When Roger Keil looks north from Toronto’s CN Tower, he sees more than just pavement smothering Canada’s best farmland. Keil, the new director of the City Institute at York University, sees somewhere in between the past and future of a world that’s urbanizing so fast that it has created a new species of cityscape.

Directly beneath the Tower, the tallest freestanding piece of cement in the world, Keil can see the old downtown core, established when the economy’s lifeline to the outside world was a harbor on Lake Ontario and a rail line that brought goods to it. How many Torontonians remember that Bay Street is so named because the economy carried real things to a real bay, not a virtual bay of global stock and money exchanges? Probably about as many as those who know that almost all the world’s cities are built on prime farmland, because historically that was how cities fed themselves and grew.

Beyond the hustle and bustle of a dense downtown that mixes homes and businesses with cultural and civic centers—the kind of mix that helped create Toronto’s reputation as “the city that works”—lies a ring of streetcar- and then auto-linked suburbs, and then another ring of small cities that are struggling to hold on to some kind of center, and beyond that a fringe, a jumbled mess of land and buildings apparently organized on the same housekeeping and design principles as a teenager’s bedroom. This is the area most Torontonians identify by its telephone exchange, 905, not by any definable feature of its natural or built landscape. Keil sees in this “archipelago of disconnected enclaves” a future that just might work. He calls this zone “the in-between city,” translating Zwischenstadt, a term coined by the renowned German planner and architect Thomas Sieverts. This could mean the zone between Barrie and Toronto, between urban and rural, betwixt present and future, or between cities and survival.

Keil studies such backdoor entrances to the world’s metropolitan cities, a new phenomenon of the built environment that is growing at an explosive rate. It is seldom talked about except as the butt of comments about vulgar sprawl. But, he tells me, a plurality of the world’s people now live and work in just such in-between areas, and, contrary to the out-of-date stereotype, most of them are have-nots compared to downtown haves.

York University, where Keil works, was built during the 1960s on former farmland on the edge of Downsview, which, local history buffs insist, once commanded a beautiful view. It’s a great place to think about the past and future of the in-between city. Like most of Toronto’s booming outer edges during the 1950s and 1960s, Downsview was what Keil calls a “Fordist suburb,” a place where working people could pay for their own homes by working in nearby factories, both built on low-cost farmland—a virtuous economic circle of a perverse kind. Fordist suburbs were distinct from the “bedroom communities” we now think of as exemplifying suburbia, which in the 1950s and 1960s were the territory of executive types who drove downtown to make the money they spent in the outskirts. That difference between then and now is why today’s de-industrialized Fordist suburbs face such problems with poverty and its frequent byproduct—of much more concern to the media and politicians—crime. In 2001, Toronto’s Food and Hunger Action Committee described the paradox confronting these areas, which are in greater difficulty than the urban core, but whose dire situations are commonly overlooked because poverty and crime are still typecast as “inner city” problems. The suburbs, said the committee, have “downtown problems without downtown services.”

During Keil’s daily bus ride to York, he gets to study post-Fordist Downsview as it merges with the new in-between city. The visuals that tell him he is entering the in-between are the juxtapositions of university/pioneer village/nine-acre urban farm/box store/utility corridor/oil tanks/plaza/aircraft factory runway/upper-income white neighborhood/low-income black neighborhood/expressway— the kind of jumble that would never be part of traditional suburbia. The hodgepodge is the message, the indicator of the new urban species Keil is tracking.

Keil’s perspective first took shape in his native Germany, where he worked as a planner for Frankfurt’s Green Party administration. Frankfurt has a relatively small and compact downtown of about 600,000 people, but, much like Toronto, it has attracted four and a half million more people, who live in its suburbs and outskirts—making it Germany’s second-largest metropolis as well as a transport and trade hub. Trying to develop a greenbelt plan for that historic city “inspired my method of understanding the production of urban landscapes,” Keil says. “I came to see landscapes as in process of evolution, as the debris of history, the sediment of past forms of production and consumption.” That’s the urban archaeologist who can see backwards and forwards from the CN Tower.

An important influence on Keil’s thinking was Thomas Sieverts, one of the first Europeans to treat the sprawl beyond city outskirts as more than an abomination. It was in a 1997 book, translated as Cities Without Cities, that he introduced the term Zwischenstadt. Both Keil and Sieverts are struck by the stark contrast of in-between and traditional suburbs, where zoning enforced the strict separation of permitted commercial uses and people. “Everything here is highly splintered,” says Keil. “There are contradictions and juxtapositions you never found in the suburbs which were known for conformity and sameness. What’s new is the togetherness of contradiction. It’s a type of urban morphology that’s different from thirty years ago, and the new planning has to correspond to the change. There are huge opportunities to think more creatively.”

Keil, a member of the City of Toronto’s Environmental Round-table, is most keen about linking urban design with social justice and environmentalism. I first met him in my Greenpeace days, shortly after he moved to Toronto in the early 1990s, when he joined a weird in-between-style juxtaposition of the time—a joint initiative of Greenpeace and the auto workers’ union to convert a closed tractor factory into a production line for solar water heaters. The in-between city gives scope to Keil’s social as well as environmental thinking. He smiles as he notes that it’s now the gentry who live in the inner city. The old migration out of the inner city used to be about well-employed workers and professionals “fleeing the city to escape the lower class,” he says. This is no longer so in the post-Fordist era. Today’s out-migration is about working and professional families “escaping from the upper class and unaffordable housing in the downtown.”

What about environmental sustainability and self-reliance in the twilight zone of the in-between city? As global warming reconfigures the world’s access to food, water, and energy, the in-between city may get some respect. In the near future, water for food production will be scarce, fossil fuels will be too expensive to devote to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, the transportation of vegetables and fruit across oceans and continents will be costly, and just-in-time supply lines will be vulnerable to disruption from the spread of new diseases. City planning for self-reliance in food basics thus takes on a new urgency, which is what places the in-between city in the foreground of responsible urban planning.

The in-between city is loaded with unused capacity to rise to the challenge. Orphaned land, acres of open space in the middle of no rhyme or reason, is waiting to be used for orchards and gardens. It’s accessible, and just the right size for low-tech sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, the intensive kind that produces plenty of food per square foot as well as lots of jobs and ecological benefits, such as the cleansing and revitalizing of air and water. In-between farmers, in other words, will provide precious ecological services as well as food.

Think of assets, not problems. Box stores and parking garages have flat roofs that can take the weight of all-season greenhouses. Both residential and commercial areas produce tides of soapy “gray water,” now wasted but rich with both water and key fertilizer elements that can be adapted for agriculture. There’s no shortage of humanure that, carefully composted, could regenerate exhausted soil. And the distance between producer, processor, distributor, and an archipelago of diverse customers is ideal for low-energy, high value-added, high-efficiency businesses. The in-between city is as close as we’ll ever get to near-urban agriculture, which is one of the chief ways that cities of the near future will be feeding themselves.

Keil says it’s time to stop dissing and start re-examining the area. “There are crown jewels here, but we can’t see them,” he says, “because they’re ugly.”

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