Compounding Copps’s difficulties, a year after he unveiled an ambitious new plan to remake downtown Hamilton as a commercial and service center, the province launched a regional planning initiative that mandated Hamilton’s continued development as a regional manufacturing hub that would support, rather than compete with, Toronto’s role as Ontario’s service and finance center. The regional development initiative stemmed from Progressive Conservative Premier John Robarts’s concerns about Ontario’s competitive position.61 After taking office in 1961, Robarts established two agencies to advise him on economic issues, the Department of Economics and Development (a provincial ministry) and the Ontario Economic Council (OEC, an independent advisory committee). Staffed by economists and businessmen, the OEC advocated for provincial reforms that would benefit business interests. The OEC commissioned research reports from economic experts in the universities and private sector, who typically recommended that Ontario should reduce the social safety net, institute business-friendly tax reforms, and pursue various forms of deregulation and decentralization.62
In 1965, on the advice of his economic policy advisors from the OEC and the Department of Economics and Development, Robarts held two international conferences. He invited experts from the United States, Canada, and the UK to address regional development in Ontario as well as Canada’s changing economic structure. A popular consensus in favor of governmentled regional planning and development emerged from the conferences. A year later, Ontario Department of Municipal Affairs Minister Darcy McKeough announced a comprehensive regional planning initiative, Design for Development, which launched what scholars later described as Ontario’s “golden age of planning.”63 Robarts, despite his conservative economic views, thought centralized planning was the best way to ensure regional economic stability. He and McKeough explicitly linked provincially led regional planning to private sector initiatives. To achieve Design for Development’s goals, McKeough called for “a partnership relationship between the Provincial Government, municipalities, and private enterprise in bringing about the quality and pattern of development that we all want and that we are confident can be achieved.” He praised private developers, noting that, while most of the planning beyond the scale of individual projects would be carried out by the provincial and municipal governments, “by the quality of its performance this development industry has earned the right to be accepted into the partnership that will develop this region along the lines we are drawing here today.”64 In contrast to local redevelopment partnerships in the United States, Ontario officials sought private-sector partners who would help the province carry out development projects initiated by public officials.
Design for Development created a series of economic development regions, through which provincial officials planned to decentralize industry out of Southern Ontario to the “underdeveloped” northern and eastern reaches of the province. The industrial belt around Lake Ontario with Hamilton at its center was the only exception.65 Hamilton would remain a manufacturing hub. Hamilton’s supporting role in what provincial officials deemed the “Toronto-centered region” vexed municipal officials who wanted to develop their city as a regional commercial center. In response, Hamilton’s Economic Development Commission prepared a study that forecast the increasing importance of service sector jobs, while tacitly accepting that Hamilton would likely house a greater share of regional manufacturing due to industrial decentralization out of Toronto. Like Pittsburgh’s PRPA earlier in the decade, Hamilton planners proposed a regional development pattern that would “accommodate increasing preoccupation with leisuretime activities” and promote “a pattern of urbanization that is amenable to social changes based on future economic and technological developments.” They predicted intensified professional, cultural, and educational activities and recommended land uses that would encourage rather than hinder that intensification. This translated, for the planners, into zoning changes and public investment geared toward establishing new nodes of development around specialized industry, outside both the city center and the traditional industrial areas along the harbor. In apparent defiance of Design for Development, Hamilton’s planners argued that the city’s place in Ontario’s urban system should remain flexible.66
Though they shared the postindustrial imagination of Pittsburgh’s growth coalition, Hamilton’s public officials and civic leaders were constrained by national regional development programs that privileged underdeveloped provinces, a lack of federal funds for commercial revitalization, provincial growth policies that protected Toronto’s regional supremacy, and a local business class with little interest in urban development. The expensive study Copps commissioned from Arthur D. Little and Moore’s subsequent trip to Pittsburgh to figure out how to create a redevelopment partnership did not change those facts. As the 1960s drew to a close, Hamilton had not replicated the redevelopment partnership that facilitated Pittsburgh’s Renaissance, and its proposed downtown renewal program was stalled.
Decentralization and Regional Development
Pittsburgh and Hamilton’s growth coalitions found themselves at a crossroads at the end of the 1960s, caught between optimistic downtown revitalization schemes and dire regional economic forecasts. In Ontario, provincial officials had taken steps to formalize public-private cooperation, which should have been a boon to Copps’s and Moore’s efforts to form a partnership. The designation of a “Toronto-centered region,” however, made Copps’s vision of Hamilton as a serious competitor to Toronto untenable. In Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Conference shifted course as the first Renaissance wound to an end, leaving the city’s future development up in the air. The U.S. and Canadian federal systems, too, were approaching a crossroads. In the United States, federal housing policies dating back to the New Deal had promoted uncontrolled suburban expansion and deindustrialization and created racially segregated metropolitan areas through redlining and other discriminatory real estate practices. Urban renewal programs carried out under the auspices of redevelopment partnerships destroyed African American and working-class white neighborhoods, displaced long-time residents, and lined the pockets of real estate developers. These practices provoked urban uprisings that tore apart central cities, devastated urban tax bases, accelerated middle-class relocation to the suburbs, and led pundits to describe northeastern and mid-western cities as in the throes of an urban crisis.67 By contrast, Canadian central city housing markets were not redlined, and residents could more easily get mortgages and home improvement loans than could residents of U.S. central cities. In the 1960s, Canadian cities did not burn. Instead, when Canadian policymakers talked about a looming urban crisis, they referred to an aging urban infrastructure insufficient to meet the demands of a projected population boom in the next decade.68
To address its urban crisis, the U.S. government focused more attention and greater resources on central cities through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs; the Canadian government instead turned to regional development. Canada’s federal transfers to other levels of government generally took the form of unconditional equalization payments that, beginning in 1957, redistributed revenue from wealthier to poorer provinces to ensure that all provinces could provide similar services to their citizens at reasonably comparable levels of taxation, regardless of each province’s ability to generate revenue—a program for which there was no analogue in the United States.69 Federal agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933) and the Appalachian Regional Commission (1965) funneled federal funds for infrastructure projects to distressed regions, while the more ambitious but short-lived Area Redevelopment Administration (1961–1965) encouraged economic development primarily in Appalachia and the South.70 None of these federal agencies, however, redistributed wealth at a national scale.
At the national scale, distinctions in U.S. and Canadian urban and regional development policy shaped the political possibilities for public-private partnership and postindustrial redevelopment in Pittsburgh and Hamilton. Canada’s stronger commitment to regional development and social welfare spending became increasingly evident as national policy orientations toward privatization and decentralization intensified steadily, if unevenly, in the United