bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Saint-Laurent: Montreal's Main / Saint-Laurent, la Main de Montréal (April 17 to October 27, 2002) / (17 avril au 27 octobre 2002) Pointe-à-Callière, Musée d’archéologie et d’histoire de Montréal
Authors: Lord Kathleen
Published: September 2013

Commercial and residential streets fascinate me: the specific qualities of the street environment that reveal rich layers of meaning in people's lives, the rhythms attached to their movements, their social character and class structure. In Montreal, the current vestiges of working-class sociability and a sense of community, are rooted in the historical development of streets and suburbs. The unique circumstances encompassing their growth beg for a comparative analysis. Overall, this museum exhibition about Saint-Laurent fulfils expectations, particularly in the subtle ability to combine factual accuracy and popular delivery. Pierre Anctil and his collaborators are to be commended for their innovative displays and historical imagination, as well as for a superb video.
Les rapports riverains de la ville : Sherbrooke et ses usages des rivières Magog et Saint-François, XIXe -XXe siècles
Authors: Castonguay Stéphane , Fougères Dany
Published: September 2013

Cet article analyse le travail continu de révision et de mise en oeuvre des rapports riverains de la ville de Sherbrooke Sherbrooke est situé aux confins de la Magog et de la Saint-François, qui toutes deux se posent à la fois comme frein et tremplin au développement de la ville. C’est autour de la présence de ces rivières dans la ville de Sherbrooke que nous aborderons les rapports riverains. Au rythme des préoccupations sur la présence de Veau dans la ville, ces rapports riverains se matérialisent également en fonction de la diversité des usages des rivières : production d’énergie hydraulique et hydro-électrique, construction de mur de soutènement et dragage pour maintenir un débit régulier, déversement d’eaux usées et approvisionnement dîeau potable, aménagement récréo-touristique. Sur une période de près de 100 ans, soit des débuts de l’industrialisation de la ville aux années 1970, la matérialité propre à chacun des rapports riverains est tour à tour revue et corrigée, et les pratiques qui y sont associées, remplacées. Ce qui reste de toute cette succession, ce sont les rivières elles-mêmes et des rapports qui trouvent leur matérialité dans les rives et les lits continuellement aménagés. En fait, notre recherche nous amène à considérer les rivières comme des infrastructures qui, tel un service public ou une voie publique locale, devaient continuellement s’adapter à la demande économique, sociale et culturelle changeante, mais qui, inversement, ordonnaient les développements de la ville, de l’espace urbain et de ses usages.
Development Controls in Toronto in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Fischler Raphaël
Published: September 2013

Histories of contemporary development control tend to situate its beginning in the first or second decade of the twentieth century, when modern zoning bylaws were adopted. Yet, as some researchers have pointed out, building and land-use regulations took shape in the nineteenth century and even earlier. This paper focuses on controls set by the City of Toronto between 1834, when it was incorporated, and 1904, when it adopted bylaw no. 4408, which is seen by many as the first step taken by the city toward modern zoning. In technical terms, it appears that a coherent, though minimal, apparatus of land-use regulation was already in place by the 1860s. Over the course of the nineteenth century, building codes and nuisance laws display the growing intervention of public authorities in the development of the industrial city. Municipal control over material production and over human activity diversifies and finds expression in increasingly complex ordinances. In political terms, the bylaws reveal a growing concern with socio-spatial differentiation and with the protection of property values rather than with health and safety. The incremental development of land-use regulation suggests that, even though North American cities borrowed from each other and from their European counterparts, they constructed zoning locally, in accordance to local needs, resources, and constraints (economic, political, and legal) and in a piecemeal fashion, one bylaw, one amendment at a time.
Society and Space in the Industrial City: Introduction
Authors: Gilliland Jason
Published: September 2013

Over the last decade, historians, geographers, and other urban analysts have devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to the history of Montreal. This attention derives not just from the fact that Montreal celebrated its 350th birthday a decade ago (landmark anniversaries do encourage us to reflect on the past), nor is it solely because for most of those 350 years, Montreal was "the largest, wealthiest, and most progressive city of the fair Dominion."1 Interest in Montreal is in part a function of these circumstances, but it is related mainly to the fact that the city has managed to maintain a distinctive social, cultural, and physical fabric in an increasingly homogeneous world.
The Creative Destruction of Montreal: Street Widenings and Urban (Re)Development in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Gilliland Jason
Published: September 2013

﻿Rapid industrialization of North American cities during the nineteenth century was associated with periodic innovations in transportation and massive increases in traffic, which, in turn, caused perennial problems of congestion in ill-adapted urban cores. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the municipal government of Montreal expropriated and destroyed thousands of properties to widen dozens of existing streets. This paper argues that the key to these acts of "creative destruction" was the removal of barriers to circulation through a periodic redimensioning of the "urban vascular system, " and hence, a speed up in the rate of urban growth. A detailed investigation of the planning and execution of major street widening projects between 1862 and 1900 reveals how the built environment of Montreal was periodically destroyed and recreated by a local growth coalition committed to increasing aggregate rents, property values, and municipal revenues, through the intensification of land use. Examination of a sample of properties before and after street widenings suggests that redevelopment was most intense during economic boom periods and in central areas, when and where competition for space was most extreme, and there existed the greatest pressure to remodel the built landscape to fit the needs of a changed economic environment.
The Impact of Cholera on the Design and Implementation of Toronto’s First Municipal By-laws, 1834
Authors: Atkinson Logan
Published: September 2013

The City of Toronto was incorporated in 1834 amid much political animosity and turmoil. The tension between the executive administration and its tory sympathizers on the one hand, and the promoters of reform on the other, had moved political matters to a critical juncture. Perhaps inconsistent with this struggle between central and municipal authority in Upper Canada was the statute by which the City was created, a statute that settled virtually complete legislative authority on the local government. But the first municipal election returned a reform majority to Toronto’s council, with the intransigent William Lyon Mackenzie as first mayor, further heightening the difficulties between the central authority and the local administration.

It might be anticipated that, when the City turned its attention to passing its first set of by-laws in the late spring of 1834, the contest over the right organization of government would dominate the thinking of City councillors. However, a review of those by-laws and the issues that gave rise to them reveals that environmental concerns, including the threat of a repeat of the dangerous cholera epidemic of 1832, had as much to do with the ultimate design of those by-laws as did political orientation. In fact, the environmental pressures felt at the time allowed for the transcendence of political differences for the sake of the defence of public health, a result quite inconsistent with dominant interpretations of the role of law and legal institutions in the Upper Canadian experience.
Old Strathcona: Building Character and Commerce in a Preservation District
Authors: Wall Karen L.
Published: September 2013

Urban spaces of leisure serve to coordinate cultural and économie benefits for local citizens, and contribute to civic profiles in the international competition for prestige and resources. The potential conflicts between cultural and commercial priorities in urban development are particularly marked in the cases of heritage or conservation-oriented districts. The Old Strathcona Historical Preservation District in Edmonton, Alberta provides a case study for an inquiry into how local community has been imagined and expressed through material development processes. The discourse of heritage as both cultural and economic resource is reflected in an analysis of the negotiation among various interests to define Old Strathcona’s character and functions. A central point of tension lies between the mandate to conserve and narrate what are primarily community and cultural values, and the economic potential of pragmatic commercial development using that historical content as a marketing feature. As an environment dedicated to consumption, however, Old Strathcona does in fact represent an a core element in local civic identity.
Victoria Debates Its Post-industrial Reality: Tourism, Deindustrialization, and Store-Hour Regulations, 1900-1958
Authors: Dawson Michael
Published: September 2013

By examining local debates about store-hour regulations in Victoria, BC, this article highlights the extent to which the city’s decision to pursue tourism promotion as an economic alternative to traditional industry divided the local community. Some community members championed tourism as an effective alternative economic strategy and fought to eliminate the city’s store-hour restrictions, especially the Wednesday half-holiday, because they believed these restrictions limited tourist expenditures. Others strenuously opposed the elimination of these restrictions on the grounds that they served the social and cultural interests of the local community. The article calls for a more flexible understanding of "deindustrialization" that views the term less as an "era" and more as an inherent characteristic of capitalism and argues that the recent literature on deindustrialization holds important lessons for historians examining the period before 1970.
Interpreting Personalized Industrial Heritage in the Mining Towns of Cumberland County, Nova Scotia: Landscape Examples from Springhill and River Hebert
Authors: Summerby-Murray Robert
Published: September 2013

As analysis of deindustrialization shifts from economic processes to community response, public landscapes become the locus for the struggle over memory. The interpretation of collective memory has been considered through oral histories, worker narratives, and public art. Missing from this analysis, however, are the personalized landscapes that also contribute to the understanding of industrial heritage in deindustrializing cities and small towns. This article considers a small number of artifacts and constructed objects that create personalized landscapes of industrial heritage in two mining towns in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. Interpreting these landscapes highlights their ambiguity, the contributions they may make to processes of local cultural resistance, and their intensely personal motivation. The analysis questions the extent to which these landscapes reflect a wider coherent heritage discourse or function to reinforce local community, family, and place identity.
Philanthropic Landmarks: The Toronto Trail from a Comparative Perspective, 1870s to the 1930s
Authors: Adam Thomas
Published: September 2013

In this essay the author compares nineteenth-and early twentieth-century philanthropy in Toronto to that in German and American cities such as Leipzig and New York, The argument is divided into four parts, each dealing with different aspects of philanthropy. In the first part of this essay, the author develops his concept of "philanthropic culture", which is the theoretical basis for this essay. The main thesis is that donating became a bourgeois behavioural pattern, which served to integrate new elites, women, and religious and ethnic minorities into social structures, mainly "High Society". The second part of the essay examines wealthy Toron-tonians who became philanthropists. This part paints the portrait of the typical Toronto philanthropist. The concept of philanthropy did not emerge on the American continent, but was imported from Europe. Therefore, the third part of the essay is dedicated to exploration of how philanthropic models were transferred from Europe to Toronto. The last part investigates the development of Toronto’s philanthropic landmarks—the Toronto General Hospital, the Art Gallery of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Toronto Housing Company.
Surf City: A Guide to the Web for Urban Historians
Authors: McShane Clay
Published: September 2013

The World Wide Web is useful for the scholarly needs of urban historians. Not only can it present information in the traditional print format, but it can also provide information in the visual form that urban scholars are usually concerned with. Writing about social geography, contested public spaces, the material culture of the inarticulate, physical planning, and environmental injustice without iconographie materials is difficult. For this the web is ideally suited. Indeed, it adds three new weapons to our traditional arsenal. The web can display moving images, provide sound, and enable hyperlinks to related materials—all options unavailable in print. With the appearance of the peer-reviewed electronic publications, Maria Balshaw, Anna No-taro, Liam Kennedy, and Douglas Tallack, eds., City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930A and Philip Ethington, "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge,"2 the world wide web has moved firmly into the realm of publishing respectability with formatting appropriate to the new medium.
A Home away from Home: Defining, Regulating, and Challenging Femininity at the Julia Drummond Residence in Montreal, 1920-1971
Authors: Kirkland Elizabeth
Published: September 2013

As newcomers to Montreal, young single, working women were often subject to low salaries, poor housing options, and unknown dangers—both real and imagined—of a big city. This article considers thefulia Drummond Residence as a place of intersection for two groups of women: the middle-class volunteers who ran the residence and the young, single working women who lived there. While meeting a need in society by providing shelter and food for women earning small salaries, the women running the residence were just as concerned with shaping the femininity and moral fibre of the residents. The practices and ideology of these women, who used the language of reform and renewal, resembled closely those of social reformers of the previous generation, echoing judgment of femininity based on understandings of race, class, religion, and sexuality. This article explores what it was like to live at the residence, how some women found the residence a uhome away from home" while others were less comfortable in the unfamiliar and seemingly cold middle-class institution. Positioning themselves as independent citizens of Montreal, at a time when affordable housing became increasingly available, many young, single women asserted their freedom and independence in the years following the Second World War by challenging the regulations imposed on them, and, in so doing, rejected the structured femininity offered to them by institutions such as thefulia Drummond Residence.
La toile municipale aux XIXe-XXe siècles : un panorama transnational vu d’Europe
Authors: Saunier Pierre-Yves
Published: September 2013

La « ville globale » est devenue un objet d’étude très couru depuis une quinzaine d’années. La participation active des cités aux mouvements d’interconnexion, qu’on résume sous le nom de globalisation, est pourtant absente de cette littérature. On fait ici l’hypothèse qu’en tant qu’acteurs et que sujets, les villes, à travers leur incarnation politique de gouvernements municipaux urbains, sont plus qu’un simple terrain où se déploie la globalisation. Les échanges entre ces gouvernements municipaux urbains et au sujet de leur fonctionnement, de leur action et de leur situation institutionnelle sont alors considérés comme participant à la construction des phénomènes d’interconnexion transnationale, qu’ils soient régionaux ou globaux. Cet article propose une première approche de la « toile municipale » tissée entre les gouvernements municipaux urbains et au sujet de ceux-ci à l’époque contemporaine. Cette toile inclut gouvernements municipaux, élus et employés municipaux, mais aussi savants et réformateurs ; organismes intergouvernementaux, organisations non gouvernementales nationales et transnationales aussi bien que sections de gouvernements nationaux ou infra-nationaux, sans omettre les entreprises qui travaillent sur le marché de l’urbain. Elle organise et canalise la circulation des idées, des personnes, des services entre les gouvernements municipaux urbains et à leur sujet. L’article s’attache particulièrement aux acteurs, matériaux de cette toile, aux objets qui la parcourent, en insistant sur les effets à long terme de ce réseau de contacts et d’échanges qui s’est mis en place depuis la fin du XIXe siècle.
« Le fil conducteur, la vie montréalaise et la Commission des services électriques de Montréal 1914 à 1933 »
Authors: Poitras Claire
Published: September 2013

Dans la grande région de Montréal, la tempête de verglas de janvier 1998, qui a plongé dans le noir des centaines de milliers de personnes pendant plusieurs jours, nous a fait prendre conscience de la fragilité du réseau aérien de distribution d’électricité. Cet événement a également relancé la discussion sur l’enfouissement des lignes électriques de distribution. En plus des avantages techniques propres à la pratique d’enfouissement, l’aménagement de quartiers sans fil serait, selon ses défenseurs, visuellement plus agréable et pourrait aussi contribuer à augmenter les valeurs foncières des propriétés s’y trouvant. Bref, les environnements sans fil donneraient du prestige aux quartiers urbains et aux lotissements résidentiels. Certaines municipalités particulièrement soucieuses de la qualité de leur environnement bâti et paysager ont, depuis plusieurs décennies, mis en œuvre des programmes d’enfouissement des fils ou encore préconisé l’implantation des infrastructures dans les ruelles, à l’abri du regard.
Sense of the City, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1920
Authors: Kenny Nicolas
Published: September 2013

As visitors first step into the latest exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the senses are immediately aroused. We are drawn through a dark and narrow tunnel and, before our eyes can adjust, the sounds of a railway station, with trains pulling up to and leaving platforms and announcers calling out the next departures in various languages, immediately evoke the constant movement of city life. A small screen tells us that one minute we are in Cologne, the next in Lille, and thus, with eyes squinting and ears alert, begins a sensorial voyage through urban space. Questioning assumptions is the primary objective of "Sense of the City," curated by the CCA’s recently appointed director, architect, and scholar Mirko Zardini, who wants to inspire visitors to think differently about how they experience their urban environment. Zardini reminds us that although the visual has always been privileged in urban dwellers’ conception, design, and interaction with their milieu, cities also stimulate the other senses in a multitude of ways. A more pronounced appreciation of how we touch, hear, smell, and perhaps even taste the city, argues this exhibition, will not only lead us to a fuller, more balanced understanding of our habitat, but will also encourage us to formulate new claims for an environment planned with greater sensitivity to our fundamentally, though oft-neglected, corporeal relationship with urban space.
The Nature of Cities: Perspectives in Canadian Urban Environmental History
Authors: Bocking Stephen
Published: September 2013

Capilano Canyon seems in a realm quite separate from Vancouver. Steep rock walls, mossy and wet; rapids and pools tracing a thin line from snowpack to ocean; ferns and Douglas firs—all remote from the suburbs that surround them. To descend into the park is to pass between two worlds; from one of humans, to another of nature. But traces within the park undermine this distinction. Cedar stumps display notches made by loggers, and in a remote corner a timber railway rots quietly away. These testify to Vancouver’s history of timber-cutting, when the "forest vanished and up went the city."1 Around a bend in the river, Cleveland Dam’s concrete bulk suddenly appears, storing and diverting the river, annexing it to Vancouver’s water system. Today, though, loggers and engineers have been displaced by strollers and tourists, catered to by gentle paths and a bus parking lot. The park testifies to the evolving place of nature within a Canadian city.
Reflections on the Nature of an Urban Bog
Authors: Hermansen Sally , Wynn Graeme
Published: September 2013

Camosun Bog has existed for approximately two thousand years. Little is known about its use by indigenous people, but it was left essentially undisturbed by European newcomers until the twentieth century. Then, as the population of Vancouver and its neighbouring suburb of Point Grey (amalgamated with Vancouver in 1929) grew almost exponentially, the bog was subject to massively accelerated change. By 1980 it was a tiny, endangered remnant landscape, little understood, and valued even less, until a small group of volunteers constituting the Camosun Bog Restoration Society began to reverse the ravages of the previous seventy-five years. This paper combines careful Geographical Information Systems—based mapping of the bog, using evidence from aerial photographs, the scientific findings of botanists, and interviews with members of the Bog Restoration Society, with research in the City of Vancouver archives and newspaper files to detail the effects of human action upon the bog and to reflect upon what the history of this unique place reveals about changing attitudes toward nature in the city.
Lights Out: Conserving Electricity for War in the Canadian City, 1939-1945
Authors: Evenden Matthew
Published: September 2013

Economic mobilization in Canada during the Second World War drove a major expansion in power demand in cities of the industrial heartland. To meet the needs of wartime industry, the federal government imposed power conservation measures, and utilities sought to inspire voluntary conservation among urban and primarily female consumers. These measures produced conflicts over their proper application and broader meanings. Conservation came to be understood not as an environmental measure, but as a planning policy to restrict uses in some sectors of society to allow for unfettered use in others. Wartime conservation did not ultimately reduce power demand in Canada, but it did lay down conditions that would support massive postwar growth.
A Changing of the Guard: Regional Planning in Ottawa, 1945-1974
Authors: Fullerton Christopher
Published: September 2013

This paper examines the evolution of planning in Ottawa’s metropolitan region between 1945 and 1974—a period of significant change in the city’s planning history.1 As else-where, planners and policy-makers in Ottawa were coming under increasing pressure to make effective public participation a legitimate part of planning activities and to consider more seriously the potential quality-oflife impacts of their planning decisions, most notably those related to the provision of transportation infrastructure. Yet it was also in the late 1960s that the federal government was forced to concede its long-standing, yet unofficial, control of regional planning for the Ottawa area to the newly created Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton (RMOC). Accordingly, creation of the RMOC’s first official plan was a contentious process that, in the end, enabled the continuation of postwar suburban development trends while also incorporating a "transit first" philosophy granting precedence to public transit over all forms of road construction and widening. The direction taken in its first official plan also enabled the RMOC to demonstrate that it, rather than the federal government, would from then on play the lead in regional planning.
The Senator, The Merchant, Two Carpenters, and a Widow: A Survey of Canadian Landlords in 1871
Authors: Burley David G.
Published: September 2013

Recent scholarship has improved our understanding of the increase in home ownership in Canada from the late nineteenth century, but less attention bas been directed to the group that owners displaced, landlords. With data sampled from the 1871 manuscript census, this study compares landlords and housing tenure in twenty urban centres of various sizes to reveal variations in housing markets, in the concentration of the ownership of rental accommodation, and in the relative attraction of housing investments for different people. By 1871 housing markets had already responded to industrial development, and landlords in Canadas major centres provided much more residential accommodation than in smaller communities. They also were drawn from different social backgrounds and were more likely in Toronto and Montreal than elsewhere to be artisans and tradesmen, to be younger, and less likely to be engaged in commerce. The market sensitivity of petty landlords qualifies assumptions about the inability of such investors to expand the housing of industrial cities. But, their limited resources did mean that they were unlikely to increase their participation in the housing market further. Nor was there much incentive for the major landlords in large centres — retired businessmen, gentlemen, bourgeois, and widows — to invest more: having retired, further investment required them to con strain their level of consumption and perhaps reduce their standard of living.
Home or Homelessness? Marginal Housing in Vancouver, 1886–1950
Authors: Wade Jill
Published: September 2013

Between 1886 and 1950, marginal bousing in Vancouver ran the gamut from borne to homelessness: in tbe spectrum of bousing conditions, it could be anything between a room in a lodging house in a respectable suburb and a tea box in a depression-era jungle. Many residents had strong emotional ties to their homes, whatever the quality of housing conditions. Foremost among the reasons for this attachment was a variety of attitudes, concerns, and relationships, including the expectations about ade quate housing of those who had lived and worked in British Columbia's resource communities. Examples of these powerful ties, and of the resistance to change that they prompted, suggest that housing bureaucrats and activists should think carefully about the justness and the effectiveness of interventions such as eviction and relocation.
Industrial Efficiency, Social Order and Moral Purity: Housing Reform Thought in English Canada, 1900–1950
Authors: Purdy Sean
Published: September 2013

This paper traces the evolution of reform ideology in the housing sphere in the first half of the twentieth century by critically analyzing the ideas and practices of a number of key housing reformers and agencies. Premised on middle-class beliefs in the necessity of state intervention and the capacity of the trained expert to alleviate social conflict, the movement for housing betterment centred on a doctrine of "community' that ostensibly stood above labour and capital, aiming to harmonize social relations for the greater good of the nation. To this end, stress was placed on bettering the physical conditions of workers' dwellings in order to improve the productive capacity of the labour force. But the concentration on the physical quality of workers' homes was also tied to the wider ideological goal of strengthening the nuclear family — a cornerstone of the nation and the state in the estimation of reform-minded citizens. The role housing reform could play as part of the larger project of securing social consent by stabilizing family structures and contributing to the construction of a distinct national identity constituted pivotal concerns in the discourse of the reform effort. Progressives aimed to extend state intervention in the housing sphere in order to allay the impact of industrialization and preserve class cooperation and social hierarchy. Yet without losing sight of this distinct regulatory thrust from above, it is also necessary to chart how housing experts and policy makers groped through the contradictions of urban society in a creative manner they themselves saw as more or less disinterested.
The Dominion Housing Act
Authors: Belec John
Published: September 2013

Since its inception fifty years ago, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has played a dominant role in the development of Canadian housing. Although the policy mechanisms and directions have expanded over the years, the primary role of CMHC has remained consistent since 1946; to promote home ownership by reducing the risk inherent in mortgage loans, to financial institutions. This policy predates CMHQ in 1935 the Dominion Housing Act (DHA) initiated joint lending on mortgages between lenders and the federal government The joint-lending arrangement continued with the National Housing Act in 1938 and responsibility for its administration was inherited by CMHC A basic shift in policy occurred in 1954 when joint lending was replaced with the current programme of mortgage insurance. Although state-assisted mortgage policy is often cited to have been central to the building of the post-war suburb in Canada, empirical analysis is lacking. This paper analyses the socio-spatial impact of the DHA through use of original mortgage files. DHA-sponsored mortgage lending featured pronounced class and geographical biases. Although a suburban orientation was present from the beginning, the middle classes were generally unable to participate.
Critique du projet de Place Royale à travers les valeurs investies dans sa politique de conservation
Authors: Faure Isabelle
Published: September 2013

L'analyse des arguments des auteurs dans le projet d'intervention sur Place Royale permet d'énoncer les valeurs réellement investies dans le projet de Place Royale. Elles sont, selon leur importance décroissante, nationaliste, touristique, d'usage, artistique et historique. Cette hiérarchie de valeurs apparaît en contradiction avec les priorités historique, archéologique et artistique de la conservation d'un ensemble urbain qui avait été annoncée par les auteurs, et suggère que l'intervention effectuée sur l'ensemble urbain historique de Place Royale est davantage une construction d'un mémorial à la survivance française en Amérique du Nord qu'une opération de conservation et de mise en valeur d'un patrimoine.
Karen Herland, People, Potholes and City Politics Shlomo Hasson and David Ley, Neighbourhood Organizations and the Welfar Henri Lustiger-Thaler (éd.), Political Arrangements: Power and the City Vered Amit-Talai and Henri Lustiger-Thaler (eds.), Urban Lives: Fragmentation and Resistan
Authors: Phillips Susan D.
Published: September 2013

Review Essay Susan D. Phillips School of Public Administration Carleton University Karen Herland, People, Potholes and City Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992). Shlomo Hasson and David Ley, Neighbourhood Organizations and the Welfare State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). Henri Lustiger-Thaler (éd.), Political Arrangements: Power and the City (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992). Vered Amit-Talai and Henri Lustiger-Thaler (eds.), Urban Lives: Fragmentation and Resistance (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994). Collectively these four volumes mark, however tentatively and unevenly, the beginning of a significant new direction in the study of Canadian urban politics. They begin to move us away from the traditional focus on structures and services to a closer examination of the relationship between urban governments and civil society. While they point us down these exciting new paths, none of these books provides an adequate road map to help us complete the journey. Nevertheless, some of the themes that emerge from these volumes are useful starting points.
Les sociétés de prêt juives à Montréal, 1911-1945
Authors: Taschereau Sylvie
Published: September 2013

Entre 1911 et 1945, plus d’une centaine de sociétés de prêt juives sont fondées à Montréal. Leur apparition correspond à un moment crucial dans la vie de cette communauté. Les formes qu’elles prennent et la variété de leurs orientations sont également à son image et témoignent des clivages sociaux et idéologiques qui la marquent. Mais par ailleurs, ces sociétés, dont la majorité sont des coopératives de crédit, se multiplient au moment où le mouvement des caisses populaires Desjardins prend son essor à travers le Québec. Ce parallélisme nous oblige à les considérer dans un contexte plus large et à nous interroger aussi sur les liens que ces mouvements peuvent entretenir.
Permeable Boundaries: Negotiation, Resistance, and Transgression of Street Space in Saint-Henri, Quebec, 1875-1905
Authors: Lord Kathleen
Published: September 2013

In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Saint-Henri, the street was a contested space. The local elite’s municipal management of public space conflicted with the popular social use of the streets, both in the design and promotion of the main commercial street, rue Notre-Dame, and in the moral regulation of street behaviour. Political negotiation was limited to male property owners, for restrictions on the municipal franchise in a bourgeois liberal democracy excluded most women, many tenants, and all street vagrants. Mounting public debt resulting from the promotional politics of expropriation and bonusing incited popular resistance and, in 1905, led to annexation to the city of Montreal. The local elite directed the use of public space in ways that conformed with their private perspectives. Local by-laws and policing efforts largely succeeded in eliminating or displacing criminal and disruptive behaviour on rue Notre-Dame by day, but nightly disturbances and illicit activities were common on adjoining residential streets, in hidden areas, and in the neighbouring community of Sainte-Cunégonde. A wider range of primary sources, including photographs and sketches, are crucial to disclosing the class and gendered nature of street life.
Technology and Law Enforcement: The Transformation of the Calgary Police Force, 1900-1940
Authors: Bright David
Published: September 2013

As was the case in cities across North America, Calgary’s police force underwent a transformation in the early twentieth century. In particular, new technologies were embraced and utilized, notably in the fields of training, communication, identification, and records. Yet while this process of modernization certainly eased the day-to-day operations of Calgary’s law enforcers, it provided mixed results in increasing the rate of conviction across a wide range of offences. As such, this article offers a caution against equating modernization and professionalization, per se, with improvements in effective policing.
Partisan Politics, Civic Priorities, and the Urban Militia: Situating the Calgary Armoury, 1907-1917
Authors: Lackenbauer P. Whitney
Published: September 2013

The military’s physical presence in Canadian cities has received little critical analysis in terms of local power and identities, urban governance, and competing visions for the use of public space. Using the case study of Calgary, this paper explores the political power struggle surrounding the establishment of an armoury in the early twentieth century. Decision-making involved municipal, provincial, and federal stakeholders, as well as local interest groups, concerned citizens, and the partisan press. This attempt to situate the military within urban political and public space reveals complex processes and relationships, even during an era characterized as "the moment of Canadian militarism."
Mortality in an Early Ontario Community: Belleville 1876–1885
Authors: Sawchuk Larry A. , Burke Stacie D. A.
Published: September 2013

This study contributes to our understanding of health in late nineteenth-century communities in Ontario and the major factors contributing to the high mortality of the period. The focus of the study is Belleville, Ontario, from 1876 to 1885. Life expectancies at birth in the low forties characterized the community with infant mortality rates in the very high range, 160 per 1000 live-births. Major contributors to the observed pattern of mortality included tuberculosis, weanling diarrhea, and scarlet fever. Significant differences in the likelihood of dying from these three major causes varied by gender and religious affiliation. It is possible that more extended patterns of breast-feeding among Catholics led to lower levels of weanling diarrhea mortality in their infants.
A Sense of Time and Place: Gilbert Stelter’s Contribution to Urban History
Authors: Taylor John
Published: September 2013

A Sense of Time and Place: Gilbert Steiter’s Contribution to Urban History John Taylor Abstract These remarks were presented at "The Urban Academic," a conference in honour of the retirement of Dr. Gil Steiter, September 26, 1998, at the University ofGuelph. The conference was presented by the History Department of the university.

Gil Steiter was the first president of the Canadian Urban Group after it was founded in 1971 at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in St. John’s, Newfoundland. In retirement, Gil combines his writing on urban history with the hybridizing of day lilies. He is currently president of the U.S.-based Urban History Association.
The Two-Wheeled Workhorse: The Bicycle as Personal and Commercial Transport in Winnipeg
Authors: Lehr John C. , Selwood H. John
Published: September 2013

The bicycle has yet to be afforded its rightful place in Canadian urban transportation history. Previous interest in the bicycle has centred on the gay nineties cycling craze, when the bicycle was a relatively expensive plaything of the wealthy, leisured classes. This paper outlines that short phase in the history of the bicycle in Winnipeg but focuses on its later utilitarian function as a personal conveyance, giving mobility and freedom to the less affluent but far more numerous working classes. Despite Winnipeg's harsh winter climate, it served not only as a summertime recreational form of transport but also as a year-round workhorse and commuting vehicle.
“A Tale of Two Cities:” Boosterism and the Imagination of Community during the Visit of the Prince of Wales to Saint John and Halifax in 1860
Authors: Huskins Bonnie
Published: September 2013

A phalanx of politicians, newspaper editors, and leading citizens in Saint John and Halifax used the royal visit of 1860 to promote their respective communities to the Prince of Wales and his entourage of British statesmen and reporters. Halifax boosters used the city's status as a provincial capital to impress their international visitors. The Prince and his royal retinue were regaled with a levee, a grand ball, a regatta, numerous military displays, and an excursion to the Prince's Lodge. Organizers in Saint John used a different promotional strategy. They presented their city as a viable commercial centre and insisted that the Prince cross the Reversing Falls Suspension Bridge and ride the European and North American railway line to Shediac. The Prince was also shown how to manufacture deals at a local sawmill. The response to these spectacles was decidedly mixed. While some British and American press correspondents praised the boosters' efforts and the cities themselves, others were quick to ridicule or criticize Halifax and Saint John. Nonetheless, an analysis of the boosters' promotional strategies reveals how they "imagined" their communities to local and international audiences as well as to themselves. Moreover, their efforts illustrate how segments of the urban middle class used this celebration to construct favourable images of their communities to attract international attention and thereby political prestige and economic investment.
Galts "Dickson's Hill": The Evolution of a Late-Victorian Neighbourhood in an Ontarian Town
Authors: Hagopian John S.
Published: September 2013

Previous research has shown that the economic growth and urban population increases which occurred in the 1880s prompted the development of many new residential neighbourhoods in central Canadian municipalities. Much of this housing was of superior quality, to meet the needs of the growing middle and upper classes, who began to segregate themselves in affluent enclaves within cities. These neighbourhoods evolved slowly, reflecting the small scale of the processes of land subdivision and housing construction which then existed. These processes, however, were in a state of transition, and by the early 20l century, housing provision had become more professional and large scale. The present research uses the case of Dickson's Hill to explore how these and other events unfolded in a Late Victorian neighbourhood in a small Ontarian town. The social segregation which occurred here was not extreme, as the rich and poor lived on opposite sides of the same neighbourhood. The basic street pattern and most of the subdividing of land was done by one person — Florence Dickson — but many builders and tradesmen were involved in the provision of housing. There was much variation in house styles, even on the same block, since individual lot owners contracted for the construction of their homes, and since the pace of development was so slow that the popularity of certain architectural styles had changed. This variety, together with a number of planning decisions, explains in part the character and charm exuded by the neighbourhood.
Vie culturelle et pouvoirs publics locaux. La fondation de la bibliothèque municipale de Montréal
Authors: Dagenais Michèle
Published: September 2013

Carte maîtresse de la stratégie des villes dans la concurrence qu'elles se livrent, la culture constitue aujourd'hui une sorte de vitrine qui confère aux grands ensembles urbains leur personnalité propre. De ce fait, on a bien souvent l'impression que la mu-nicipalisation du champ culturel est un phénomène nouveau ou du moins récent. Or, il n'en est rien. Dans cet article, nous analyserons certaines des circonstances à l'origine de l'intervention municipale dans le champ culturel au tournant du XXe siècle, en présentant les différentes étapes entourant la création de la Bibliothèque municipale de Montréal À l'époque, l'avènement d'une bibliothèque publique engendre de vives tensions au sein de la société montréalaise. Deux questions fondamentales se retrouvent au coeur du litige: la première concerne la définition même de la notion de culture publique; la deuxième, celle du mandat des pouvoirs municipaux dans ce domaine.
Continuity and Discontinuity in Canadian Cab History
Authors: Davis Donald F.
Published: September 2013

Taxicabs have been virtually ignored by Canadian historians. This neglect is surprising, considering how large this service looms in academic life. Not only do cab drivers regularly whisk professors off to conferences, but their spirits also haunt university corridors as a bogeyman. Has there been a graduate student or untenured professor in recent years who has not been warned, or feared, that a PhD in the humanities or social sciences qualifies him — or her — only to drive a hack? Cab drivers are a classic instance of "the other," a stereotype against whom intellectuals have long defined their own identities and aspirations. PhDs do not want to "push cab." Yet what does the job actually entail?
The Canadian Taxi Wars, 1925–1950
Authors: Davis Donald F.
Published: September 2013

Between 1925 and 1950 most Canadian cities experienced a taxi war during which fares and drivers' incomes plum meted. These wars had their origin in the low barriers to entry into the industry», as it became clear in the late 1920's that motor cabs did not need private concessions, special-built cabs, telephone switchboards and taxime ters to make a profit. The older firms that had made these investments were able by 1950 to persuade the larger Canadian cities — including Winnipeg and Vancou ver, the two featured here — to introduce the present regulatory regime. The imposition of uniform fares, of taximeters, of minimum wages, of liability insurance, as well as limits on entry into the industry (through the medallion system) ended the taxi wars. The industry thereafter operated in a less chaotic, more ethical way. Yet the new regime also reduced the industry's flexibility, making it less helpful in moving the urban masses.
The Cab Trade in Winnipeg, 1871–1910
Authors: Beattie Norman
Published: September 2013

The history of the cab trade in Canada prior to 1914 is a largely unexplored field. This paper outlines the history of cabs in Winnipeg from 1871, when the first livery stables were opened, to 1910, when motorised taxicabs were introduced. The most striking feature of the early cab trade was its unpr of it ability, stemming the nature of the trade itself and from local conditions that made matters worse. Low revenues, high operating costs, a small and fragmented local market and competition from inside and outside the trade tended to keep individual enterprises small and without sufficient resources to compete with the well-financed taxicab companies that appeared in 1910. The taxicab dealt a severe blow to the horse cab, +but the growing numbers of private automobiles also diminished the potential market for both horse cabs and taxicabs. Further, the private automobile created a whole new class of competitors as owners discovered lucrative sidelines in car hire and jitney services.
Ward Heelers and Honest Men: Urban Québécois Political Culture and the Montreal Reform of 1909
Authors: Gordon Alan
Published: September 2013

While scholars often emphasize traditionalism, ruralism and anti-statism as the "dominants" of Quebec's political culture prior to the Quiet Revolution, some Québécois embraced progressivism early in the twentieth century. Municipal government reform, one of the hallmarks of the progressive movement, cropped up in Canada's largest city, Montreal. Far from being confined to anglophones and remnants of Quebec's rouge party, support for reform came from a wide section of Montreal's French-speaking population. This article analyzes the rhetoric employed by Montreal's mass circulation newspapers during the referendum campaign of 1909 in order to demonstrate the popularity of reform in Montreal and to uncover the main doctrines of French-Canadian progressivism. Urban Quebec's political culture, then, accommodated the position of the city in Québécois culture and envisioned an expanding and active state role in city life. Overriding these beliefs were the basic assumptions of early-twentieth-century liberalism and, curiously for a referendum campaign, a distrust of popular sovereignty characteristic of North American reformism in general.