Contested periurban amenity landscapes: changing waterfront ‘countryside ideals’ in central Canada

Abstract

Periurban second homes have received limited attention in landscape research, but they can offer important insight for landscape histories of urbanisation. This paper focuses on the hundreds of thousands of waterfront ‘cottages’ or ‘chalets’ found in central Canada’s densely-populated Toronto-Montréal urban corridor. A review of scholarly work examines how wide swaths of forest have become periurban amenity landscapes over the last 150 years. An interwoven theoretical narrative centres on the ‘countryside ideal’—an enduring concept linking Anglo-American attitudes about nature and culture with context-specific assemblages of landscape, urban form, and social practice. Finally, a critical discussion highlights how these periurban amenity landscapes have become increasingly contested, taking stock of new clashes between rapid processes of landscape transformation now underway and the broader Anglo-American images, representations, and material cultures expressing what nature is (or ought to be).

Keywords:

• Periurban space
• urbanisation
• second homes
• amenity settings
• rural–urban fringe

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank many colleagues and students with whom discussions have helped to develop the ideas presented here: Annmarie Adams, Andrew Blum, Lisa Bornstein, Larry S. Bourne, Michael Bunce, Kirsten Valentine Cadieux, Carole Després, Mark Ramsay Elsworthy, Emily Gilbert, Jeremy Guth, Paul Hess, Sandra T. Hyde, Hoi Kong, Pierre Larochelle, Becky Lentz, Nina-Marie Lister, Robert Mellin, Alessandro Olsaretti, Claire Poitras, Mattias Qviström, Nathaniel R. Racine, Ted Relph, Richard Shearmur, Véronique Sikora, André Sorensen, Laura Taylor, Geneviève Vachon, Benjamin Wareing, Daniel Weinstock, and Martin Wexler.

Notes

1. Recent contributions include Cadieux (2005, 2011), Fortin and Després (2011), Halseth (2004), Mitchell (2004), Quayle (2003), Qviström (2007, 2012, 2013), Scott et al. (2013), Taylor (2011), Tilt and Cerveny (2013), Urbain (2002), Vachon, Després, Rivard, Lacroix, and Moretti (2011), and Zanghi (2014).

2. These are official estimates for 2014 provided by Statistics Canada (2015). Ontario and Québec households owned about 54% of all second homes in Canada in 2009, the last year for which reliable data exist.

3. Statistics Canada (2015) defines a Census Metropolitan Area as a geographical unit with a population of at least 100,000 in one or more adjacent municipalities centred on a large urban core. Most of Canada’s population now lives in the urban, suburban, and periurban spaces of the 33 CMAs; see Gordon and Janzen (2013). The current government data cited here indicate a total CMA population of 11,400,900 in the subject territory, including the CMAs of Toronto (6,055,700), Ottawa-Gatineau (1, 318, 100), and Montréal (4, 027, 100).

4. Toronto-based households tend to frequent ‘cottage country’ (Georgian Bay, Muskoka, Haliburton, and the Kawartha Lakes), while their Ottawa-Gatineau counterparts frequent the Rideau Lakes and the Gatineau hills; Montréal-based households typically travel north to the Laurentian hills or southeast to the Eastern Townships. See Bourne et al. (2003), Dagenais (2005), Dahms (1996), Gagnon (2003), Halseth and Rosenberg (1990, 1995), Hodge (1974), Luka (2008b, 2012, 2013), Luka and Lister (2012), Quayle (2003), Robinson (2013), Saint-Amour (1979), Stevens, 2013; and Wolfe (1951, 1977).

5. Comparisons might be drawn with the ‘spaces of uncertainty’ described by Cupers and Miessen (2002) and the periurban ‘zone indécise’ discussed by Zanghi (2014).