Volume 17, Number 1, June 1988

Table of contents (20 articles)

Articles

Abstract EN: To a remarkable extent the course of Canadian housing policy from 1935 to 1952 was set by the deputy minister of finance, W. C. Clark. By developing programs that stimulated the building of new homes for sale, he was able to deflect growing calls for a substantial federal program of subsidized low rental housing. Working in close consultation with representatives of mortgage-lending institutions, including D'Arcy Leonard, and with David Mansur, inspector of mortgages for Sun Life and later president of Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Clark was able to build an alliance of realty interests, home builders, life insurance companies, and material supply companies, such as retail lumber dealers. This alliance prevailed over public-housing supporters: trade unions, large construction companies, architects, social workers and urban planners. Clark was largely responsible for drafting the Dominion Housing Act of 1935 and the national housing acts of 1938 and 1944. Although all his legislation was geared to building new homes, and reducing political criticism, these acts also contained misleading and unworkable provisions for low-income housing. During World War II Clark reluctantly accepted rent-control and federal rental housing, but he restricted their scope and oversaw their phasing out by his long-time associate Mansur. Clark was also crucial in developing government programs that fostered large residential builders to plan future urban communities.

Abstract EN: During the late 1960s and early 1970s the Canadian government effected a turnabout in its urban renewal policy, which culminated in the launching of the Neighbourhood Improvement Program in 1973. This program differed from prior forms of renewal by emphasizing the preservation of the built environment and citizen participation in neighbourhood planning. This article is concerned with examining the difference in the attitudes the city administrations of Montreal and Toronto took toward the federal program, and the impact of this difference on the results in the two cities. It appears that Toronto's mode of implementation was in the spirit of the federal policy revision while Montreal endeavoured to pursue traditional urban renewal objectives through its use of the program. These two approaches to the Neighbourhood Improvement Program are depicted respectively as expressions of a participatory and a centralized mode of policy making at the local level.

EN: During the 1950s and 1960s, suburbanization went hand-in-hand with the decline of the old inner-city proletarian neighbourhoods, "Centre-sud," an area of Montreal that had experienced major growth during the nineteenth century, was one of those neighbourhoods showing signs of decline after World War II. The initial urban renewal measures undertaken to redevelop this deteriorating area were typical for the time, consisting of demolition and reconstruction. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, the neighbourhood attracted new interest and urban revitalization replaced the former approach to renewal. No longer was it a question of bulldozing parts of the ''blighted area," but rather it was a matter of restoring "an older neighbourhood." The present article reports on the sequence of decline, redevelopment, and revitalization. Following a brief theoretical discussion, it proceeds with a case study of "Centre-sud." The transformations in this neighbourhood are not seen so much as a result of a natural process or inevitable progression, but as the consequence of steps taken by various local agents or activists.