 Hi, I'm Brian Doucette, Canada Research Chair in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. And I'm here today with my father and co-author Michael Doucette. Together we've produced a book, Street Cars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto, a visual analysis of change. We share a long-standing interest in Toronto's transportation history, including its iconic street cars. And we're not alone in this. Many people, both from Toronto and from outside, have come to the city to photograph the street cars. Now these photographers were primarily interested in the vehicles themselves. But for us, as people who are interested in both street cars and in the way in which cities change, we're also interested in everything else that's in these images. The buildings, the people, the streets, the changing land use and urban form. And if you think about it, in the 1960s there really weren't many people going into distant urban neighborhoods or old industrial districts taking photographs of these ordinary spaces. But you know, put a few street car tracks down and you're pretty much guaranteed that an enthusiast has taken a picture there. For this book, we've re-photographed these old images to bring them into dialogue with current planning and policy issues. This repeat photography reveals the subtle and not so subtle changes that have occurred in Toronto, which helps us to understand the transition the city made from a provincial and manufacturing center to a major global player today. Downtown Toronto is where the transition to a global city is most striking. You can see it in the skyline. For example, Over My Shoulder is the old Bank of Commerce building. It opened in 1931 and it was the tallest building in Canada until the early 1960s. Today, because of developments in terms of new offices and condominiums, there are more than 90 buildings that are taller than the Bank of Commerce. Looking at Toronto today, it's easy to forget how industrial this city once was. Back in the 1960s, there were factories along the waterfront, rail corridors, streets like King and even in all but the most wealthy neighborhoods. Today, virtually all that manufacturing is gone and most of those factories have been demolished. Where this industry used to be, today we find tall clusters of condominium towers. When people speak of the condominiumization of Toronto, it's in formerly industrial districts where this is most evident. If dramatic physical changes to the landscapes dominate downtown and formerly industrial districts, in most of the city's residential neighborhoods, stability of the built form is the dominant trend. Local streets like Bloor, College, Dundas, still have most of the buildings that they had 100 years ago and on residential side streets there are detached and semi-detached houses dating from the late 19th and early 20th century. You can easily use these old streetcar photographs and navigate through these neighborhoods knowing exactly where you are because most of the buildings that were there 60 or 70 years ago are still there today. In many Toronto neighborhoods, physical change happens at an extremely slow, you could say glacial pace which is fitting because some of the earliest work in repeat photography was done by natural scientists who used repeat photography to measure the growth and decline of glaciers. If stability is the dominant physical characteristic in these neighborhoods, economically and socially they're anything but. Many Toronto neighborhoods have become wealthier as gentrification has displaced many of the working class and immigrant communities that are now increasingly found within inner suburbs. In neighborhoods such as this, a combination of smaller households and a lack of new housing means that populations have declined sometimes dramatically. In this book we ask two questions. What do visual changes tell us about spatial, social and economic change? How can the big forces of change in cities be visualized? There are many books that try to assess urban change. Ours is one of the few that use its visual methodology as its basis. We want to use photography as a way to begin new conversations and to enhance existing ones about how Toronto has changed and why. We move beyond using photographs simply as a nice way to illustrate findings derived from other sources. Our world and our city are very visual. In this book we want to not only strengthen academic debates, we want to challenge everyone – planners, politicians, policymakers and the general public – to think about their cities in new and different ways.