Quote:
Originally Posted by Docere
I didn't actually ask whether Toronto was "our" L.A. or not though.
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The point though, is that Toronto's similarities to Los Angeles are because it fulfills many of the same roles for Canada that LA does for the US. We didn't have a sunbelt to siphon off prosperity from the old Eastern/Great Lakes industrial cities - the post-war suburban boom, the ethnoburbs, and all the other features that it shares with LA came to Toronto (and the few other Canadian cities) because there wasn't really a Canadian equivalent.
By extension, if there were no Los Angeles or Sunbelt in general, the post-war experience of Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, et all would have looked a lot more like Toronto's.
That Toronto has similarities - cultural, historical, built, or otherwise - to Chicago, or similarities to Los Angeles, or to New York, is because it's our Great Lakes industrial city,
and our post-war boomtown, and our primate metropolis, and so on. What defines the characteristics of these individual US cities is that they tend to "specialize" in something more specific; and are often shaped by distinct boom-bust growth cycles, whereas growth has been distributed more evenly through time here. This is why we always get a half-dozen different answers on the "what American city is most similar or equivalent to Canadian city X?"