TOC: Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine Vol. 46 No. 2

Volume 46, Number 2, Spring 2018
Publication Date: November 2019

Planning History / Histoire de l’aménagement

Richard White

pp. 5–9 Record

La contribution des édifices municipaux au développement des villes québécoises en région, 1870–1929

Claudine Déom

pp. 11–24 Record

Cities in the regions of Quebec experienced significant growth in the second half of the 19th century. Industrialization, which had manifested itself first in Quebec City and Montreal, began to take hold in areas of the province further away from major centres. Quebec’s urban population grew with the arrival of the railway and manufacturing companies, transforming former villages into small regional centres. This period is characterized by the implementation of the first municipal laws. Following Confederation, the Province of Quebec’s Municipal Code permanently established local governments in 1870. The municipality then became the authority for managing the land and servicing its taxpayers. This period of intense growth forced municipal governments to take responsibility for land management. At a time when hygiene conditions in working neighbourhoods were precarious and fires constituted a daily threat, cities built infrastructure and public buildings to meet new urban needs. This article proposes a review of the municipal buildings built by cities located in different regions of the Province of Quebec between the 1870s and 1929. These markets, fire halls, pumping stations and city halls reflect an important moment of the history of these towns. This body of work will be examined through its contribution to the organization and operation of cities at a crucial time in their development. The value of these buildings is also based on the fact that they demonstrate clearly a willingness on the part of administrators to project the image of a civic ideal.
 

De siège du gouvernement à capitale éphémère : Kingston, Montréal et le passage à l’État libéral moderne (1838–1849)

Alain Roy

pp. 25–41 Record

In the early years of the province of Canada, Kingston and Montreal were alternately seat of government and then capital, and various development projects were proposed. However, making the history of these cities as capitals can only be done at the crossroads of political and urban history. It is therefore important first to look at what capitals are, their development and their relationship with the modern liberal state. We will then examine the three projects for the seat of government and then the capital from 1838 to 1849, in Montreal (1838–1840), in Kingston (1840–1843), and again in Montreal (1844–1849). These projects, which were more or less completed, will be examined along two axes. On the one hand, on the political level, the successive choices testify of an increasing empowerment in the face of sovereign power and a “modern” affirmation of the capital as a political centre. On the other hand, the proposed and partially implemented developments reflect a desire to enhance the material and symbolic value of emerging power in the urban space. In that perspective, the project to establish what would be called a “parliamentary city” in Montreal is the most complete, but the provincial government, limited in its resources, must adopt a more focused approach. In the end, the capital projects reflect the vicissitudes and difficulties of a new emerging state, whose marks on the urban landscape and memory of Kingston and Montreal remain unknown.
 

Introducing Canada to Urban Planning? Henry Vivian’s Canadian Planning Tour, 1910

Catherine Mary Ulmer

pp. 43–56 Record
From the late nineteenth century onwards, an informal but dedicated group of middle- and upper-class Canadians came to embrace urban planning, building networks across the growing international movement that they used to import and circulate foreign innovations within Canada. This article studies the impact of such transnational planning exchanges through exploring British Garden City planning expert Henry Vivian’s 1910 tour of Canada. Arriving at the request of Earl Grey, Canada’s ninth governor general and an influential planning advocate, Vivian spent three months touring municipalities, lecturing on the Garden City approach, and advising on local urban issues. The article studies the wider Canadian and transnational planning movements from which Vivian’s tour emerged before considering the tour itself and Vivian’s ultimate influence on Canada’s planning movement.
 

Reconstruction Reconsidered: Thomas Adams’s Role in Rebuilding the “Devastated Area” after the 1917 Halifax Disaster

Barry Cahill

pp. 57–69 Record
Though English urban planner Thomas Adams’s connection with reconstruction after the 1917 Halifax Disaster (“Halifax Explosion”) is well known, the precise nature and extent of his involvement has not been subject to rigorous research or informed analysis and, as a result, is neither known nor understood. Perhaps least-known is Adams’s crucial working relationship with the Halifax Relief Commission, the federal government body set up seven weeks after the disaster to take complete charge of emergency management. This article addresses a significant lacuna in early Canadian planning history as well as in the history of recovery from the Halifax Disaster. The history of reconstruction itself, which has yet to be written, can ill-afford to magnify or misrepresent Adams’s significant contribution to it.
 

Humphrey Carver and the Federal Government’s Postwar Revival of Canadian Community Planning

David L.A. Gordon

pp. 71–84 Record

Humphrey S.M. Carver (1902–1995) played an important role in the federal government’s revival of Canadian community planning following the Second World War and guiding Canada’s transformation into a suburban nation. Carver was a senior executive at Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) from 1948 until his retirement in 1967. While Carver’s work as a housing advocate is well documented, his role as an advocate for community planning is less known. He was the founding vice-president of the Community Planning Association of Canada (CPAC) in 1947, president of the Town Planning Institute of Canada (TPIC), 1963–4, and a vice-president of the American Society of Planning Officials. While at CMHC, he assisted in the rapid national expansion of the CPAC and the 1953 resuscitation of the TPIC. His agency funded the establishment of the first five Canadian planning schools, hundreds of planning scholarships, and millions of dollars in planning research and planning studies.
 

Tristan Loubes

pp. 87–88 Record

Marsan, Jean-Claude. Montréal en évolution. Quatre siècles d’architecture et d’aménagement. Sainte-Foy, Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2016. 752 p.

Louis Martin

p. 89 Record