Polarities of structure and change in urban systems: A Canadian example

Abstract

The Canadian urban system, like most other national urban systems, has been subjected to intense pressures for change over the last two decades, emanating from both external and internal sources. The combined outcomes of these changes for the urban system, however, remain ambiguous.This paper examines some of the contradictory assertions in the research literature regarding the on-going reorganization of urban systems through a detailed empirical analysis of the changing properties of the Canadian urban system. The analysis begins with a conceptual framework that recognizes alternative logics and trajectories of change in urban systems, the latter expressed for analytical purposes as simple polarities. The paper then demonstrates not only the diversity and rapidity of change, with its intensely uneven geography, but the often indeterminant and contadictory nature of many of the relationships underlying that change.