Gilbert A. Stelter

The Usable Urban Past: Planning and Politics in the Modern Canadian City

This collection of original essays serves both the historians and geographers who seek a deeper understanding of Canadas urban past, and the planners, politicians and citizens who seek to preserve or to change their cities today.

Power and place : Canadian urban development in the North American context

Western historians continue to seek new ways of understanding the particular mixture of physical territory, human actions, outside influences, and unique expectations that has made the North American West what it is today. This collection of twelve essays tackles the subject of power and place from several angles--Indians and non-Indians, race and gender, environment and economy--to gain insight into major forces at work during two centuries of western history.The essays, related to one another by their concern with how power is exercised in, over, and by western places, cover a wide range of times and topics, from 18th-century Spanish New Mexico to 19th-century British Columbia to 20th-century Sun Valley and Los Angeles. They encompass analyses of the concept and rhetoric of race, theoretical speculations on gender and powerlessness, and insights on the causes of current environmental crises.

Shaping the urban landscape : aspects of the Canadian city-building process

This is a collection of essays focusing on the process of city-building in Canada. The authors weigh the relative broad social, economic and technological trends as they attempt to explain the shaping of this urban landscape.

Military Considerations and Colonial Town Planning: France and New France in the Seventeenth Century

This chapter provides a historical account of the grid-pattern design of the French bastide towns as the most significant model for France’s New World expansion during the seventeenth century. Endowed with both political and agricultural functions by making agricultural expansion possible through the political process of colonization, the author considers the classical roots of this urban model during the European Renaissance and then examines its use in France and New France as a military strategy of fortified urban design. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the territorial conflicts between France and England during the mid-eighteenth century, which had disastrous effects for France’s colonial settlements in North America.

Urban Planning and Development in Upper Canada

Le present expose traite de la planification et du developpement des villes du Haut-Canada, region frontiere de l’Amerique du Nord britannique. Les fonctionnaires de l’Empire, se fondant sur l’experience acquise par les Britanniques en Irlande et dans les colonies americaines, se servirent sciemment des villes pour favoriser le peuplement de cette region. Au milieu du XIXe siecle, les entrepots coloniaux etaient devenus des centres de commerce ambitieux, tandis que l’organisation sociale se refletait dans une conception traditionaliste du gouvernement local; par exemple, les objets fabriques ressemblaient enormement a ceux des Etats-Unis.

Urban History in North America

History is a tricky business, if only because history, as a phenomenon of the present, subject to scrutiny and manipulation, does not exist: it is, in a very real sense, made up. The study of the history of historical writing is a doubly tricky business because it is not merely what really happened in the past which determined the way people acted and wrote history, but also the way in which people perceived what happened. These complications require that one not only take into account what historians have said but also their perceptions of reality in their own times and the way that perception defined their conception of what was real in the past. Definition becomes the crux of the matter, for the way our predecessors wrote urban history depended upon their definition of their subject matter.