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Montreal in 1881 was highly segregated along four distinct social dimensions: language, religion, socioeconomic status, and sector of employment. By 1901 the population had doubled, and we examine changes in residential distributions over the two decades. Despite the increased integration of certain groups, segregation remains high, and multiple dimensions are still discernible. In addition to long-established communities of French Canadians, Irish Catholics, and Anglo-Protestants, we see new streams of immigrants occupying their own patches in the urban fabric. To make meaningful observations of sociospatial changes over two decades, we used a geographic information system (GIS) to situate individual census households with spatial precision on 1 of 12,000 lots in 1881 and 30,000 in 1901, so that we could reaggregate them into meaningful districts of different scales and districts with identical boundaries for both years of observation, thereby overcoming the major methodological problems hindering previous comparative analyses. Coupling well-established statistical indexes of segregation and diversity in a GIS framework lends new analytic power to grasp the scale of phenomena and inquire into behavioral choices of nineteenth-century households. The empirical evidence shows how both concentration and diversity were built into the urban fabric. This study also offers methodological cues for comparative studies in other places and periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps and measures several dimensions of residential segregation in Montreal in 1881, thereby adding to our understanding of the social structure of the industrial city. Taking advantage of an unusual historical database--a historical geographic information system (H-GIS)--we locate 17,000 individual households with precision, and evaluate the "dissimilarity" of neighborhoods along several social dimensions and at various levels of spatial aggregation. The empirical findings suggest that Montreal was highly segregated along lines of ethnic identity as well as socioeconomic status; segregation values increased inversely with size of the spatial unit, but precision of unit boundaries have negligible effect. Coupling the high-precision GIS with a statistical model such as the classic index of dissimilarity lends new power to grasp the scale of phenomena, to inquire into behavioral choices of 19th-century households, and even to challenge our assumptions about the meaning of "segregation" or "integration." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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For Montréal in the nineteenth century, as for most port cities, the waterfront served as the primary interface between the city and the markets of the world. This paper examines how and why the primitive waterfront of Montréal as of 1830 was repeatedly adapted and transformed into a modern port district by 1914. Beyond a detailed examination of the set of physical changes on the waterfront, this paper draws theoretical insights from geographical interpretations of the rhythm of capital accumulation to explore the formative and adaptive processes underlying waterfront redevelopment. Global innovations in transport and cargo-handling technology are recognised as the preconditions for the periodic redimensioning of the port of Montréal, and it is established that these changes were driven by the perennial demands of local investors to accelerate circulation and thus reduce the turnover time of capital. This paper offers a new perspective on waterfront development by conceptualising the entire port as a comprehensive circulatory system and then exploring the redevelopment of various components in relation to others. The findings indicate that massive increases in traffic—the number and size of ships—through the port were correlated with the redimensioning of all of the connected components of the circulatory system; that is, the major arteries such as the St Lawrence River ship channel, as well as the smaller capillaries like finger piers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]