Reform, Planning, and City Politics: Montreal, Winnipeg, Toronto

William T. Perks was Professor of Urbanism and Planning, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary.

This is a scholarly work, large in ambition and complex in design. Kaplan, a professor of political science and dean at York University, started out to produce a “modestly conceived study of how political systems engage in program-level innovation.” He ended by writing a theoretical treatise in addition to a set of empirical analyses of reform movements in three Canadian cities. One crucial assertion of Kaplan’s is, “Phenomena like decision making, policy innovation, and the evolution of programs are best studied when viewed within their system context.” His thesis is determinist: individual behaviour and political decisions are dependent upon, and explained by, a “systemic tradition”; personal will and reform platforms of politicians are not the central explanatory variables in how cities actually developed.

Nearly half of the book is devoted to theoretical discussion which links the concept of political reform to (social) “system, hierarchy and development.” A discussion of the Canadian political culture and municipal system serves to illustrate Kaplan’s thesis. The treatment of Canadian cities provides an interesting perspective because of its attempt to integrate several disciplinary approaches. Kaplan’s account of the city planning ideas and “programs” by which Canadian communities have been variously seized in the past is equally interesting and original. Kaplan concludes that “Town-planning ideas and proposals have dominated twentieth-century politics ... more than the reform concerns …”

The other “half’ (425 pages) of the book is comprised of three case studies — Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg. Each is a deeply researched interpretation of how socio-political forces, reform and planning ideologies, and administrative structures combined and evolved over twenty years or more; and how these determined the course of development of the city. All three cities became complex “metropolitan” administrations, the most notable being Toronto (1953). The Montreal system came to be dominated by the “personalist” political doctrines of Jean Drapeau, therefore with less interest and fewer accomplishments in land use planning. Winnipeg evolved from “company town” frontier politics toward centrist coalitions in the 1960s; the conception of reform at city hall had become more “managerial” and technocratic than politically ideological by the time the metro Winnipeg system was in operation.

No other scholarship of this kind is available on planning in Canadian cities and how planning can be related to political systems as these evolved over 50 years. The book can be informative to all sorts of students, and it can be read according to selected compartments of interest. Irrespective of the author’s system theory, university teachers in fields of sociology, political science and government, public administration, urban studies, and planning should, at very least, find it an advantageous reference work.