Lawrence Solomon's Toronto Sprawls is a little book about a big subject, with even bigger ambitions. In less than 85 pages, Solomon sets out not only to explain how Toronto (and by extension other North American cities) grew to consume most of the land in South Central Ontario over the last half century, but also to overturn our thinking about why that occurred. Contrary to standard accounts of suburbia which focus on developers, the automobile and popular culture, Solomon focuses on the role of government, which he claims did not simply facilitate sprawl but played a ‘lead role, and directed the show’ (Preface). In doing so, he argues, government promotion of suburban sprawl did more to frustrate than to satisfy the desires of the very citizens they claimed to represent.

Solomon begins by examining Toronto in the first three decades of the twentieth century when the city's population and its role as Canada's premier metropole grew by leaps and bounds. Despite this growth, he points out that its physical geography remained compact, making it one of the most densely populated cities in North America. Owing to the high costs of providing basic services, such as transportation and other utilities, such development as did take place on the outskirts of the city was largely unplanned and principally limited to poor and working-class citizens who moved to the suburbs simply because it was cheaper to live there. However, even in this period he notes that there were signs that Toronto's future as a compact city would not last. These signs included the introduction of government-controlled utilities; more stringent building regulations, which discouraged more dense living arrangements; and the growing popularity of comprehensive urban planning, especially the profession's enchantment with the garden city concept. Though most of these developments would not take firm root in Toronto until the end of World War II, Solomon claims that the conditions for Toronto's future sprawl were in place by the early 1920s. Solomon thus sees the turning point in Toronto's history of sprawl as the decade that followed the end of World War II. Here he points to the role of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the development of the Toronto Transit Commission and, perhaps most importantly, the creation of the metropolitan level of government in 1953, as the crucial factors which pushed the city towards its never-ending expansion across York Region. According to Solomon, without government-backed mortgage financing and government-subsidized transportation and basic services, neither developers nor house buyers would have been attracted to the suburbs to fulfil their home dreams. Moreover, without such interventions the Toronto of 1920 would have been able to hold all of its present population.

All in all, Solomon's book is useful reminder that suburban sprawl is not the natural evolution of urban forms, but a creation clearly rooted in human ideas and actions (sometimes conscious and sometimes not). By placing government and the state at the centre of his analysis, Solomon's history of Toronto's sprawl reminds us that this is often the locus where competing interests, ideas and actors meet to reshape the built environment. However, Solomon's study could benefit from a more complex analysis of the state itself. While he avoids the common fallacy of seeing the state simply as beholden to the interests of capital and the development industry, too often it appears here to act simply on its own whims or those of urban reformers – a group that is far too complex to treat cavalierly. Perhaps much of this is due to the relative brevity of the book. Something as complex as a ‘history’ of Toronto's suburban sprawl, which was managed (or mismanaged) by at least four levels of government, requires more than 80 pages of explanation. Nonetheless, Solomon's book has at least provided us with a skeletal argument that future scholars will undoubtedly flesh out.