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The Assembling a City project explores the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of urban change by tracing the flow of material and energy that built, fed, and fueled downtown Toronto between 1836 and 1937. Over this period, Toronto grew from a small colonial port town to one of the largest cities on the Great Lakes. This transformation relied on waterborne shipments of commodities to the port of Toronto, which served as a conduit for the flow of material and energy between various resource hinterlands around the Great Lakes and the city’s downtown where residents erected buildings, purchased fresh foods, and acquired fuel to heat their homes and cook their meals. This project investigates aspects of Toronto’s urban metabolism to uncover the relationship between environmental change in sites of resource extraction, networks of distribution, processes of urban development, and patterns of abundance and scarcity.
The Assembling a City project contributes to several fields, including environmental history, Canadian history, urban studies, and social metabolism research by blending quantitative and qualitative methods to better understand how urban development was a product of both environmental change caused by resource extraction and social relationships between people with uneven access to and control over commodities in the city. The project will create a database of commodities delivered to the city’s harbour over the course of a century, analyze that data to reconstruct how these commodities shaped the lives of urban residents, and employ a combination of Historical GIS geospatial analysis and archival research to provide context and further evidence to provide new insights into the urban development and its reliance on resource hinterlands.
The Assembling a City project is supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant (430-2024-00573).
“Filth, Squalid Misery, and Seemingly Drunken Debauchery”: Energy Relief in Toronto’s House of Industry Records
In 1860s Toronto, poor relief depended on moral judgment, reinforcing elite control, stigmatizing poverty, and linking aid to behaviour and labour.
Identifying Historical Actors in Toronto’s Coal Network During the Late 19th Century
Toronto’s coal trade celebrated elite merchants’ power, while obscuring labourers’ roles; surviving records reveal economic influence, limited worker visibility, and unequal historical memory.
Transcribing Toronto: Tips from a Research Assistant
A research assistant shares practical tips for transcribing historical records, emphasizing practice, note-taking, research, organization, and self-care to improve accuracy.
Continue Reading Transcribing Toronto: Tips from a Research Assistant
Feeding, Fuelling, and Building the Foundations of Toronto: Sources for Exploring Historic Urban Metabolism
Using harbour ledgers, the “Assembling a City” project reconstructs Toronto’s nineteenth-century urban metabolism, tracing fruit, coal, and stone flows linking city and hinterlands.