Is Toronto obsolete?: Process and ambivalence in Marshall McLuhan’s urban studies

In this article I reflect on the obsolescence of Toronto in order to enquire into the fate of the city as a viable entity within the terms of Marshall McLuhan’s investigations of the late 1960s and their relevance for today. By 1968 McLuhan had pronounced the city obsolete in a universe of globe-extending news satellites and Bucky Fuller domes, that artefactualized and programmed nature. The city as obsolete was a ‘probe’ McLuhan offered to make sense of the enhancements of supersonic speeds of jet travel that he called Jet City. Using the Dew-Line Newsletter as my central point of reference, I want to develop McLuhan’s ideas that arose in the city’s wake; these are threefold: Jet City, mini-states and the application of the Joycean nostrum the ‘the urb… it orbs’. Indeed, in the 1970s McLuhan talked more and more about cities in terms of aviation-figures, as airports coordinating flights and passages, of corporate hijackings and crashes. McLuhan asked us to imagine ‘circulating cities’ in the forms of mass migrations, for business and pleasure, of populations on the move, anticipating the multiple mobilities of the present day. Yet at the same time, revealing the lived tension of his position, he acted against plans for the downtown Spadina Expressway, against the developers, as a homeowner who still lived in a neighbourhood worth protecting from development.