A New Publisher for Canada's Urban History Journal

Welcome to the Fall 2020 issue of Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine (UHR/RHU). By now you have probably noticed the journal's changed appearance. This landmark issue represents our first published by the University of Toronto Press (UTP). Our editorial board decided that this step was necessary to improve the journal's visibility in today's publishing context. UHR/RHU will now benefit from UTP's marketing expertise, its digital platform, and the institutional subscriptions that will make our content more accessible to a much larger readership. Furthermore, its transfer to a Canadian publisher will ensure that it maintains the Canadian identity that has been a central feature throughout the journal's nearly fifty-year history.

We have also introduced a couple of new formats for contributions. In addition to article manuscripts, research notes, and book reviews, we now encourage the submission of review essays and forum contributions. The latter is a brief commentary (roughly 1500–3000 words excluding notes) on a scholarly topic related to the study of urban history. Our aim is to provide a space for a range of contributions, including editorials, personal reminiscences, and accounts of archival sources.

Despite these modifications to the business side of the journal and to its outward appearance, much more remains the same. Our board of associate editors is unchanged, as is our scholarly focus. UHR/RHU remains concerned with the historical development of cities and urban societies in Canada and beyond, with particular emphasis on current research on Canadian towns and cities and the broader phenomenon of urbanization, discussions of fruitful areas for future research, and methodology and sources. Although we are a history journal, we share Raymond Mohl's understanding of urban history as a "big tent."¹ Thus, we aim to bring together the various disciplinary perspectives that exist in the broad field of urban studies and will publish non-Canadian material when it deals with comparative, methodological, or historiographical issues.

While dealing with the formalities of transferring the journal's operations, we had the pleasure of communicating with two of the journal's important past editors, Richard Harris and Alan Artibise. Dr. Harris served for nearly a decade in this role and continues on our editorial advisory board. Dr. Artibise founded UHR/RHU in 1972 while at the Canadian Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of History) as the first urban history journal. Over a fifteen-year period, Dr. Artibise developed the publication from its humble beginnings as a newsletter to a well-respected and influential peer-reviewed journal. We wish to express our gratitude to Dr. Harris, Dr. Artibise, and the other editors whose hard work has enabled UHR/RHU to continually thrive as the field's oldest journal of urban history. We also want to recognize Becker Associates, the journal's previous publisher. For nearly thirty years, Becker Associates managed the journal's subscriptions and production process. This company deserves much of the credit for the attractive layout and excellent copy editing of our previous issues. Lastly, we would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the many years of funding that enabled UHR/RHU to be published. Our new business model no longer requires that UHR/RHU receive government funding, but the financial assistance the journal received in the past helped us get to where we are now.

We are pleased to present the article contributions in this issue. In his research note "Le rôle méconnu des promesses de vente dans le processus d'urbanisation à Montréal," Guy Gaudreau uses the case of the village of Villeray, on the island of Montreal, to demonstrate that the conventional sale of vacant lots, duly documented in registry offices, was not the only form of access to property at the turn of the twentieth century. Another strategy—also legal—was commonly used but mostly unnoticed by historians: contracts, sale commitments, that defined the terms of sale of these lots. Significantly, while this allowed people of modest means to own land, this particular strategy was also quite profitable...