Neighbourhood and Community in Interwar Vancouver: Residential Differentiation and Civic Voting Behaviour
Neighbourhood and Community in Interwar Vancouver: Residential Differentiation and Civic Voting Behaviour JEAN BARMAN For a quarter century after incorporation in i8865 Vancouver experi enced rapid growth. Its population approached 14,000 within five years, despite depression doubled over the next decade, and then almost quad rupled to surpass 100,000 by 1911. Concurrently, settlement pushed out from an enclave on Burrard Inlet westward along the water's edge, east as far as neighbouring Burnaby, and south to the two residential suburbs of South Vancouver and Point Grey. The inevitable concomitant was, as numerous historians have detailed, residential diversity.1 As new arrivals sought out suitable living arrangements, so they congregated in neighbour hoods reflecting their socio-economic status and possibly also their racial and ethnic background. By the time of the First World War Vancouver's 1 I am grateful to Bob McDonald and Pat Roy for their perceptive critiques of this essay. On the early history of Vancouver, see Norbert MacDonald, " 'C.P.R. Town': The City-Building Process in Vancouver, 1860-1914," pp. 382-412 in Shaping the Urban Landscape: Aspects of the Canadian City-Building Process, ed. G. A. Stelter and A. F. J. Artibise (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1982); Robert A. J. McDonald, "The Business Elite and Municipal Politics in Vancouver, 1886-1914," Urban History Review 11 (February 1983) : 1-14; McDonald, "Business Leaders in Early Vancouver, 1886-1914" (Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, University of British Columbia [UBC], 1977) ; Angus Everett Robertson, "The Pursuit of Power, Profit and Privacy: a Study of Vancouver's West End Elite, 1886-1914" (M.A.
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