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A New Publisher for Canada’s Urban History Journal

Harold Bérubé and Owen Temby

Le rôle méconnu des promesses de vente dans le processus d’urbanisation à Montréal : le cas du village de Villeray au tournant du XXe siècle

Guy Gaudreau
Using the case of the village of Villeray, on the Island of Montreal, this research note will try to demonstrate that the conventional sale of vacant lots, duly documented in registry offices, is not the only form of access to property. Another strategy, just as legal, but unnoticed by historians, was commonly used. It remains difficult to document because it rests on private understandings taking the form of contracts, sale commitments, that defines the terms of sale of said lot. Ubiquitous in Villeray, these contracts allow for payments of varying length, going up to a decade. Often, they were transferred to a third party by the original buyer to avoid losing the payments made up to then. If it allowed people of modest means to own property, this particular strategy was also quite profitable for land developer, accelerating the sale of vacant lots and allowing them to avoid land taxes, paid by the prospective buyers as part of the sale commitment.

À travers les frontières : la participation de Montréal au réseau d’échange inter-municipal sur les problèmes de logement dans les années 1930

Jean-Christophe Racette
During the economic crisis of the 1930s, the quality of housing in Montreal decreased rapidly. In this context, the municipal government was pressed to address the question of sanitary housing and find solutions to improve the living conditions of its citizens. The Commission on Sanitary Housing was formed especially to study Montreal’s slums and to propose plans for urban renewal. That commission started to research best practices in housing control in other North American and European cities. Through study trips, reviews of local newspaper columns, and discussion between city officials, Montreal became part of a broad network of knowledge and know-how exchange. In this decade, the competition between Montreal and its rivals was high and this fact affected the ongoing relations between cities and the way the municipal government saw and acted on the “slum problem.”

Youth Hostels and Hostile Locals: Vancouver’s ‘Battle of Jericho,’ 1970

Linda Mahood
Chasing tourist dollars was a necessity for many following the Second World War. However, few people in the summers of 1968 and 1969 could have escaped the sight of hundreds of fashionably penniless baby boomers hitchhiking along roads on their “annual summer trek”. Municipal authorities began to receive complaints about “scruffy young people” panhandling and sleeping rough in cities and towns along the Trans-Canada Highway. Tourism, wanted and unwanted, has the capacity to cause conflict between travelers and locals. In 1970, federally funded youth hostels became the focus of Trudeau’s Liberal government’s need to manage youth unemployment as well as radicalism on university campuses. The focus of this article is youth travel to Vancouver and Vancouverites’ responses to the National Hostel Task Force, which led to sit-ins and police-youth and youth-youth conflict, which culminated in the “Battle of Jericho”. Drawing on contemporary mainstream and university newspaper accounts, Vancouver City Police reports, RCMP intelligence files and activities at University of British Columbia, this article argues that failure to understand the diverse needs of Canada’s young people turned youth tourism into the transient youth problem in the summer of 1970.

Julien Puget. Les embellissements d’Aix et de Marseille : droits, espaces et fabrique de la ville aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018, 370 pages

Agueda Iturbe-Kennedy

Joanne Burgess et Paul-André Linteau, dir., Histoire et patrimoine. Pistes de recherche et mise en valeur. Québec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2019, 246 pages

Robert C.H. Sweeny

Claire Dolan, dir., Les pratiques politiques dans les villes françaises d’Ancien Régime : communauté, citoyenneté et localité. Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018, 236 pages

Aurélien Peter

Guy Saupin, dir., Les villes atlantiques européennes : une comparaison entre l’Espagne et la France (1650-1850). Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019, 385 pages

Arnaud Exbalin

Florence Bourillon, Nathalie Gorochov, Boris Noguès et Loïc Vadelorge, dir., L’université et la ville : les espaces universitaires et leurs usages en Europe du XIIIe au XXIe siècle. Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018, 306 pages

Daniel Poitras

Angelo Torre. Production of Locality in the Early Modern and Modern Age. London & New York: Routledge, 2019, 238 pages

Ariane Godbout