Canadian Planning and its British Connections
Canadian Planning and its British Connections: the Evolution of Urban Planning in English Canada c. 1890-1930
Canadian Planning and its British Connections
04 Mar 2019, 18:00 – 20:00
From the outset of modern urban planning’s development as an emerging international movement in the 1890s, a varied group of middle and upper class English-Canadians embraced planning: they formed connections with the international cohort, imported foreign ideas, and disseminated this knowledge across Canada. Yet, despite the importance of such transnational exchanges to Canada’s early planning movement, the current historical narrative does not fully account for the complex nature of English Canadian interactions with this global planning world. Concentrating on the period between 1890 and 1930, this presentation studies English-Canadians as informed and discerning members of the wider planning cohort who imported and rejected outside innovations and expertise based on local needs and concerns. Drawing on material gathered from sixteen British and North American archives, the presentation will consider the channels through which English Canadians acquired and circulated British and other foreign planning innovations, and the role of international planning experts who worked across Canada in the early 20th century.
Catherine Mary Ulmer
UCL Institute of the Americas
Catherine Mary Ulmer received her PhD from McGill University in June 2018 and recently completed an International Council for Canadian Studies' Postdoctoral Fellowship at the UCL Institute of the Americas. Her work focuses on the period between the 1880s and 1930s and applies a transnational lens to Canada’s modern planning history. Her publications include ‘Of crossings, conduits, networks and channels: the introduction and diffusion of foreign planning innovation within English Canada, 1900-1914’, Urban History 44.4 (November 2017), and ‘Awakening Canada to Urban Planning: Henry Vivian’s Canadian Planning Tour, 1910’, Urban History Review (forthcoming). Catherine’s current research explores urban planning as a tool central to the settler colonial projects of establishing Western Canadian cities as Anglo- Protestant space and integrating them within global municipal networks. The project views the introduction of modern infrastructure and planning not just as discrete improvement efforts, but as tools wielded to ‘civilise’ the urban environment and its citizens.