The neighbourhood of Cabbagetown has always been more of an idea than a well-defined physical space. Different people have had drastically different ideas about the location and boundaries of the neighbourhood ranging from a large and diverse geographical area in East Downtown Toronto (bordered by Bloor and Yonge Street as well as Lake Ontario and the Don River) to a small neighbourhood of homogenous Victorian Homes (Bordered by Gerrard and Parliament Street as well as the St. James Cemetery and the Don River).

Where people locate the 'real' Cabbagetown has often reflected their economic status. Many of the homes in the East Downtown of Toronto were built at around the same time during the 1800s. These houses tended to be inhabited by people from the British Isles, with a large contingent of working-class Irish Immigrants. During the early 1900s these houses began to fall into disrepair and became overcrowded by poor and working-class people who worked downtown or in the nearby factories that lined the Don River and Lake Ontario. It was at this time that outsiders began to use the word Cabbagetown to describe this poor and overcrowded "slum." Today most historians trace the origins of the name Cabbagetown to outsiders who noticed the that its working-class inhabitants often planted cabbages in their front yards.

Beginning in the 1940s urban reformers used the image of Cabbagetown as a working-class slum to justify urban renewal projects in that part of the city. The most famous of these incidents of slum-clearance was in the area that is now Regent Park. During the 1930s and 1940s these reformers increasingly criticized these mostly (but not entirely) run-down parts of the city as breeding immorality and juvenile delinquency and many began to advocate for the building of new high-rises in their place. In the late 1940s this became a reality with the approval of the Regent Park Housing Project.

Later in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s residents of the increasingly middle-class neighbourhood of Don Vale began to claim the name Cabbagetown. This more compact Cabbagetown claimed that the name referred to a Victorian Era architectural heritage that had been lost in the surrounding area through renewal. Through this process the name Cabbagetown was transformed from a derogatory term used to describe working-class neighbourhoods to a name that Torontonians increasingly associated with a middle-class heritage homes.

Penina Coopersmith, Cabbagetown: The Story of a Victorian Neighbourhood (Toronto: James and Lorimer Company, 1998)

Kevin Brushett, "Blots on the Face of the City: The Politics of Slum Housing and Urban Renewal in Toronto 1940-1970" (PhD diss., Queen's University, 2001)

Ryan K. James, "From 'Slum Clearance' to 'revitalization': Planning, Expertise and Moral Regulation in Toronto's Regent Park." Planning Perspectives Vol. 25 no. 1 (January 2010), 69-86.