An article by the CITY Institute's resident PhD student, Simon Black, appeared in today's Toronto Star:
For years, Toronto avoided the street violence that plagued U.S. cities. Yet since the late 1980s we’ve embarked on a path that would make manifest in our urban fabric the social problems of inner-city America. We cut the social safety net; we’ve neglected the built environment of poor neighbourhoods; we’ve failed to regulate precarious employment and create “good jobs”; we’ve yet to solve high dropout rates and youth unemployment, disproportionately impacting racialized youth; and we’ve rolled back equity initiatives that acknowledged the ways socio-economic outcomes continue to be shaped by race.
Thus, the Third City was manufactured. And as it was made, it can be unmade, with policies to make more economically and socially secure the lives of its inhabitants.