Marta Gara

After 50 years from the Toronto Spadina Expressway (SE)’s cancellation, scholars consider the battle over the proposed urban motorway as one of the greatest symbols of successfully citizen resistance in Canada. In fact, the mobilization against the SE project encouraged Toronto inhabitants to become more involved in city planning over the next decade. The paper means to spot the light on the interplay of diverse group identities inside the SE protest coalition, demonstrating the essential role of each one of the alliance’s three main components: the grassroots activism of Stop Spadina Save Our City Coordinating Committee (SSSOCCC), the public exposure of well-known figures such as Jane Jacobs and Marshall McLuhan, the administrative pressure by the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB). Indeed, despite the Jacobs’ outstanding legacy in Canadian urban planning and the SE consequential stop in Toronto have been already acknowledged by the urban history literature, an inquire of the protest organization behind the SE cancellation and its long-standing political impact is still lacking. In fact, several actors actively participated in the grass-roots resistance, even inspired by practices of community organizing spreading through the US-Canada border. In this direction, the paper especially aims at presenting the research’s first steps, introducing a review and revision of the existing literature and reconstructing – through historical archival findings and press analysis - how the SE protest coalition worked against the political, social and cultural background of the late 1960s-early 1970s context. Through the SE case history, the paper eventually intends to show the relevance of a strong relationship between civil servants and citizens to produce liveable cities, in Canada and in North-America generally speaking.