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New models of urban planning, including the lofty design principles of City Beautiful architects and the comprehensive schemes of Garden City and Garden Suburb reformers, were introduced to Canada during the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite their widespread advocacy by professionals and civic-minded enthusiasts alike, the impact of these new models on the contemporary Canadian city was actually quite limited. However, selected principles of these models were used rather pragmatically in several locations, including the northwestern suburbs of Montreal where the Canadian Northern Railway built the 'Model City' of Mount Royal, a corporate suburb that was planned, designed, and developed as a real estate venture to help offset the costs of building a railway tunnel into the centre of Montreal. This paper examines the process of city-building in Mount Royal during the town's formative years, from 1910 to 1925. It demonstrates how the idea for the town emerged as a speculative residential scheme at the height of the pre-First World War land boom; how the City Beautiful ideals of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr and the Garden Suburb principles of Henry Vivian were introduced to Montreal during their visits there in 1910; and how, one year later, their ideas and other planning models converged and were incorporated to form the unique design for Mount Royal's urban plan by Frederick Todd, a protege of the junior Olmsted and Canada's most prominent landscape architect of the early twentieth century.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike virtually all other old immigrant enclaves in North American cities, the historic downtown Chinatowns of big cities in the United States and Canada largely survive, though not for lack of plans to destroy them. City Beautiful era plans, development projects, and other public and private interventions displaced or sought to eradicate Chinatowns, from Los Angeles to Victoria to Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Urban renewal era projects destroyed large portions of many Chinatowns, and some entirely. This article traces these broad patterns and trends of planned and realized destruction and preservation across 15 of the major cities in twentieth-century Canada and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an impressive international career, the German city planner Hans Blumenfeld remains largely unknown. In The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, Christopher Klemek depicts him as an apologist of authoritarian and technocratic urban renewal. This statement is puzzling because many post-war planners saw him as a humble left-wing progressive. Drawing from a close analysis of the writings and actions of Blumenfeld, in particular his work in Canada, this article shows that he was far from being an uncritical apologist of urban renewal in North America. He was always very sceptical but, as opposed to Jane Jacobs, he did not think that modernist urban planning had it all wrong. He always thought that progress came not only from citizens' participation, but also principally from science and expertise. For that reason, Blumenfeld tried, on the one hand, to transform the language of city planning to answer criticism from citizens and activists, and, on the other, to retain the expertise to proceed from plan-making to a communication-process, as some professionals were beginning to advocate at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For four years, Frederick G. Todd (1876-1948) studied and practiced with the Boston-based Olmsted Brothers, the seminal landscape architecture and town planning firm. The Olmsteds executed ambitious plans for parks, park systems, urban design, and suburban development according to the pioneering design principles of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr and his two sons, John Charles and Frederick Law Jr. In 1900, Todd left the firm to establish the first landscape architecture office in Canada. While Todd was deeply influenced by the ideas of Olmsted Sr and his sons, he arguably had more direct impact on Canadian city development than his mentors. Many Todd projects survive as treasured open spaces, and sought-after residential enclaves. However, despite Todd's impressive career his reputation remains overshadowed by the legacy of the Olmsteds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]