A walking tour of downtown Guelph 4. A guide to archives and record repositories 5. A database on the built environment 6. Discussion questions 1. Studying a Local Community A town is a town wherever it is.
Every town is different.
These apparently contradictory statements are both true. Cities and towns everywhere share some basic characteristics, some common patterns that can be recognized whether we are exploring classical Athens, medieval Paris, or modern San Francisco. On the other hand, each urban place is distinctive in some respects, whether in location, what it does for a living, what kind of people live there, the style and size of buildings, the infrastructure of roads, or even the network of institutions and organizations that help make a concentration of people and activities into a community. One of the aims of using urban history as a tool for understanding a local community is that urban history tends to act as a sort of middle ground between the Social Sciences approach which concentrates on common patterns, on the univeral and the general, and on the other hand, the interests of local history, in which the particular and the unique are emphasized. Urban places are created.