Championing the City Motto: An Analysis of Edmonton’s Un/Official Slogan

This article examines urban slogans using a case study of Edmonton’s unofficial motto; “City of Champions.” We will be exploring the decision-making process regarding the city slogan, specifically who creates and adopts a city slogan, and what the relationship is between a city’s slogan and its residents. The analysis focuses on events in 2003, when the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation suggested creating a new slogan for the City, prompting a debate over whether to keep or discard the old slogan: “City of Champions.” We carried out a historical case study, using newspaper articles, blogs, and city documents, to gauge public opinion and the slogan-building process. We argue that the residents are ultimately the key decision-makers regarding the creation and acceptance of a city’s slogan. During the slogan-building process, residents modify, twist, and may adopt a slogan to build collective and multiple identities and images of the city to exhibit to themselves and outsiders

Landing at Home: Insights on Immigration and Metropolitan Housing Markets from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada

This paper examines the housing conditions, needs and trajectories of recent new- comers to Canada, by focusing on the first few months of their adjustment process. Until now, most research in this field has been unable to provide a comprehensive description of this early stage of settlement. Employing individual survey data from the first wave of Statistics Canada’s Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC), we draw a portrait of immigrant and refugee residential out- comes as observed six months after arrival. In particular, we highlight five novel insights, centered around the rapidity with which newcomers in general enter the housing market, but also around the appreciable variability of outcomes in tenure status, class of entry, metropolitan area of settlement, and assessment by newcom- ers of their situation in the housing market. We conclude with a discussion of the significance of these variegated findings for the settlement experience of recently arrived immigrants and refugees and, more broadly, for social policy in the areas of housing and newcomer integration

Facebook as a Way ofLife: Louis Wirth in theSocial Network

The rise of social networking practices has inspired widespread public debate and scholarly attention: a growing share of social relations began to take place online in the virtual worlds of social media sites at the same time that the ‘real’ world became majority-urban. What are the implications of these trends for how we understand the geography of urban society? In this paper, we re-engage one of the foundational contributions of twentieth-century Chicago School sociology, Louis Wirth’s article “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” (1938) to understand the socio-spatial implications of social media in an era of planetary urbanization. A growing body of evidence suggests that central elements that Wirth saw as defining urbanism — the calculating instrumentalism of daily life, the paradox of individual isolation fueling the proliferation of voluntary associations and organizations, the “segmented selves” of complex divisions of labor — are being reproduced and reconfigured in socially networked lives. The centripetal social relations of the twentieth-century metropolis are overlaid by networking practices that mediate each urbanite’s blend of local, regional, national, and transnational social relations. The result is an intricate, evolving world system of socially and spatially segmented urban ways of life

More Continuity than Change? Re-evaluating the Contemporary Socio-economic and Housing Characteristics of Suburbs

Suburbs that developed in metropolitan Canada post-World War II have historically been depicted as homogeneous landscapes of gendered domesticity, detached housing, White middle-class nuclear families, and heavy automobile use. We find that key features of this historical popular image do in fact persist across the nation’s contemporary metropolitan landscape, particularly at the expanding fringes and in mid-sized cities near the largest metropolitan areas. Th e findings reflect suburbanization into new areas, point to enduring social exclusion, and recall the negative environmental consequences arising from suburban ways of living such as widespread automobile use and continuing sprawl. However, the analysis also points to the internal diversity thatmarks suburbanization today and to the growing presence of suburban ways of living in central areas. Our results suggest that planning policies promoting intensification and targeting social equity objectives are likely to remain ineff ective if society fails to challenge directly the political, economic and socio-cultural drivers behind the kind of suburban ways of living that fit popular imaginings of post-World War II suburbs in central areas. Our results suggest that planning policies promoting intensification and targeting social equity objectives are likely to remain ineffective if society fails to challenge directly the political, economic and socio-cultural drivers behind the kind of suburban ways of living that fit popular imaginings of post-World War II suburbs

Travel Behavior, Gender, and Social Class in the Twin Cities

Center for Transportation StudiesWyly, Elvin K.. (1995). Travel Behavior, Gender, and Social Class in the Twin Cities. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/155377

Class-ifying London: Questioning social division and space claims in the post-industrial metropolis

Richard Florida\u27s Rise of the Creative Class of 2002 ends with a clarion call for a post-industrial, post-class sensibility: \u27The task of building a truly creative society is not a game of solitaire. This game, we play as a team.\u27 Florida\u27s sentiment has been echoed across a broad and interdisciplinary literature in social theory and public policy, producing a new conventional wisdom: that class antagonisms are redundant in today\u27s climate of competitive professionalism and a dominant creative mainstream. Questions of social justice are thus deflected by reassurances that there is no \u27I\u27 in team, and that \u27we\u27 must always be defined by corporate membership rather than class-based solidarities. The post-industrial city becomes a post-political city nurtured by efficient, market-oriented governance leavened with a generous dose of multicultural liberalism. In this paper, we analyze how this Floridian fascination has spread into debates on contemporary urban social structure and neighbourhood change. In particular, we focus on recent arguments that London has become a thoroughly middle-class, post-industrial metropolis. We evaluate the empirical claims and interpretive generalizations of this literature by using the classical tools of urban factorial ecology to analyze small-area data from the UK Census. Our analysis documents a durable, fine-grained geography of social class division in London, which has been changed but not erased by ongoing processes of industrial and occupational restructuring: the central tensions of class in the city persist. Without critical empirical and theoretical analysis of the contours of post-industrial class division, the worsening inequalities of cities like London will be de-politicized. We suggest that class-conscious scholars should only head to Florida for Spring Break or retirement. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Same, but different: Within London’s ‘static’ class structure and the missing antagonism

In this paper, we discuss (Manley, D., and R. Johnston. 2014. ‘London: A Dividing City, 2001–11?’ City 18 (6): 633–643) intervention into recent debates on London\u27s contemporary class structure. We find that Manley and Johnston show evidence to support many of the claims we have previously made, providing further support against the argument that London has become increasingly a middle-class (Butler, T., C. Hamnett, and M. Ramsden. 2008. ‘Inward and Upward? Marking Out Social Class Change in London 1981–2001.’ Urban Studies 45 (2): 67–88) and/or professionalized (Hamnett, C. 2004. ‘Economic and Social Change and Inequality in Global Cities: The Case of London.’ The Greek Review of Social Research 113: 63–80) city. Yet Manley and Johnston\u27s accounting of class change in London also requires critical consideration. We argue their description of London as static in terms of class change has to be read extremely carefully, since such descriptions can obscure the vast population shifts that have occurred in London over recent decades. We also question the extent to which a concern with class antagonism is absent from their intervention. In conclusion, we reflect on what recent talk of London\u27s social class composition means for working-class politics