Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto

"""Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto is an essential book for the library of anyone - academic or otherwise - interested in the city's history. It offers an engaging but unflinching narrative of Toronto's development over the past fifty years, in all its inequity, and helps us think about the role of transit within the city it moves through. But the Doucets' critical visual analysis of the city's landscape extends well beyond the streetcar, and provides an insightful approach to grappling with the impact of the complex changes brought about by local and global forces."" - Patricia Burke Wood, Professor of Geography, York University ""Cities are places and material assemblages, but they are also portals that allow and require us to look across space and time in new and creative ways. This is a brilliant, beautiful book, an eloquent blend of Jane Jacobs, Susan Sontag, Sam Bass Warner, and Annie Leibovitz. Join me in a desire named streetcar, as Brian and Michael Doucet help us navigate the present, past, and future on a key Canadian node of the multidimensional frontiers of planetary urbanization!"" - Elvin Wyly, Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia ""The secret to understanding Toronto is the streetcars: their rails are the city's backbone and the cars themselves the electric nervous system that propels the city forward. The visual record of the streetcars themselves is a unique and clever frame to see the city through. The Doucets tap into decades of photos guiding us to look for the deeper context in each one. All that, and the streetcars are pretty cool too."" - Shawn Micallef, author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto"