A study in Modern(ist) urbanism: planning Vancouver, 1945–1965

The Place Ville-Marie development was central to the renovation of Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. Its cruciform office tower transformed the city’s skyline and marked the removal of the city’s financial district from St. James Street to the new alley of skyscrapers on Dorchester Boulevard (now Boulevard René Lévesque). Earlier studies have emphasized the role of modern planning in the making of Place Ville-Marie and other post–Second World War urban redevelopment projects. This article advances an interpretation of Place Ville-Marie as a capital investment in the “production of space.” The project was a highly speculative effort by its developer, William Zeckendorf, to utilize monumental architecture to sell prestige to corporate tenants. This took place in specific, historically contingent, and politically contested circumstances. In a period when modernization was a powerful and popular idea, Zeckendorf cultivated a myth about Place Ville-Marie that accommodated and absorbed nationalist aspirations within Montreal and Canada that were fixed upon the panacea of modernization. While Zeckendorf’s financial woes and the overcapacity of office space that Place Ville-Marie helped create contradicted the project’s mythic image, Place Ville-Marie also embodied new capitalist values and the rise of new capitalist forces in the city.

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Protesting Smoke: A Social and Political History of Vancouver Air Pollution in the 1950s and 1960s

Thiessen¹

2017

Urban History Review

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Growth-oriented local businesses and the city of Vancouver initiated efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to address the city’s air pollution problem. Despite generally improving dustfall measurements due to changing fuel use, industrial relocation, and steady city management of the issue, the coalition of air-quality reformers did not obtain broader regional or provincial government support until the late 1960s. Rather, public interventions prompted the provincial government to acknowledge air pollution as a formal political issue, and finally to take action. This article provides an account of air pollution in Vancouver and British Columbia in the 1950s and 1960s, highlighting the roles of social and economic groups and their interactions with political structures.

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A study in Modern(ist) urbanism: planning Vancouver, 1945–1965

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

Vancouver's suburban involution

Vancouver's suburban involution

William Zeckendorf, Place Ville-Marie, and the Making of Modern Montreal

Protesting Smoke: A Social and Political History of Vancouver Air Pollution in the 1950s and 1960s

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