By Dr. Maurice Yeates (with Paul Du and Tansel Erguden)

This paper shows that downtown Toronto (bounded by Jarvis St. on the east, Spadina Ave. on the west, Davenport Rd. on the north, and Lake Ontario on the south) is a rarity among large North American metropolises - it has a strong and vibrant core. Well into the 1980s there were doubts about the state of its health, but since that time its local population has doubled to almost 100,000, and development has proceeded apace. The key to this has been the strength of its major clusters of economic, commercial, public service, health care, educational, and cultural activities which generate about 400,000 jobs, and the strong transport linkages which this nucleus has with the surrounding Greater Toronto Area of almost 6.2 million persons. This paper is an extract fr om the CSCA's major research report, Charting the GTA: The Dynamics of Commercial Change in the Greater Toronto Area which, in eight chapters, examines the basis of commercial growth in all parts of the metropolis, and peers into the future.