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Article Excerpt
Introduction
The intellectual history of research in any discipline can be viewed in two distinct ways: either from above as the net outcome of collective activity or from the bottom up as a collage of individual research experiences. This article takes the latter route. Essentially, it follows the evolution, or trajectory, of my own research ideas, interests and priorities, but set within a broader framework of changing ideas in the sub-discipline of urban geography and in the multi-disciplinary field of urban studies more broadly. Ideas, of course, do not emerge in a vacuum. They reflect, and are conditioned by the social context, and by the economic and political conditions prevailing at the time they are formulated, and they respond to how these conditions intersect in certain places. Further, such ideas emanate from a particular point in the evolution of academic disciplines, with each discipline characterized by its own methodological debates and its own sequence of paradigm shifts, some whimsical and some fundamental and long-lasting.
The objective here is to use this trajectory to illustrate how ideas change as part of a larger research agenda. This is not, however, intended to be a review of the urban literature writ large, which is increasingly impossible in a subject area of such breadth, or of the substantial literature on urban Canada (see Bunting and Filion 2006). (1) Nor is it a philosophical treatise on the nature of the research enterprise. Instead, the article follows, in rough chronological order, my personal research history with a primary focus on efforts in understanding changes within the city. (2) At each stage, decisions on the choice of research themes, and the design and interpretation of research results, are linked to the changing contextual environment of research, and illustrated with a small sample of publications. The review highlights some of the lessons learned that may be of interest and value to the next generation, especially to students.
Setting the Context: Time and Place
As a doctoral student entering the University of Chicago in the 1960s I was immediately immersed in and challenged by the intense intellectual energy circulating in that institution. This energy was also evident in the emerging subfield of urban geography and perhaps more importantly in the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. Certainly, the academic environment at Chicago readily accommodated, indeed encouraged, cross-disciplinary dialogue, and the geography program facilitated access to leading figures in urban sociology, economics, history and political science. This was not only an unexpected bonus of the Chicago experience but a signpost to the future.
This was also a time in both geography and urban studies, as in most of the social sciences, when everything seemed new and exciting. In the 1960s there were few inherited research precedents to follow or to give due regard to, and few constraints on the kinds of research avenues and questions that could be explored. A virtual flood of new data sources appeared, especially from the U.S. and Canadian censuses. Statistical techniques were imported from other fields, notably the physical sciences, enabling geographers to manipulate, dissect and then display those data, and mainframe computers provided both the opportunity for and the means of analysis. As graduate students we experimented with different types of methodologies, tested ideas as formal hypotheses and ran computer simulation models. In one sense, the availability of new data, new methods and powerful machines opened new doors for urban research; in another sense they also dictated the research agenda and the style of that research.
As part of the context of research, cities everywhere (and especially Chicago) were in turmoil, characterized by rapid growth, widespread social unrest and intense political struggles for space, resources and political power. New office skyscrapers punctured the downtown skyline, shopping centres proliferated, and new expressways knifed through old established neighbourhoods. The postwar suburbs were also exploding as the baby boom population and rising real incomes generated demands for more living space, greater personal mobility and new housing. In parallel, evidence of inner city decline, increasing crime, intense poverty ghettoes and deepening racial segregation was becoming all too painfully obvious. Chicago, more than any city that I knew or had experienced, personified these attributes. It was even larger than it appeared in the literature, which emphatically failed to capture the vibrancy, colour and tensions of the place. Chicago politics was of the bare-knuckle, in-your-face variety, played out like a fast-paced black and white movie with sharp racial and ethnic contrasts.
All of these trends called out for new research initiatives, for new and more robust theories, and for a multi-disciplinary approach to urban problems and public policies. The essence of what was meant by the notion of the 'city', and who controlled its destiny, seemed to be up for debate and negotiation. Who could not be turned on to urban issues and research during this period and under these conditions?
The urban literature was also exploding at that time. The initial student handbook of urban geography, Mayer and Kohn's Readings in Urban Geography (1959), while still a benchmark, now looked incomplete, dated and boring (Bourne 2007b). It was rapidly being supplanted by new publications, including classics from cognate fields such as Hoover and Vernon's Anatomy of a Metropolis (1962), Wingo's Cities and Space (1963), Alonso's Location and Land Use (1964) and others too numerous to mention. Still other classics that spoke directly to my need for conceptual benchmarks were Webber's Explorations into Urban Structure (1964) and Rannells' Core of the City (1956), in my view two of the most underrated publications in the field at that time, and Berry's innovative paper 'Cities as Systems within Systems of Cities' (1964).
At the same time, and given my location in Chicago's south side, I was particularly impressed by monographs that focused on the problems of the inner city, on processes of transition in older neighbourhoods, and on the challenges of urban renewal. These included Leo Grebler's Renewal in European Countries (1964) and Scott Greer's Urban Renewal in American Cities (1965), and of course the biting critiques of the renewal process by, among others, Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Martin Anderson in The Federal Bulldozer (1964). The latter critiques of the destructive impacts of oversized, top-down, bureaucratic and fundamentally misconceived planning policies remain as germane today as when they were written.
Arriving in Toronto in the late 1960s was as fortuitous--personally and professionally--as the earlier Chicago experience, bur in rather different ways. Toronto was indeed different; more reserved, much smaller and certainly less hectic. It was after all, a Canadian city. Nevertheless, it shared many of the attributes of the 1960s urbanization process. The city was booming, and governments were relatively open to change and innovation. New public infrastructure, both hard (water and sewers) and soft (social services), were rapidly being put in place or upgraded. New transit lines and highways were being built, regional planning was in vogue, and a unique two-tier regional government was firmly established.
This combination of events and decisions, in effect, set the template for development of the region for decades to come. In parallel, data and research funding were widely available, and interdisciplinary research institutes and programs proliferated. One such unit, the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, has played a pivotal role in my research since 1970. The die was cast for an entire research career.
Land, Space and the Built Environment: The Development-Redevelopment Continuum
My initial research projects were stimulated jointly by these urban conditions, by the availability of data and by the emerging literature in urban studies. That research was directed to a set of simple but basic questions: how is the city spatially organized, and why? How does it actually function, and how does it develop and change? What factors underlie changes in land use and in the land development process? Who decides? And, who benefits and who loses in this process? These questions, although hardly original, in turn led to an emphasis in my research, and that of many other students, on understanding the processes of change in the built environment, land use and urban economic functions.
This emphasis on the physical (and functional) dimensions of cities was not surprising. The dominant theme in the Mayer and Kohn volume was on land use and property development, many leading theorists of the day were economists, and most planning strategies at that time were overwhelmingly focused on physical planning and infrastructure provision. Understanding the operation of urban land market, and correcting its failures, were the key policy issues of the day. Interestingly, the land question (the land nexus) became the subject of intense intellectual debates that have carried on for several decades (Alonso 1964; Kain 1975; Scott 1980; Bourne 1992a; Richardson and Bae 2004).
Initially, however, I was disappointed by the rather narrow interpretations of urban structural change available at that early stage, by the highly abstract nature of urban land rent theory, by the lack of emphasis on process and by the paucity of empirical analyses of change. Most researchers focused on one of two areas of rapid change-the new suburban margin or commercial office investment in the downtown core--with little regard for changes in between. Indeed, two common assumptions with which I took issue were that few or no other changes in the built environment were of interest or significance, and that suburban development and core area renewal were essentially unrelated processes.
Even more restricting, renewal and redevelopment became widely viewed as entirely public undertakings, rather than as market processes operating throughout the built-up urban area. To many writers the term redevelopment became a code word for wanton destruction and a rallying cry for community resistance to change. Moreover, there were few estimates available of the scale or direction of change, in either land use or within the existing building fabric that covered the entire metropolitan region. Change within the already built environment was in effect a 'black box' that had not yet been opened.
My subsequent research tried to open that box. Published under the mundane title Private Redevelopment of the Central City (1967), this study documented the immense variety and complexity of change through demolition and new construction, rehabilitation and restoration, conversion and deconversion, throughout the City of Toronto. The analysis was based on a unique data source that traced all properties in the city over two decades and recorded all changes in building fabric, use and occupancy. It provided a real opportunity to study change as a continuous process rather than as cross sections at different points in time. Ironically, the most rapidly growing land uses in terms of physical area during the period were in...
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