Urbanizing The Countryside? The Governance Of Rural Restructuring In Bancroft And North Hastings County, Ontario

This dissertation comprises a case study of local governance in the Town of Bancroft, Ontario, and the surrounding municipalities of North Hastings County. The capacity for strategic agency by local governance actors, regarding economic development initiatives and mitigation of inequality, is the central object of analysis. The contexts of economic change - from lumber production, through mining, to tourism and recreation - and political structures - considering colonial origins, Canada’s hierarchical system of government, and the recent impacts of amalgamation and downloading in Ontario in the late 1990s - are shown to be profoundly structure the agency of local governance actors. The dissertation demonstrates a resulting intensification of “urban” phenomena in a traditionally “rural” space - while new forms of work encroach, and development pressures intensify - and highlights the limitations of existing structures of local government regarding the maintenance of a cohesive and inclusive community. A fundamental social disjuncture is shown to correspond to mixed land tenures of the sub-region: public Crown Land supports a generational rural economic culture at odds with the dynamics inherent to urbanizing spaces governed by municipal corporations. Semi-structured interviews with actors in local governance and key economic sectors, alongside document analysis of plans, reports and local histories provide the methodological foundation.

To the field of rural geography, the dissertation contributes an early analysis of post-COVID 19 rural transformation, demonstrating the effects of North Hastings being brought into the metropolitan space economy of Southern Ontario to an unprecedented extent. The distinctive analytical perspective - centring structured agency - offers a new approach to rural research in Ontario. Regarding the study of local government, the dissertation contributes an important case study in intergovernmental relations under twenty first century neoliberalism. Analysis of a small municipality - in relation to horizontal and vertical governmental dynamics and with regard to the management of essential infrastructures - provides a clear demonstration of the pressures driving institutional change. Finally, the dissertation interjects into contemporary urban theory debates, presenting an empirically grounded argument that planetary urbanization is best understood as a process inherent to the particular land use and political systems of the municipal system, spread by European colonization.