Regions and Cities of Southern Ontario

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Regions and Cities of Southern Ontario

Southern Ontario is a land of cities and is steadily becoming more urbanized. Almost two-thirds of the people live in incorporated places. Many factors have contributed to city growth. Some cities, for instance Kingston, Toronto and Owen Sound were primarily lake ports; Ottawa and Peterborough were river towns; Welland has grown because of the canal; Windsor, Sarnia and Niagara Falls are gateways.

Of course, all of them are manufacturing centres but very definite influences have caused industries to locate in them.

It is impossible to deal with each city at great length, but in the following pages considerable discussion will be devoted to the larger ones, and to some of the lesser ones which illustrate geographic principles or have important relations with the regions in which they are located. The reader who happens to live in a town, not herein discussed in detail, may use the same framework and organize his knowledge of his town into a coherent whole. In so doing he will become an urban geographer.

Cities developed rapidly during the first half of the twentieth century. Hard surfaced highways and motor transportation have enabled people to live at some distance from their work and suburbs have arisen around most large cities. Of the fifteen metropolitan areas recognized in Canada, five are in southern Ontario; they are, Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Windsor, and London.

Probably no two geographers would be able to agree upon the regional sub-divisions of Southern Ontario. Certain geomorphological lines are very clear, so are certain climatic lines but the two sets do not coincide. Still greater diversity is found when population, manufacturing and agriculture are taken into consideration. It is, therefore, hard to resist the tendency to cut Southern Ontario into very tiny areas in the hope of obtaining homogeneous regions. As a result the regions are bounded by broad bands indicating zones of transition rather than definite boundary lines. The six regions which will be briefly discussed are: Eastern Ontario, South Central Ontario, Niagara, Southwestern Ontario, Western Ontario and Highland Ontario.