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A welcome addition to the growing corpus of works dealing with how North American cities came to be built, Unplanned Suburbs by McMaster University geographer Richard Harris is an imaginative and well-structured account of residential construction by individuals in early twentieth-century Toronto. Although Harris rounds up the usual suspects in terms of his primary data sources -- assessment rolls, insurance atlases, the census, building permits, newspaper accounts, council minutes, personal papers, and interviews -- he does so in interesting and useful combinations. The end result is a work that displays a geographer's keen sense of place and, simultaneously, sheds light on Toronto and how parts of it were developed. Even Toronto experts should learn something from reading this book.
Harris is at his best in his attempts to estimate the amount of self-building that occurred in Toronto and its suburbs in the early part of this century. It is here that he really seems to extract an impressive amount from his many samples painstakingly drawn from Toronto's assessment records. His estimate that owner building accounted for about 40 per cent of all new housing construction in Toronto and its suburbs between 1901 and 1913 is believable. This meant that as many as 15,000 homes were constructed by owners for their...