Study title

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.Main Topics: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...