The article focuses on growth and development of the suburban landscape of Canadian cities from 1900 to 1950. By the mid-twentieth century, as the full impact of the new industrialism and its modernist tendencies were being felt throughout Canada's economy and society, cities across the country stood more segregated. The urban landscape of the nineteenth-century commercial city was almost completely transformed. Most fundamentally, with the growing power of planners and other government officials who sought an efficient, rational, and orderly city--expressed most forcefully through zoning bye-laws that controlled the location of economic activities and the form of the built environment--distinct places now existed for the exclusive use of separate land-use activities. As the post-industrial metropolis took shape in the 1980s and 1990s, with a more fragmented pattern of mixed-use schemes at its centre and with an increasing variety of neo-traditional housing projects intended to break its monotonous outer edge, it is as well to recall that, less than one hundred years ago, the obverse was the case. The suburban landscape of Canadian cities stood fragmented, the central business district segregated into quite distinctive zones.