In recent decades growing inequality and polarization have been reshaping the social landscape of Canada’s metropolitan areas, changing neighbourhoods and negatively affecting the lived realities of increasingly diverse urban populations. This book examines the dimensions and impacts of increased economic inequality and urban socio-spatial polarization since the 1980s. Based on the work of the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership, an innovative national comparative study of seven major cities, the authors reveal the dynamics of neighbourhood change across the Canadian urban system. By mapping average income trends across neighbourhoods, they show the kinds of factors – social, economic, and cultural – that influenced residential options and redistributed concentrations of poverty and affluence.

While the heart of the book lies in the project’s findings from each city, other chapters provide critical context. Taken together, they offer important understandings of the depth and the breadth of the problem at hand and signal the urgency for concerted policy responses in the decades to come.

Jill L. Grant is a professor in the School of Planning at Dalhousie University.

Jill Grant's profile page

Alan Walks' profile page

Howard Ramos' profile page

Overall, this is an important work for social geography and urban studies.

CHOICE Connect

Changing Neighbourhoods provides a timely and significant contribution to our understanding of the causes and consequences of social change at the neighbourhood level.

Canadian Jewish Studies