Quote:
Originally Posted by jeremy_haak
I'm not sure I really see the problem here. It's easy to look at a map like that and be mystified about why there's a big hole there where people could be living and building cities etc. and imagine that this requires some sort of solution. That giant hole is called the Canadian Shield and people don't live there because there really isn't a whole lot to draw them there. Except in a few pockets that already support a rural population (Kapuskasing, Thunder Bay, Dryden, Fort Frances), most of the shield does not support agriculture. The economic value of the land is principally through mining and forestry, but neither of those requires proximity to settlements in order to be successful. So why go solve a problem which doesn't exist and go put people somewhere where they aren't needed and somewhere they don't want to go?
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But it's not like Toronto has a whole lot of agriculture going on anymore, nor is agriculture a draw for people today anyway. It's not for lack of agricultural land that people are not settling in Northern Ontario today. From an historical perspective, what you say is correct and it explains why Toronto was settled and Northern Ontario was not. But the factors that were important then are of little or no consequence now in an economy based mainly on services, so an historical explanation doesn't explain the lack of settlement in the present.
What attracts people to Toronto today is basically that Toronto has a large, diverse economy that continually reinforces itself through adding yet more people. It got that way ultimately because it was able to draw large enough numbers of people for other reasons in the past. If, by some quirk of history, a city the size of Toronto had formed at Sault Ste. Marie or Thunder Bay or Nipigon, then it would be attracting people today just as Toronto does.
I wouldn't have given this issue any great thought were it not for the fact that we keep expanding our existing cities onto some of our best remaining farmland all the while thousands of square kilometres of pretty much otherwise useless land exists that we could be using for urban development instead.
Quote:
Originally Posted by canadaonstrike
I've always been fascinated by the Canadian Shield rock formation. Ontario is so huge but a lot of it is covered by the shield. How much of Ontario's portion of the Canadian Shield has been developed for homes? How hard is it to do?
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I've been wondering about that too. So we might need to employ some extra explosives, but in the grand scheme of urban development that's not the end of the world, and it ought to cut down on the cost of aggregates since they can be quarried onsite rather than brought in from sometimes distant quarries. In Ottawa's western suburb of Kanata we seem to blast away at an extensive outcrop of the Canadian Shield known as the Carp Ridge without concerning ourselves too much with it, other than its loss on enviro-aesthetic grounds, turning it into random generic suburbia but on a hillside where at least it doesn't have flooding issues. Elsewhere in Ottawa we have to blast limestone bedrock out for utilities, and I'm sure that's the case in many places. The Finns seem to be able to manage building cities on granite, as do the Swedes. From the looks of it, so do we in Sudbury, although our obsession with creating little plots of grassland surrounding each house and everything else imaginable is a tad insane in such an environment, but nevertheless it can apparently be done.
I would even surmise that if we adapted our building techniques, especially for residential, to slab-on-grade rather than building basements to get below what would be non-existent frost coverage we could speed up construction somewhat. Perhaps building on Canadian Shield might even encourage denser development and/or development that conformed to the landscape (i.e. stop trying to create lawns everywhere).
In short, I don't believe there are any serious technical or cost impediments to city-building on Canadian Shield. The reason it doesn't happen is basically from a chicken-and-egg socio-economic situation whereby since there are no major cities in Northern Ontario we're not expanding them.
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