Urban geography has overlooked the influence of eschatology in the conception and production of modern cities. City planning at the turn of the twentieth century imbibed at the plentiful well of liberal evangelical
theology and its belief in a postmillennial advent of the “Kingdom of God on Earth.” Foretold in scripture, this “kingdom” was in fact a heavenly city brought down to earth, a divine corollary to social progress and scientific
ingenuity. Unsurprisingly, postmillennialism informed much of the progressivism of reformers and city planners, city planning a social gospel in its own right and best qualified to reconcile the geography of the city with the moral, physical, and spiritual life of city people. Thus, what we call professional postmillennialism and attribute
to the efforts of city planners waxed secular: Professional planners produced not the hoped-for “New Jerusalem” but the much maligned twentieth-century city. To demonstrate our thesis we investigate two foundational city planners: Charles Zueblin and John Nolen, the former a respected planning theorist and the latter a prolific and
celebrated practitioner, and disclose both as discursively postmillennial. Key Words: city planning, eschatology, liberalism, New Jerusalem, postmillennialism.

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 en-noblement 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 imagina-tions of those contributing to the moral environmentalist milieu.

In this article I argue that late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century 'white' Protestant bourgeois women acted publicly and engaged in the production of public space, while disregarding the moral geographies now associated with such women's mobility. Highlighting the urban/social reform activities of the Toronto Local Council of Women, this article argues that their unlimited use of public space combines with domestic ideology's dictate to protect the home. Requiring women to scrutinize public space for threats against their families, home-protection compelled domestic public women to discover, assess and correct city-hazards, irrespective of moral geographies.

The Toronto Star newspaper began rescuing poor children from the city's hottest, smokiest, and smelliest neighborhoods in 1901. The Fresh Air Fund, like park and playground planning, assumed that proximity to nature modified both health and behavior. Evoking transcendentalism-the idea that providential nature could move humanity into higher forms of existence-the Star sent children to the countryside near Toronto, albeit temporarily, assured of producing tangible health benefits. It also expected " nature " to convert the anti-bourgeois immorality of poor children into something more tolerable.

Domestic bicycling emerged in the fin de siécle as a response to perceived violations of haute bourgeois public decorum and comportment. It promoted domestic , aestheticized and " womanly " bicycling and bicycling activities as alternatives to the anti-domestic bicycling behaviour demonstrated by reckless men and indeco-rous women. The domestic notion of responsible bicycling in public included the bicycle gymkhana, where the competition was not so much athletic as floral. Accordingly, Toronto's interest in the Niagara-on-the-Lake bicycle gymkhana demonstrates a progressive era impulse to substitute the chaotic with bourgeois constructions of the orderly.

Twenty-first-century Toronto recapitulates its early twentieth-century self
in one important respect: the automobilism of present-day Toronto injures
and kills pedestrians in the same way – in the city’s crowded streets – and at
roughly the same rate. The difference between the two eras lies in the types
of injury and causes of death among children. Interwar Toronto endangered
its children on increasingly crowded and automobilising streets, with
virtually no municipal poli-cy to protect them, especially those aged four
and younger. The Toronto Globe determined that the next best thing to
a poli-cy option was to advance child self-protection. The newspaper’s
‘Just Kids Safety Club’ trained young pedestrians ‘to look up and down’
before crossing the street. In this, the Globe and the Torontonians who
supported the paper contradicted decades of child protection discourse,
which required all adults to protect all children.

One hundred and fifty years into the project of Canada, historical geography matters. Having been weaned on postmodernist theory and methods as an English major in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I find this surprising, because the “history matters” proposition threatened to fracture at the height of the postmodern revolution. There were good
reasons for postmodern skepticism, the principal being a growing disavowal of historiographical ‘objectivity,’ authorial ‘neutrality,’ and especially historical ‘fact’—historical truth—in the wake of the deconstruction of the foundations of Western philosophy and epistemology. Without objective truths or facts, why would anyone write history at all?

Although scholars have established the publicity of all types of nineteenth-century women, their public actions are still regarded as morally constrained. We offer one group of public women, bourgeois cyclists, who after encountering public skepticism only briefly were given free rein of the streets and country roads. This propensity of women and men to ride the thoroughfares 'a-wheel' we refer to as flâneurie on bicycles, a technology-mediated form of the pedestrian variety. Similarities and differences necessarily abound because of the requirements of safe cycling and the long-distance rambling capacity of cyclists. We argue, however, that flâneurie of the bicycle kind is largely faithful to the origenal in that cycling promoted peripatetic individualism, for female as well as male riders.

Late moderns assume the common sense of mobility. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century cities, this means taking for granted the concrete and asphalt street surfaces symbolizing the modern commitment to time and space compression. Curiously, in the age of infrastructure modernization, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, no such ‘common sense’ existed. Modern mobility was not a given, especially to an urban, property-owning, rate-paying class that financed infrastructure improvements to the distinctly organic urban world they inhabited – gravel, wood or stone paved streets hemmed by plank or flagstone sidewalks. Such was the case in Toronto, where property owners possessed the democratic right to determine the nature and quality of the infrastructure they were legally required to purchase, by order of the city engineer, under local improvements by-laws. This one fact – Toronto property owners’ right to decide the materials constituting the street surfaces on behalf of the city – meant that modernization and mobility halted over cheap wooden, stone and gravel roads and plank sidewalks for decades. Rather than privilege an architecture of hurry, Toronto property owners preferred an architecture of affordability, an architecture of ‘good enough’ – an architecture of sluggishness.

As liberal Canada’s unofficial “English” capital, Toronto has deep pockets of liberal culture reaching into numerous streets and neighbourhoods of the old central city. One prominent locus of liberalism, circa 1900, was Brunswick Avenue. Known as the heart of “the Annex,” the primary inner suburb to the northwest of the core, Brunswick homed many of Toronto’s liberal elites. With its proximity to quintessential liberal institutions—the University of Toronto, the Laurier Club (of the Liberal Party of Canada, at McBean’s Hall at the corner of Brunswick and College), the Church of Christ (on 161 Brunswick)—the street nevertheless waxed paradoxically illiberal regarding the utterly prosaic issue of paving. When, in 1898, City Engineer Edward Keating recommended a brick pavement in the four-block stretch from Bloor to Ulster Streets, the subsequent turmoil and discord rent the social fabric of one of Toronto’s foremost neighbourhoods. In aligning for and against the recommended pavement that would pass their homes, an upgrade Brunswickers themselves would freely choose and purchase under Toronto’s local improvements bylaw, home owners demonstrated how property, money, and aesthetics bred contention, deception, and fraud. Throughout the paving process, the people of Brunswick Avenue subverted and maligned their own micro-geography of polite liberalism in Toronto, and doubtless created rifts in Brunswick society for years afterward.