Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
The focus of the research has been to investigate the role of apartment housing in the social geography of two Canadian cities - Toronto and Winnipeg - in the period 1900-1939, in the context of debates about 'spaces of modernity' in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities. The project aimed to reconstruct just who, in practice, occupied apartment buildings in each city. Were apartment tenants in any way distinctive, with respect to gender, socio-economic status, household structure, or ethnicity, and in their residential mobility, and day-to-day journey-to-work? Were there differences among the apartment-house population, especially when categorised according to the type of building in which they lived? From the outset, a principle aim has been to provide a readily accessible computerised dataset for use by secondary analysts interested in twentieth-century urban society. For example it can be used for a social-historical analysis for heritage planners and architectural historians contemplating the listing or conservation of selected apartment buildings; and by comparing patterns of occupancy in dwellings adjacent to apartment blocks, it can be used to provide historical evidence of the social impact of apartments as non-conforming uses in areas of single-family housing. More broadly, the project aimed to explore the social construction of property relations, especially with respect to the role of <i>rental</i> housing in an increasingly owner-occupied housing market, and apartment housing in a society where the single-family detached dwelling was generally regarded as the most desirable form of dwelling.
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The data collection consists of two databases, one for Toronto and one for Winnipeg, which contain information on: a) apartment residents in a sample of buildings of varying size, age and location; b) the ownership of this sample of buildings; c) a small sample of residents of <i>houses</i> situated close to major concentrations of apartment buildings. Data were collected for three sample years: 1909, when only 9 of the selected buildings in Toronto, and 8 in Winnipeg, had been erected; 1914, by which date 29 of the selected Toronto buildings, and 32 in Winnipeg, had been completed; and 1930, when the full sample of 72 buildings in Toronto and 60 in Winnipeg were occupied. The databases each include a table of 'building information' recording ownership and other information pertaining to the sample buildings over the whole period, 1900-1939; a photo album of illustrations of sample buildings; three tables listing the occupiers of all apartment suites in the sample buildings in 1909, 1914 and 1930; and a table listing occupants of 'nearby houses' over the whole period.
The two samples were selected to include different ages and sizes of buildings and - to a lesser extent - to ensure that buildings from different parts of each city were included. It was not possible to make a perfectly systematic, stratified sample of buildings, for the simple reason that there was no absolutely definitive list of apartment buildings in each city. Nor could there be, given the ambiguity at the margins over what constitutes an apartment building. There was also a deliberate decision to select buildings for which other information was available, for example, in architectural magazines, council minutes and correspondence, and newspaper reports.
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