I grew up in Scarborough, one of what Shawn Micallef calls an “inner suburb” of Toronto. Scarborough is a place of incredible ethic diversity, as the place where immigrants from China and Sri Lanka and India settle down — but it’s also a place that for many decades was neglected, decayed as Scarborough residents grew poorer and poorer while the city grew richer, and suffered from a chronic lack of transit.
Frontier City’s core idea is that the internationally famous former mayor, Rob Ford, was not solely a result of suburban voters voting against their own interests. It’s also that the richer inner city’s intentional neglect of growing poverty and needs of residents of places like Scarborough and Etobicoke was also a contributing factor. Rob Ford was a populist, conservative politician that appealed directly to these voters — suggesting that they wouldn’t be left behind. The author isn’t a Ford apologist, but he does acknowledge what is indisputable — that poorer residents of the city largely felt they had a voice in city hall with Ford after being “utterly let down by their government” by a “political class that could not care less about their quiet struggle”. Ford was not the right person for the job, but I think to this day there are no politicians that come close to promising the same sort of attention.
Micallef evokes this idea of two cities within one. The inner city — the richer, shining part of the city most of the world is familiar with — and the concrete suburbs that were typically ethnically diverse, relatively recently amalgamated into the city in 1998. These suburbs were the subject of much academic study over the 1990s and 2000s, which concluded that poverty was growing substantially in the suburbs and that failing social programmes were going to put the city in crisis — “a deep division that cannot be whitewashed” by John Tory. Amalgamation left parts of the city behind, but there are few right now that would dare to suggest reversing amalgamation, because it would leave more people behind, with less supports for the people that need them, and less of a voice for those people.
There are some good quotes in the book, but the writing gets awfully monotonous and repetitive over the neighbourhoods Micallef walks through. A lot of the broader citywide problems he talks about are essentially repeated word-for-word multiple times. The structure doesn’t change at any point. The writing isn’t particularly insightful either, nor is the writing particularly bold. At times, Frontier City outright gets things wrong. It decries the Scarborough subway extension for no discernible reason other than that it was championed by Rob Ford, while neglecting the very real notion that Scarborough residents face the longest commutes in the city. On these fronts it loses two points from me.
3/5
Written 24 June 2023 Adapted from my review on Goodreads.