Peter G. Goheen

The changing bias of inter-urban communications in nineteenth-century Canada

Abstract In the years between 1845 and 1875 the character of communications in Canada changed significantly. The arrival of the telegraph altered the technology of message transmission, and the spread of urban settlement across the continent changed the dimensions of the communications network. This paper aims to analyse the relationship between these developments and the flow of published economic information between and among the cities. Content analyses of non-local economic data, both advertising and editorial, in the pages of the urban newspapers were undertaken at intervals of a decade between 1845 and 1875. The results of these analyses suggest that the new technology had an evolutionary, not revolutionary, effect on the structure of information flows, encouraging both the centralization of control of news gathering and dissemination while allowing the periphery closer contact with the centre. The volume of economic values circulating increased significantly. Regional, national and international networks all became better articulated as the system of cities expanded and intensified.

The Impact of the Telegraph on the Newspaper in Mid- Nineteenth Century British North America.

Among the first clients to benefit from the telegraphs capability radically to improve the speed and reliability of information circulation was the newspaper. This essay examines how editors in the British colonies of North America used the telegraph in newsgathering and what effects it had on the speed and routing of published communications. Regional, interregional, and international patterns of communications are examined. These issues are investigated in the context of theories of space-time convergence and of the relationship between technology and geography posited in H. A. Inniss communications theory.

Competing Visions of the City

For urban geography the decade of the 1970s was a period of critical reflection on the positivist social science that had flourished in the 1960s. Two challenges to existing practice were of special importance. One, identified with humanistic geography, sought to broaden the idea of science and dissociate it from positive statistical analysis. The other, espousing a Marxist analysis, challenged the legitimacy of the science practiced by the profession. The former served to diversify the nature of the research contributed to the field. The latter sought to supplant it. The decade ended in discord, with urban geography suffering a loss of coherence in the absence of a productive discussion of the issues which confronted its practice.

The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation

Kenny aims in this examination of Montreal and Brussels, in the period of their industrialization from the 1880s until the opening of World War I, to recover the “urban dwellers’ visceral, bodily connection to the unique spaces of the industrial city” and to examine the “hopes and aspirations, concerns and fears” (pp. xi–xii) that their experiences produced. Three concepts—modernity, material space, and experience—guide his investigation. It was, he believes, the changing sensory quality of life in the new urban environment that most impacted the lives of city residents. Modernity’s importance was “to desensitize the body even as it produced conditions of intense sensation: material space was “a dynamic force in social relations;” and experience was “a genuine, not merely constructed, form of acquiring knowledge” (p. 6). For Kenny, modernity’s significance arises principally not from the alteration of the material landscape by the forces of industrialization and urbanization but rather from residents’ perceptions “and the various strategies people adopted in responding to these pressures. . ..The project of modernity. . .is the self-conscious will to embrace and shape the nature of these changes. . .” (p. 8). His emphasis on material space is designed to understand the production of spatial meaning as a duality between the material and the mental, highlighting the underlying tension “of bodily practice and the visual, olfactory, auditory, and tactile experiences that were borne out of intensified encounters between individuals and space” (p. 16). The contested notion of experience Kenny explores is “the localized realm of quotidian life, where bodily and sensorial experiences did shape myriad day-to-day outlooks and attitudes” (p. 17). After introducing the reader to his two chosen cities, Kenny presents his ambitious prospectus in four chapters dealing with: panoramic views as conceptualizations of the modern city as a whole, bodily experiences of the new spaces of industry and the variety of responses to them, the homes of workers and the “bourgeoisie’s moral imperatives” that informed the social improvers’ scientific agenda (p. 121), and the street as significant public space in the process of being reorganized to highlight a new way of thinking about the body itself in the modern city. Panoramic views of cities were a favorite technique employed by nineteenth-century city boosters to solicit interest. They were artful products and could be carefully edited to reveal and conceal. Kenny explores the ideologies influencing the pictorial presentations of Montreal and Brussels, leading to a preference for displaying the city as an organic unity,

Toronto: Transformations in a City and Its Region

Toronto today is among the most cosmopolitan metropolises in the world: Its proportion of foreign-born residents is the highest of any city in the developed world. The Toronto Census Metropolitan Area was home to 5.1 million people in 2006, 45 percent of them foreign born. More than 2 million people have arrived there during the past thirty years from countries where the prevailing background is not European descended. In 1971, the Toronto metropolitan area housed 2,628,000 people of overwhelmingly European stock. This is the place and period Edward Relph addresses with a focus on “the transformations ... that have turned [Toronto] ... from a primarily white, rustbelt city into an intensely multicultural, polycentric metropolitan region” (p. vii). He views the city through its landscapes, “the way places look, including their buildings, streets, and assorted other visible things, as expressions of what a society actually does rather than what people say it is doing” (p. 7).

The Rise of Suburban Culture and the Death of the City: 1945 to 1975

Robert Beauregard believes that America should be understood through the prism of its suburbs and Sunbelt cities: Americans have, through their experience in these places during the sixty years since 1945, “reimagined” and “reinvented” (p. ix) the nation. Suburbs and these cities should not remain at the peripheries of our conceptual imaginations; their place is at the center of our attention because we cannot understand the country without focusing on the roles they have come to play in its economy and society. Beauregard argues that the post-war American suburban and urban experience created a new popular culture; he designed the book as an “interpretive scheme” to identify the social forces that shaped it (p. xv). In this review, I will focus on his view of what was distinctive about urbanization during this period, recognizing that he devotes more of his book to exploring the consequences of the process than to the nature of urbanization itself. He discusses the ideology of American exceptionalism, theories of long-wave economic growth, strategies of foreign economic investment and international trade, the politics of the Cold War as they influenced cities, and other issues that arose as American culture projected itself on the global stage, reflecting the new cultural values arising from the distinctive suburban and urban experiences of the period. Beauregard devotes little space to the suburbs themselves. Instead, he aims to interpret the cultural impact of the social forces that massive and sustained suburbanization have unleashed on America. He regards suburbs not as places to be explored in their own right but as crucibles where the important symbols of American culture were produced. He provides a photograph of a kaffeeklatsch in Park Forest, Illinois, the community made memorable by William Whyte in his 1956 book, The Organization Man. He recalls Nixon’s famous kitchen debate with Khrushchev in 1959 in Moscow. Leaving no room for the reader to doubt the significance of this meeting, he declares that this “iconic” event most powerfully “epitomizes the suburban quality” of cultural propaganda in postwar America (p. 166). These dates are significant, for they fall about midpoint in what Beauregard identifies as the “short American Century.” He borrows the widely heralded words of Henry R. Luce, a founder of the Time-Life publishing empire. Luce, who announced the approach of the “American Century” in Life magazine in February 1941, urged Americans to prepare themselves to become “the most powerful and vital nation in the world” (quoted