| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard Harris. Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960. (Themes in Canadian History, number 7.) Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2004. Pp. x, 204. Cloth $45.00, paper $19.95.
Caught as I am here between past and present, between history and social science, and between town planning and urban studies, I read this well-written and enjoyable little book with mixed emotions. In part, it was with the pride that comes to someone who recognizes a story about his own experience mixed with the dread that one's experiences are now indeed the stuff of history. In part, it is the comfort that comes to a scholar listening to a familiar story told by an accomplished storyteller mixed with a scholar's skepticism that is only heightened the better the story is told. In part, it is an exasperation with the conventional wisdom and platitudes that too often plague the practice of town planning combined with the uneasy balance in the social sciences between model simplification that allows testable hypotheses and the rich and nuanced accounts that too often do not.	1
Richard Harris is a well-known historical geographer with interests in social issues and social geography and a string of lively and interesting books to his credit. This latest book will leave no one disappointed. At one level, it is an account of the making of the Canadian suburb divided into three periods: an early automobile period that stretches from 1900 to 1929; a hiatus period from 1930 to 1944, during which much new housing policy arose in response to the Great Depression and, later, the need for wartime housing; and a final period from 1945 to 1960 when automobiles had become prevalent. The book describes suburbanization and housing during each of these periods. At another level, the book is a travelogue that revisits classic examples of Canadian suburban design: the early planned suburbs of Uplands in Victoria, Shaughnessy Heights of Vancouver, and Coldbrook Garden City in Saint John, the 1920s grid streets in East Toronto and Edmonton, the curvilinear streets of postwar suburban Lethbridge, Hamilton, and Calgary, and the Park Royal shopping center in West Vancouver.	. . .

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