Whither the Federal Urban Agenda? A New Deal in Transition

Abstract

Recently there has been growing awareness of the importance of cities as strategic spaces in the age of globalization. Contrary to predictions about the “locationless” effects of virtual communications and the “death of distance” in a weightless economy, urban centres are becoming more important as places where people live, work, and play (O’Brien, 1992; Cairncross, 1997). Knowledge-based innovation is critical for prosperity and well-being in the 21st century and it seems to thrive in local places that value diversity, generate new ideas, and involve all residents in learning opportunities. A priority for governments everywhere is to understand better the problems and prospects of cities and to implement policies that convert local opportunities into national successes. With nearly 80 percent of its population concentrated in urban areas, Canada is a country where the policy challenge is urgent. The purpose of this chapter is to take stock of public policy responses to the “new localism” (Polese and Stren, 2000; Brenner, 2005). Our focus is Canada’s evolving “cities agenda,” specifically, recent policy departures at the federal level. Drawing on leading-edge European research tracking different national approaches, we offer a comparative analysis of the urban agendas developed by the Martin Liberal and the Harper Conservative governments. We argue that the Liberal government’s New Deal for Cities and Communities attempted what European researchers call an

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.