City-Building in the Canadian West: From Boosterism to Corporatism

Abstract

Western Canadian cities experienced two distinct phases of development between 1870 and the 1960s. In an initial phase of city-building, which stretches from the beginnings of western Canadian urban development to the Great War, the urban network of the region was established and most communities enjoyed a decade or more of rapid and substantial growth. During this phase, communities were dominated by civic commercial elites who identified closely with their communities and who practiced a policy of municipal boosterism. In a second phase, just getting underway prior to 1914 and lasting through to the 1960s, western urban centres experienced relatively slow growth and numerous problems. Increasingly, civic elites identified with regional, national, or even international corporations and were far more concerned with large-scale issues than with particular communities. This change from boosterism to corporatism was a result of several factors, including a decline in municipal autonomy, the changing nature of municipal politics, and the rise of corporate capitalism. The impact this shift from boosterism to corporatism had upon western city-building was profound.

The "Metropolitan Thesis" and the Writing of Canadian Urban History

“…This formative stage was more or less complete by 1920," Artibise believes, "and boosterism declines rapidly as an explanatory force in western development" thereafter as the major corporations and government agencies chipped away at the foundations of municipal autonomy. 107 Both Artibise and McCann have thus joined Morton in disputing the universality of the metropolis-hinterland paradigm, and their viewpoint is likely to spread as the growing complexity of Canada's urban system makes it too protean for its essence to be captured by a duadic concept like metropolitanism. Moreover, even the chroniclers of Canada's earliest settlements, for whom the simple dichotomies of centrality and peripherality (or dominance and dependence) have the most heuristic potential, even they should avoid an approachmetropolitanism -that prejudges these relationships as quintessentially spatial in nature.…”

Accentuating the Positive: City Branding, Narrative and Practice

“…One stemmed from the work of historical geographers interested in the role that promotional literature and advertising had played in facilitating European colonial and neo‐colonial expansion (e.g. Merrens ; Cameron ; Artibise ). The second centred on the history of tourism, highlighting particularly the ways in which health and seaside resorts had been promoted (Cazes ; Buck ; Stallibrass ).…”

Similitudes et différences des formes urbaines en Europe et en Amérique du Nord

“…Ce mécanisme de « boosterism » naît aux États-Unis (Boorstin, 1965;Artibise, 1982). Les « boosters » imaginent des projets de développement destinés à augmenter la taille de la ville et à en étendre le territoire, dans un esprit mercantiliste qui conduit à négliger le bien-être de la population (Linteau et Artibise, 1984).…”