The Grainau Conference on Canadian Studies

Commentary TheGrainau Conferenee on Canadian Studies ALISON TAYLOR Parallel to the emerging Canadian belief that ours is a country worthy of close scrutiny, other nations, their universities and representatives have exp_ ressed a continuing interest in Canadian affairs. In February 1984, the Association for Canadian Studies in Germanspeaking countries, in cooperation with the International Council of Canadian Studies (ICCS), reaffirmed this commitment by hosting its fourth annual conference in Grainau, Germany. Sponsored by Northern Telecom, the conference brought together members of national Canadian Studies associations from Canada, Great Britain, Japan, the U.S.A., France, the Scandinavian countries and Germany. Papers at the two-day conference were grouped according to discipline (French Linguistics , History, Geography, Economics, Anglo-Canadian Literature and Political Science). To facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and to reflect the shared interest in Canadian affairs, the organizers chose "Social Structures in Canada" as the general theme. Many papers were written with an international audience in mind and,1 of necessity , rehearsed ideas and analyses well-known to Canadianists at home. Overlapping sessions made it impossible to hear all the papers. The following observations merely highlight some of the English-language presentations which stimulated thought and discussion about Canadian issues and which incorporated the interdisciplinary philosophy central to the field of Canadian Studies. Larry Bourne from the Centre for Urban Studies at the University of Toronto presented the conference's first paper, "Urban Canada in Transition: Emerging Patterns of Social and Demographic Change." Arguing that the period 1971-1981 was a decade of dramatic change in the makeup of urban centres, 140 Bourne analyzed the population shifts from city centres to their peripheries. To explain this trend, he applied measurement on three spatial scales; national/urban, regional/urban , and individual/local, arguing that a comprehensive explanation of patterns of urban growth must include economic and political factors and their relationship to population growth. Bourne's model also stressed the importance of international events because regional systems, particularly those specializing in specific resources, are affected by world supply and demand cycles. These in turn are translated into spatial changes in population distribution patterns. On a national scale, Canada has experienced a movement toward decentralization, away from the industrialized centres of the East to the resource-based West. This pattern is contradicted by a strong regional tendency to concentration; for example, 80 percent of Ontario's growth is in the central core area. Bourne's thesis focuses on the notion that this ambiguity is largely explained by the movement, on the individual/ local scale, of populations away from the city centre. The ·revitalization of housing in downtown areas has polarized the core population into the low-income group, many of whom are immigrants, and the wealthy, professional upper-class group. Some immigrant populations gravitated to the suburbs in a search for affordable housing. Provincial and federal governments have encouraged this same pattern in the country at large, redirecting growth away from the highly developed areas. The result on a local scale is a new metropolitan core which has a lower population density and a different age structure than was evident previously. However, this decentralization has not left a depressed and decaying city core, but has created the "donut effect" - a hole in the centre of the city with an extensive fringe population. Some of the short-term, identifiable effects include the creation in the central core of minority communities (gays, young childless couples) and the rise of metropolitan governments with mandates to generate funds for the core area. Bourne's paper successfully illustrated a number of broad patterns in Canadian Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 19, No. 3 (Automne 1984 Fall) urbanization which differ according to the scale on which it is measured. Nationally, government policies have effected a movement away from urban areas, particularly to the West. Regionally, there is a centralized growth pattern gravitating to major urbanized areas. On the metropolitan scale, there is a continual movement out of the city core to its periphery. Kenneth Norrie's presentation, "Social Structure in Western Canada: An Economic Perspective," complemented Bourne's approach . Advancing a thesis which countered the growing popularity of dependency theory, Norrie offered a different interpretation of western political and...