ROBERT LEWIS

I am professor of geography with a specialization in urban historical geographies. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto, and I completed my M.A and Ph.D. on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Montreal at McGill University under the supervision of Professor Sherry Olson. My teaching focuses on urban and historical questions with an emphasis on Canada and the United States. Among other things, I have been the editor of the Urban Historical Review and North American editor of Urban History, and I have served on the manuscript review committee of the University of Toronto Press.

My research has two strands. The first focuses on the historical geographies of metropolitan economic processes in the United States and Canada between 1850 and 1960, with particular emphasis on industry and factory districts. My studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century industry, factory districts and class-based neighborhoods have been informed by work taken from economic and urban geography (flexible production, labor market formation, ethnic and gender divisions of labor, scales of analysis, and landscape); business and urban history (production strategies, economic networks, historical narratives); and historical materialism (the tensions between the contingencies of the historical geography of people, firms and institutions in urban places and the broader structures theorized by political economists).

The second strand, which is its early stages, focuses on the dynamics that produced a massive wave of private apartment construction in Toronto between the early 1950s and the early 1970s. The current dominant form of residential development in Toronto is the condominium tower, but the condo is not the city’s first nor most transformative wave of apartment construction. As in other large, North American cities, Toronto’s housing markets and social geography were transformed after World War II as areas of low-rise, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century single family houses were replaced with comprehensively planned superblocks of modernist apartments that still dominate large swathes of the city. Working with Paul Hess, the purpose of this research is to show how Toronto was transformed from a “city of homes” into a “city of apartments.”