AbstractsGeography &GIS

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.