remain at different stages of economic development. In Europe most cities originated long before industrialization took hold and so carry on with structures inherited from the time before automobiles became omnipresent. Intense urbanization on the Asian and African continents, as well as in South America, on the other hand, is still mostly fed by migration from poor rural areas, and the cities there are for the most part poor. For this reason these cities are further removed from the experiences of Canadian urban centres.
By virtue of taking off at a later stage of industrialization, Canada has escaped the worst effects of the rapid deindustrialization that has affected the “rustbelt” cities south of the border, yet the processes of economic transformation are resulting in concomitant large population shifts within its borders. So while overfishing has caused collapse of the traditional economies of towns in the Atlantic Provinces, forcing former maritime populations to move to urban areas, rationalization of farming in the Prairies has also left large swaths of rural population with no choice but to seek new sources of income in the cities. As a result, urban agglomerations, and particularly the GTA, are witnessing large influxes of population from other regions of the country.
This essay attempts to trace the growth of the City of Mississauga as a distinctive entity, as well as to view it as an inextricable part of the Toronto agglomeration that itself is a chapter in Canadian urbanization. By virtue of being situated near the border of the United States, the burgeoning Toronto agglomeration offers a vantage point for examining urbanization on the North American continent, and in particular on its divergent paths of development.
In this essay we will consider the dominant contemporary issues of cities in North America, and Canada—and those of the Toronto urbanized region, Mississauga in particular. In reviewing the literature we come to conclusion that discussing the livability of North American cities from selected vantage points provides the best insights for our purposes. Two of these: rapid population growth and population concentration in cities of unprecedented size have defined the most conspicuous aspects of global change since World War Two. These demographic shifts reinforce the transformation of national economies that are often subsumed under the catchword "Globalization". This change has been triggered in large part by technological and scientific breakthroughs that permitted have increased food production worldwide and, at the same time, enabled large population migrations in developing countries, often beyond their national borders. Mass migrations with all their disruptive consequences have particularly intensified in the 2000s.
These technological and scientific achievements have significantly extended the human life span during the second half of the 20th century which has resulted in the rapid ageing of the population with a corresponding decrease of fertility. While the demographic explosion, mass migrations, the appearance of whole new urbanized areas, and profound technological changes are widely experienced and discussed, the consequences of a rapidly ageing population are not universally acknowledged, much less discussed from the point of view of policy. We will recognize the growing urgency of considering the consequences of all these changes for the environment that until the last decades–due to economic and political expediencies—have been ignored or altogether dismissed.
We will attempt to lay the groundwork for systematic thinking about contemporary urban issues. While the elements of that analysis are not new, their combination, at least in the available literature, is. There are quite illuminating analyses of urbanized regions, but they do not include our factors, with at least one of them usually being left out: either the environment or the impact of expected new intelligent technologies.
Later we will attempt to tie into discussions encountered in the public domain by narrowing down our considerations to problems immediately experienced in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Two of these have been widely discussed by the public at large since they affect everyday life in the city in a most direct way: congested roadways and the lack of jobs. While loss of jobs in manufacturing can be attributed to globalization and automation, congested roadways are often considered out of context, and not as a consequence of urban sprawl or of automobile-based urban planning. In that respect it is worthwhile to view the city as primarily a collection of the people living within it and only secondarily as an urban infrastructure. People can and do move around, and they can abandon a city for another one that may offer better opportunities. Mobility is increasing within a global economy that affects individual lives in every respect. People choose cities in other countries that offer opportunities to improve their lives, often for environmental reasons, as is the case with the Chinese leaving their own heavily polluted industrial cities.
There are various approaches to the gridlock problems that depend on what people value more: either the comfort—and discomfort—of driving on congested roads, or bearing the cost of building public transit and living in denser urban areas. If people insist on driving they are tacitly resigned to bearing with the consequences of a polluted atmosphere and its harmful effects on their health. They are also sacrificing the health and welfare of subsequent generations that will have to live with the effects of climate change—a consequence of a heavily polluted environment, polluted largely by automobile exhaust.
There is an emerging consensus that a solution to environmental problems in urbanized regions depends primarily on planning denser neighbourhoods with access to efficient transit and pedestrian walkways; this solution could be conveniently subsumed under the phrase: "the walkability of the neighbourhood". Secondarily, the chances of effectively dealing with environmental problems rely on the realization by the population at large of the real costs of living in suburban settings, and peoples' readiness to bear those costs that so far have been shared—in the form of extensive subsidies—by all taxpayers, including by those who do not live in suburbia.
Apart from issues of urban sprawl, we will present the most often cited approaches to economic problems of large cities affected by globalization and loss of jobs due to advanced automation. All cities recognize education and innovation as the main factors facilitating the transformation of the urban economy, along with individual adaptation to change.
Our interests in this research were shaped by the dramatic change of fate of the US border cities of Detroit and Buffalo, just a few hours’ drive from Toronto. In the course of deindustrialization those once leading US industrial cities, in just a few decades, were reduced to mere shadows of their former selves. Their fates were fundamentally different from those of the European industrial cities that in the second half of the past century were rebuilding after the ravages of WWII. Reconstruction of some of these cities, such as Berlin and Frankfurt, has reached into the first decades of this century and involved the rebuilding of their erstwhile dense and walkable neighbourhoods. For this reason the denser European cities have largely been spared the negative experiences with suburbanization and urban sprawl of English speaking North America. Similarly, the denser Francophone cities in Canada, such as Quebec City and Montreal, have been exposed to more limited effects of urban sprawl.
Rapid population growth combined with rapid urbanization has also produced dense cities in Asia. Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai have grown extremely dense and, while relying mainly on public transport, are experiencing continuous accumulation of unprecedented levels of wealth. In the course of recovering from the destruction of WWII the Tokyo region has emerged even more densely inhabited, and as such has become the most populous and productive area in the world. The present success of New York with its high-rise condo towers is another example of this. These experiences may stimulate the imagination of city planners in The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area who are envisaging the necessity to densify a previously sprawling suburbia, as witnessed in Mississauga.
Apart from the consequences of urban sprawl, the other major issue in contemporary North American cities is the rapid loss of jobs in the manufacturing sectors, mainly on assembly lines both in Canada, and in the US. Automation of non-manual jobs is being experienced as well but it might be just an augur of much more difficult to absorb processes of automation to come.
Environment, one of our crucial factors in analyzing the livability of cities, and which was often absent in traditional studies of urbanization, appears now as a dominant factor determining the fate of not only such cities as New Orleans, New York, and Beijing (along with other Chinese industrial cities) but also of Canada’s Fort McMurray. Edward Glaeser in his Triumph of the City, for example, considers alternatives for the costly rebuilding of New Orleans’ infrastructure after the flooding disaster in 2005. Glaeser gives equally weighty arguments for a total abandonment of the city in favour of assigning the funds dedicated to rebuilding the infrastructure instead to the relocation and education of the most afflicted low income population, which might have secured better outcomes.
The discussion undertaken in this essay is centred on the livability of cities as considered from our viewpoints in each chapter. It starts with the acknowledgement that the concept of livability itself has been evolving through the centuries and is still continuing to evolve with changing technology and the changing preferences of urban residents.
In early industrial cities residents usually wanted to move from the heavily polluted city centres to the surrounding area in order seek refuge from contagious diseases less prevalent on the urban fringes. Still, they needed to be able to commute to the centrally located factories for work. During deindustrialization, that continues from the end of WWII through the first decades of this century, factories were either moved to the suburbs, or closed altogether. New jobs were being increasingly created in downtown office towers and other facilities that do not produce any physical goods, for example, in the case of digital communication technologies. The workplaces and their highly qualified workers of this knowledge-based economy still tend to be concentrated in downtown cores, where they profit from the face-to-face interactions between their employees that are conducive to the creative spill-over of knowledge. This concentration of productive capacities in densely populated urbanized areas is best explained by the concept of "agglomeration economies" that refers to the high productivity of densely populated areas.
People in Mississauga want a livable city, and would like to know what the chances are that Mississauga will be liveable in the coming two decades. It is a challenging task to calculate those chances. This essay is an attempt to narrow down the uncertainties. The time limit of two decades is chosen because the forecasts regarding the advent of the new intelligent digital technologies that will be endangering future labour markets, are based on currently developed technologies, beyond which forecasters do not venture, for then new developments become exceedingly unpredictable. Intelligent digital technologies will displace a large range of work related tasks, covering most types of manual tasks, not only routine ones, as in assembly lines, but also flexible tasks such as those required in the service sectors; but most significantly they will affect the non-manual occupations in the knowledge based economy. Globalization and advanced automation are expected to create large scale imbalances in the future labour markets with a concomitant increase in social tensions around employment and income polarization.
In this essay we will discuss the infrastructure of the city as it affects the lives of its citizens by providing options for housing, employment, and transportation. We will consider the general directions of change that the entire Toronto urbanized region is undergoing, within which Mississauga is finding its own role to play. People have to cover increasing distances between where they live and work, and commuting itself has become an important aspect of their quality of life. We will also consider where people tend to live, and the choices city planners make about shaping the urban environment, especially important as the pace of change is accelerating to a virtually unprecedented degree in the recent history of cities.
We will seek here to clarify and exemplify the effects of globalization and advanced automation as they are portrayed in the literature and on the basis of the author's own observations in Mississauga, in the Greater Toronto Area, and in other world cities in America, Mexico, and Europe.