‘The development of higher urban life’ and the geographic imagination: beauty, art, and moral environmentalism in Toronto, 1900–1920

The existence of school art leagues in Toronto, which sought to use beauty and art in the public schools as a means of sensitizing children to aesthetics, can be explained through their ideational affiliation with the city beautification impulse. In Toronto, a chief proponent of city beautification and the link between city beauty and school art was the painter, city planner, and art educator, George Agnew Reid, who regarded city beauty as more than an exercise in urban cosmetics; city beautification relied on extant beliefs in the morality of beauty and its putative efficacy as a shaper of human behaviour in the city, especially the ennoblement of the working and immigrant classes. The resulting ‘moral environmentalism’ of beautification changes the way we should think about early city planning, ultimately revealing the geographical imaginations of those contributing to the moral environmentalist milieu.