Toronto has long struggled to preserve and retell its own history. Ours is a city in perpetual self-reinvention: buildings destroyed, neighborhoods transformed, cultural histories neglected and displaced. Whispers of past Torontos live on in building facades and buried train tracks, but day-to-day Toronto feels more like a city in the making than one with a history worth telling.
Multi-generational residents recall the city's past, and can share stories of political disputes, shuttered music venues, and local public figures. But Toronto is a city of newcomers: The majority of Torontonians were born outside of Canada, and much of the Canadian-born population grew up outside of Toronto proper. Suburbanites, Canadians from other provinces, and immigrants from other countries come to this city starting completely afresh, with no inherited local context. These new residents are hungry for stories about their city. What is Toronto's origin story? Its founding myth? Who has called this place home before, and what does it mean to call it home now?
Many institutions around the city are trying to answer these questions, and struggling to meet the demand. Festivals like Jane's Walk and Doors Open, for instance, are indispensable weekend-long celebrations of civic engagement, and are being attended in record numbers. The city has a vibrant ecosystem of local tour guides, and communities like First Story and Lost Rivers lead walks from a place of deep expertise. When I started my own walking tour company in 2023, the tours immediately sold out, and I was proud to give many Torontonians their first glimpse of the city beyond the downtown core. Torontonians are hungry to learn about and engage with their city.
Walking tours and festivals are an excellent introduction, but they are ultimately just a first step. A two-hour walking tour can introduce you to a new neighborhood, but will ultimately only be a light gloss, a one-off source of fun facts. These events can be genuinely inspiring, but what is one to do with the energy they confer? You've been introduced to a new neighborhood or new idea about the city — now what?
The next step goes beyond just information or insights. True learning—truly transformational learning, the kind that reconfigures your relationship to a place and possibly your relationship to yourself—requires sustained attention. It requires a community of fellow learners with whom you can exchange ideas, refine arguments, exchange interpretations, and stay motivated. It's immersive, and feels not like a one-off activity, but like an integrated part of day-to-day life.
But where can one turn to get this thorough, rigorous local civic education? Universities are primarily for young adults and it's challenging to enroll in one-off classes. Libraries and adult education centers offer courses, but those are primarily frequented by retirees. Book clubs can be effective, but it takes rare dedication to sustain a book club through multiple long works of history. There are few forums for learners of all ages to engage in collective sense-making.
Toronto's 12,000 Year History is this next step — the beginning of a deeper engagement with the city of Toronto through historical texts, expert-led walks, and rigorous bi-weekly discussions, among a group of equally curious and dedicated peers. The course is the midway point—an educational missing middle, if you will—between a credential-conferring university course and a book club among friends. It is a space, in short, to rigorously study Toronto's past while meeting, and perhaps becoming, the people shaping its future.
This course syllabus was inspired by the spirit of Stewart Brand's concept of pace layering, which describes how complex systems like cities evolve. Cities are made up of layers that move at different speeds: nature and culture at the slow, powerful core; governance and infrastructure in the middle; fashion and commerce at the fast-moving surface.
We will read Toronto through this pace layering lens. Nature provides the foundation for everything that comes after; the first draft upon which humans write their story. In our case, we will explore Toronto's singular urban ecology, the largest ravine system in the world, which has been a source of wayfinding, fishing, and navigation for ten millennia. We will then move to culture and governance, exploring the core ideas and ideologies that have shaped Toronto since its inception as a British colony. We then turn to infrastructure, looking at the city's long history of transportation debacles. We conclude with the fast-moving recent past: histories of marginalized populations and their struggles for rights and recognition in the city.
We will be in direct conversation with experts who are chronicling and shaping Toronto in real time—historians, activists, heritage professionals, artists, urban planners, technologists, and writers—including many of the authors of the texts we will read together. They will act as our thought partners, helping us refine our ideas about the city and guide our questions as we continue to learn week-to-week.
The course therefore alternates between texts about Toronto's history, walks that embody the historical ideas we explore together, and discussions with the relevant thinkers preserving and advancing our city forward. Together we will be learning not just new information but new habits of attention and ways of seeing. Its ethos is collaborative and participatory; I expect the thing we will most come to value about this course experience is each other.
One of the great joys of studying history is that there is no predicting its effects in advance. Readers of the same historical text could take wildly different paths; one inspired into politics, another into art, the other into community organizing. The one guarantee is this: studying the history of the place you live enormously enriches your daily life, creates a permanent sense of rootedness, and opens your imagination to all the Torontos that could have been and could still be.
The ultimate goal of this course is to make you feel that you are not simply an observer of this city; you are part of its essential fabric. You are not a passive recipient of the story of Toronto; you are among its many authors. We are living history, if we only choose to pay attention.