Redesigning Life in the Inner Suburbs

The popular view of Toronto defines the city by its downtown core, defined in contrast to the self-contained 905 outer suburbs. But this binary ignores Toronto’s inner suburbs, the fastest growing portion of the city and home to much of its aging population, newly landed citizens, and some of its poorest residents, resulting in a neighbourhood infrastructure that is in decline. It is this kind of neighbourhood – spanning within 14 kilometres of downtown and including  parts of North York, East York and York, Scarborough and Etobicoke – that George Brown’s Institute Without Boundaries (IwB) in the School of Design aimed to address through its Renovate Your Neighbourhood student research and design project in 2008-2009, funded by OCE Connections.