Civic Boosterism Research Articles

The Impact of Prairie and Maritime Reformers and Boosters on the Development of Parks and Playgrounds, 1880 to 1930

Abstract Two recent research projects have investigated the development of parks and playgrounds in selected Canadian Prairie and Maritime cities between 1880 and 1930. The central objective in each study was to determine if there were any common threads and links in the patterns of development of municipal parks and playgrounds in the cities, and, if so, what these were. In both studies the urban reform movement and civic boosterism were examined to determine their impacts on parks and playgrounds. The proposition that urban reform and civic boosterism were factors which significantly affected the development of parks and playgrounds was not supported by the research findings. The two sets of cities had some common threads in the development of their parks and playgrounds. The impact of the urban reform movement was evident in creating an awareness of park and playground issues in the cities of both studies. Civic boosterism not only had little impact in both studies, but had extremely limited impact in ...

Social Spatialization and the Built Environment: The West Edmonton Mall

The West Edmonton Mall, situated on the northwestern extremities of the Canadian Prairies, and the largest shopping–leisure complex at the time of writing, draws shoppers from all over North America and even Japan. As a privatized public space which diverts consumers from other urban areas it has occasioned much civic boosterism. It presents a fascinating set of interventions in the local social spatialization of a regional capital on the North American cultural periphery. The Mall both imposes and implies changes in the spatial patterns of everyday life, in the imaginary geography of sites of consumption in North America, and in conceptions of the world as a space of distance and difference. To draw on Lefebvre, the creation of such a space in the built environment, called a hyperspace by some, amounts both to a new representation of the spatial and to a ‘space of representation’. Building upon the work of Benjamin and Bakhtin, an analysis of liminality and carnival in the Mall's reunion of the rational and the ludic provides a critical perspective from which to evaluate recent work by Gottdiener on shopping malls. This leads to a view which pays close attention to users' resistance to the above suggestions through refunctioning and ‘hijacking’ the mall space for their own purposes.

The Image of the City

This interdisciplinary urban history examines the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the St. Louis riverfront as a case study of the Progressive response to the urban disorder resulting from the modernization of American society during the twentieth century. Using the insights of urban sociologist Anselm Strauss into urban images and urban historian Blain Brownell into civic boosterism as a conceptual framework, this article draws upon original documents such as city plans and newspapers from the turn of the century until the 1947-1948 design competition for the memorial. These materials reveal an enduring pattern underlying attempts by St. Louis commercial and civic leaders to restructure the urban form-of the riverfront into an orderly image consistent with their progressive urban ethos.

Historical Influences on Contemporary Local Politics: The Case ofWinnipeg

L'auteur de cet article soutient qu'il est faux de prétendre que «la grève générale a été le facteur déterminant dans l'histoire politique moderne de Winnipeg,» d'une part, parce que cette assertion ne peut pas s'appuyer sur des preuves suffisantes et d'autre part, parce qu'une analyse historique plus poussée semble indiquer que le boosterism serait davantage un facteur déterminant que la grève de 1919. L'auteur donne son interprétation de la nature et de la portée de la grève et soutient que le boosterism illustre bien la «troisième facette du pouvoir» proposée par Steven Lukes, c'est-à-dire, une valeur culturelle dominante d'un système politique donné. Le concept comme tel peut très bien s'appliquer aux influences dominantes de l'histoire politique de Winnipeg et même être applicable à d'autres événements.