Canadian urban 'reform' and local conditions: an alternative to Harris's 'reinterprentation'

The article presents an alternative to researcher Richard Harris's interpretation of Canadian urban reform and local conditions. According to Harris, local circumstances did not play the decisive role in the timing and nature of Canadian municipal reform movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to the author, particular instances of social movements do occur in wider social and cultural contexts, but these contexts may provide, at best, some of the necessary conditions for the emergence of conflict, sufficient conditions arise in the concrete dilemmas in which real people find themselves. The author feels Harris mainly goes wrong is in confusing two different issues, namely, urbanness and localness. By local conditions the author means consequences of broader structural conditions that take specific forms in local places, including cities, and that may or may not be amplified by size, density and heterogeneity. It is one thing to argue that Canadian municipal reform movements of the late 1960s and 1970s were not generically urban, but it is quite another to argue local conditions were not decisive in these movements emergence. Grasping the real nature of Canadian municipal reform, or grasping the real nature of any urban movement, requires careful case-by-case study of actual local struggles in which different groups of city-dwellers variously engage.