Jennefer Laidley

7 Networks of Power: Toronto’s Waterfront Energy Systems from 1840 to 1970

Urban networks in the contemporary city are largely hidden, opaque, invisible, disappearing underground, locked into pipes, cables, conduits, tubes, passages and electronic waves. It is exactly this hidden form that renders the tense relationship between nature and the city blurred, that contributes to severing the process of social transformation of nature from the process of urbanization. Perhaps more importantly, the hidden flows and their technological framing render occult the social relations and power mechanisms that are scripted in and enacted through these flows. Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000: 121

13 Socio-ecological Change in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first Centuries: The Lower Don River

On 2 February 2007, Waterfront Toronto, the city’s lead waterfront development corporation, announced an international design competition intended to secure a world-class plan for developing forty hectares of land at the mouth of the Don River. The task given to firms selected for the competition was an ambitious one: they were to envision the ‘renaturalizing’ and revitalization of an area that has been marginalized for years. Waterfront Toronto had called for a plan for the Lower Don Lands that would establish a ‘common vision for this area’ and would construct an ‘iconic landscape’ to bring new urban life to the area (Waterfront Toronto 2007a: 7).1 The initiative of Waterfront Toronto to reinvent the mouth of the Don River marks a major reversal in changes to the Don that began in the late nineteenth century. It is part of an ongoing process aimed at re-imagining, reconfiguring, and reshaping a problematic area of the waterfront. It is particularly appropriate that the final chapter in this volume focuses on a comparison between contemporary plans for ‘re-naturalization’ of the Don River and the changes made to the river in the late nineteenth century. The volume begins with chapters that discuss the ways Toronto’s waterfront was transformed in conjunction with an industrially oriented era of development and ends with discussions of the more recent wave of development. This chapter uses the particular case of the Don River to compare the ways that socio-ecological changes in the two periods were similar and different. Late-nineteenth-century city builders constructed plans for the Don that spoke ambivalently of nature both as exalted and outside the bounds of human control, but also as requiring improvement as the key to unlocking its productive capacity in support of urban growth. In contrast, contemporary plans

5 A Social History of a Changing Environment: The Don River Valley, 1910–1931

Not far from the spot where, at present, the Don-street bridge crosses the river, on the west side and to the north, lived for a long time a hermitsquatter, named Joseph Tyler ... His abode on the Don was an excavation in the side of the steep hill, a little way above the level of the river bank ... To the south of his cave he cultivated a large garden, and raised among other things, the white sweet edible Indian corn, a novelty here at the time; and very excellent tobacco. Scadding 1873: 228–9