Justin Bur has a dual background in urban studies (M.Urb., Université de Montréal 1994) and in computer science (M.Sc., Université de Montréal 1989). After working as a software developer for over twenty years, while in parallel devoting his attention to the railway history of Montreal and the historical evolution of the Mile End area, he entered the Ph.D. program in urban studies at UQAM in 2016 in order to focus on the historical development of Montreal neighborhoods.
His thesis project, with Dany Fougères as adviser, is titled La banlieue électrique de Montréal: vie, travail et transports dans un nouveau quartier, 1895–1935 (Montreal's electric suburbs: life, work and mobility in a new neighborhood). Between the beginning of electric streetcar service in Montreal in September 1892 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the city's growth was rapid and sustained. During this time, the neighborhoods that are now considered typical of Montreal were built, with their two- and three-storey rowhouses containing superposed flats, usually with outdoor stairways. The first half of the period is the time when streetcars were the dominant form of urban transit; the second half is the time when the automobile started taking over. The project aims to understand the mechanisms of development on the urban fringe, the reasons for the choice of building types, and the relationship between development and streetcar routes.
Since 2008, he has been an active member of local history groups Mile End Memories and the Friends of Saint-Laurent Boulevard. He is also a Montreal tour guide.
Documents
Sessions in which Justin Bur participates
Tuesday 30 August, 2022
Sessions in which Justin Bur attends
Sunday 28 August, 2022
You are invited to the McGill-Queen’s University Press book launch of “Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence and Class” on Sunday August 28th (1-3pm) at Batiment 7’s
Join the conference organisers and TICCIH board members for a welcome cocktail and some festive words of introduction, in the former forge of the École technique de Montréal, founded in 1909, now part of the Université du Québec à Montréal campus.
Monday 29 August, 2022
Si la vallée du canal de Lachine a été le berceau de l’industrialisation canadienne, la géographie industrielle métropolitaine ne s’y est pas confinée, peu s’en faut, Outre les grandes concentrations d’entreprises des quartiers centraux, elle est constituée des réseaux infrastructuraux, d’une douzaine de centrales hydroélectriques et des ensembles manufacturiers disséminés dans une quinzaine de petites villes aujourd’hui intégrées dans l’aire métropolitaine. La conférence proposera un surv...
Tuesday 30 August, 2022
It is widely accepted that understanding a historic place is a critical first step to guide subsequent management and conservation. Industrial sites present a number of challenges as understanding their form, function, design, boundaries, and conservation often requires a high degree of technical expertise and experience. In Canada, gaining this expertise and information sharing is hampered by a limited number of institutions offering training in industrial archaeology and the lack of a na...
It is widely accepted that understanding a historic place is a critical first step to guide subsequent management and conservation. Industrial sites present a number of challenges as understanding their form, function, design, boundaries, and conservation often requires a high degree of technical expertise and experience. In Canada, gaining this expertise and information sharing is hampered by a limited number of institutions offering training in industrial archaeology and the lack of a na...
This session focuses on company towns from the perspective of urban planning. “Company towns” are here defined as single-enterprise planned communities, usually centered around a single industry, where a company commissions an urban plan, builds housing for its workers, and sets up recreational, commercial, institutional or community facilities. While these are now endangered by a second wave of deindustrialization, we observe that, aside studies or monographs of individual towns that popu...
Efforts to preserve industrial heritage occurs in a socio-economic and political context. But what is being preserved and for whom? And, relatedly, what is the relationship between industrial heritage sites and the deindustrialized working-class communities that often adjoin them? The keynote will consider the ways that the preservation of Montreal’s Lachine Canal, Canada’s premier industrial heritage site, has enabled gentrification processes that have forc...
Wednesday 31 August, 2022
In this lecture, I would like to talk about deindustrialised communities, heritage and memory in the context of right-wing populism. Drawing on studies of memory and heritage, I argue that right-wing populists have cornered the market on talking about the past of deindustrialised communities. They have successfully misrepresented this rich and complex history to fuel rage, resentment, fear and reactionary nostalgia. Indeed, ‘the past’, and in particular the industr...
Thursday 1 September, 2022
The use of industrial heritage is a profoundly important factor in the process of creating a sustainable economic, social, and political future for many communities occupying industrial heritage landscapes. More than ever we recognize the need for such communities to be capable of shaping and expressing their heritage in different forms in the context of current events and issues, and in doing so to inform both contemporary decision-making as well as the way their industrial heritage is re...
Si le blé occupe une place mythique dans l’histoire de l’industrie au Canada, le pain et la boulangerie n’ont pas suscité le même intérêt. Témoin de l’époque artisanale, puis de l’industrialisation, le secteur du pain connaît aujourd’hui un retour à des modes de production préindustriels, dans la foulée de la « glocalisation » qui caractérise plusieurs produits alimentaires. Les études consacrées à la fabrication du pain se sont surtout intéressées au monde rural et à l’époque préindustrie...
This lecture will argue that the landscapes of industrial heritage that can be found in different parts of the world are directly related to the place-specific trajectories of deindustrialization. In other words: the different ways in which deindustrialization impacts on local communities has a direct bearing on the emergence of forms of industrial heritage. I will differentialte between deindustrialization paths and related industrial heritage regimes in a) Anglo-...
Friday 2 September, 2022
In the refusal of people in communities abandoned by industrial capital to abandon their own places, we can read an implicit critique of the mobility and unaccountability of capital, raised by those who were once inside (however tenuously or uncomfortably) and now find themselves marginalized, “left behind.” The desire to catch up again, whether through attracting new investment or transvaluing abandoned sites as tourist attractions, makes this an essentially conservative critique that is ...
