During the last mayoral election when “the suburbs” were pitted against “downtown” there were occasional objections from people who lived in what we often call the suburbs, like Scarborough or North York.

“We’re not the suburbs, we’re the city,” is the sort of phrase I heard here and there. It didn’t make sense at first, but when you look at how people actually live throughout Toronto, it does.

Think first of an archetypal image of a suburb and you might picture a single-family home on a cul-de-sac with a front and back yard, driveway, maybe some shrubs and trees. Picture then “the city” and an image of dense streets, apartment buildings, and shops may appear.

Both those places exist in Toronto but it’s near impossible to draw a line between them.

Certainly lots of people are happy with the term suburb, many more likely don’t care what the part of town they live in is called, but over the last few years these two parts of the city have been pitted against each other, as if downtown and suburb are foreign countries in need of a United Nations intervention. But there’s so much overlap between the two, a peacekeeping force would not know where to go.

The idea of “downtown” in Toronto is just as confused as the notion of suburbs. Just a few blocks from the skyscraper core there are neighbourhoods where houses have front yards, some even with driveways of their own. Think of the residential streets east of Chinatown or those in Corktown. They’re on a much smaller scale but it’s an utterly suburban form at the heart of our city, if you take the “sub” in suburb to mean less urban. Go to a city like Montreal and kilometres out of the city centre there are dense houses and apartments, built right to the sidewalk, making it a much more urban city throughout.

Then there are older parts of Toronto we generally refer to as “the city” that are actually streetcar suburbs, places that grew once rails were laid in the street, like neighbourhoods along St. Clair Ave. or Leslieville and the Beach. Walk east out of the Beach along Kingston Rd., past Victoria Park Ave. into Scarborough — there isn’t much change. “The city” continues for some time. Maybe it never ends.

Neighbourhoods with a “downtown” look extend far beyond the borders of the old City of Toronto. In south Etobicoke the corner of Islington Ave. and Lake Shore Blvd., in the heart of the New Toronto neighbourhood, itself a streetcar suburb, would take quite a bit of imagination be seen as anything other than urban, with solid blocks of retail along the sidewalk and surrounding neighbourhood streets often feeling as dense as the Annex or Little Italy.

The former town of Weston along Weston Rd. at Lawrence Ave. W. is a neighbourhood as urban as any downtown. Even in areas where the cul-de-sacs dominate, there are often apartment towers nearby that house hundreds of thousands, far from the core, living downtown apartment-style lives in neighbourhoods that are a patchwork of urban and suburban landscapes.

The suburbs are often called “dull” or “monotonous.” At the same time, people who don’t like downtown condo towers call them “vertical suburbs.” What does that mean here? Toronto’s suburbs are where much of our valued multiculturalism lives, and its strips malls often have more variety than downtown streets where you can see the next Starbucks from inside the one you’re in.

The categories don’t work. There is no downtown. There is no suburb. There is only Toronto.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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