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The Canadian urban system, like most other national urban systems, has been subjected to intense pressures for change over the last two decades, emanating from both external and internal sources. The combined outcomes of these changes for the urban system, however, remain ambiguous.This paper examines some of the contradictory assertions in the research literature regarding the on-going reorganization of urban systems through a detailed empirical analysis of the changing properties of the Canadian urban system. The analysis begins with a conceptual framework that recognizes alternative logics and trajectories of change in urban systems, the latter expressed for analytical purposes as simple polarities. The paper then demonstrates not only the diversity and rapidity of change, with its intensely uneven geography, but the often indeterminant and contadictory nature of many of the relationships underlying that change.

All spatial systems, by definition, have margins or peripheries. Many, but not all, of these peripheries also display particular properties as a result of their isolation—uncertainty, vulnerability and exploitation—in short, conditions of marginality and dependence. This chapter outlines the conditions that typify the peripheries of urban systems during a period of economic restructuring and global integration. It then examines the expressions of these conditions at different spatial scales—continental, national and regional—and critically evaluates their consequences for economic well-being, social inequalities and public policy. Examples drawn from ongoing research on changes in the Canadian urban system are then used to illustrate the multiplicity and complexity of contemporary peripheries and the increasing inadequacies of existing theoretical frameworks to account for the new conditions of marginality. The chapter concludes with a call for a rethinking of the processes underlying these conditions, but set within the context of an increasingly integrated global economy and prevailing neo-conservative ideologies.