Getting someone outside of the 416 area code to read HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets may be a hard sell. But early on, the book reminds us that water is a connective force. In the Introduction, editors Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio explain, “The future of Toronto’s water is not ours alone. Despite what we do here, it matters what happens in Thunder Bay and Thornhill. And what we do affects Kingston and Quebec City. We are all downstream.”

The book may explicitly be about Toronto – its shape, history, architects, and activists – but anyone interested in how North American cities work will find that HTO provides an intense and multifaceted approach to the relationship between the natural and urban world.

In terms of format, HTO is a close cousin to other books put out by Coach House Press. Like uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, and GreenTOpia, the book explores a single topic through multiple perspectives. HTO is written by architects, geology professors, poets, and environmentalists. The book attempts to keep its focus by grouping likeminded ideas together. The essays are divided into four sections: Foundations, Transformations, Explorations, and Directions.

The history-heavy Foundations section often sounds like a textbook. In particular, Ronald F. Williamson and Robert I. Macdonald’s “A resource like no other: Understanding the 11,000-year relationship between people and water” creaks under the task of cramming so many details into ten pages. But the reader does get a break in the form of visuals in the section. “Shapeshifters: Toronto’s changing watersheds, streams and shorelines” by Chris Hardwicke and Wayne Reeves pepper their piece with a number of old maps that must be a delight to every cartographer-at-heart.

Much of the book emphasizes that although it is often out of sight, water in Toronto is never far away. Ignoring it or attempting to tame it with pipes, parks, pavement, can have serious repercussions.

Toronto’s “relentlessly modern” street grid made no room for nature: bygone city planners buried ravines with garbage and relegated Toronto’s many creeks to sewers, all for the straight lines and ordered streets that make up the city today.

Relegating creeks to underground sewage pipes is not just about creating a streetscape with no abrupt twists and turns. Water was the source of a number of health problems. In the 1830s, 200 people in Toronto died from cholera, a waterborne disease. Piping creeks underground was part of grander sanitation plans.

But it also destroyed wetlands and marshes that help control floods. The sewers built to control creeks were often designed without much room for storm overflow. The result: big storms, more frequent thanks to climate change, have damaged property and infrastructure. In August of 2005, a torrential downpour caused $500 million in damage and 3,600 basements in the city’s suburbs were flooded with sewage. Water out of sight is never out of mind when a deluge hits your home.

Buried history will escape eventually. The west end neighbourhood of Swansea made headlines in 2001 when residents learned that elevated levels of lead were found in the soil of a local public school. The school grounds were built upon the back of Rennie Creek. The creek’s ravine was used as a dump as the city expanded, festering into the 1920s until the land was filled in and built as a playground by the early 1940s.

The Riverfill landfills near the Humber River accepted material from 1959 and was not completely covered until 1967. Re-packaged as parks, the dumps were a few metres from the river, and bled leachate into the Humber River.

Richard Anderson writes that the contents of the sites can often seep into surface groundwaters unheeded and “amnesia carries risks.”

But efforts to rehabilitate the city’s lost – or piped – waterways are happening with an ecological bent. Wetland restorations are being constructed on the Etobicoke waterfront, in North York’s Earl Bales Park, and in High Park.

The municipal government is not the only body trying to look at water in a different way. Communities within the city have attempted to get people to engage in the city’s history by looking at its water in a creative way. The Human River started in 2005, when a number of people got together to trace the meandering path of the lost Garrison Creek through the city.

The social side of water is where HTO showcases its most effective writing. Maggie Helwig’s “Downward” is by far the most compelling piece. In black and white photos and poetic prose she explores how landscape informs a person’s place in the city.

“At the edges of ravines, on the high ground, are some of the most privileged neighbourhoods in Toronto – Rosedale, Forest Hill, the Bridle Path, and further north, expanses of golf and country clubs. But if you walk down the hills…The ravines are inhabited as well, and directly downward from Rosedale are other members of our city; the people, mostly men, who live in tents and boxes, who mainly do not want to be found, the sharp end of deprivation in a wealthy city.”

Helwig’s writing stands out among the 30 essays, despite the overflow of different styles and perspectives.

Similarly themed essays are grouped into the four sections, but the reader must be prepared to navigate the series ready for changes in tone and topic. An easy explanation for the dizzying number of writers could be that the book reflects the city: since Toronto is a diverse place, a book about Toronto ought to have a diverse range of voices.

So many perspectives can tire a reader determined to read the volume from front to back. A change of pace and voice may be refreshing in moderation, but can be frustrating when the author is switched every ten pages or so.

But ultimately, the writers of HTO should be lauded for exploring new territory in such depth, by tracing a topic that rarely gets the attention it deserves. James Brown and Kim Storey summarize the dearth of serious consideration for water in Canada’s largest city: “The best way to describe the research into water in Toronto is with one word: dry.”

Water may not be the foremost issue at the top of most Torontonians’ minds, but HTO suggests that by rediscovering our buried creeks, concrete-clad rivers, and murky lake, we can map out our history and find the tools for making the future of the city a little greener, and a little bluer.

HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets
Edited by Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio
Coach House Books, November 2008
288 pages (paperback)