Edge Of City Research Articles

Tourism Flow Between Major Cities During China’s National Day Holiday: A Social Network Analysis Using Weibo Check-in Data

Holiday tourism flow is a significant indicator to evaluate the development of tourism. The exploration of the rule of tourism flow between cities can not only provide reasonable suggestions for stimulating demand, promoting consumption and economic development, but also make crucial significance for the management of tourism destinations and the optimization of spatial structure of tourism flow. Based on Weibo check-in data, this paper, by using social network analysis, studies the spatial distribution and network structure characteristics of tourism flow in 50 major cities in China during the National Day holiday in 2018. The results show that: 1) the tourism flow connection of the main cities in China represents a diamond shaped spatial structure with “Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou-Chengdu” as the core. There exists spatial heterogeneity in different levels of tourism flow intensity and proximity and selectivity in tourism links between cities; 2) the intensity of tourism connection between cities in China is clearly divided into different levels. On the basis of index of degree of centrality, Beijing and Shanghai are far higher than other cities;3) there are obvious differences between core nodes and edge nodes, with the core nodes often composed of cities with high economic development or rich tourism resources. Although the number is small, it plays a significant role in driving the edge cities; 4) the urban tourism flow network is relatively stable, but most cities have relatively weak tourism links and more small-scale tourism flows. In the division of cohesive subgroups, the fifth and sixth subgroups are not only the main tourist sources but also the main destinations. Whether it is the internal connection of subgroups or the connection with other subgroups, tourism flow has a very high density of connection.

Identifying Urban Structure Based on Transit-Oriented Development

The fast development of urbanization has led to imbalances in cities, causing congestion, pollution, and urban sprawl. In response to the growing concern over the distribution of demand and supply, a more coordinated urban structure is addressed in comprehensive planning processes. In this study, we attempt to identify urban structure using a Network–Activity–Human model under the Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) concept, since TOD is usually regarded as an urban spatial planning tool. In order to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the urban structure, we define the TOD index and unbalance degree and then classify the urban areas accordingly. We take the city of Beijing as a case study and identify nine urban types. The results show a hierarchical urban structure: the city center covers most of the hotspots which display higher imbalances, the surroundings of the city center are less developed, and the city edges show higher potentials in both exploitation and transportation development. Moreover, we discuss the extent to which the spatial scale influences the unbalance degree and apply a sensitivity analysis based on the goals of different stakeholders. This methodology could be utilized at any study scale and in any situation, and the results could offer suggestions for more accurate urban planning, strengthening the relationship between TOD and spatial organization.

‘Van koper blijf je proper, van ijzer wordt je niets wijzer’: klooster Yesse, metaalvondsten uit 2017 en 2018

The Yesse monastery: Metal finds from 2017 and 2018. The female Cistercian monastery at Yesse (1215–1594), situated on what is today the southern edge of city of Groningen (province of Groningen), has recently experienced increased archaeological interest in its history and inhabitants. In addition to ceramic, botanical and zooarchaeological finds, metal objects reflect economic activities as well as activities of daily life which, at first glance, may not present the sobriety of monastic life. On the contrary, they tell of (supra-)regional trade, craftsmanship, metalworking, administrative duties, and the presence of books, that allowed the convent to flourish and become an important economic actor. While the reconstruction of the cloister lay-out on the basis of metal finds is not conclusive, the find locations of specific objects seem to indicate that Yesse followed the classic pattern of Cistercian cloisters, with a secular western side and a religious eastern side.

Universities and the Formation of Edge Cities: Evidence from China's Government‐led University Town Construction

AbstractThis paper examines the localized effect of clusters of universities by exploiting a university town (UT) construction boom in China. We show that UT establishment has generated positive impact on local night‐time light density and population concentration. The UT effect is much localized, and completely decays within 10 km. We emphasize the role of knowledge spillover and find that UT establishment has increased local human capital level. The number of high skill labors as well as high‐tech firms has experienced higher growth in UT districts, as they benefited more from knowledge spillovers. Finally, we find that land prices in the UT have appreciated by 7%‐12% using a unique dataset of land parcel transactions.

Research on the Measurement and Path of Urban Agglomeration Growth Effect

This paper employed dynamic generalized method of moment methods to measure the growth effect of 202 prefecture-level cities covered by 14 national urban agglomerations in China from 2007 to 2016. Based on this, this paper further explored the main factors affecting the growth of urban agglomeration and the path to achieving sustainable growth from the aspects of system, technology, structure, and influencing factors, and used the dynamic panel data (DPD) model and threshold panel data to empirically test the growth effect of urban agglomerations. The empirical results showed the following. (1) From the perspective of influencing factors, the improvement of technology and the increase in technology expenditure had a good growth effect on urban agglomeration, and this growth effect became more and more significant as the economic development level within the urban agglomeration narrowed; moreover, the increase of the agglomeration degree could alleviate the negative externality caused by the expansion of the urban scale and produce the dispersion effect to relieve the pressure of urban agglomeration. (2) From the results of the growth effect of urban agglomerations, the growth effect of multi-core urban agglomerations was more significant than that of single-core and dual-core urban agglomerations, and technology, agglomeration degree, foreign direct investment and human capital all significantly promoted the growth of urban agglomerations. Compared with trans-provincial urban agglomerations, provincial urban agglomerations have less resistance due to administrative jurisdiction, and the growth effect was obvious. (3) From the perspective of regional differences, the growth momentum of urban agglomerations in the eastern region was significantly stronger than that in the central and western regions, and the growth effect of agglomeration degree, technology, and human capital on urban agglomeration were all stronger than that in the central and western regions. Considering that the spatial distance between the edge cities and the central cities of the urban agglomeration will have an important impact on the overall growth of the urban agglomeration, this paper then used the panel threshold method to deeply discuss the influence mechanism and path dependence of the agglomeration degree on the growth of urban agglomerations. The results showed that within a certain spatial scale, a higher agglomeration degree of an urban agglomeration creates a stronger radiation effect of the core city and more obvious growth momentum of the urban agglomeration. In the future development of urban agglomerations, it is necessary to clarify the functions of the core city, vigorously develop new technologies, strengthen the construction of the core city as well as maximize its radiation and driving effect on the surrounding cities. Meanwhile, the government should improve transportation, increase the construction of urban expressways and railways, strengthen the connection between cities, strengthen regional integration and cooperation, and give play to the role of human capital in promoting growth to achieve the stable and continuous growth of urban agglomerations.

Frontiers of Urban Control: Lawlessness on the City Edge and Forms of Clientalist Statecraft in Zimbabwe

AbstractThis article develops the concept of “urban frontier” to explore conflicts over state regularisation of city edge informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. It conceptualises the presence of “lawless” urban frontiers and “illegal” territorial authorities in capital cities as expressions of a permissive form of central statecraft. In so doing, the article takes forward debates over the politics shaping the margins of Africa’s rapidly expanding cities, redressing scholars’ tendency to neglect central party‐state strategic calculations and party politics in their analyses of unregulated settlements. Dominant interpretations generally hinge on state absence or weakness and emphasise localised influences. The case of Harare’s highly politicised city‐edge informal settlements reveals the inadequacy of apolitical approaches particularly clearly, as all were controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party. The conflicts provoked by regularisation provide a lens on disputes within the ruling party, which we interpret as disputes over different forms of clientalist statecraft. Analyses of urban frontiers can thus help move away from generic one‐size‐fits‐all explanations of informality and patronage politics in Africa’s expanding cities.

Urban bumblebees are smaller and more phenotypically diverse than their rural counterparts.

With urbanization identified as being one of the key drivers of change in global land use, and the rapid expansion of urban areas world-wide, it is relevant to evaluate how novel ecological conditions in cities shape species functional traits, which are essential for how species interact with their environments and with each other. Despite the many comparative studies on organisms living in urban and non-urban areas, our knowledge on species responses to urban environments remains limited. For one, much of the ecological research has assumed that the environment changes in a linear fashion from the city core to the city edges, whereas in reality the environments within the cities are highly heterogeneous. Furthermore, studies on species responses to these highly variable ecosystems are often based on interspecific mean trait values, which ignore the potential for high levels of intraspecific variation among individuals in key functional traits. The current study investigated intraspecific functional trait differences for four functional traits associated with body size, mobility and resource selection among rural and urban populations of two common bumblebee species, Bombus pascuorum and Bombus lapidarius, in urban centres and adjacent rural areas in Switzerland. We document shifts in functional traits towards smaller individuals and higher multidimensional trait variation in urban populations compared to rural conspecifics of both species. This shows that urban individuals for both species are on average smaller sized but populations are distinctively different from rural population by increasing their trait richness and diversifying their trait combinations. In addition, we found bimodality in tongue length within urban B.pascuorum populations. Our results suggest that urban and rural populations possibly experience differential selection pressures resulting in trait differences across and among populations. We argue that variations in the respective foraging landscapes in cities leads to smaller sized but phenotypically more diverse populations, and drive functional trait divergence.

Impact of Climate Change and Global Warming in India (With a Special Reference to Its Stand on Climate Change in International Forums)

In the last couple of decades, there have been extensive debates over the existence of global warming, today, the debate is largely over and a consensus has emerged in the global scientific community that Global Climate Change is occurring and that it will have a dramatic and adverse impact on the planet earth’s ecosystem. According to a report for the World Bank, by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) a German government-funded institute: the increase in earth’s temperature could result in a sea-level rise of 0.5 to 1 meter with higher levels also possible, by the year 2100 AD, affecting some of the most densely populated and vulnerable coastal cities and mega polis’s located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico, Mozambique, Philippines, the USA, and Vietnam as well as small Island Nations all over the world especially in South Pacific like Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Federated States of Nauru, Palau, Samoa and Solomon Islands. India also has been identified as one amongst the 27 countries that are most vulnerable to sea level rise caused by global warming. With global warming, the Glaciers are melting on all the six continents as well as in the Arctic Circle and these once majestic glacial mass which used to stretch to the edge of cities like La Paz and El Alto now end up high in the mountains. If present warming trends continue, all glaciers in the Glacier National Park could be gone by 2030 AD. Over the next 100 years, climate change is expected to accelerate and contribute to major ecological, physical, social, and economic changes, many of which have already begun. No one knows how long our planet can sustain and take on this onslaught, what we do know for sure is that climate change especially due to increasing levels of Green House Gases is already harming the fragile ecosystems and humankind all over the world. Its reality can be seen in the melting glaciers, disintegrating polar ice caps, thawing permafrost, changing monsoon patterns, rising sea levels, and fatal heat waves. Scientists are not the only ones talking about El Nino and La Nina which cause global changes in both temperatures and rainfall, it’s also been discussed at length now by Academia, Civil Societies, and Political Leadership, all over the world. ‎ From the apple growers in the orchards of Himachal Pradesh to the farmers in the drought-prone region of Vidharbha and those living on the disappearing islands of Sunder bans Delta a sprawling archipelago, with a core area of 10,000 square kilometres straddling between the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh are already struggling with the impacts of climate change. India has been involved in constructive engagements on Climate Change and Sustainable Development since the inception of United Nations Environment Programme in 1972, through Rio Declaration Earth Summit 1992, Kyoto Protocol 1997, Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development 2002, Copenhagen and the Paris Accord of 2009 and 2016 respectively within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). India is also a party to five major international conventions like the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization-World Heritage Committee (UNESCO-WHC) etc.

Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: durable bodies and disposable things

AbstractWhat can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's ‘edge city’ of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and struggles for urban survival converge. Here, day-to-day entanglements with city dwellers’ discarded items muddy the expected terms of economic dispossession and attainment. At Ashaiman's dump, the perils of social and bodily breakdown are matched by the promise of expanded reproduction via waste work, invigorating the economic prospects of the region's footloose underemployed. Relevant well beyond Ghana, such inversions point to an insistent underside of late-capitalist overproduction: namely, in this dense space of discard and decay, those on the lowest rungs of the urban economic ladder meld bodily expenditure, social aspiration and material breakdown to forge fragile futures and to format urban space. Blending materialisms new and old, a view from Ashaiman's dump bridges the insights of relational ontologies focused on the agency of things and labour-based renderings of capitalism's transformation.

Urban blue-green space planning based on thermal environment simulation: A case study of Shanghai, China

Abstract Improving the thermal environment of highly urbanized mega cities by optimized blue and green space brings great ecological and social benefits. In this study, applying remote sensing and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation, the Urban Cool Island (UCI) of blue and green space is explored. It indicates that complex outline of faceted water bodies leads to high UCI. Faceted water bodies have stronger UCI than linear ones. The UCI strength ranking of different types of green lands is wedge > radial > punctate > banding. The UCI distribution of green lands are different, which makes them appropriate in specific urban applications. Then, optimized design method of green lands and water bodies to maximize UCI is proposed, including integrating eco-system of green lands and water bodies, limiting riparian development, introducing artificial water within parks, inserting punctate green lands in old districts, setting green bands along roads in direction of prevailing wind and planning wedge green lands on the edge of cities. Finally, according to the optimized design method and the thermal environment simulation of Shanghai, strategy of distribution of blue and green space in urban planning to improve urban thermal environment is formulated, including polishing cool bands beside major and ring roads to increase permeability, inserting cool points into continuous UHI districts, protecting and improving cool surfaces on the edge of cities. The strategy is proved by simulation and provides hints for future planning of urban blue and green spaces.

Ring roads and urban biodiversity: distribution of butterflies in urban parks in Beijing city and correlations with other indicator species

The capital of China, Beijing, has a history of more than 800 years of urbanization, representing a unique site for studies of urban ecology. Urbanization can severely impact butterfly communities, yet there have been no reports of the species richness and distribution of butterflies in urban parks in Beijing. Here, we conducted the first butterfly survey in ten urban parks in Beijing and estimated butterfly species richness. Subsequently, we examined the distribution pattern of butterfly species and analyzed correlations between butterfly species richness with park variables (age, area and distance to city center), and richness of other bioindicator groups (birds and plants). We collected 587 individual butterflies belonging to 31 species from five families; 74% of the species were considered cosmopolitan. The highest butterfly species richness and abundance was recorded at parks located at the edge of city and species richness was significantly positively correlated with distance from city center (p < 0.05). No significant correlations were detected between the species richness and park age, park area and other bioindicator groups (p > 0.05). Our study provides the first data of butterfly species in urban Beijing, and serves as a baseline for further surveys and conservation efforts.

“Disguised beyond any possibility of recognition”: The Seaside and the Subversion of Social Norms at Coney Island

This essay directs attention to the original attraction of those amusements outside the city proper: natural landscapes at the edge of cities in which popular amusements were constructed. Here, the heart of subversive possibility was located where the immutable, uncontrollable natural elements interacted with constructed ones. In the case of Coney Island and similar coastal landscapes, this meant the seashore. The beach broke down manufactured limitations, exposing all beachgoers—particularly women—as the same under the sun. I examine the impact that Coney's seashore had on defining class-bound womanhood. I argue that within the island's liminal confines, the beach's natural elements exposed the fallacy that well-off women were naturally cleaner, both physically and morally, than not just men, but also working-class women. Nature trumped the manufactured to sully both the bodies and, metaphorically, the respectability of the women who flocked to Coney. The farther that women ventured toward the ocean, the more the seascape nullified their differences and democratized its allegedly hygienic visitors. This concept normalized in the early twentieth century as city borderlands, primarily the seashore and mountains, introduced possibilities for more porous gender and class identities in urban areas.

Edge-Urbanization: Land Policy, Development Zones, and Urban Expansion in Tianjin

Fast-paced urban growth in China has produced a specific, transient form of urban periphery, which continuously shifts outwards as the city expands. Seeing this process as a distinctive type of (sub)urbanization, this paper encapsulates it under the notion of edge-urbanization. The paper argues that edge-urbanization in China is fueled by deliberate government policies, which seek to mobilize peripheral land for high-growth strategies. The relationships between urban expansions and spatial economic policy are analyzed more closely in the case of Tianjin. Geospatial analysis derived from satellite imagery for the period of 1980–2015 reveals the morphological and temporal dynamics of urban growth in the post-reform era. Built-up land in Tianjin has expanded 1.8 times during this period, with the dominant growth type being edge-expansion. This character of urban expansion is shown to be closely associated with government’s “project fever”—setting up development zones and new economic activity on city edge. The results demonstrate a decisive role of the state in shaping (edge) urbanization in China’s major cities.

Vacancy at the edges of the precarious city

In this paper, we examine the relationship between precarity, property and urban vacancy. Our main aim is to develop a conceptual framework that connects recent geographical scholarship on precarity to the production of vacant urban landscapes. The paper extends recent geographical scholarship on urban vacancy as a key site of antagonism for post-crisis forms of urbanisation. In so doing, it highlights the role of urban vacancy as a key feature in the making of the precarious city. Particular attention is paid to the rise of Property Guardianship and its relationship to the production and management of vacant urban land and property in the case of the ongoing financialisation of housing in London. Vacancy, in this context, is best understood as a spatial process that produces a varied geography of insecurity and disposability. This is, moreover, a geography that must be positioned within wider and longer trajectories in the urbanisation of injustice. The paper therefore combines a contemporary analysis of guardians living 'on the city's edge' with a historical look back at the 1970s and the little-known practice of 'short-life co-operative housing'. Taking a longitudinal view on the management of vacant buildings through temporary living arrangements across the last forty years enables us to examine old and new geographies of housing precarity and their relationship to the logics of large scale urban transformation.

On the Use of Satellite Imagery and GIS Tools to Detect and Characterize the Urbanization around Heritage Sites: The Case Studies of the Catacombs of Mustafa Kamel in Alexandria, Egypt and the Aragonese Castle in Baia, Italy

The sustainable development of urban growth is a mandatory challenge to be addressed, as also highlighted in the Agenda 2030, and this requires suitable and sustainable planning strategies, as well as systematic and timely monitoring of urban expansion and its effects. In this context, satellite data (today also available free of charge) can provide both (i) historical time-series datasets, and (ii) timely updated information related to the current urban spatial structure and city edges, as well as parameters to assess urban features and their statistical characterization to better understand and manage the phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that the identification and mapping of urban areas is still today a complex challenge, due to the heterogeneities of materials, complexity of the features, etc. Our approach, herein adopted, addresses the challenges in using heterogeneous data from multiple data sources for change detection analysis to improve knowledge and monitoring of landscape over time with a specific focus on urban sprawl and land-use change around cultural properties and archaeological areas. Two significant test cases were selected: (i) one in Egypt, the Catacombs of Mustafa Kamel in Alexandria, and (ii) one in Italy, the Aragonese Castle in Baia–Naples. For both study areas, the changes in urban layers were identified over time from satellite data and investigated using spatial analytic tools to statistically characterize them. The results of this study showed that (i) the increase in urban areas is the main phenomenon around both heritage areas, (ii) this increase is sharper in developing countries (e.g., Egypt) than developed countries (e.g., Italy), (iii) the methodology herein adopted is suitable for both big and small urban changes as observed around the Catacombs of Mustafa Kamel and the Aragonese Castle.

Ancient trash mounds unravel urban collapse a century before the end of Byzantine hegemony in the southern Levant

The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth-seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time-space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire.

The implication of regional and local growth management policies on sprawl: A case of the Calgary Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACT The Calgary Metropolitan Area experienced unprecedented growth between 1991 and 2011, becoming the most densifying metropolitan area in Canada. New developments during this period were concentrated in the city edge and exurban areas in parallel with the population growth and occurred contiguously to the existing urban areas. Local growth management policies were found to be effective in densifying the inner suburban areas. However, during the same 2 decades, municipalities outside the city boundary also experienced substantial growth and a considerable increase in the number of their residents relying on automobiles to commute to jobs in Calgary, showing the sign of regional sprawl. The growth challenges of the Calgary metro were felt increasingly more regionally over the years, creating a need for stronger regional growth management.

Another alien bug in Europe: the first case of transcontinental introduction of the Asiatic burrower bug Macroscytus subaeneus (Dallas, 1851) (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Cydnidae) to the U.K. through maritime transport.

The Oriental burrower bug Macroscytus subaeneus (Dallas, 1851) (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Cydnidae: Cydninae), presently known only from single localities in Flores (Indonesia), the Philippines and Thailand, is recorded from the United Kingdom (hereafter U.K.). A single female specimen was collected on the semi-rural edge of Bath city by a Starling (Sturnus vulgaris L.) and taken to its nest from which it was retrieved during 2015. The specimen is illustrated and its diagnostic characters are provided. We hypothesize that this specimen could have been imported with a shipping container from Thailand.

The Advanced Water Sport and Leisure Centre Project at The Water Edge of Dabie Lake in Szczecin (Poland)

Szczecin is the town located in the Middle Ages in the 60 km distance from the Baltic Sea coastline. It is the unique town in Poland having in its limits over 30% of lake and river waters. The great potential of this fact has been used since ever for communication and transportation routes, for shipbuilding and port facilities. The XIX-century Szczecin was a significant industrial center, thanks to the location at Odra River and Dąbie Lake. The negative result of industrialization was the heavy water pollution. In the recent years the inner – city waters are on one hand partly subject of protection as an Odra River Natural Park, Natura 2000 restricted area, but on the other hand more and more used for leisure and water sports. European Funds contribution made possible a severe limitation of water pollution by installation of ecologically advanced sewage purification plants. It was also possible due to the elimination of the old-type industry in the town and its surroundings and increase of ecological consciousness. Better quality of the water in the Dąbie Lake and Odra River, on the edge to the city of Szczecin, attracts therefore touristic and leisure development and the growing welfare in Poland and Europe makes recreation facilities a new, attractive income source. The water-city edge project is aimed to transform the deteriorated brownfield at the Dąbie Lake Waterfront into the place for health care, leisure and sport activities on the higher level of quality and proficiency. The paper describes the project ideas and visions. This project, still in development, shows the possibilities of alternative leisure developments to sea-coastal ones at the Baltic Sea Coast. It represents the method of combining different positive features of the climate and waterfront locations with the investment opportunities, what could contribute to a success of the one common, overall idea of leisure and sport center on the city edge. It shows an example of the investments in the hotel/sport/recreation/health care branches. The conclusion of the paper aims to prove, the necessary changes in the town planning goals structure, taking more seriously into account: the preferences of active people (spending free time for leisure, recreation, nature observations, health care and water sport), economic opportunities (foreign and domestic investors) and overall climate change in the Central Europe Region.

Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901–1961 by Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, Adrian Werner

Reviewed by: Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901–1961 by Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, Adrian Werner Timothy Foran Peters, Evelyn, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner – Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901–1961. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018. Pp. 248. Given the steady growth of scholarly interest in Métis history over the past four decades, it is surprising that urban Métis communities have all but eluded sustained investigation. For the most part, scholarship on Indigenous experiences of cities has focused on First Nations people registered under the Indian Act and on the colonial mechanisms that contained, expelled, and erased them from urban spaces. Rooster Town expands and complicates this scholarship by training a critical lens on one of the many Métis communities that emerged on the edges of settler cities on the prairies and in British Columbia in the first half of the [End Page 410] twentieth century. Its eponymous community developed on the southwest fringe of Winnipeg from around 1900 until its dissolution by the municipal government in the 1950s and early 1960s. According to authors Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner, Rooster Town was an innovative Métis response to settler colonialism and dispossession: flouting settler stereotypes about the inability or unwillingness of Indigenous people to adapt to urban life, Métis households moved to the community from rural parishes in order to access the urban labour market and gain economic and housing security. In examining the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of these households, Peters, Stock, and Werner make an important and overdue contribution to Métis historiography and, more broadly, to Canadian urban historiography and geography. The book is structured chronologically in five chapters, each of which is complemented by maps, tables, family trees, and (in the final three chapters) building plans and photographs. Chapter 1 sets out the social and economic context in which Rooster Town came into being. It surveys the processes through which the Métis were dispossessed of lands reserved for them under the 1870 Manitoba Act and through which Métis farming, fishing, and small business-owning families were supplanted by large, well-financed operations in the 1870s and 1880s. Chapter 2 examines the formation of Rooster Town from 1901 to 1911, when many Métis households left the poverty of rural parishes to find wage work in Winnipeg. These households coordinated their movement and resettlement through kinship and social connections: the majority (81.3%) of Rooster Town’s founding families hailed from St. Norbert parish, and subsequent arrivals tended to come and settle in family units. Clustering outside the serviced area of the city, though for the most part squatting on city-owned land, these families established a place of cultural safety and mutual support. Chapter 3 highlights the variety of housing and tenure strategies employed by Rooster Town families between 1916 and 1926. These included squatting, self-building, renting, and purchasing land (a risky investment when low incomes and unstable employment could spell foreclosure on unpaid taxes). Chapter 4 details the persistence of these strategies during and beyond the Depression years when Rooster Town experienced rapid population growth (mainly through internal increase) and new households were formed. The final chapter examines the decade between 1951 and 1961 when Winnipeg newspapers and city authorities set their crosshairs on Rooster Town, deploying racist tropes to frame the community as a den of squalor and disorder and ultimately rationalizing its destruction and dispersal. Undergirding this narrative is an impressive, if somewhat partial, selection and analysis of primary source material. Peters, Stock, and Werner make brilliant use of civil administrative records—including manuscript censuses, voter lists, assessment rolls, and building permits—to delineate patterns of movement, employment, housing, and land tenure among Rooster Town households. The authors are less successful, however, in obtaining and analyzing data on connections between these households, particularly extended kin connections. This problem arises from a restrictive, genealogically based understanding of kinship—an understanding that has lately been challenged and revised by Métis scholars [End Page 411] Brenda Macdougall, Chris Andersen, and Adam Gaudry. The authors might have better elucidated networks of...