Lessons from the Garden City Movement: Making a Case to Regionalize City of Toronto’s Tower Renewal Program

The urban landscape spatially articulates diverse urban realities and historical trajectories of urban development, ideals and visions, and governance structures. Urban thinkers have often proposed utopian ideals of cities, which would alleviate the social issues of the society they were living in. Ebenezer Howard and his Garden City vision is a sustainable city utopia that offered an alternative to the industrial capitalist city. On the other hand, Modernist urban thinkers such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier championed car-oriented cities. The ‘tower in the park’ vertical city of Le Corbusier has deeply impacted the urban landscape of Toronto, and now more than 50 years later, these towers provide the largest proportion of affordable housing stock for low-income groups and newcomers. This paper analyzes the place-based Tower Renewal program of the City of Toronto, which sets to ameliorate the physical and social disparities that are disproportionately concentrated in tower communities. This paper proposes the 15-minute city as a 21st-century approach to the Garden City for the tower communities of Toronto, which helps to connect this place-specific initiative to broader economic and urban restructuring trends in the region.