Focusing on a series of pivotal issues confronting Canadian cities and city-dwellers today, this volume address key themes in urban studies: the interaction between social relations and urban landscape, the status of the city in the new world economy, and the sociocultural complexity of urban populations. The fifteen essays presented here reflect the current preoccupations and perspectives of critically oriented urban researchers in Canada. The essays in Part 1, 'People, Places, Cultures, ' examine the nature of urban space and the links between this space and social relations, illustrating the fundamental principle that urban spaces are 'built values' and 'built politics' - physical expressions of social process. Part 2, 'The Economy of Cities, ' explores recent fundamental shifts in the economic character of Canadian cities, whose effect on the social and physical landscapes has been as dramatic as the explosive onset of industrialism was in the last century. Part 3, 'Urban Social Movements, ' focuses on the practices of social movements, including those oriented to gender, race, and the environment.

Consisting largely of applied case studies, rather than broad thematic essays, City Lives and City Forms presents an overall argument for focused critical research in the urban field and suggests possible directions for the future.

One feature of contemporary urban life has been the widespread transformation, by middle-class resettlement, of older inner-city neighbourhoods formerly occupied by working-class and underclass communities. Often termed ?gentrification,? this process has been a focus of intense debate in urban study and in the social sciences.This case study explores processes of change in Toronto's inner neighbourhoods in recent decades, integrating an understanding of political economy with an appreciation of the culture of everyday urban life. The author locates Toronto's gentrification in a context of both global and local patterns of contemporary city-building, focusing on the workings of the property industry and of the local state, the rise and decline of modernist planning, and the transition to postindustrial urbanism.Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews among a segment of Toronto's inner-city, middle-class population, Caulfield argues that the seeds of gentrification have included patterns of critical social practice and that the 'gentrified' landscape is highly paradoxical, embodying both the emerging dominance of a deindustrialized urban economy and an immanent critique of contemporary city-building.