Modernity and Multi-Storey Living : Apartment Tenants in Canadian Cities, 1900-1939

The focus of the research has been to investigate the role of apartment housing in the social geography of two Canadian cities - Toronto and Winnipeg - in the period 1900-1939, in the context of debates about 'spaces of modernity' in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities. The project aimed to reconstruct just who, in practice, occupied apartment buildings in each city. Were apartment tenants in any way distinctive, with respect to gender, socio-economic status, household structure, or ethnicity, and in their residential mobility, and day-to-day journey-to-work? Were there differences among the apartment-house population, especially when categorised according to the type of building in which they lived? From the outset, a principle aim has been to provide a readily accessible computerised dataset for use by secondary analysts interested in twentieth-century urban society. For example it can be used for a social-historical analysis for heritage planners and architectural historians contemplating the listing or conservation of selected apartment buildings; and by comparing patterns of occupancy in dwellings adjacent to apartment blocks, it can be used to provide historical evidence of the social impact of apartments as non-conforming uses in areas of single-family housing. More broadly, the project aimed to explore the social construction of property relations, especially with respect to the role of <i>rental</i> housing in an increasingly owner-occupied housing market, and apartment housing in a society where the single-family detached dwelling was generally regarded as the most desirable form of dwelling.