Building Blocks

For most of Canada’s first hundred years, “neighbourhood” wasn’t commonly used to describe the urban places where people lived. Instead, impersonal, technical terms like “residential districts” and “residential areas” prevailed in newspapers and government reports.

“Neighbourhood,” which puts the focus on people as opposed to land divisions, only got popular in the 1970s, as the increasingly high proportion of homeowners in various areas started mobilizing to block intrusions: Freeways, for instance. Grandiose slum-clearance plans. Industrial plants. It was also adopted by local groups previously known as “ratepayer associations” to establish a new image for their activities, including efforts to keep out certain people, perhaps especially low-income renters who didn’t speak English.

That language change is one of the telling details in Richard Harris’s latest rigorous examination of the life of cities, The Rise of the Neighbourhood in Canada...