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<p>In Canada, as in the United States, cities seemed to many to be in complete disarray in the 1960s. Growing populations and the resultant increased demands for housing fed rapid suburban sprawl, creating a postwar burst of urban and suburban planning as consultants were hired in city after city to address the challenges of the postwar era. During this period expressway proposals sparked controversy in urban centres across the developed world, including every major city in Canada, namely Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montréal and Halifax. Residents objected to postwar autocentric planning designed to encourage and promote the continued growth of city centres. Frustrated by unresponsive politicians and civic officials, citizen activists challenged authorities with an alternate vision for cities that prioritized the safeguarding of the urban environment through the preservation of communities, the prevention of environmental degradation, and the promotion of public transit. As opponents recognized the necessity of moving beyond grassroots activism to established legal and government channels to fight expressways, their protests were buoyed by the rapidly rising costs that plagued the schemes. By the latter half of the 1960s, many politicians and civil servants had joined the objectors. Growing concerns over the many costs of expressways -- financial, social, environmental, and eventually, political -- resulted in the defeat of numerous expressway networks, but most were qualified victories with mixed legacies.</p> <p>Expressway disputes were an instrumental part of a wider struggle to define urban modernity, a struggle that challenged the basis of politicians and civil servants power by questioning their legitimacy as elected leaders and uniquely qualified experts, respectively. The subsequent emergence of urban reform groups that sought to change the direction of city development by challenging the autocratic municipal bureaucracies was the direct legacy of expressway and other development battles. Despite this, autocentric planning continued and demands for greater citizen participation did not result in significant changes to the form and function of municipal governments.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Battle of the Corner: Urban Policing and Rioting in the United States, 1943-1971 provides a national history of police reform and police-citizen conflicts in marginalized urban neighborhoods in the three decades after World War II. Examining more than a dozen cities, the dissertation shows how big-city police brass and downtown-friendly municipal elites in the late 1940s and 1950s attempted to professionalize urban law enforcement and regulate rank-and-file discretion through Police-Community Relations programs and novel stop-and-frisk preventive patrol schemes. These efforts ultimately failed to produce diligent yet impartial street policing. Beginning in the late 1950s, and increasing in severity and frequency until the early 1960s, young black and Latino working-class urban residents surrounded, taunted, and attacked police officers making routine arrests. These crowd rescues garnered national attention and prepared the ground for the urban rebellions of 1964 to 1968, many of which began with a controversial police incident on a crowded street corner. While telling a national story, Battle of the Corner provides deeper local context for postwar changes to street policing through detailed case studies highlighting the various stakeholders in reform efforts. In the 1950s and 1960s, African-American activists, block clubs, residents, and politicians pressured police for effective but fair and accountable tactical policing to check rising criminal violence and street disorder in neighborhoods increasingly blighted by urban renewal. Rank-and-file police unions fought civilian review boards and used new collective bargaining rights to stage job actions to obtain higher wages. They also obtained “bill of rights” contract provisions to shield members from misconduct investigations. Police management took advantage of newly-available federal and local resources after the riots to reorganize their departments into top-down bureaucratic organizations capable of conducting stop-and-frisk on a more systematic scale. By the early 1970s, a rising generation of urban black politicians confronted skyrocketing rates of criminal violence, armed militants intent on waging war on the police, and a politically-empowered rank-and-file angry and combative over the more intense threats and pressures they faced on the job. Battle of the Corner breaks ground in telling a national story of policing that juxtaposes elite decision-making and street confrontations and that analyzes a wide range of actors who held a stake in securing order and justice in urban neighborhoods. In chronicling how urban police departments emerged from the profound institutional crisis of the 1960s with greater power, resources, and authority, Battle of the Corner provides a history and a frame for understanding policing controversies today. / History

In 1972, a flood tore through Rapid City, South Dakota, killing 238 people. Many whose lives and homes were destroyed lived in a predominately Native American neighborhood known as “Osh Kosh Camp.” This dissertation asks: why did those people lived in that neighborhood at that time? The answer lies at the intersection of the histories of race and environment in the American West. In the Black Hills region, white Americans racialized certain spaces under the conceptual framework of Indian Country as part of the process of American conquest on the northern plains beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The American project of racializing Western spaces erased Indians from histories of Rapid City, a process most obviously apparent in the construction of Mount Rushmore as a tourist attraction. Despite this attempted erasure, Indians continued to live and work in the city and throughout the Black Hills. In Rapid City, rampant discrimination forced Native Americans in Rapid City to live in neighborhoods cut off from city services, including Osh Kosh Camp After the flood, activists retook the Indian Country concept as a tool of protest. This dissertation claims that environment and race must be understood together in the American West. / History

This dissertation is a history of the change in form and location of ballparks that explains why that change happened, when it did, and what this tells us about broader society, about hopes and fears, and about tastes and prejudices. It uses case studies of five important and trend-setting ballparks to understand what it meant to go to a major league game in the twentieth century. I examine the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium in the first half of the twentieth century, what I call the classic ballpark era, Dodger Stadium and the Astrodome from the 1950s through the 1980s, what I call the multi-use ballpark era, and Camden Yards in the retro-chic ballpark era—the 1990s and beyond. I treat baseball as a reflection of larger American culture that sometimes also shaped that culture. I argue that baseball games were a purportedly inclusive space that was actually exclusive and divided, but that the exclusion and division was masked by rhetoric about the game and the relative lack of explicit policies barring anyone. Instead, owners built a system that was economically and socially stratified and increasingly physically removed from lower-class and non-white city residents. Ballparks’ tiers allowed owners to give wealthier fans the option of sitting in the seats closest to home plate where they would not have to interact with poorer fans who owners pushed to the cheaper seats further from the action. That masked exclusion gave middle- and upper-class fans a space that was comfortable and safe because it was anything but truly accessible to all Americans. I also argue that owners had to change the image of the ballpark and tinker with the exclusion there as fans’ tastes and their visions of what a city should look and feel like changed. / History

This thesis deals with perceptions of refuse as an asset or as a liability and the questions of waste management practices. The aim has been to gain new insights into Stockholm’s waste management in the period 1900–1975 by studying change and continuity in municipal practices and the notions that governed the municipal actors’ actions. The central questions are what factors determined the city’s waste management, and how an urban and local (environmental) problem was formulated and addressed by local authorities and political bodies. In answering, I have applied a theory of inertia in large technical–administrative systems and an analytical framework based on the concept of waste management regimes. During the period a resource recovery regime was replaced by an incineration regime. At the turn of the last century, the quantity and type of refuse produced by Stockholm’s rising population was compounded by increasing consumption. In order to modernize the capital’s waste disposal the city invested in resource recovery by introducing source separation. The fall in demand for fertilizer and a changing composition of the waste in the 1920s made it more difficult to get rid of refuse and led to an end of waste separation. Incineration came to be seen as the modern option and in 1938 Sweden’s first modern incineration plant for municipal waste was built outside Stockholm. The amount of waste produced by Stockholm nearly tripled between 1922, when it was at its lowest levels, and the mid-1960s. The late 1960s saw an even more dramatic increase. In the 1960s waste was discussed as an important environmental issue and in the 1970s recycling was implemented in small scale. At the national level recycling was adopted as a waste management aim in 1975.

This thesis examines the state-sponsored rise of local patriotism in the post-1961 period, interpreting this as part of the effort to strengthen popular support for and the legitimacy of the Soviet regime during the second phase of de-Stalinization. It shifts the analytical focus away from the Secret Speech of 1956, the time of Khrushchev’s full-scale assault on Stalin and his legacy, to the Twenty-Second Party Congress of 1961, the inauguration of a utopian and pioneering plan to build Communism by 1980. The thesis considers how this famously forward-looking programme gave rise to an institutionalized retrospectivism as Soviet policy makers turned to the past to mobilize popular support for socialist construction. It examines how this process played out in the Russian North West, where Soviet citizens were encouraged to turn inwards to examine their local history and traditions, and to reread these through the lens of Soviet socialism. The thesis takes as a case study the towns of Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda, where the state-sponsored regeneration of local traditions significantly impacted on the self-perception of local communities. In the first part, I look at the strategies for representing and displaying local culture in pubic institutions: the textual treatment and symbolic ordering of urban space in local tourist guides; the heritage movement and the attribution of cultural value to certain objects from the local landscape; and the primary focuses of the exhibitive 'gaze' in local museums. The second part of the thesis shifts the focus from institutionalized culture to popular culture, examining the informal practices and oral traditions that exist alongside the authoritative discourses of social identity in the post-Soviet period. The popular interpretation of public sculpture, the collective imagination of urban space, and the 'common knowledge' of the past as it is articulated in oral narratives are the focuses of discussion.