Toronto Star

Cities exist as much in the imagination as they do in time and space. Indeed, some would argue that we can really only know cities in our minds. A conference being held this week at McGill University in Montreal, "Challenging Cities in Canada," will delve into this relationship. The panel discussion, titled "The City and the Imagination," will be chaired by Edmonton historian Douglas Owram. "It'll be a pretty open-ended session," Owram says. "Basically it'll look at how we shape cities and how cities shape us. In Canada, it seems that cities have been foreign to our self-identity. You get the sense that they are seen as drains on the country. As late as 1948-49, governments were spending money to keep young people on the farm. Cities represented temptation; they were places of evil and disease. Even now, that lingers with us."