Abstract

Urban renewal is perhaps the most widely studied approach to transforming neighbourhoods, but less attention has been given to its lasting effects and its influence on the forms of governance that emerged after it ended. This study of the Montreal neighbourhood of Little Burgundy explores how the physical, social, and ideological conditions left by urban renewal shaped neighbourhood action in the post-renewal period by focusing on three aspects. The first, a logic of governance stressing community participation, emerges as citizen committees contested renewal and problematized the top-down plans of outside experts. In the post-renewal period, this thesis argues, community participation became the major source of legitimacy for neighbourhood action, a logic that came to be reflected in the activities of groups like the Little Burgundy Coalition as well as the municipal state. The second is a concern with concentrated poverty in neighbourhood sociodemographic governance, frequently traced in the literature as emerging in the post-renewal period. In contrast, this thesis shows that this preoccupation emerged much earlier (during the renewal period itself) and was less prominent in the post-renewal period. Third, this study shows how both police actions and responses to police were part of the efforts to transform the neighbourhood, an area neglected in post-renewal governance literature. Tracing the connections between these areas shows how the impact of urban renewal extended beyond the transformations of the renewal period, but instead continued to shape the ways community participation, sociodemographic management, and policing were part of urban governance in post-renewal Little Burgundy.