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For those of you with a city-focused book fetish, you should be looking forward to Spacing’s upcoming issue where we review a handful of excellent books: Toronto — A City Becoming, Concrete Toronto, Greentopia, Transit Maps of the World, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, Not The Trailer, <\/em>and Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto<\/em>.<\/p>\n But the editors of Spacing hope to highlight more books on this blog by starting a new monthly feature — with a little help from you. A Spacing Toronto contributor will briefly write about an city\/urban book they’ve been reading — a mini-review, so to speak — and then ask our readers to tell us which books have been turning their crank. We’re aware that many overlooked gems are lying on bedside tables waiting for the word-of-mouth campaign to begin.<\/p>\n A description of the book from the Neptis Foundation:<\/p>\n The Public Metropolis traces the evolution of Ontario government responses to rapid population growth and outward expansion in the Toronto city region over an eighty-year period [1924-2003]. Frisken rigorously describes the many institutions and policies that were put in place at different times to provide services of region-wide importance and skillfully assesses the extent to which those institutions and policies managed to achieve objectives commonly identified with effective regional governance.<\/em><\/p>\n Although the province acted sporadically and often reluctantly in the face of regional population growth and expansion, Frisken argues that its various interventions nonetheless contributed to the region’s most noteworthy achievement: a core city that continued to thrive while many other North American cities were experiencing population, economic, and social decline.<\/em><\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/41IWjyOKQaL._AA240_.jpg\")
I’m kicking things off today with The Public Metropolis<\/em> by Frances Frisken. As Spacing’s publisher, I should have a good grasp on the history of Toronto’s growth and development, not to mention the government decisions that have shaped our city. But to be honest, there are very few books that can help me learn about the history of local governance. So when I received The Public Metropolis<\/em> in the mail back in January, I was extremely excited to jump right into it.<\/p>\n