# Book Review

Richard Harris

Canadian Planning and Policy /
Aménagement et politique au Canada,

Volume 2025

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

International License

ISSN 2562-122X

**The Rise of the Neighbourhood in Canada, 1880s-2020s.** Available at [University of Toronto Press](https://www university of toronto press), 2025; 429 pp., hardcover, paperback and online; $90.00 (hardcover). ISBN 9781487520441.

**Reviewed by:** David L.A. Gordon, Department of Geography and Planning, Queen's University, email: [david.gordon@queensu.ca](mailto:david.gordon@queensu.ca)

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Richard Harris's *The Rise of the Neighbourhood in Canada, 1880s-2020s* offers a history of urban neighbourhoods as social, spatial, and political units. Drawing on newspaper analysis, extensive archival research from his previous books, and secondary literature, Harris traces how the idea and planning of “neighbourhoods” evolved alongside Canadian urban growth. This review highlights the book’s key insights for community planning—particularly how citizen participation, land-use regulation, and investment shaped neighbourhood development.

Harris organizes his historical narrative into four phases: early urban reform (1880-1920), inter-war slum debates and subdivision planning (1920-1945), post-war neighbourhood unit expansion (1945-1970), and modern participatory governance (1970s-2020s). In each era, he shows how health and moral reformers linked poor housing conditions (“blight” and “slums”) to public costs, prompting municipal interventions. Initially, developer-driven covenants and emerging zoning by-laws defined early “residential districts.” In the critical post-war period, Harris demonstrates how the federal government’s mortgage insurance was used by the Central (now Canada) Mortgage and Housing Corporation to encourage the neighbourhood units advocated by Clarence Perry in community plans. Finally, he describes how citizen activism in the 1960s and 1970s led to Local Area Planning Offices, Neighbourhood Improvement Programs, and more structured consultation. By connecting these developments, Harris reveals that community

planning has balanced between top-down regulation and grassroots mobilization.

A central theme is the evolving role of residents in planning decisions. Harris documents how early ratepayer associations—initially property-owner bodies—lobbied for simple land-use restrictions. Over

time, these groups expanded into broader residents' associations, pressing for schools, parks, and transit. The large increase in middle-class homeowners in the post-WWII period changed the composition and objectives of neighbourhood groups, especially in gentrifying inner-city neighbourhoods that had once been the preserve of lower-income homeowners.

The arrival of Local Area Planning Committees in Vancouver (1972) and Toronto's Neighbourhood Planning Division (1974) institutionalized resident input. Harris highlights how these structures formalized engagement at the neighbourhood scale, brought planners into direct collaboration with community volunteers and created new channels for underrepresented groups, though homeowners often dominated. This history underscores a core lesson:

THE RISE OF THE
NEIGHBOURHOOD
IN CANADA

1880s-2020s

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effective community planning requires both clear institutional frameworks and proactive outreach to ensure equity.

Harris's analysis of Canada's Neighbourhood Improvement Program (NIP) launched in 1974 offers important lessons for planning practitioners. NIP aimed to pair federal funding with local decision-making. Slum clearance and urban renewal were to be replaced by Jane Jacobs' prescriptions for re-weaving the urban fabric. Projects ranged from housing retrofit to community-driven cultural initiatives. Harris shows that while NIP stabilized some older districts, it also risked triggering gentrification where rising property values displaced low-income residents. Key NIP takeaways include: the need to couple physical upgrades with affordable housing safeguards and the importance of building local capacity—training community leaders to manage funds. NIP also demonstrated the value of integrated social services—linking planning offices with settlement agencies and health providers. These findings remain relevant today, as planners seek to revitalize older urban neighbourhoods without exacerbating displacement.

One innovative contribution from the book is Harris's examination of the nexus between homeownership, school catchments, and neighbourhood politics. Post-1950s, the surge in mortgages and near-universal high-school attendance meant that parents increasingly had both financial and educational stakes in local land-use decisions. Harris documents how school catchment boundaries became de facto neighbourhood markers and ratepayer associations merged housing and education agendas. He notes that parents campaigned to maintain small class sizes and opposed closure of the elementary schools at the centre of neighbourhoods. Harris describes how “When a school closes, all hell can break loose...” (221) using examples from 1970s local elementary schools in Québec and the 2020

closure of Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute, leaving that city's downtown neighbourhoods without a public high school. These layered accounts remind planners that local educational policy and housing market dynamics are deeply intertwined with community planning.

Despite decades of participatory frameworks, Harris notes persistent challenges with representation of newcomers, low-income households, and Indigenous Peoples and increased resistance to densification and mixed-income projects and the potential for gentrification. He argues for approaches that recognize the legitimacy of local concerns while deploying equity lenses to broaden participation and protect vulnerable groups. Planning agencies should fund liaison staff, offer multilingual training, and partner with community organizations to ensure diverse voices shape local plans. Successful neighbourhood plans combine land-use policy with service delivery—schools, health clinics, and cultural spaces—creating more holistic and complete communities.

Harris has done extensive comparative research with American cities, and notes that the high-quality public-school systems in Canadian inner-city neighbourhoods are an important difference between the two countries. He also points out other significant differences in income inequality, social inequality, racial segregation, neighbourhood health and crime, which make neighbourhood inequality a much larger issue in the United States (230-235). Harris recommends that maintaining good public schools, increasing affordable housing and careful attention to Indigenous urban reserves are key policies to prevent further increases in inequality among Canadian neighbourhoods.

The book documents Harris' decades of research with almost 1000 text and digital references. A technical appendix describes how the research made innovative use of Google's Ngram Viewer and *The*
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*Globe and Mail's* digital archive to trace the evolution of the term “neighbourhood.” The book's scholarly usefulness is further enhanced with extensive indexes of places, people and subjects. However, its readability for general audiences is marred by collecting all the illustrations, tables, and figures at the rear of the volume, rather than interspersing them with the text that they support. Unfortunately, several of the historic photographs are barely legible in the paperback book, and not much better in the digital volume.

*The Rise of the Neighbourhood in Canada* fills a gap by weaving together social history, planning policy, and neighbourhood activism. Richard Harris's richly detailed narrative not only maps the evolution of Canadian neighbourhoods but offers timely insights on participatory, equity-centered planning. The book deserves to be read alongside his consummate histories of Canadian suburbs—*Creeping Conformity and Unplanned Suburbs*.<fnref n="1" /> As municipalities grapple with affordability, intensification, and demographic change, planners and policymakers will find in Harris's work both valuable precedents and cautionary examples. This volume is a strong scholarly study that should be acquired by municipal and research libraries and provides good reading for planners committed to sustaining vibrant, inclusive, and dynamic urban neighbourhoods.

<footnote n="1">¹Harris, R. (2004). *Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900-1960*. University of Toronto Press; Harris, R. (1999). *Unplanned suburbs: Toronto's American tragedy, 1900 to 1950*. Johns Hopkins University Press.</footnote>