Quelques semaines avant mon entrée en fonction comme professeur à l’Université de Sherbrooke, j’ai participé pour la première fois au colloque annuel du Urban History Group, une expérience que j’ai énormément appréciée. Les communications étaient très intéressantes et les chercheurs que j’ai rencontrés sur place étaient fort amicaux et accueillants pour le jeune chercheur que j’étais. De plus, je dois avouer que j’ai beaucoup d’affection (et d’affinités) pour l’historiographie britannique en matière d’histoire urbaine.

C’est donc avec grand plaisir que j’y retourne cette année pour présenter une communication basée sur le projet de recherche sur la gouvernance des petites et moyennes villes du Québec que je mène actuellement avec Amélie Bourbeau. En voici le résumé:

This paper aims to re-evaluate the place of the city in Canadian history at two levels. First, this paper explores how municipal governance evolved from the creation of the Canadian municipal regime in 1855 up to the Great Depression. Canadian urban history has had relatively little to say regarding local political history since the 1970s, and much of this research presented local governments as economic development tools controlled by capitalist elites. By approaching the question through governance and citizenship in smaller cities, this paper demonstrates that, while their success varied, there were attempts made by different local actors to democratize and expand a municipal regime that was initially conceived with the idea of creating “cities without citizens” (Isin, 1992). Second, by setting aside the metropolises that dominate Canadian urban history, this paper explores the impact of scale in the construction and evolution of urban governance. Smaller cities are confronted to challenges similar to their larger counterparts (industrialization and zoning, for instance), but the shape of these challenges and the tools available to handle them varies greatly depending on the size of the community. By the same token, the political actors that are involved in urban governance and the political culture they forge also differ from those that are observed in larger cities. For instance, they come from more homogeneous communities and are involved in more localized social networks, two factors that are particularly relevant in the bilingual context of the province of Quebec. Finally, this paper explores these questions by comparing three medium-sized Quebec cities, a preliminary to a larger research project that will hopefully contribute to a greater interest, in Canada and beyond, in the history of local governance, as well as in the comparative history of smaller urban communities.