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Mad Cows,
Regional Governance,
and Urban Sprawl
Path Dependence and Unintended
Consequences in the Calgary Region
Geoff Ghitter
Alan Smart
University of Calgary
History matters. Inspired by evolutionary approaches in economics and, more
recently, economic geography, the authors present, through the lens of a
slaughterhouse development on the city’s fringe, a historical model of urban
development in the metropolitan region of Calgary, Canada. Their analysis
shows how an unanticipated system shock conditioned by strong historical
differences in the political and economic aspirations of adjacent urban and
rural jurisdictions manifested at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Their
narrative explores the intertwined evolutionary trajectories of five key system
elements whose pathways converged in 2004, resulting in unintended, and
from a regional environmental perspective, undesirable, consequences.
Keywords: path dependence; regional relations; evolutionary urban
geography; unintended consequences
Cities are among the most complex of human artefacts. Managing them
in a period of technological and global institutional changes is daunting.
As urban activity spills past jurisdictional boundaries, the challenge is amplified.
Urban Affairs Review
Volume 44 Number 5
May 2009 617-644
© 2009 SAGE Publications
10.1177/1078087408325257
http://uar.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
617
Authors’ Note: This research has been supported by an Alberta Prion Research Institute–
funded project titled “TSEs and Socioeconomic Impact in Alberta” (Josephine Smart, P.I.) and
a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Major Collaborative Research Initiative
titled “Multilevel Governance and Canadian Municipalities (Robert Young, P.I.). This article
has benefited from the advice of a variety of people, including Chris Leo, Byron Miller, Paul
Plummer, Josephine Smart, Ian MacLachlan, Ivan Townshend, Melanie Rock, Robert Young,
Emma Stewart and Max Foran. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers who provided important
insights and feedback that helped us improve the manuscript. Technical assistance was pro-
vided by Elly Carlson, Anne Rainville, and Renee Mak; original cartography is by Shawn
Mueller with thanks to the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary.
We present a case study of a city that is better positioned than most to han-
dle these challenges. Calgary, with a population of 1 million, has an unusu-
ally low level of fragmentation and is one of the foremost examples in
North America of uni-city urban governance; 91.56% of the population in
the metropolitan region are contained within the City of Calgary. Calgary
is also the fastest-growing large city in Canada (a 12.4% increase between
2001 and 2006; see Table 1). With the highest per capita income among
large Canadian cities, Calgary has resources for managing its problems that
slow-growth or declining cities might not. Despite these advantages, polit-
ical changes have resulted in these two characteristics increasingly coming
into conflict. Calgary’s ability to annex land to contain all new urban devel-
opment and plan for its growth corridors decades in advance was curtailed
after 1994. Neighboring rural municipalities have since promoted subdivi-
sions and other urban uses without coordinating with Calgary’s develop-
ment plans, resulting in escalating regional tensions.
In May 2003, “crisis” responses by the Alberta provincial government to
the emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) enflamed a
long-standing dispute between rural and urban jurisdictions. Provincial
programs to assist the beef industry included the promotion of new meat
packing facilities to reduce reliance on live-animal exports. Conflict over
the construction of a new beef processing facility in northeast Calgary
reflects the historical forces structuring the city and its hinterland, with con-
sequences that are still unfolding in unintended, unforeseen, and for some,
undesirable ways. Political opposition within the city encouraged the pro-
moters to move the project seven hundred meters to the neighboring
Municipal District of Rocky View (MDRV). Urban/rural relations were
tested when a deal between the City of Calgary and MDRV to extend exist-
ing infrastructure to the new facility could not be reached because the terms
were seen by rural politicians as an attempt by the city to retain urban con-
trol over development in rural municipalities. Instead, to the dismay of
urban politicians, MDRV set out to develop its own independent water and
wastewater infrastructure.
Outcomes of social, political, economic, and environmental processes
can be better understood by investigating the impact of decisions and events
early in the system’s history and relating how these have enabled or con-
strained subsequent actions. Cumulatively, these decisions and events lead
to particular, locally contingent configurations of sociospatial relations that
coevolve through a dialectical process with other elements of natural and
urban systems. Past political and economic action become sedimentary lay-
ers of contemporary urban landscapes, political institutions, and social
618 Urban Affairs Review
619
Table 1
Comparison of Canada’s 10 Largest CMAs: Population Growth and Jurisdictional Fragmentation, 2001–2006
CMA City Fragmentation
Name (No. of Population Growth Rate Population Growth Rate % of CMA in % of CMA in
CSDs in CMA)aPopulation +/– 2001–2006 2001–2006 Population +/– 2001–2006 2001–2006 largest CSD next 5 largest CSDs
Toronto (23) 5,113,149 430,252 9.2 2,503,281 21,787 0.9 48.96 34.59
Montréal (89) 3,635,571 184,544 5.3 1,620,693 37,103 2.3 44.58 23.11
Vancouver (23) 2,116,581 129,616 6.5 578,041 32,370 5.9 27.31 46.47
Ottawa–Gatineau (11) 1,130,761 62,961 5.9 812,129 38,057 4.9 71.82 26.02
Calgary (8) 1,079,310 127,816 13.4 988,193 109,190 12.4 91.56 8.25
Edmonton (32) 1,034,945 97,100 10.4 730,372 64,268 9.6 70.57 20.06
Québec (24) 715,515 28,946 4.2 491,142 14,812 3.1 68.64 7.13
Winnipeg (10) 694,668 18,074 2.7 633,451 13,907 2.2 91.19 6.65
Hamilton (3) 692,911 30,510 4.6 504,559 14,291 2.9 72.82 27.18
London (8) 457,720 22,120 5.1 352,395 15,856 4.7 76.99 21.3
Source: Statistics Canada (2007).
Note: CMA =Census metropolitan area; CSD =Census subdivision.
a. Excluding First Nation or treaty lands.
structures. Although the past does not determine the future, it does make
particular directions easier to pursue. This conditioning of human action is
known as path dependence. Although the easiest course is not always fol-
lowed, great effort is required to shift from the beaten path. Shaping new
paths requires understanding the tendencies toward particular paths to
“keep the path from kicking back in” (Torfing 1999; Garud and Karnøe
2001). Our examination of how the historical geography of the Calgary
region conditioned the course of the Rancher’s Beef land-use dispute sheds
light on these spatial sedimentations.
An Evolutionary Approach to Urban Change
The complexity of an urban region creates difficulties in explaining its
transformative processes. As the context within which urban managers must
navigate becomes larger in scale, less controllable, and less predictable, the
relationship between the intentions of decision makers and the outcomes of
their decisions becomes even less certain than it had been in the past.
Unintended consequences seem more common than effective policy imple-
mentation. In this context, the application of ideas from the field of evolution-
ary economics seems attractive (Boschma and Frenken 2006; Martin and
Sunley 2006; Plummer and Sheppard 2006). Urban historians and other
urban scholars have concentrated on urban transformation over time, for
example, in the way that the location of past streetcar lines have continuing
impact on urban forms after they have disappeared (Warner 1962). There has,
however, always been tension between seeing particular cases as unique and
generalizations about the direction of change, ranging from the loss of com-
munity to the Chicago school of urban ecology to Marxian conflict analyses
to postmodernist accounts. Evolutionary approaches offer perspectives that
acknowledge the uniqueness and contingency of particular cases while gen-
erating insights that go beyond the idiosyncratic.
The basic insight in an evolutionary approach is that how and why insti-
tutions change over time are critical considerations in assessing the current
state of affairs in a system and its potential. In other words, the evolution-
ary trajectory of the system plays a vital role in determining its future:
history matters (David 1985). Path dependence refers to the idea that events
in a system’s past are critical in determining its present and the range of
options available for future evolution (Pierson 2000a).
Martin and Sunley (2006) define the key characteristic of path depen-
dence as the inability of a system to shake free of its own history. Due to
620 Urban Affairs Review
this, options chosen at crucial moments in the system’s past have a dispro-
portionate influence in shaping its future because they exclude other futures
that might have ensued with alternative choices. A new set of critical issues,
each with a range of alternatives, emerges unpredictably as the system
evolves. As a recursive process, the consequences of these new choices—
such as the persistence of the QWERTY typewriter keyboard despite its
supposed inferiority to other systems—constrain future options, and so on
(David 1985; Greener 2002).
Martin and Sunley (2006, 400–1) identify three key features of path
dependence. First, small, historically contingent “accidents” can have pro-
found long-term effects on future pathways. Second, “early decisions rever-
berate through history, closing alternative paths and validating a particular
path, with the implications that the outcomes need not be rational or optimal.”
In contrast to neoclassical economics, which is concerned with demonstrat-
ing how the economy “tends ineluctably towards a unique ex ante equilib-
rium state,” there is “no inevitability of economic outcome or outcome that is
independent of history or context” (Martin and Sunley 2006, 401). Third,
they focus on technological “lock-in,” the idea that the reinforcing effects of
complementarity and compatibility of technology, economies of scale, and
the quasi irreversibility of investments (the inertia of sunk costs) create a sit-
uation that encourages reinvestment in existing pathways.
To date, evolutionary approaches have been integrated into economic
geography more than in urban studies. While this might be because cities
are much more complex than keyboards or even markets, this very com-
plexity makes the approach fruitful. This study illustrates features of path-
dependent systems by examining how intertwined evolution of distinct
components of the sociospatial dialectic fuse to enable an apparently anom-
alous result. Path dependency helps explain the tendency of complex sys-
tems to produce unintended consequences that, in our study, frustrated the
best efforts of urban managers and planners. A city is not simply on a sin-
gle constrained path, but is a confluence of many distinct causal chains and
beaten paths, resulting in interactions that are difficult to predict even if
they can in hindsight be seen as following the paths of least resistance.
While the origin of evolutionary approaches in economics has resulted in
most attention being paid to market processes, path dependence can be
applied to any institution at any scale. In particular, we have had to pay
greater attention to spatial aspects normally assumed away by economists
operating theoretically on a frictionless plain. To contextualize our case study,
we show how the original cartographic representation of the city seeded its
subsequent layout and was a factor in the production of a spatiality of
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 621
disamenities. The contemporary controversy over a new beef slaughter-
house demonstrates how the trajectory of operations in the beef industry,
suddenly confronted with a system shock, left it ill equipped to weather tur-
bulent changes to the status quo. Economic decisions taken early in the evo-
lution of Calgary’s urban form had unintended sociospatial outcomes that
influenced public response to the slaughterhouse. Path dependence analy-
sis arose from the attempt to explain implausible events, such as the persis-
tence of the QWERTY keyboard. Our case study also seeks to explain an
implausible outcome: how was it that an expensive infrastructure system,
which duplicated an existing system and promoted what were, to many,
unwanted forms of development, came to be built despite being the least
efficient, most costly alternative among an array of potential options?
Background: From Mad Cows to Urban Sprawl
In the spring of 2006, MDRV, a rural municipality surrounding the city
of Calgary, Alberta, on three sides, completed construction of a 42-km
wastewater pipeline from Balzac to Langdon following a route deliberately
skirting the city’s northern and eastern perimeter (Figure 1).1At CDN$40
million, the pipeline was seen by many as economically inefficient, as it
duplicated existing capacity that could be provided at a small fraction of the
cost. Moreover, to pay for the pipeline, MDRV would actively promote new
development on the city’s fringe, a plan, according to Calgary’s mayor, that
promoted environmentally unsound “rural sprawl” and unduly constrained
the city’s long-term planning capability and growth corridors.
The sequence of events leading to the construction of the pipeline was
unknowingly sparked in May 2003, when BSE was discovered in an
Alberta cow. The consequences of BSE were devastating to the Canadian
beef industry, concentrated mainly in Alberta. Overnight borders world-
wide closed to finished beef exports, and the most significant fraction of the
industry, the shipment of live cattle to the United States, ceased. The result-
ing pileup of live cattle in Alberta feedlots provoked crisis responses by
both industry and government, focusing principally on an apparent shortfall
of domestic slaughter capacity (Fairbairn and Gustafson 2005, 3). One such
response was a proposal by Rancher’s Beef Ltd. (RB), a syndicate of entre-
preneurial ranchers and investors, to construct a slaughterhouse/packing
operation in Calgary’s northeast industrial zone (Figure 2, inset). That spot
was chosen mainly, according to RB, to be close to its most important labor
market (comprising primarily foreign workers and recent immigrants)
located in nearby residential neighborhoods. Despite abundant public
622 Urban Affairs Review
sympathy and “patriotic” support (Smart et al. 2006) for the beef industry
early in the BSE crisis, when RB officially announced its plans in March
2004, a vocal NIMBY movement, rooted in the politics of neighborhood
community associations, quickly catalyzed. Due to the imminence of trien-
nial municipal elections looming that October, the slaughterhouse issue
endowed the protestors with greater political leverage than they might oth-
erwise have had. Thus political considerations in an election year led RB to
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 623
Figure 1
Calgary Region, Showing the Wastewater Pipeline
and Adjacent Municipal Districts
624 Urban Affairs Review
Figure 2
Spatial Relations of Original Stockyards, Wind Direction,
and Calgary’s Subsequent Industrial Development
reconsider its options. In August 2004, under increasing pressure to get the
project under way and with fears that because of political pressure Calgary
City Council would deny its rezoning application, RB announced it was
moving to MDRV at a site less than 1 km from the original proposed loca-
tion inside Calgary city limits (Figure 2). This move stifled political oppo-
sition but produced other problems. No municipal utility infrastructure
capable of servicing the packing plant yet existed. For MDRV, there were
only two options: to make a deal with Calgary to extend city infrastructure
or to build a system of its own.
At one time, industrial development of this kind neither would nor could
have been approved in MDRV without cooperation from the city. However,
in 1995, changes to provincial legislation curbed Calgary’s power to control
regional urban development by transferring subdivision approval authority
from the urban-oriented Regional Planning Commissions (RPC; abolished
in the same legislation) to individual municipalities (Elder 1996). Similarly,
taxation revenue derived from local development, which under regional
planning had flowed to cities (as the primary provider of regional urban
infrastructure), was redirected to local government. In response, in an
attempt to maintain some control over regional development and to protect
its long-term growth corridors, the city instituted a policy of not extending
urban infrastructure for urban uses to rural areas. In 1995, a period of low
growth, this had not been as important an issue, but times had changed. In
2004, Calgary, as the administrative nexus of the Canadian oil industry, had
been in an almost-decade-long economic boom driven by high world
energy prices. The intense economic activity this generated fueled power-
ful forces in real estate markets, equating to soaring demand for residen-
tial, commercial, and industrial development. This activity has flooded
across jurisdictional boundaries into adjacent land-rich, infrastructure poor,
tax-hungry rural municipalities. But in 2004, rural municipalities were no
longer bound by the dictates of regional planning, as they had been prior to
1995, and were free to develop when and where they chose. With an aggres-
sive development agenda already on record (Municipal District of Rocky View
No. 44 2004; McCormick and Hope 2006), the timing of the BSE crisis was
an unintended boon for MDRV because it provided a perfect reason to opt to
build its own infrastructure (thereby locking in the preferred trajectory of
ambitious development) instead of cooperating with Calgary. Now many
lucrative residential and commercial “concept plans” already approved could
be implemented. Adding to this good timing was that the provincial govern-
ment, eager to be seen actively responding to the BSE crisis, became a de facto
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 625
partner to MDRV in promoting the packing plant. Not only did the province
contribute 20% of the pipeline’s construction costs; it also furnished political
support to MDRV in its battles with Calgary over regional development.
The discovery of BSE in May 2003 sparked an unlikely series of events that
culminated with the construction of a beef packing plant, and a wastewater
pipeline to service it, three years later; but BSE was not the cause. Instead, the
chance timing of BSE with an oil-driven development boom, political dynam-
ics in an election year, and the recent retooling of provincial legislation led to
an expanded range of possible regional outcomes. Furthermore, the beef
industry, dealing with a system shock for which it was unprepared and bound
within a historical urban matrix it had significantly helped to shape (discussed
below), provided MDRV an opening to further its aggressive development
agenda when it relocated from the “city” to the “country.”
Path Dependence
The right to control land development has been at the heart of
rural/urban conflict in Alberta (Bettison et al. 1975). The RB case provides
a lens to view the confluence of development processes with roots entan-
gled throughout history. The case is set amid conflict between urban and
rural municipalities over land development rights, over the control of water
resources, over the location of noxious industrial facilities, and over the
reaction of citizens (Lake 1993).
There are five key elements that we consider as context:
1. the influence of the local physical geography on human perceptions and
subsequent locational choices,
2. the historical geography of the beef industry and its role in shaping the
sociospatial configuration of the modern city,
3. the influence of the oil industry on local development,
4. regional planning regimes and their influence in shaping rural/urban
duality, and
5. a newly emerging political geography of water.
The intersection of these elements pervades Calgary’s history. Once the
physical features of the city became entrenched as the built environment, a
process of positive feedback was initiated whereby subsequent generations
of capitalist investment accumulated in path-dependent ways that perpetu-
ated the same uneven configuration of sociospatial relations it had created.
626 Urban Affairs Review
Physical Geography
Ice, Wind, and Water
Ten thousand years ago, the Calgary area lay in the contact zone
between two great glacial forces. The contact line between these two glacial
fronts cut a north-south trajectory along the eastern front of the Rocky
Mountains. As the climate warmed, vast rivers of melting water rushed
southward along the contact zone, carving out a large channel. Today, part
of that ancient watercourse is the site of the Calgary’s primary north-south
freeway: Deerfoot Trail. The Deerfoot vertically bisects the city into sec-
tions that have distinctive social-economic landscapes and dramatically
contrasting environmental histories. Deerfoot Trail is both a physical bar-
rier, separating the city into east and west, and an invisible curtain, segre-
gating the city into distinct socioeconomic quadrants (Figure 1). This brief
sketch of Calgary’s geologic past is intended to illustrate the way locally
contingent circumstances can unpredictably condition the evolution of
place-centered socioeconomic forces. This is not to say that some other
equally contingent reality could not have emerged. Rather, the point is to
give weight to the notion that path dependence is not only an economic or
a political process (Pierson 2004; David 2007) but also an inherently spa-
tial process (Boschma and Frenken 2006; Martin and Sunley 2006).
A second contingent aspect of Calgary’s physical geography relevant to
this study is the city’s proximity to the Rocky Mountains and, hence, to
strong westerly winds that blow year round. In winter, these winds, called
Chinooks, are much warmer than the local air mass, resulting in instances
when air temperature can rise by 20°C or more inside one hour. These con-
sistent westerlies played a central role in the spatial choices that were to set
the initial path trajectories of Calgary’s evolutionary spatial development in
motion. A third contingent aspect of the local geography is water. Both eco-
logically and economically, access to and control over water resources had
a significant impact on the spatial evolution of the metropolitan region.
Particularly in light of a recently announced, permanent moratorium on
new water allocations from local river systems, the political economy of
water has emerged as a key factor that will influence future regional devel-
opment. Once imagined as an abundant resource, city managers are now
being confronted with water scarcity as the new reality.
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 627
Embedding Path Dependence: Beef and Oil
The Beef Industry and City Form
As early as 1887, rancher-entrepreneurs operating around Calgary were
struggling, similarly to our case, to create a vertically and horizontally inte-
grated beef industry (Klassen 1999; Foran 2004). A 1900 survey of
Calgary’s industrial base showed three packing plant operations, a soap
works, a tannery, a pork packing plant, a cold storage works, and a brew-
ery, illustrating Calgary’s long relationship with the beef industry (Foran,
Foran, and Balcers 1982, 106–7; Klassen 1999).
Although the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers had always been
a traditional meeting place of indigenous people, the location of the city
was due to its selection by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), in 1874, as
a townsite and maintenance repair depot along the new national railroad.
Despite pressure to locate the passenger train station in the part of Section
14 (Figure 2) lying east of the Elbow River, where a ramshackle assortment
of makeshift structures, owned mostly by land speculators and profiteers,
already stood, the railway chose to locate its central passenger station on
land it already owned in Section 15, three quarters of a mile to the west
(Foran, Foran, and Balcers 1982, Figure 2). This initial decision had an
important influence on the city’s subsequent spatial configuration. For
example, it dictated where future industrial development would be located,
which in turn had a direct influence on the spatial evolution of the city’s res-
idential and commercial spaces.
With the train station and associated downtown business agglomerations
located west of the Elbow, the finger of land between the two rivers became
the CPR’s primary industrial staging yards (Figure 2). Proximity to rail trans-
port was a primary economic consideration in the location of stockyards.
Since the CPR had a monopoly on the early stockyard operations (Foran
2004), that area attracted the city’s burgeoning stockyard and packing plant
facilities (Klassen 1999; MacLachlan and Townshend 2003/2004). This
also, unofficially, demarcated the original eastern boundary of the city. This
was not so much because the Deerfoot corridor and the high ground to the
east marked a logical and natural geographic constraint to urban develop-
ment, although they did, but because the prevailing westerly winds resulted
in a fetid downwind odor shed that made the zone to the east of the stock-
yards much more conducive to industrial than to residential development.
In consequence, Calgary’s industrial expansion for over a century has con-
centrated along the north-south extent of the Deerfoot that has expanded in
628 Urban Affairs Review
concert with city growth. While the natural features of the landscape sug-
gested a geographic logic for the city, it was the location, first of the rail-
way and then of the stockyards, that set the trajectory governing the
evolution of spatial patterns of industrial development.
During the early history of the city, commercial zones and middle- and
upper-class residential districts were located west of the Elbow River, while
industrial zones and the lower- and working-class residential districts were
located to the east of the river. Cheap hotels near the stockyards sprang up
with rooms to service tradesmen. Their ethnic and blue-collar character and
the shenanigans associated with the east Calgary hotel trade combined to
create a perception of eastern city spaces as both tough and dangerous.
Moreover, the location of Calgary’s “sporting houses” north of the Bow
along Nose Creek enhanced east Calgary’s bawdy reputation.
Cheaper land prices ensured that urban neighbourhoods inevitably did
locate on land east of the stockyards. Protosettlements appeared as early as
1908, when land speculators, hoping to cash in on a development boom,
tried to entice investors. By 1913, the market had collapsed, while the bulk
of the property east of the Bow River remained unsold. The end of the
boom, followed closely by World War I, stifled growth until the late 1920s.
It was not until the 1930s that development would finally expand to this
area. Growth would not recover fully until after World War II.
Forest Lawn, one of a number of hamlets to appear on the prairie east
of Calgary during this period, incorporated as a village in 1934. By the
1950s, several small settlements coalesced to form the Town of Forest
Lawn. The location of the town’s major intersection less than 5 km east of
the Calgary stockyards virtually guaranteed lower property values there.
Yet despite a lack of infrastructure, which the town was too poor to pro-
vide, the preference for home ownership ensured continuing growth of
blue-collar residential neighborhoods on Calgary’s urban fringe (Bettison
et al. 1975). Meanwhile, the negative image of east Calgary, the cheaper
land prices that resulted and the lack of a significant industrial tax base
that could provide revenue to fund other urban services like sewer and
water, had “locked in” the perception and the reality that Forest Lawn was
destined to be a low-rent, low-regarded bedroom community. Ironically, it
was precisely this style of low-quality, periurban developments, and the
problems they created for the growth plans of Calgary and Edmonton, that
had prompted the province to first convene the McNally Royal
Commission in 1954 (discussed below).
After Forest Lawn was amalgamated with the City of Calgary in 1962
(following recommendations in the McNally Commission’s final report),
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 629
conditions improved. Although modern urban infrastructure was extended
to Forest Lawn as part of the amalgamation agreement, this did not elimi-
nate place-based social stigma associated with east Calgary, nor did it alter
the historic sociospatial forces that had originally influenced the area’s
development and reinforced them with succeeding generations of spatially
targeted industrial investment. In consequence, east Calgary has remained
the preferred location for industrial growth as well as the primary destina-
tion for working class and, more recently, ethnic residential migration.
These same forces earmarked east Calgary as the choice destination for the
RB plant, which incited aggrieved reactions from local residents tired of the
negative effects on property values resulting from industrial development.
The choice of location by RB resulted from a century of self-reinforcing
economic feedback that structured the spatial configuration of the city. The
primary reason RB chose to locate in the northeast was to be close to its work-
force. The working-class ethnic workers it sought were found there because
east Calgary housing prices were more affordable. Lower house prices, in turn,
were the result of a lower-quality physical environment and a deeply
engrained social stigma, which both had their genesis with the original choices
by the CPR for their industrial activities and through specific government poli-
cies that inhibited the development of anything but working-class residential
development (Foran 2008). These economic choices were both enabled and
bounded by the physical geography of the site, which led first to its choice as
a settlement site and then later to the real and perceived inequities of the dis-
tribution of risks and amenities in the urban arena.
Boom and Bust in an Oil Economy
The oil industry has dictated the overall pace of investment and develop-
ment in the Calgary region. The discovery of oil in 1947 transformed the
economic, political, and social dynamics of Calgary and the province.
Economic development in the region has been highly reliant on the vagaries
of world energy markets. Boom or bust in the Alberta oil industry has sim-
ilarly been the primary force in setting the pace of urban development and
rural land conversion (Climenhaga 1997).
Following 1947, there was a prolonged period of growth as the magni-
tude of the oil potential in Alberta became evident. This growth continued
unabated until the 1970s oil shock catapulted the economy into a new
period of even more intense growth. This spurt lasted until the 1980s,
when new federal energy policy, followed by a precipitous drop in world
energy prices, initiated a drastic turndown. The decline in oil-related
630 Urban Affairs Review
activity resulted in a severe downturn in commercial and residential real
estate markets.
After a tumultuous decline in oil prices in 1986, the provincial govern-
ment was in dire political straits. The charismatic Alberta premier, Peter
Lougheed, who was the local hero of the province’s epic battle against the
federal government over provincial autonomy and the National Energy
Program earlier in the decade, had retired in 1985. His less compelling
successor, Don Getty, was the premier when the crisis broke. After barely
retaining power in the 1989 provincial election (considered a defeat in
light of Alberta’s history of massive government majorities), Getty was
forced to resign. In 1992, Ralph Klein, the populist former mayor of
Calgary, was elected party leader based on a neoliberal platform of fiscal
austerity, conservative values, and a commitment for smaller government
through devolution of power to lower levels of government and individu-
als and through the market.
One target for cost cutting was the system of regional planning, which
had governed municipal and regional development. Not only was there
less development owing to the economic downturn, but the philosophy
behind regional planning ran contrary to the new philosophical goals of
decentralization and downloading of authority. Consequently, one of the
first major pieces of legislation enacted by the Klein government was the
1995 Municipal Government Act (MGA), which fundamentally altered
the structure of planning power. This legislation empowered MDRV to act
with new confidence in its development battles with the City of Calgary.
The connection between global energy markets and rural/urban develop-
ment battles is that not only do oil prices drive increasing demand for
urban development when they are high, but they can also spark negative
outcomes when low.
Regional Planning and Urban/Rural Conflict
Geographies of Power: Regional Planning
and Urban Supremacy, 1959–1995
With a major oil discovery at Leduc in 1947, the Calgary and Alberta
economies, already humming in the post–World War II consumption boom,
accelerated further. In Calgary, quiescent administrative capacity in the oil
patch—which originated with the inflow of Texan expertise when gas was
discovered at nearby Turner Valley in 1913—sprang to life. Seemingly
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 631
overnight, the somewhat sleepy agricultural hub Calgary had become after
35 years of slow growth quickly emerged as the administrative and finan-
cial nexus of the nation’s oil industry and the corporate headquarters for
most established and fledgling oil companies, both domestic and foreign
(Stamp 2004). Consequently, and not for the last time, the global oil econ-
omy had a direct influence on urban development pressure in Calgary, the
Calgary metropolitan region, and in Alberta generally.
As a result, in the early 1950s, the province was confronted with serious
issues revolving around runaway urban growth in an overheated, oil-fired
economy. Instigated by development battles between the City of Edmonton
and the nearby Municipal District of Strathcona (Climenhaga 1997, 33), in
1954, the province convened the Royal Commission on the Metropolitan
Development of Calgary and Edmonton (also known as the McNally
Commission) to assess the situation regarding growth and development in
Alberta’s two major metropolitan regions and make recommendations to
address the problems.
The commission was convened for three distinct purposes:
1. to recommend the boundaries and the form of local government that will
most adequately and equitably provide for the orderly development of
school and municipal services,
2. to recommend any practical measures that may be taken in the interests
of the ratepayers and citizens generally with respect to the administration
and financing of school and municipal matters and the form of govern-
ment recommended to the areas under review, and
3. to hear representations from any and all interested bodies and to give
consideration to any other factors relevant to the establishment of the
boundaries, the form of local government, equitable distribution of costs,
and the orderly development of areas.
The commission’s recommendations were tabled in January 1956 (Alberta
Royal Commissions and Commissions of Inquiry and McNally 1956). The
17 recommendations on urban planning, the metropolitan areas, and the
regions were underlain by a development philosophy predicated on four
interrelated themes discussed below (Parker 2005).
From the application of these themes to the commission’s objectives
emerged a local interpretation for the concept of “uni-city,” a philosophy
designed to confront the realization that orderly development in a region
could not proceed where dissent by one member municipality alone could
disrupt an entire district plan (Climenhaga 1997, 34). To achieve this goal,
the system of voluntary District Planning Commissions, which had first
632 Urban Affairs Review
been organized in 1950–1951, evolved through a series of amendments to
the 1950 Town and Rural Planning Act (Burton 1981; Gordon and
Hulchanski 1985; Climenhaga 1997). Changes relevant to regional plan-
ning were imposed beginning in 1957 with the transfer of subdivision
approval powers from the province to local authorities and culminated in
1963 with the Planning Act, which created Regional Planning Commissions
(RPCs). These RPCs, unlike their voluntary predecessors, wielded the
power of subdivision approval, allowing detailed control over development
outcomes in the entire region (Laux 1990, 35).
The recommendations of the McNally Commission Report (MCR),
many of which were enacted into law in the amended 1957 planning legis-
lation (Bettison et al. 1975), had far-reaching consequences. Local out-
comes depended on the local political geography and spatial outcomes of
historical development decisions. To grow in Alberta, urban municipalities
annex land from adjacent rural municipalities. Historically, this process has
provoked ill will between urban and rural interests. The most intense con-
flict has been associated with the province’s highest growth regions and is
especially pronounced during times of rapidly accelerating economic activ-
ity (Climenhaga 1997). Many small and midsized urban centers in zones of
relatively slower growth (Leo and Anderson 2006) have had a more amica-
ble record of cooperation.
To illustrate the intersection of the MCR and the RB case, we frame the
spatial and political consequences of the situation with regard to the report’s
four main themes:
1. In one metropolitan economic and social unit, tax base equity is impor-
tant, and the best form of governance within which to achieve this is
through one central municipal authority.
This theme reflects a local adaptation of uni-city philosophy (Collin,
Leveillee, and Poitras 2002; Sancton 2002; Parker 2005). Although uni-
city has sometimes been simplified to mean the percentage of the popu-
lation of a region (or national space) living in the primate city (making it
a measure of jurisdictional fragmentation), or as a parliamentary form of
regional municipal governance (Leo and Piel 2006), in the Alberta con-
text, it refers to the philosophy that optimal organization is best achieved
through the use of a regional plan, which is most efficiently aggregated
at a regional scale with one, central power-wielding entity coordinating
growth at multiple scales. With a centralized taxation authority, a more
democratic form of regional taxation is achieved because residents of
city and country are taxed according to the same criteria and level of
delivered services. Reductions in the duplication of services are expected
as jurisdictions are amalgamated.
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 633
From an urban/rural perspective in Alberta, uni-city philosophy endows
a self-justified bias favoring the agenda of urban growth over that of rural
interests. This bias was to become the heart of rural/urban conflict. More
recently, uni-city, in the form of regional economic development, has been
reconstituted from a neoliberal perspective typified by public/private part-
nerships, which bring together government and business in the combined
goal of successfully competing in globalized markets (Sancton 2001).
2. Where industrial development (meaning a business tax base) is occurring
just outside an urban municipality, the tax base generated from this
development should accrue to the same municipality that provides the
educational and other municipal services to workers and families.
This theme speaks to the harmonization of taxation and services and
assumes that the employees of urban fringe industry lived in the city and
commuted to work. Since workers and families spent most of their time in
cities and made use of infrastructure provided at city expense, the city
should be entitled to a share of rural industrial taxation. Uni-city was
thought to provide the most efficient and fair means of equalizing the dis-
tribution of services and taxation, assuming that when the time was right,
such industrial facilities would be subsumed through annexation into the
urban fabric and the city’s taxation regime. Under these conditions, a
coherent logic of utility and infrastructure extension could be devised with-
out the fear of interjurisdictional conflict or unanticipated development in
undesirable locations. This measure further irritated rural landowners and
politicians. Not only was local political authority diminished, but rural
areas, already lacking in infrastructure, were denied the full benefit of local
taxation income so their deficits were unlikely to improve.
3. Urban municipalities are entitled to growing space as they to expand into
rural areas.
Extended planning horizons necessitated spatially based political con-
trol over large tracts belonging to the rural municipality. With a morato-
rium on unapproved rural development within this zone, which
surrounded the city equally on all sides, rural landowners felt denied the
ability to benefit from their asset. Their economic well-being was being
manipulated by a central authority whose first allegiance was seen to be
to nonlocal interests.
4. Where areas adjacent to a city take on urban characteristics, these areas
are best planned and governed by one municipality. Uni-city was seen as
a solution to the problem of poor communities, such as Forest Lawn, and
substandard development then appearing on the fringes of the large met-
ropolitan areas in Alberta (Burton 1981).
Following these themes, the new RPCs, legislated in the 1963 Planning
Act (Laux 1990), shaped the regional landscape for the next three decades.
A high degree of order and efficiency was achieved, and the region was
634 Urban Affairs Review
hailed as a world-class model of regional planning. But the commission’s
governance model, based on population, gave large, urban municipalities a
virtual veto over the development agenda. In the decades following the
1963 act, many proposals for commercial development in MDRV were
turned down by the province at the behest of objections from the Calgary
RPC (Bettison et al. 1975). Continued preference by the province for the
urban agenda strengthened rural resistance to the goals of the commission
and of regional planning, a legacy of resentment visible across the province
in current development battles.
The 1995 Municipal Government Act:
Reallocating Power and Rural Revenge
Before 1995, planning legislation was predicated on a particular vision
of orderly development requiring state intervention in property markets and
a centralized planning authority. Afterwards, as Elder (1996, 24) observes,
“The twin strands of devolution of authority to municipalities and unleash-
ing of market forces are evident in the[se] changes.”
The changes most significant to this case were brought about in two pol-
icy areas: (1) supramunicipal planning, the rules governing how municipal
neighbors behave in resolving disputes, and (2) increased decentralization,
the transfer of subdivision approval authority from the province to every
municipality, whether urban or rural (Elder 1996). Compulsory regional
planning and mandatory regional plans were abolished. A secondary func-
tion of the RPCs had been as a “watchdog” to ensure development in
member municipalities conformed with the regional plan, leading to occa-
sions that contravened local autonomy (Laux 1990, 110–11). Under the new
MGA, however, local development was no longer subjected to the scrutiny
of other governments beyond a common intermunicipal development
zone—an area 5 km in width inside the rural jurisidiction along the common
border of the municipalities. This new freedom to develop emboldened
MDRV to issue a development permit to RB without a secure utility servic-
ing agreement and that sought solutions that would never have been enter-
tained under regional planning, for example, the construction of a redundant,
unintegrated water infrastructure system. Under the 1995 legislation, final
authority over development was transferred from the province to the munic-
ipalities. No longer did adjacent jurisdictions have the ability to appeal
development decisions outside the intermunicipal development zone
because of the new provincial credo of downloading development responsi-
bility to local municipalities. Previously, under the auspices of the regional
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 635
planning commissions, cities could, and on many occasions did, derail rural
development initiatives by appealing to the Alberta Planning Board. Now
there was no provincial planning authority over development in municipalities
and, hence, no authority to which decisions could be appealed.
With these changes, we can see how the philosophy of uni-city embraced
in the MCR was undermined particularly in relation to the development
themes. Another significant consequence was a large transfer of tax revenue
from the city to MDRV. The situation where taxes generated by industrial
development on the city fringe were directed to the city was reversed.
Instead, taxation resulting from intense rural gentrification along with com-
mercial and industrial development was directed to MDRV, although the
urban services consumed by these urban refugees were still mainly supplied
by Calgary. This situation enabled MDRV, unencumbered by the need to pro-
vide expensive urban services already available in the city, to undercut the
city’s tax rates to encourage development.
Unintended Consequences
Since the establishment of regional planning in Alberta in the early
1960s, annexation proceedings have generally been highly contested, gen-
erating strong feelings of resentment among rural landowners and politi-
cians. Calgary’s last major land grab had occurred in 1989, closing a
record-breaking decade of annexation, but relatively little development
activity occurred during the 1990s as oil prices remained low. It is impor-
tant because for the Calgary metropolitan region, the round of annexation
proceedings in 2004 were the first negotiations of significance in which
rural politicians were able to fully exercise the new bundle of development
powers endowed in the 1995 MGA. The legislation’s underpinning, a
neoliberal agenda characterized by values of individualism, small govern-
ment, and fiscal austerity, combined with a complementary devolution of
power to control development outcomes (Elder 1996), enabled MDRV to
prevail over its larger and stronger opponent to control development in its
territory. Noting that such outcomes could never have occurred under the
uni-city planning paradigm embodied in McNally report and the pre-1995
regime, Calgary politicians renewed their appeal to the province for a return
to regional planning, a stance vociferously rejected in MDRV (Hope 2004;
Myers 2005).
In mid-October 2005, a new circumstance emerged that threatened to
disrupt Rocky View’s aggressive development plan, when the province
636 Urban Affairs Review
released a draft for a new water management plan for the South Saska-
tchewan River Basin (SSRB) that recommended a permanent moratorium
for new waters licenses on three of the four rivers constituting the basin,
including the Bow River, on which both Calgary and MDRV depend for
water. The moratorium, subsequently formalized in 2006, was the culmina-
tion of a process first instigated in 2001 in response to “a demonstrated
need for protection” as “a growing population and economy are putting
unprecedented pressure on water resources” (Alberta Environment 2005).
Suddenly, for MDRV, the issue was not only how water was to be delivered
but also from where it would come. This unforeseen event left MDRV in
dire straits, as not only was service to RB in peril, but a nearby $1.5 billion
commercial megaproject (consisting of a horse-racing track, hotel, casino,
retail mall, and an agricultural college extension), already under construc-
tion, was also threatened (Figure 1). In these new circumstances, then, the
original plan to twin the sewer line skirting Calgary’s east flank with an
intake on the Bow River, downstream of Calgary, was not possible. Thus
the announcement of the moratorium further convinced Calgary politicians
that in order to proceed, both with the packing plant and megaproject,
MDRV would have to accede in the concurrent annexation negotiations,
which at that moment were at an impasse. But MDRV had different ideas.
The first was a scheme to divert water from the Red Deer River (100 km
away), the only major river in the SSRB not affected by the moratorium.
But this initiative, repackaged a number of times, met with stiff political
opposition, especially from the river’s current users, and was finally
rejected. At this point, construction at the megaproject site, whose permits
had been issued at a time when water seemed freely available, was scaled
back pending resolution of the search for water. Finally, in the spring of
2007, after what one MDRV politician said were “many sleepless nights,”
a solution was found. The Western Irrigation District (WID; one of 13
districts in a quasigovernmental network managing the distribution of water for
irrigation in southern Alberta) agreed to sell a portion of its abundant licence to
MDRV in return for a $15 million upgrade to its canal system. As the WID
draws its water from the Bow River at Calgary, the twinning of the wastewater
pipeline with a freshwater line could proceed as originally planned. The (lack
of) availability of water for development, however, has been permanently
embedded as a factor for all future development in the region.
Ironically, after all the conflict associated with the development of the
packing plant, and the considerable unintended consequences that we have
linked to it, RB survived for a very short period of time. In August 2007,
the plant closed and filed for creditor protection. Its closure was affected by
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 637
the reopening of the U.S. border to live animals younger than 30 months,
which has resulted in a reduction of slaughter capacity utilization in Canada
to 70%. Another factor, however, was that the plant had invested $10
million in a sophisticated tracing system that allowed individual animals to
be traced from the plant to the store. This was intended to allow the testing
of individual animals for BSE, which would have increased the marketabil-
ity of their beef at a premium price, particularly in Japan. However,
Canadian Food Inspection Agency policy has rejected testing of healthy
animals, with the result that “government policy has rendered the invest-
ment in the tracing system to be presently of little or no value,” according
to the president, Tony Martinez (MacArthur 2007, 11). It is widely believed
among cattle producers that these restrictions on testing are the result of
American reluctance to increase testing and pressures for harmonization of
food safety regulation between the two countries.
Conclusion: Regarding Implausible Outcomes
In conclusion, we return to the question of implausible outcomes. David
(1985), to recall, identified three features of evolutionary systems that con-
spire to produce “path dependence”: first, that small, historically contingent
“accidents” can have profound long-term effects on the system’s future
pathways; second, that early decisions reverberate through history, closing
alternative paths and validating others; and third, that technological “lock-
in” creates a situation that, when speaking of urban systems, encourages
particular patterns of reinvestment in the urban form.
Each of the key elements we have presented in this article is rife with
examples of these path-making processes. For example, the random place-
ment of a cartographic grid encouraged the CPR to build its passenger
station in Section 15 rather than in the more developed Section 14. This, in
turn, prompted a cascade of spatial consequences that did not manifest on
a frictionless plain but rather were constrained and enabled by the geologic
heritage of the landscape: ice, water, and wind. From this intersection of
geography and economic decision making arose a chain of spatial outcomes
that configured both the spatial and social reality of the modern city, whose
boundaries, in turn, marked the arena within which the RB case would
unfold.
Another of these seeming accidents was the arrival of BSE in 2003. Over
more than a century, the economics of the beef industry in Alberta had
evolved into a system with one primary purpose, the production of live cat-
tle for shipment to American feedlots, where they would be fattened and
638 Urban Affairs Review
sold for slaughter (Foran 2002). As such, the focus of the industry in
Alberta was to provide the most efficient and profitable configuration of
organizational productivity to achieve this goal. When export markets dis-
appeared overnight, however, the system collapsed and local slaughter
capacity was overwhelmed. And timing is everything (Pierson 2000b). The
random appearance of BSE, just at a moment in time when battles over
rural land development were at their most fever pitched, made it possible
for MDRV to leverage the province’s response to the crisis to underwrite
some of its ambitious development plans. Not inconsequentially, none of
these options or responses would have been possible under the regime of
regional planning and development that had only recently been reformed.
A third example of “historical accident” is the emergence of water scarcity
as an issue of imminent concern. Recent legislation, prompted by the stark
realization that the old law envisioned water as an inexhaustible resource
when, in fact, it was anything but (Percy 1996), led to a moratorium on new
allocations. Furthermore, in low-flow years, which with global warming are
predicted to increase, junior licensees may not receive their full allocation.
The recent meteoric growth of cities and the fact that 87% of water alloca-
tions from the Bow River basins are currently directed for irrigation and less
than 13% for municipal purposes (Alberta Environment: Regional Services
Southern Region 2003) are potential sources of future conflict.
Similarly, there are a number of standout examples of how early events
and choices in the city have reverberated through its evolution. Our main
example is to observe how the sociospatial relations of uneven development
in east Calgary caused the location of RB’s labor hinterland and, hence,
their choice of plant location to be spatially proximate. We have argued that
this outcome is not by chance; indeed, lower land prices, due in part to nox-
ious emissions from the beef industry, narrowed the range of settlement
destinations for the immigrant class composing RB’s primary labor force.
A second example is the back story of how Calgary came to be the cor-
porate heart of the Canadian oil industry in the first place, an outcome not
readily explainable by simply considering Edmonton’s closer proximity to
Leduc, site of the first major oil find in Alberta. Why did this administrative
function not flow to Edmonton, which was more logically situated to cap-
ture this lucrative portion of the industry? The answer lies primarily in the
dormant capacity for oil administration that had existed in Calgary owing to
the discovery of natural gas at nearby Turner Valley in 1913. That event
encouraged a migration of American oilmen from Houston who brought
with them expertise garnered in the mature Texas oil industry. By the time
Imperial Oil’s Leduc Number One—the well that started it all—struck oil in
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 639
1947, the industry in Calgary was experiencing low levels of development
activity, as its gas fields had by then matured. But the capacity that had first
arrived from Texas in 1913 sprang quickly back to life with a new boom in
exploration and drilling following Leduc.
Today Calgary is home to the Canadian headquarters of every national and
international oil corporation with an interest in Alberta’s oil resources.
During its August 2005 move from Toronto, Imperial Oil, the last major to
move to Calgary, relocated some 3,000 employees; yet these were only a
small fraction of an avalanche of immigrants who have descended on the
Calgary region at a rate of 2,200 per month for since 2001 (Table 1). In this
example, it is easy to see how development pressures—the need for housing,
infrastructure, schools, utilities, and so on—are in turn influenced by
increased oil industry activity. Moreover, as enough of these new migrants are
well enough paid to afford a “rurban” lifestyle, which is centered, not surpris-
ingly, on Calgary’s west side (which boasts little industrial development and
spectacular mountain vistas), the more these development pressures spill over
into the surrounding region. The culmination of the battle over future urban
spaces, as we have discussed, is now being played out through development
and annexation battles between municipal jurisdictions.
While David (1985) specified technical lock-in, the engineering/eco-
nomic side of path dependence, for the purpose of extending the metaphor
to this case study, we view lock-in in terms of the social, institutional, and
political forces that embed themselves in the fabric of the urban spatial
matrix as it evolves over time. This process not only provides a continuous
source of positive feedback, which perpetuates social inequality through the
built environment, but it also shapes and assesses social and environmental
outcomes through the lens of growth and development. An example from
this case study is how the diminished status of east Calgary, once imprinted,
became locked in through subsequent economic, social, and political
actions. So from this evolutionary perspective, each new investment in the
built environment contributed an additional degree of lock-in, further con-
straining the future trajectory of the system. Similarly, the organization of
the beef industry was locked in to a system that had been optimized for a
single purpose and, when confronted with unpredicted events that radically
altered the rules of the game, was unprepared to cope.
The goal of this article has been to present a narrative model of
Calgary’s historical development to illustrate how pathways of decision
making are intertwined with chance circumstances and systemic processes
to produce outcomes with spatial consequences that both constrain and
640 Urban Affairs Review
enable particular urban futures. Once embraced, these processes are self-
reinforcing; that is, they respond to positive feedback with growth. For
example, once east Calgary became the site of industrial development, a
consequence flowing from decisions made soon after the first European set-
tlement in Calgary, all future residential development east of the industrial
zone was destined to be of considerably lower economic status and reduced
environmental quality. This spatial outcome, replicated until today, pro-
voked certain citizens in 2004 to protest yet another unfavorable economic
and environmental outcome looming in their future.
From a spatial perspective, the initial distribution of amenities and hazards
in the built environment played a pivotal role in determining the tenor and
location of future conflict. And as greater power to control development was
relinquished to market forces through a new philosophy of governance, spatial
outcomes resulting from the goal of profit maximization have not necessarily
coincided with the public’s best interest. This disconnection can be ascribed to
generations of positive economic feedback that have, through their historic
interactions, constituted the present-day state of sociospatial relations.
From a temporal perspective, we note that various spatial processes
evolve through differing cycles of temporal dynamics each with a unique
time–space relation. This cross-scale structure (Allen and Holling 2002)
has profound implications for urban development in that potential spatial
outcomes are unduly influenced by a few key decisions made early in the
process (Pierson 2000a), limiting, in turn, how potential futures may unfold
(Plummer and Sheppard 2006). Thus, as we have seen, the intersection of
long-term historic and short-term contemporary forces of urban develop-
ment have construed to produce unpredictable, yet bounded, outcomes. In
this case, initial locational choices for Calgary’s economic and industrial
infrastructure resulted in a contemporary spatial reality that both spurred
industrial investors to prefer a northeast Calgary location and prompted, at
various historic moments, the social indignation of nearby area residents.
On the surface, the decision to build expensive, new infrastructure appears
to be a routine sort of development strategy taken daily by rural and urban
municipalities everywhere as they compete for lucrative industrial develop-
ment. But below the surface, more complex, historic processes are ever at
work. In this case, local geologic history gave material form to the city,
which in turn embedded a spatial logic that, once set, became increasingly
difficult to alter. In these sorts of evolutionary systems, the agency to affect
change diminishes over time as urban policy and capitalist investment,
guided by decades of history and precedent, locks in a particular socially
spatialized configuration of capital relations.
Ghitter, Smart / Path Dependence in Calgary 641
Note
1. Under the 1995 Alberta Municipal Government Act, the only distinction between urban
and rural municipalities is the maximum parcel size allowed for development. Land is consid-
ered rural if the majority of buildings used as dwellings are located on parcels greater in area
than 1,850 square meters. Under the same 1995 legislation, rural municipalities were granted
the same bundle of rights and responsibilities as urban municipalities and became in all ways
equivalent to urban municipalities.
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data/popdwell/SubTables.cfm?T=200.
Torfing, J. 1999. Towards a Schumpeterian workfare postnational regime: Path-shaping and
path-dependency in Danish welfare state reform. Economy and Society 28 (3): 369-402.
Warner, S. B. 1962. Streetcar suburbs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
Geoff Ghitter (MSc, Calgary, 1995) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at
the University of Calgary. His research focuses on the application of complex systems theory
to urban spatial development and to bringing conceptions of evolutionary processes from eco-
nomics and political science to geographic analysis, especially relating to regional political
and social dynamics.
Alan Smart (PhD, Toronto, 1986) is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Calgary. His research has focused on urban issues, housing, foreign investment,
and social change. He is author of Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong (Hong
Kong University Press, 1992), Petty Capitalists and Globalization (coedited with Josephine
Smart, SUNY Press, 2005), The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in
Hong Kong, 1950–1963 (Hong Kong Univ. Press, 2006), and numerous articles in journals and
edited volumes.
644 Urban Affairs Review
