HTO: hidden water and local exploration

January 18th, 2009

Now that the holidays are over, and the baking and preserving is finished, and I’ve splurged on a third bookshelf and rearranged my books to be layered two-deep instead of three (discovering a number of duplicates in the process), I finally have some time to settle in and read some of the new aquisitions. Two in particular are fascinating: Unbuilt Toronto and HTO. Both are worthy of a review, but I’ll concentrate on HTO in this post.

HTO (Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio, eds.) is both a history and a geography of water in Toronto, but is also a collection of essays about local exploration, water use, engineering, and architecture. Among other things. I’ve been racing through it, but I’ll be going back to re-read it again.

The essays are full of interesting facts about Toronto (mammoth bones uncovered at Bathurst and Dupont? who knew?), but more importantly, in explaining and discussing the history of the construction of the city, the authors challenge their readers to consider how dramatically we’ve changed the land around us, and whether that can be sustainable. There’s no blanket condemnation of the watercourse diversions and burials that have taken place since the 1800s, but there is a lot of discussion as to how we can achieve the same goal of a safe water supply for humans while allowing space for wildlife to survive. Several of the essays are also concentrated on the interaction between humans and the waters we live around, both physically and culturally. This emphasis on the many dimensions of the value of water, whatever its form, seems like the right approach to me.

While reading this book, I was also struck by how little I know about the city I’ve lived in for years. I know the major streets and the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in pretty well – but on the other hand, I used to live only a few minutes away from the Riverdale Park, and I’ve been there only a couple of times, and I don’t know the Western waterfront at all. I’ve mostly seen the Don River from the Queen Street bridge and the subway. I think I’ll be using HTO as a guide for exploration (though I won’t go as far as the urban infiltrators who explored and photographed some of the city’s storm sewers – I do think that’s an activity that people should be cautious about) as much as an information source. If everyone who reads it feels the same way I do, the book’s most important effect is going to be the number of people who start really getting to know their home.

This is a book I’ll be coming back to for ideas and information on a regular basis.