From city to city-region: historical perspective on the contentious definitions of the Montreal metropolitan area (1).

Collin, Jean-Pierre ; Dagenais, Michele ; Poitras, Claire 等

Resume

Cet article vise a dresser l'etat des lieux en ce qui a trait aux approches pour comprendre le developpement des villes dans leur environnement regional immediat. Prenant appui sur le cas de Montreal, notre objectif est d'alimenter le debat en cours en histoire urbaine et en geographie urbaine eu egard a l'echelle la plus pertinente pour eclairer les tensions sous-jacentes au developpement d'une ville-region. En ayant recours a une definition plus souple de la region, a la notion de ville-region, de meme qu'a une approche reposant a la fois sur l'histoire urbaine et l'histoire de l'environnement, il est possible de mieux comprendre la dynamique historique qui a faconne la region metropolitaine de Montreal.

Mots cles: Regions metropolitaines; villes-regions; Montreal.

Abstract

This paper sets out some of the essential approaches to understand the development of cities within their regional settings. By using the Montreal metropolitan area as a case study, our purpose is to shed light on the debate concerning the appropriate scale needed to help resolve the tensions in the development of the city-region by redefining the analytical framework in urban history and urban geography. This paper shows that by using a flexible definition of the region, the concept of "city-region", and an approach that calls upon both environmental and urban history, we can better understand the historical forces that shaped the Montreal metropolitan region.

Keywords: Metropolitan areas; city-regions; Montreal.

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In 2002, the Montreal metropolitan area as defined by the Canadian census extends over an area of 4,024 square kilometres inhabited by more than 3.3 million people, representing about half the population of Quebec. Compared with other North American metropolitan regions of similar population size, the Montreal region is distinguished by the presence of a large central city. The city of Montreal in fact belongs to the very select club of the 15 or so North American cities with a population of over 1,000,000. This characteristic has been accentuated with the merger (in January 2002) of all the municipalities on the island of Montreal, when the city of the same name reached a population of 1,700,000.

The Montreal region shows certain characteristic features that differentiate it from other North American urban areas of comparable size: a high level of public transit use, central neighbourhoods still inhabited by a relatively diversified population, a downtown area where most service-sector jobs are still concentrated, a dynamic retail sector, and a relatively high percentage of jobs in the manufacturing sector--17.2% in 1996. But the metropolitan region is experiencing certain problems common to large North American cities: a natural environment made very vulnerable due to intensive industrialization and urbanization, ever-increasing traffic congestion, a lower level of population growth in the central city, incomplete economic re-conversion marked by a certain degree of social exclusion, and growing suburban sprawl.

In the last 20 years or so, the Montreal region has been tom between multiple identities. Suburban elected officials and inhabitants located outside the island of Montreal have claimed a distinctive social and cultural identity, arguing that their lifestyle, their interests, and the assets of their communities set them apart from Montrealers. North Shore mayors thus said in 2000 that their territory "is located within the suburban area of Greater Montreal but not within its urban area, therefore making this territory completely free from the Montreal urban process" [our translation] (2)

In 2000 and 2001, elected officials of the island of Montreal's suburban localities vigorously fought against their integration into the new City of Montreal. They argued that the social, cultural, and linguistic specificities of their inhabitants and institutions have to be protected and preserved. In fact, since the creation of new cities in the late 19th century, the fragmentation of identities in the metropolitan area has increased. At the same time, some institutional and economic actors claim that, given the contemporary globalizing forces, the region's future has never before so strongly depended on its capacity to mobilize resources and build social, political, and economic alliances and partnerships in order to increase the visibility of Greater Montreal on the world scene.

In 1999, the government of Quebec undertook a vast program aimed at restructuring local government throughout the province. It started with legislation imposing five mergers in the main urban areas of Quebec, Montreal and Hull in 2000. In the Montreal area, the municipal reform resulted in the creation of two mega cities (Montreal and Longueuil), which were added to the already amalgamated city of Laval; one by merging the 28 existing municipalities on the island of Montreal, and the other by amalgamating eight South Shore municipalities. The reform also created in 2000 the Montreal Metropolitan Community, which brings together elected officials from the 105 former municipalities, which became 64 after the mergers. Its members are responsible for tackling region-wide problems such as urban sprawl, economic development, and the planning of transit systems. Will these new projects and institutions provide the Montreal region with a new dynamism and give its inhabitants a regional sense of belonging? It is still difficult to predict the future of the Montreal region. However, one thing is certain: the contemporary challenges that the Montreal metropolitan region is facing have historical roots.

Part of the problem in defining the Montreal region is that it has always been considered as a city and not so much as a region. This partial vision of Montreal has affected its history, characterized by institutional fragmentation due to the creation of new suburban localities. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the debate concerning the appropriate scale needed to help resolve the tensions in the development of the city-region by redefining the analytical framework in urban history and urban geography. Firstly, we review how the Montreal metropolitan area has been examined in the fields of urban history and urban geography. Secondly, we present a brief historical overview of the different definitions that have been given to the Montreal region. Thirdly, we propose to give the concept of the "city-region" a central role in the analysis of the Montreal metropolitan area, in the context of an approach that calls upon both urban and environmental history.

Reviewing the History of the Montreal Metropolitan Area

The territory of the Montreal region has been the focus of the largest number of historical and geographical research studies in Quebec. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, geographer Raoul Blanchard provided an overview of the Montreal region in his works entitled Montreal, esquisse de geographie urbaine (1947) and L'Ouest du Canada Francais, Montreal et sa region (1953), a study of the Montreal Plain which also outlined the region's urban geography. Blanchard focussed on the industrial development of Montreal and its remarkable attractive power that drew families and workers from the surrounding rural plain. His studies did not, however, attempt to understand the nature of the links between the two types of spaces: agricultural and urban. Some years earlier, another geographer, Raymond Tanghe, had published two works on Montreal: Geographie humaine de Montreal in 1926, and Montreal in 1936. Although covering some aspects of the region's history, the perspective was that of a geographer more concerned with describing the Montreal reality than with understanding its development. These works were also published some time ago and have certain conceptual and thematic limitations.

Since the 1970s, several historical overviews have examined the history of Montreal without necessarily trying to understand the process involved in structuring a metropolitan region. Most of these works also concentrated on specific aspects of the Montreal environment. This is the case for Jean-Claude Marsan's study, published in 1974 and reissued 20 years later, Montreal en evolution, which is mainly concerned with the built environment. In Governing the island of Montreal, Andrew Sancton (1985) analysed the metropolitan political scene by examining the impacts of linguistic conflicts, relations, and divergences on the organization of local, social, and education services during the 1960s and 1970s. In his overview of Montreal's position within the continental and Canadian economy, Benjamin Higgins (1986) developed the idea of a possible rebirth of Montreal after its decline as the Canadian metropolis to the advantage of Toronto. However, Higgins' study does not specifically address the Montreal region per se, or its internal dynamics. The region is not precisely defined: the city, the island, the metropolitan statistical area, and the administrative region are used interchangeably depending on the topics addressed and, above all, on the availability of data. Paul-Andre Linteau's work, Histoire de Montreal depuis la Confederation (published in 1992 and reissued in 2000), chiefly focusses on the history of the central city since Confederation, although it readily evokes the context of the urban area in which the central city lies. In his Atlas historique de Montreal, Jean-Claude Robert (1994) expands both the temporal and spatial framework of his analysis. His work primarily examines urban development on the island of Montreal. More recently, researchers Annick Germain and Damaris Rose (2000) produced a monograph on Montreal highlighting the search for a metropolitan identity. These works mainly emphasize Montreal's role as a metropolis: its rise, its heyday, its rivalry with Toronto (and, briefly, its competition with Boston, New York and other large American urban centres), its decline to the lesser status of Quebec's metropolis after the Second World War and, finally, its claim to the status of the cultural and economic capital of Quebec.

These overviews take advantage of the fact that, in the past 30 years, the history of the city of Montreal (and to a lesser extent that of other central parts of the urban area) has been the subject of numerous works focussing on a variety of aspects. (3) Produced by historians, geographers, urbanists and specialists in various social sciences, this Montreal historiography generally falls into the North American tradition of urban history dominated by the approach of the Chicago school of sociology (Mohl 1998: 5-8) and, in practice, focusses its discussion and analysis primarily on the urban cure (especially the city of Montreal).

Conversely, in terms of this tradition of urban history which always starts from the "centre," the first overviews of regional history (Laurin 1989; Filion, Fortin, Viau and Lambert 2000), whose field of analysis covers a portion of the Montreal region, show little interest in the urban area, and even less in the central city. Studies on these"regions" generally ignore the centre and concentrate more on suburban areas' external ties with the rural periphery, recreational hinterlands or the satellite cities that forma ring around Montreal.

This brief review of Montreal monographs reveals that little research has been done on the influence of the city on the hinterland, the influence of the countryside on the city, or on the internal dynamics of the area around Montreal. Montreal's character or urban identity obviously depends, on the one hand, on the characteristics of its old neighbourhoods and suburbs and, on the other hand, on its status as a continental or regional metropolis; but it is clearly just as much the product of its intra-metropolitan experience. A better understanding of the historical background regarding the various definitions of the Montreal region can clarify some elements of the debate concerning the interpretation of the administrative limits.

What is the Montreal Metropolitan Region?

In a public opinion poll, everyone would be able to identify the Central Business District as the centre of the metropolitan region (although some prominent figures in the suburbs have disputed the importance of the Montreal downtown core). But very few people would be able to precisely define the region's contours and components, especially since, on a geophysical level, there are no clear barriers indicating its limits or perimeter. Situated in the southwest of the Province of Quebec, the region is centred around the Montreal archipelago and extends on either side of the St. Lawrence River within the Montreal Plain.

On a socioeconomic level, similar to the situation elsewhere in Canada and the United States, the definition on which most observers agree is the definition provided by the Canadian census. On the political, administrative and cultural levels, and on the historical level, however, there are many and often widely differing conceptions of the metropolitan region. Some observers recognize the census area as the territorial framework. Others look to a broader definition, in part based on the history of the political and administrative divisions that have marked this area of Quebec. But many argue for a much more limited definition of the Montreal metropolitan region.

The vigorous debate around the definition of the Montreal region is not a new phenomenon. The main issue is that since 1840 this territory has been subjected to an infinite number of divisions. These multiple political or administrative divisions, while facilitating the performance of certain tasks, have to some extent blurred the significance and identity of the metropolitan region. In other words, the divisions into counties and municipalities, dioceses and parishes, school, health and judicial districts, the countless regional directorates of various government departments, etc., have generated variable identifies that have historically marked and today cut across the Montreal area.

An analysis of the different institutional divisions shows that there is no consensus on the definition of the Montreal metropolitan region and no formal recognition of this region. The definition fluctuates between the area of the island of Montreal alone and a broader area that takes into account the urban network and the historical development of the Montreal Plain. Definition of the region is instead a focus of debate, and if, as Bender (1999) claims, the current period is marked by the emergence of a metropolitan citizenship, a phenomenon comparable to the development of an urban citizenship in the 1890s (which the reformist-progressive movement of the following decades made clear), we have to recognize that, in the case of Montreal, this metropolitan identity has not yet taken shape. It is instead fragmented into multiple senses of belonging, which do not always harmonize with one another.

In the 18th century, the colonial administration had in fact divided the territory of New France among the three governments of Quebec City, Trois-Rivieres and Montreal. Later, the District of Montreal (see Figure 1), within which the main elements of the administration of municipal, judicial, educational, diocesan, health, etc., matters were structured from 1830 to 1860, largely corresponded to the 1966 administrative region, except for some areas to the north, where the land had not yet been opened up.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In the contemporary period--that is, since 1941--the limits of the socioeconomic region have been provided by the definition of the census metropolitan area given in the Statistics Canada censuses. According to this federal body, a metropolitan region "is defined as an urban core surrounded by urban and rural fringes with which there is a strong degree of social and economic integration: the area thus defined is identified especially by daily commuting patterns" [our translation] (Foggin and Manzagol 2001 : 56). Defined with the help of measurements of population size and density and of the job market, radiating outwards from an urban core, the delimitation of a metropolitan region is likely to change from one census to the next (see Figure 2).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Until 1951, the census metropolitan area was mainly confined to the island of Montreal and a small fringe of Ile Jesus and the nearby South Shore (around the bridges). However, in the 1950s a continuous period of urban sprawl began that is still going on. By 1961, the census metropolitan area included all the main elements of the Montreal archipelago as well as the main nearby cities of the South Shore and small sections of the North Shore of the St. Lawrence.

Thirty years later, the region had grown significantly and now included all, or a large part of the territories of a dozen or so regional county municipalities, as well as the island of Montreal and Ile Jesus. In surface area, however, it was still one of the smallest metropolitan regions in North America. Although spread out, the Montreal region "still has a compact centre, where large housing and commercial projects, office towers and institutional complexes are concentrated. This compact form can be interpreted as a sign of vitality for the centre of the urban area" [our translation] (Senecal et al. 2000: 4). Moreover, agricultural activity is still closely interwoven with the urban region and the recreational hinterland begins only a few dozen kilometres from the centre.

There is, however, another contrasting view of the Montreal area that accords the region a far more extensive territory. Thus, during the setting up of administrative regions in 1966, the Quebec government recognized a Montreal administrative region that included the entire Montreal Plain and surrounding districts, in particular those stretching southwards right to the U.S. border (see Figure 3). On the one hand, this division was established mainly in reference to the theory of growth poles. The urban framework of Quebec and especially the urban network centred on Montreal were thus used as the prime analytical criterion. On the other hand, this division of the territory is to some extent in line with the old geographical divisions going back to the French colonial period.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

But there are clearly other possible definitions than the statistical definition of the Montreal metropolitan region. Although much prized by social science researchers, this definition of the Montreal area encounters, in practice, far more opposition than manifestations of interest. We can take as an indication of this the difficulty there has been in setting up a regional council at this spatial level. More than 10 years of debates, task forces and consultations have only resulted in the as-yet tentative establishment of a so-called strategic planning structure that has no independent political status. Many observers want to limit the region to the island of Montreal, or at least to the major urban core.

This is the case for suburban elites and elected officials in the second- and third-ring suburbs who, citing the emergence within the urban area of sub-centres competing with the downtown core (Collin 1998), are taking advantage of the regionalist movement that has taken root in the various administrative regions to turn their backs on the city of Montreal and, consequently, on the metropolitan region. For these individuals, the city and the suburbs are two different worlds, which are independent especially in terms of their characteristics and development prospects. This movement contributed to the fragmentation of the Montreal administrative region in 1987, which resulted in many people involved losing sight of the very notion of a metropolitan region (see Figure 4).

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

One variation of this stance sees the region as coinciding with the main urban core. Proponents of this view add the territory of Ile Jesus and the nearby South Shore to that of the Montreal Urban Community, which brings us back, more or less, to the territory of the 1951 census metropolitan area.

The debates on these issues in the 1990s, especially in the briefs presented to the various working groups or task forces, centred on two opposing conceptions of the Montreal region: the vision of an organic entity or of an aggregation of particularisms. For instance, in a first group of briefs submitted to the Task Force on Montreal and its Region in 1992, some authors called for an organic vision of the Montreal region. In particular, they firmly believe that the dynamism of the Central Business District is in any event the cornerstone for the regeneration and prosperity of the entire urban area. In the second group of briefs, political, economic and cultural elites of the "new suburbs" refused to recognize the CBD as the leading component of the metropolis. In their view, the concept of a "Greater Montreal Region" is used primarily to establish that the vitality of the metropolitan area is already and will increasingly be fostered by the "region" and gradually less by the central city. There is no longer a dominant district as is generally implied by the term "metropolitan." For these actors, the "Greater Montreal Region" is a collection of more or less prosperous partners, not an integrated whole.

But does the lack of a metropolitan identity and of administrative recognition mean that no specific region exists? In stepping back from the current debate, while simultaneously presenting a fresh outlook on the issues, the historical approach should provide us with some new answers to this question.

Reflections on Some of the Main Interpretations of the Concepts of Region, Metropolis and City-Region

What is the proper spatial framework for the study of the history of cities? Should urban historians focus more on cities and their hinterlands, in other words, on city-regions? Recently, these questions have attracted more attention within the field of urban history. Calls have been addressed to historians encouraging them to enlarge their field of inquiry in order to include the wider metropolitan community in their work on specific cities. Despite these repeated calls, few scholars have actually adopted this approach.

This concern for histories of cities and their hinterlands is not entirely new. Social scientists in economics and geography have analysed these relationships for a number of years. Renewed scholarly interest with regard to the regional settings of cities is the outcome of a fruitful encounter between the history of cities and environmental history. In the past 10 years or so, many scholars have called for histories of cities that are not limited to the political boundaries of the latter, but are instead sensitive to their areas of activities and relations with the spaces around them (Mohl 1998). This would mean going beyond studies of cities conducted in a vacuum, and instead to incorporate the history of the city and its hinterland--in short, to focus on city-regions. If few researchers have objected to such an approach, few have actually put it into practice, undoubtedly due to the problems posed by writing simultaneous histories of cities and their hinterlands?

The main stumbling block is clearly the problem of definitions. While it is relatively easy to define what a city is, it is hot so easy to define regions. If it is possible to define a region in a general sense, to conceive of it overall, problems arise as soon as one attempts to define its actual, physical boundaries (Muller 1989:183). The problem is that the notion of a region is variable and multifaceted (Deshaies 1994). The content of its definition varies significantly according to the user and the context. Depending on whether one refers to an administrative, geographic, cultural, economic or historical region, one will most often obtain a region delimited by different boundaries. How can we then succeed in defining a region? Should we not instead consider a region as the product of a series of relations, as the outcome of a process rather than a space defined by strict geographical boundaries? Several authors in fact tend to consider regions as abstract phenomena (Abbott 1987).

Rather than the concept of the region, which generally refers to broad economic and social phenomena, the concept of the city-region seems to us the most appropriate for studying the history of the city and its surrounding area. But this concept would not necessarily apply to all cities. The city-region would seem to be more like the outcome of a process through which a city succeeds in generating an urban region, as for example in the meaning given to this term by Jane Jacobs (1984). The terre city-region would thus apply to cities that, together with their immediate area of development, succeed in seizing the opportunities offered by, economic, technological and cultural revolutions.

In this sense, it is possible to link the concept of the city-region to that of the economic metropolis, as defined by the historian Norman S.B. Gras (1922), which historians still refer to today (Abbott 1987: 273; Muller 1989: 189). In his introductory work on economic history, Gras (1969) presents the emergence of the economic metropolis as corresponding to the ultimate stage of development of the western economy, the stage accompanying the birth of the modern state. He defines the role of the metropolis using three concepts. The concept of "external connectivity" refers to the role played by the metropolis as a link between the region in which it is located and other regions, as well as with the country as a whole. The metropolis is also the functional focus of the region, that is, it is the intermediary in the area of trade, communications and networks, a function that differentiates it from other cities of lesser importance within the region. Secondly, the metropolis is the place through which regional activities pass and that offers the most diversified range of services and goods. Gras terms this the concept of "regional integration." Finally, the pressures brought to bear by the growing metropolis also promote the development of the surrounding region and eventually its integration into the metropolis. This is the concept of "urban development," or the third major function performed by the metropolis.

Muller, in particular, uses these three concepts as a guide in analysing the process of economic and social change in the Pittsburgh region, or, more specifically, Western Pennsylvania (Muller 1989:184 ff). But, as he explains, the main problem with Gras' model is that it assigns a driving role in regional development only to the central city, with the populations in the hinterland and its institutions only accorded a passive role. Thus, although Gras recognizes the interdependence of the city and the hinterland in the context of the metropolitan economy, he does not give it a central role in his analysis. (5)

In Canadian studies on urban history and geography, the concept of the metropolis, and especially the concept of "metropolitanism," has also been used to understand the development of interactions between cities and their surrounding regions and, more generally, the history of Canada as a whole (McCann and Smith 1991). The metropolitan thesis was in fact largely developed as a Canadian alternative to the American frontier thesis after certain historians had shown that it was difficult to apply the latter north of the 49th parallel. The historian Maurice Careless (1954) offered the most complete analysis of the metropolitan thesis in the 1950s. (6) This thesis maintains that it is the largest cities, or in other words, metropolises, that, in relation to their hinterlands, have been the driving forces in Canada's economic development. In turn, the development of Canada as a whole is said to have been determined by its relationship with larger, internationally more important metropolises such as London and New York in particular. This thesis can be criticized for the passive role to which it limits hinterlands. Likewise, it has been criticized for making cities the main players, whereas it is in fact social actors and their networks that give meaning and direction to economic development and history (Davies 1985).

Whatever the case, what emerges from the large majority of the studies is that the concept of the city-region is much more akin to an area of relations than to a fixed geographic space. As geographer Robert E. Dickinson (1964) explains, it is the sum of "areas of functional association with the city" that defines the city-region. The city-region would correspond to the historically built-up area in which a constellation of areas of influence has developed that do not necessarily have relations with one another but that do have as a common denominator their dependence on the central city. Dickinson defines four major processes at work, which coexist, mutually influence one another, and allow us to define the space of the city-region, the perimeter or boundaries of which do not correspond to a clear line on a geographic map but rather to a sort of halo. These processes consist of the network of trade relations, social relations, population movement and of the impact of the central city on land uses. The model Dickinson proposes is ultimately based on a dynamic vision of both the city and its surrounding area: "We must now seek to evaluate both the city and its region ... in terms of their mutual relations and in the light of their historical development" (Dickinson 1964:228-229).

In all the studies, however, the economic aspect clearly dominates. We must turn to the analyses of Donald W. Meinig (1965, 1972 and 2000) in order to add cultural characteristics to this economically oriented definition. Meinig, who has studied the development of the western United States, looks to the notion of a "cultural region" to grasp regional dynamics. He maintains in particular that this part of the United States is the result of the development of six regions starting in the early 19th century, each of which had a particular city as its epicentre. In order to analyse these regions, Meinig takes four main factors into account: population in terms of size and distribution, circulation within and between regions, political areas defining basic territorial jurisdictions, and culture, seen as the sum of certain specific features of local societies that give a particular character to the region. Thus, for Meinig, a region is never static on the territorial level and should be considered in its historical, cultural and environmental richness.

Similarly, Raymond D. Gastil (1975) conducted a study of various regions of the United States based on a cultural definition of these regions and an analysis of population movements within these regions. The study of a cultural region first consists of a historical analysis of migratory movements at various stages, from settlement of the areas by European populations, to interregional movements, the migration of rural populations to the cities and the movement of city-dwellers to the suburbs. It is also based on the conviction that it is individuals who shape regions and give them their distinctive features, far more than geographic or economic factors alone. (7) Some authors may have been criticized for giving little attention to actors in their studies on regions, which chiefly focus on the geographic and economic context (Davies 1985). However, an approach that pays equally little attention to the context in its emphasis on the actors is likely to overlook key questions such as the impact of the environment on individuals and the way these individuals use the environment.

The sociologist Fernand Harvey (1996:113) also took a primarily cultural approach to the region in his series of monographs on the regional history of Quebec. He considers regions first and foremost as subjective entities whose boundaries are likely to change over rime: "regional divisions are not the result of objective or absolute criteria but ... ultimately ensue from a representation" [our translation]. (8) Regions are seen as the product of specific historical factors, of political and administrative divisions, and also of representations of the spaces in which social groups live.

In short, regions, and therefore city-regions, should be seen as spaces that are shaped and their analysis considered in terms of terminus ad quem (point of arrival) rather than origo a qua (point of departure), to use Dickinson's formulation. And as this geographer went on to say: "Regionalization and the discovery of principles of regionalization are research objectives in themselves" (Dickinson 1964:8). Writing the history of a city-region thus means writing the history of a "problem." It means considering city-regions as processes, as the products of various developments, interrelations and exchanges that occur there. As spaces with shifting boundaries, city-regions represent constructs, at once the products of administrative divisions, natural elements, economic, social and cultural activities, and representations generated by all these factors.

Beyond the works of geographers and economists, the analyses developed in recent years by specialists in environmental history also testify to a dynamic conception of city-regions. In particular, the call by certain historians of the city for scholars to bring together urban and environmental history suggests some interesting research avenues in this area (Rosen and Tarr 1994; Hays 1998; Tarr 2000). Because it immediately raises the issue of relations between populations and their environments, this type of approach centres not only on the question of the city's relations with its hinterland but also on the question of their reciprocity, with these two components ideally taken into account in the analysis. Rosen and Tarr (1994:301) look to four aspects underlying this approach: analysis of the impact of urban development on the natural environment; analysis of the impact of the natural environment on the city; the study of society's reactions to environmental changes and methods used to control or reduce problems posed by the environment; and finally, the study of the built environment and its place and role in social change.

This perspective is also emphasized by Hays (1998) in his essay on the meeting of the history of urbanization and the history of the environment. He underscores the impacts of cities on the countryside, and especially the gradual submission of the countryside which, over time, becomes the provider of food for the city, a place for setting up a secondary residence, for practising various types of "urban" recreational activities, for dumping the city's solid and liquid waste, etc. He is therefore interested in changes in the rural environment caused by all these urban and suburban intrusions. For Hays, the history of the city is hot complete and fails to realize its full potential unless historians do not limit their studies to the area of the city alone, but also focus on the urban-rural environment of which the city is a part.

Although Hays' article does not raise the issue of the influence of the countryside on the city, most historical research studies which adopt an environmental perspective recommend a central role be given in urban history to the process of dialectical interdependence between city and nature, between urban and rural spaces (Cronon, 1991 ; Linder and Zacharias 1999). In this sense, this call for an integrated analysis of the urban-rural context is akin to that of proponents of the concept of the city-region, where the city and its nearby hinterland are in dialectical interdependence.

Conclusion

The delimitation and definition of a region are simultaneously the result of administrative and political divisions, natural elements, economic, social and cultural activities, and representations generated by all these factors, not to mention their particular method of developing and interacting depending on the time period in question. Since the definition of a region results from the superposition of a series of factors, it is difficult to analyse each one on its own.

More sensitive to the regional settings of urban development, recent studies in the fields of urban and environmental history have shown the value of adopting an approach capable of renewing our understanding of the urban dynamics, and particularly to highlight the intra-metropolitan experience, which has been much neglected to date. Clearly, the rate of the periphery and hinterlands is important in telling a story about a city-region. If urban history is to produce inclusive narratives, its stories must balance the destiny of the various hinterlands (recreational, industrial, rural) with that of the central city. Furthermore, the history of cities and urbanized regions needs to become more closely related to the history of ecosystems, which at the moment are too often analysed for their intrinsic natural features (geomorphology, fauna and flora): where the urban reality is in force, nature disappears; where nature predominates, the urban reality is overshadowed.

Supplanting the history of a city with one of the city-region appears to be an appropriate research strategy in the Montreal case where the contesting definitions of the region have led to a clear separation between the history of the central city and its regional or metropolitan settings. Looking back at the history of its various components and at the forces and tensions that have affected this particular region could represent the most effective approach to provide a clear reflection on Montreal's metropolitan dynamics. Based on historicity, this approach could well provide some useful insight into the ongoing debate on regionalism that tends to be engulfed in short-sighted, biassed considerations.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ms. Evelyn Lindhorst who did the translation from French.

Notes

(1.) An earlier version of this paper was presented in April 2001 at the Urban Affairs Annual Meeting in Detroit, Michigan.

(2.) "se situe dans la zone periurbaine du Grand Montreal et non pas dans la zone urbaine de celui-ci, constituant de ce fait un territoire affranchi de la dynamique urbaine de Montreal." Table des prefets et des maires de la Couronne Nord / Council of North Shore elected officials and mayors, Memoire de la Table des prefets et des maires de la Couronne Nord, depose a madame Louise Harel, ministre d'Etat aux Affaires municipales et a la Metropole, 2000, 7.

(3.) For an overview see J. Burgess et al., 1992 and C. Poitras, 2000.

(4.) The new series "Metropolitan Portraits," edited by Judith A. Martin and published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, is aimed at describing North American urban regions. Two books have been published: Sam Bass Warner, Jr, Greater Boston. Adapting Regional Traditions to the Present (2001) and Carl Abbott, Greater Portland. Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest (2001).

(5.) "It is true that ... we are inclined to emphasize the great metropolitan center; but to forget the large dependent district would be fatal to a correct understanding of the subject ... Interdependence of the parts is really the key to the whole situation" (Gras 1969:187).

(6.) "[it] implies the emergence of a city of outstanding size to dominate not only its surrounding countryside but other cities and their countrysides, the whole area being organized by the metropolis, through control of communications, trade, and finance, into one economic and social unit that is focussed on the metropolitan 'center of dominance' and through it trades with the world" (Careless 1954:79).

(7.) "[...] the fundamental lesson of history is that different people make different uses of the same environment, and that people use the material goods rather than the other way around" (Gastil 1975: 26).

(8.) "tout decoupage regional n'est pas le resultat de criteres objectifs ou absolus mais ... decoule finalement d'une representation" (Harvey 1996:113).

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Jean-Pierre Collin, Michele Dagenais and Claire Poitras

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Universite de Montreal