National Network for Equitable Library Service

How do we build cities where we aren't just living within the same urban space, but living together? Greater Toronto is now home to a larger proportion of foreign-born residents than any other major global metropolis. Not surprisingly, city officials rarely miss an opportunity to tout the region’s ethno-cultural neighbourhoods. Yet there’s strong evidence that the GTA is experiencing widening socio-economic disparities that have produced worrisome divisions.

What do your Eggs Benedict say about your notions of class? Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outré food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting attitudes towards social status and leisure? In some ways, brunch and other forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions.

City Hall proclaimed 2006 the Year of Creativity. ‘Live With Culture’ banners flap over the city. And across the city, donors are ponying up millions for the ROM and the AGO. Culture’s never had it so good. Right? The State of the Arts explores the Toronto arts scene from every angle, applauding, assailing and arguing about art in our fair burg. The essays consider the big-ticket and the ticket-free, from the Opera House and the CNE to the subconscious art of graffiti eradication and underground hip-hop.

Since 2010, Toronto's headlines have been consumed by the outrageous personal foibles and government-slashing, anti-urbanist policies of Mayor Rob Ford. But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascendance as a mature global city. Some Great Idea traces how post-amalgamation, and under three very different mayors, Toronto managed to so quickly oscillate from one extreme to another, and how the city might proceed from here.

Beside me, on the stone steps of this quiet courtyard, there is a lame man – the sweeper. He is so thin that the end of his belt comes back around to its buckle. He’s trying to feed a puppy the rest of his lunch. He reminds me that we all need something to need us, and that maybe that’s why we Westerners, who are so independent, mostly fail to understand family in this way, and need to come up with things like ‘quality time’ to justify such a base need. Everyone here asks if my family is in Sri Lanka, if that’s why I’ve come here. When I say no, they’re back in Canada, this confuses them.

Drained by a half-dozen major watersheds, cut by a network of deep ravines and fronting on a Great Lake, Toronto is a city dominated by water. Recently, the trend of fettering Toronto’s water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the city’s surface water. In HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets, thirty-four contributors examine the ever-changing interplay between nature and culture, and call into question the city’s past, present and future engagement with water.

'Teenage Head changed the face of music in this country. I would not be who I am today without their first record ... In 1979 they were the only band that mattered.’ – Hugh Dillon In the late 1970s and early 1980s, no Canadian band rocked harder, louder or to more hardcore fans than Hamilton, Ontario's own Teenage Head. Although usually lumped in the dubiously inevitable 'punk rock' category of the day, this high-energy quartet consisting of four guys who'd known each other since high school were really only punk by association.

Non-profits are big business. According to a recent Johns Hopkins report, third-sector institutions in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Japan, the U.S. and Canada have been growing at an average rate that is twice the growth rate of their GDPs. Canada is home to the second largest non-profit workforce in the world, employing 2 million paid staff and contributing $112 billion to our economy each year. We are also recognized worldwide as an important generator of ideas and agent of social change.

Toronto is a concrete city. From international landmarks to civic buildings to cultural institutions to metropolitan infrastructure and the single-family home, reminders of the era of 'brutalist' architecture surround Torontonians. But for how long? As architectural fashion has shifted to the glass-and-steel neomodernism of today, these concrete structures have been increasingly ignored - and in some cases, demolished. Concrete Toronto takes readers on a guided tour of Toronto's concrete architecture.

Toronto is home to multiple and thriving queer communities that reflect the dynamism of a global city. Any Other Way is an eclectic and richly illustrated local history that reveals how these individuals and community networks have transformed Toronto from a place of churches and conservative mores into a city that has consistently led the way in queer activism, not just in Canada but internationally.