Homes in Alberta: Building, Trends, and Design

James A. Love is an associate professor of environmental design at the
University of Calgary.

Wetherell and Kmet, historical consultants from Edmonton, provide a
history that is divided into four stages: the seventeenth to the
nineteenth century, 1883-1918, 1919-1945, and 1946-1967. One has to look
back only a few decades to find urban housing conditions comparable to
those in Third World slums. New-found wealth has extricated the urban
population from appalling conditions. The topics covered reflect the
authors’ assertion that “few people thought about their houses as
“architecture’ or ‘art.’ . . . They saw their houses largely in
social, economic, and technological terms.”

A central thesis is that housing and communities were shaped by the
attitude that progress was society’s primary goal, with progress
conceived of as “the product of capitalism, science and [western]
European civilization.” As is increasingly recognized, the
consequences of this attitude were devastating for Native groups, but it
also affected settlers from other areas. The system of land tenure
forced eastern European settlers to live in isolated homesteads rather
than in the villages to which they were accustomed. Rental housing was
considered second-rate, on the grounds that renting was a waste of
household income and renters transient and undesirable, despite the fact
that most apartment tenants were from the more affluent stratum of
society. The detached home was the ideal. Individual families were seen
to be responsible for their own welfare. In urban areas, this ideology
broke down to a limited extent under the threats posed by a lack of
community sanitation services, but public intervention in housing was
not a favored concept.

The book is comprehensive, although some themes might have been
developed further. For instance, the authors provide information on
wages, house prices, and land costs during different periods, but do not
trace changes in affordability over time.