Richard White is a Toronto historian and regular lecturer in Canadian History at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Now a recognized expert in Toronto planning history, he began his academic career with a PhD dissertation on the working lives of nineteenth-century Canadian civil engineers Frank and Walter Shanly, subsequently published as Gentlemen Engineers, and went on to publish several other significant works on the history of early Canadian engineering. He then served for several years as research director of the Toronto-based Neptis Foundation, during which time he developed an interest in the history of urban planning and began a long-term program of research into Toronto¿s planning history that continues to this day.