UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO THE TRANSFORMATION OF LANDSCAPES IN SOUTHWEST MONTREAL AND IDENTITY FORMATION DURING THE QUIET REVOLUTION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY AND PROGRAMME IN PLANNING BY BRIDGETTE M. KELLY TORONTO, ONTARIO COPYRIGHT 2010 THE TRANSFORMATION OF LANDSCAPES IN SOUTHWEST MONTREAL AND IDENTITY FORMATION DURING THE QUIET REVOLUTION MASTER OF ARTS 2010 BRIDGETTE M. KELLY DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY AND PROGRAMME IN PLANNING UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO ABSTRACT In this thesis I demonstrate how the social and physical construction of spaces in Montréal‘s CBD during the Quiet Revolution marginalized working-class, inner-city manufacturing districts. To address this research question, I work across a variety of secondary sources and employ census data and reports to analyze demographic changes as well as other indices that illustrate the impact of local economic restructuring.
In order to understand identity formation that is related to yet distinct from the mechanisms of capital, I examine archival documents that trace the urban growth regime’s nationalist-inflected vision of high-modernity that was inscribed onto the city’s landscape. I focus on the appropriation of landscapes in working-class Southwest Montréal. I situate these landscape transformations in a longer history of class formation in which a colonized Francophone bourgeoisie attempted to reverse its socioeconomic circumstances that were partly a consequence of the British conquest. ii CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES iv.
THE QUEBECOIS BOURGEOISIE – A PARTIAL HEGEMONIC CLASS 25 3. A CANAL RUNS THROUGH IT: THE LACHINE CANAL ECONOMY AND 48 AND SOUTHWEST MONTREAL’S INDUSTRIAL MORPHOLOGY 4. URBAN MODERNIZATION, GROWTH REGIME POLITICS, AND THE 75 CULTIVATION OF PLACE-BASED NATIONAL IDENTITY AFTERWORD: WILL MEGA-PROJECT MISTAKE BE REPEATED IN 102 MONTREAL? iii FIGURES FIGURE PAGE 1. Montréal Municipal Boundaries, 1901.
Southwest Montréal Neighbourhoods, 1901. Southwest Montréal Census Tracts, 1961. Saint-Henri Census Tracts: 69, 70, 71, 72. 95 iv Introduction: “Name me one Roman emperor who history remembers because he reduced taxes.”1 Mayor of Montréal, Jean Drapeau.
From 1954 to 1986, Jean Drapeau served almost uninterruptedly as mayor of the City of Montréal, save for a short period between 1957 and 1960. Drapeau was an iconic leader who instinctively finessed all levels of government to coordinate the funding to support his grandiose urban visions. These were inscribed onto the city’s downtown landscapes, most notably in the 1960s. The visions of Drapeau and his growth coalition were intoxicating to the competing national imaginations of Canada, which were strongly divided during the Quiet Revolution era (1960-1966).
He spared no expense in his attempts to demonstrate Montréal’s international stature. At the same time, Drapeau’s grand projets were intended to display the increased socioeconomic power of French-Canadian, Québécois society. However, the fiscal balance sheet for such endeavours was an afterthought. It was not just the fiscal costs of Drapeau’s grand projets that were out-of-control.
The expropriation of land to support his schemes grew to be unsustainable as well. The largest costs resulting from urban modernization were borne by the most vulnerable residents of Montréal, who were displaced by the installation of mega-projects that demolished entire neighbourhoods. In a similar manner to the politics of preservation explored in Duncan and Duncan’s study of Bedford, New York, Montréal urban development that was spearheaded by the city’s growth coalition masked residential land shortages and did not adequately address the affordable housing needs of the working classes.2 This conceptualization of landscape appropriation highlights the centrality of class, implicitly drawing attention to ways in which the spatial logic of capitalism can influence identity. Along with well-known grand projets such as Expo ’67, the Drapeau coalition engaged in tertiary redevelopment initiatives in the city’s new central business district CBD that were 1 intended to redensify the core in an effort to increase city revenue.
Some examples of these initiatives include Place Ville-Marie, Place Bonaventure, Place Alexis Nihon, Place des Arts and the Underground City. Montréal’s subway system, le métro, was constructed to enable circulation and support redevelopment in these areas. The structures associated with CBD redevelopment were highly identifiable, as they were legible symbols of distinctive, high- modernist architecture. However, there were also less obvious projects such as the rehabilitation and preservation of Old Montréal.
All of these forms of modern urban transformation served the political aspirations of an emerging Francophone middle-class that wanted to see its own cultural identity and majority status embedded in the urban landscape. Yet, by reconquering Montréal through the reassertion of Francophone identity, this bourgeoisie employed their class position to appropriate land and enact a form of capitalist oppression that displaced the working-class, regardless of ethnicity. Their expropriation of these landscapes also painfully revealed a stratified Francophone population that threatened to fracture the nationalist movement along class lines. This stratification in turn, points to an older social geography with roots in decades before Drapeau’s rise to power.
In this thesis, I focus on the post-World War Two appropriation of landscapes in working- class Southwest Montréal. I situate the landscape transformation that transpired in these districts during the Quiet Revolution era in a longer history of class formation in which a colonized Francophone bourgeoisie attempted to reverse its socioeconomic circumstances that were partly a consequence of the British conquest. In Québécois society, the assertion of marginalized Francophone identity onto urban landscapes reproduced the dynamics of colonial expropriation. The story of Québec’s Francophone bourgeoisie during the transition to industrial capitalism and their role in reordering urban landscapes is central to the historical geography of Montréal.
In periodizing history, “the historian [makes] explicit what she/he perceives to be the fundamental forces in the historical process, and in approaching the writing of history from this framework the historian accepts the intellectual implications of this subjectivity.” 3 This 2 epistemological approach to historical inquiry is therefore sensitive to place and political subjectivities as the study of geographically embedded social relations takes precedence over a strictly chronological understanding of events. 4 Consequently, each chapter presented here is organized thematically, incorporating extensive time periods, in order to illustrate the geographic trajectory of this evolving, class-based, Francophone group. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate how the social and physical construction of CBD spaces in the City of Montréal during the Quiet Revolution marginalized working-class, inner-city manufacturing districts. To address this research question, I work across a variety of secondary sources and employ census data and reports to analyse demographic changes as well as other indices that illustrate the impact of local economic restructuring.
In order to understand the nuanced aspects of identity formation that are related to but quite distinct from the mechanisms of capital formation, I examine archival documents that trace Mayor Drapeau’s urban growth regime and his nationalist-inflected vision of high-modernity that was inscribed onto the city’s landscape. The most important examples of these archival sources include the Métropole series of visioning documents produced by Montréal’s urban planning department in the early 1960s as well as university course curricula and materials written by sanitation engineers in the immediate post-World War Two era. These engineers influenced the development of professional planning in the city. The research presented in this thesis is significant because it addresses landscape transformation in relation to a class-based analysis of national identity formation.
Chapter One is a broad consideration of the relevant secondary literature put to use in subsequent empirical chapters. It is organized according to three themes that cut across this document: nationalism, landscape, and regimes. This literature review delves into these themes and links the secondary literature with the Montréal case. The sources that I analyse in Chapter 1 explore the social history of Québec; urban modernization; how social identities are influenced through the reshaping of the urban landscape; deindustrializing landscapes and their relation to the social and political space of the central business district (CBD); post-war suburbanization in 3 a larger North American context; and the social appropriation of landscapes by urban growth regimes.
In Chapter Two I examine the geography of social change in French-Canadian, Québécois society with the purpose of exploring the transformation of the Francophone bourgeoisie. In doing so, I situate the consolidation of the Francophone middle class, who are identified with the sweeping social reforms that were enacted during the Quiet Revolution, within a longer history of complex social relations. At the outset of the chapter, I draw attention to the Québécois social structure that emerged after the British conquest. From the late eighteenth century onwards, Anglophone groups established political and economic control, which resulted in the contingent status of Francophones.
At the same time, however, a petty bourgeois segment of Québécois society, comprised of clerics and landowners, held ideological influence over the marginalized Francophone population. Early articulations of nationalism were cultivated by conservative clerics within the petty bourgeoisie and resonated with disenfranchised Québécois habitants over the course of the nineteenth century. Reactionary nationalism reached a climax in the 1920s and 1930s in the wake of mass urbanization in Québec and the Great Depression. The economic subjugation experienced by French-Canadians in urban centres brought their class-based concerns to the forefront, which ultimately transformed the expression of nationalism.
The antecedents of the Cité libre group organized in the inter-war years to improve the socioeconomic status of French-Canadians through economic and urban modernization. In the period following the World War Two, Cité libre developed a nationalist- inflected vision of modern Québécois society that would prove to be influential and central to the reforms of the Quiet Revolution. The third chapter addresses Montréal’s industrial history and geography, drawing attention to the manner in which provincial economic and cultural policies affected the spatial patterns of urban development and land use. My analysis focuses on the social and industrial geography of Southwest Montréal.
I first look at the role of the city’s bicultural bourgeoisie and their mid-nineteenth century plan to build an industrial base in this area that was to surpass all 4 of its Canadian counterparts. I illustrate how the changing ethnic composition of municipal growth politics influenced the reshaping of its landscapes from this period onward. While the changing imperatives of industry increasingly transformed land in the southwestern districts to suit the needs of capital, morphologically distinct landscapes that were shaped by planning during the French colonial regime were more malleable to redevelopment because they were less dictated by fixed capital. Culturally motivated economic policy enacted during the 1960s launched tertiary development initiatives in the older, more adaptable areas leading to the functional segregation of Southwest Montréal.
The intensification of development in the CBD was carried out at the expense of inner-city areas that began to suffer from lack of investment. Montréal’s decline as a growth pole was partly affected by these policies. In the final chapter, I situate the role of growth machine politics in post-World War Two modernization within a broader history of urban reform. The development of professional urban planning in Montréal was influenced by late-nineteenth century urban public movements and notions of urbanism developed by sanitation engineers.
The city’s earliest planners, who were often sanitation engineers, put forth a particular notion of urbanism that combined elements of high-modernism with corporeal metaphors. In this discourse, social conditions and “blight” that were deemed to be “immoral” and “undesirable” had to be removed from neighbourhoods. However, in the process of characterizing the symptoms of ‘urban ills’, many working class areas and residents in Montréal were pathologized. Mayor Drapeau appealed to religious notions of morality that were embedded in Québécois culture to gain popular consent for urban development projects, which he framed within the discourse of the welfare state.
At the same time, many of these large-scale mega-projects were also intended to inscribe the Drapeau growth coalition’s visions of modernity and nationalism onto the landscape. During the Quiet Revolution, the Francophone bourgeoisie looked for external validation of their identity. Montréal’s bureaucratic middle-class engaged in urban modernization initiatives that transformed the city according to a culturally-guided notion of high-modernism. The encapsulation of certain landscapes in the new CBD and Old Montréal by the Drapeau coalition 5 reconstituted and politicized spaces at the intra-urban level.