Owen Temby, a postdoctoral fellow in Carleton’s School of Public Policy and Administration, recently received the 2012 Riddell Award recognizing his article as the best on Ontario’s history from the Ontario Historical Society.
Temby’s article, “Trouble in Smogville: The Politics of Toronto’s Air Pollution during the 1950s,” appeared in the July 2013 issue of the Journal of Urban History. It explores the problem in which, in the 1950s, Toronto’s downtown waterfront had dangerously high levels of air pollution caused by a concentration of factories and transportation facilities. Temby throws light on the obscure politics of air pollution abatement in the 1950s, when authorities took the first substantial measures to address the hazard. He reconstructs the political struggle between industry, which resisted change, and real estate interests, which led the reform movement because they feared the city’s reputation as Smogville would hamper growth.
The article makes a significant contribution to both the environmental history and the political history of Ontario and it places this local story in wider scholarly contexts.
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