Ottawa, 1857–1860: the making of Canada's capital city on the eve of Confederation

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Nari Shelekpayev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Indigenous Lands ◽  
Political Compromise ◽  
The City ◽  
Canada West

Abstract Canadian historiography has long regarded the choice and elaboration of Ottawa as a capital city in the mid-nineteenth century as a political compromise between Ontario (Canada West) and Quebec (Canada East). This article suggests that this view be reconsidered in the context of Canada's expansion westward and the dispossession of Indigenous lands. The key goal of this article is to provide a comprehensive analysis of transforming Ottawa into a capital city in 1857–60, including not only its choice as the seat of government but also the elaboration of Canada's Parliament Buildings, which were to become the key symbol of its future statehood, as well as the visit of the prince of Wales to Ottawa in 1860. The prince's visit allowed the city to be legitimized and inaugurated as the new seat of government.

The Growth of the Population of the World's Pre-eminent “Primate City”: Bangkok at its Bicentenary

1984 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Sternstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Population Increase ◽  
Rate Of Growth ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

When Bangkok was named the capital of Siam it held an inconsiderable population of some fifty thousand. Now, two hundred years later, this capital city boasts some five million residents. A prodigious population increase, indeed: a hundredfold gain generated by an ever-increasing rate of growth, which, after gathering momentum only gradually during the greater part of the nineteenth century, rose rapidly around the turn of this century and has since soared. The foregoing compendious description is shown on Figure I as the curve which charts the march of the population of the built-up area of the city. I have calculated this particular population by reworking the numbers reported at particular times by certain “eyewitnesses”. Since the turn of this century, the “eyewitnesses” have been censuses and registration counts for administrative areas; earlier “witnesses” are the postal census of 1882 and the considered estimate of the population of the city proper in 1822 by the “very trustworthy” Dr John Crawfurd, Head-of-Mission to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China deputised by the Governor-General of India. I have forsaken all the many other pre-twentieth century eyewitness estimates of the population of Bangkok. Why?

From Caesarea to Athens: Greek Revival Edinburgh and the Question of Scottish Identity within the Unionist State

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowrey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Town ◽  
The North ◽  
Greek Revival ◽  
Greek Architecture ◽  
The City

In the early nineteenth century, the city of Edinburgh cultivated a reputation as "the Athens of the North." The paper explores the architectural aspects of this in relation to the city's sense of its own identity. It traces the idea of Edinburgh as a "modern Athens" back to the eighteenth century, when the connotations were cultural, intellectual, and topographical rather than architectural. With the emergence of the Greek revival, however, Edinburgh began actively to construct an image of classical Greece on the hilltops and in the streets of the expanding city. It is argued that the Athenian identity of Edinburgh should be viewed as the culmination of a series of developments dating back to the Act of Union between the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707. As a result, Edinburgh lost its status as a capital city and struggled to reassert itself against the stronger economy of the south. Almost inevitably, the northern capital had to redefine itself in relation to London, the English and British capital. The major developments of Edinburgh in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the New Town and the urban proposals of Robert Adam, are interpreted in this light. As the eighteenth century progressed, the city grew more confident and by the early nineteenth century had settled upon its role within the Union and within the empire, which was that of cultural capital as a counterbalance to London, the political capital. The architectural culmination of the process of the redefinition of Edinburgh, however, coincided with the emergence of another mythology of Scottish identity, as seen through the Romantic vision of Sir Walter Scott. It implied a quite different, indigenous architecture that later found its expression in the Scots Baronial style. It is argued here, however, that duality does not contradict the idea of Edinburgh as Athens, nor, more generally, does it sit uneasily with the Scottish predilection for Greek architecture, but rather that it encapsulates the very essence of Scottish national identity: both proudly Scots and British.

scholarly journals „Varla er til ófrýniligri sjón...“

Ritið ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Marion Lerner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Judgement ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
The City ◽  
Systematic Exposition

This article examines Tómas Sæmundsson’s travel writings from his tour of Europe in the early nineteenth century. Sæmundsson visited various cities and then wrote his Ferðabók, along with a detailed introduction and several letters written to family and friends. These travel writings are examined to reveal how Sæmundsson express-es himself about the European cities he visited. How does he present these cities to his nineteenth-century Icelandic readers? How does he attempt to explain the role of the city and describe daily life in the cities? What sort of imagery does he employ to stimulate his readers’ interest and imagination?As the study demonstrates, Sæmundsson’s writings contain various observations on what characterized the cities he visited, what he found fascinating, and what he found repugnant. He was unafraid to pass aesthetic judgement on the different places and neighborhoods and to declare them to be beautiful or ugly. As a result of the article’s analysis and systematic exposition of Sæmundsson’s evaluations, it becomes evident that the young Icelandic academic had already acquired some basic knowledge of urban planning, and that he was brave enough to envision a possible layout for Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavik.

Reverberations: Mexico City’s 1985 Earthquake and the Transformation of the Capital

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane E. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
At Risk ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Earthquake Damage ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Richter Scale ◽  
The City

On September 19, 1985, at 7:14 a.m. an earthquake reaching a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale and lasting almost two full minutes hit the coast of Mexico, rocking its capital city and shaking its buildings and its people. The next day, at 7:38 p.m., Mexico City experienced a second tremor of an almost equal magnitude on the Richter scale, 7.5. What has come to be known as the Mexico City earthquake, then, was in actuality two earthquakes, although those who experienced it lived through a single disaster whose longer-term reverberations were as powerful as the first set of tremors that hit the city on that initial day in September. The earthquake, or those two days of tremors big and small, produced a physical disaster on a scale not seen since the destruction of the city in 1521, when Hernán Cortés’s forces defeated the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. This same battle site later served as the seat of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish colonial power and subsequently marked the place where the majority of the 1985 earthquake damage occurred. After the first day alone, 250 buildings were completely destroyed with 50 more at risk of collapsing; thousands of others were damaged or considered to be unusable. Five thousand people were injured with more than 1,000 still trapped under the debris; more than 250,000 people were homeless. The city lacked telephone and electricity services. After the second day’s quake, when more reliable statistics began flowing in, 2,000 were officially confirmed dead (although close to 7,000 cadavers had been identified) with 28,000 still listed as missing; more than 7,000 victims were being treated at relief stations, with 30,000 at gyms and other sites turned into shelters. More than 800,000 residents were ultimately forced to abandon their homes and sleep in the open air. Official statements later acknowledged 5,000 killed and 14,000 injured; but an independent final tally accounted for 2 million residents temporarily made homeless and thousands dead, tens of thousands injured, 100,000 damaged building units (mostly residential), and hundreds of thousands of residents made permanently homeless.

The Gogol-St. Petersburg Nexus

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-298
Author(s):  
Janet Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Solid Surface ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Nikolai Gogol ◽  
Inspector General ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
The City

From Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century to Andrei Bitov in the twentieth, St. Petersburg functions as a critical element in Russian literature and social thought. The great nineteenth-century prose writer and playwright Nikolai Gogol strikingly embodies motifs and themes associated with Russia’s great yet dysfunctional and, ultimately, erstwhile capital city. Gogol is especially celebrated for his fragmented and surreal images, his sense of a terrifying void lurking beneath an apparently solid surface reality and his dehumanized characters, all of which are linked with the city of St. Petersburg. The reader encounters these elements from Gogol’s first tales, embedded in his native Ukraine. They will figure significantly in such St. Petersburg stories as “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.” Most importantly, even those later works not set in St. Petersburg – his play The Inspector General and his unfinished novel Dead Souls – incorporate features peculiar to Gogol’s reading of a terrifying and, in the end, alien urban environment. For Gogol, St. Petersburg betokens the void, a deceptive superficial reality, and a blurring of the boundaries between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. Carried further, Gogol uses his reading of St. Petersburg symbolism to blur the line between the living and the dead, with damnation lying just beneath an illusory surface reality of an evil Westernized city founded by the tsar who led Russia away from traditional values. His characters embody this Westernized capital city and carry it around with themselves even in provincial settings far away from its dangerous glitter.

Concerning the Concept of Light-Colour Arrangement of the Urban Environment in the Central Part of Tyumen

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-42
Author(s):  
Nikolay I. Shchepetkov ◽  
Svetlana B. Kapeleva ◽  
Denis V. Bugaev ◽  
Gregory S. Matovnikov ◽  
Anna S. Kostareva
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Assessment Criteria ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
General Plan ◽  
Design Solutions ◽  
Methodological Principles ◽  
The City

The article provides a comprehensive analysis of outdoor lighting in the central part of Tyumen (with consideration of conducted field observations) and prospects of its development on the basis of the general plan of illumination of the central part of the city being under design. Main provisions of this general plan as well as methodological principles and assessment criteria of design solutions illustrat-ed by photographs, schemes and visualisations of the illuminated objects are described.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

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