Montreal serves as an illustration of how loft landscapes outside of Manhattan draw from the landscape discourse of SoHo, but are inscribed with local economic, political and cultural attributes. Two aspects of the reconstruction of loft landscapes are highlighted: the imagery of the loft in the mass media and the role of local residents in interpreting and reconstructing the loft concept in the Montreal rental market. A description of the local impact of economic restructuring on the built environment of the inner city sets the stage for an examination of two groups of residents. The industrial built environment in Montreal suffers from disinvestment and lack of regulation making the rental sector loft a readily available housing choice in the inner city. Undefined and outside of municipal regulations, lofts are domestic spaces in which tenants can construct identities. Artists, who use industrial spaces to combine home and work (Loft Artists) and non-artists, who use appropriate industrial spaces as rental housing (Loft Dwellers) are the two primary groups to occupy these spaces. A comparison between these two groups, their use of space and their identification with the loft concept, makes up the empirical component of the research. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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