I am Professor of Geography, Brock University (PhD, Queen’s). I tend to research the role of bourgeois culture in the historical production of public space in the North American modern city. This has included publications ranging from moral environmentalism, civic art leagues, and City Beautiful, to park planning and racialization, evangelical Protestantism and early city planning. I have strayed into the cultural-historical geography of bicycling in the fin de siècle, historical mobilities and modernity, and masculinity and the moral geography of the Victorian masonic lodge. I am also interested in post-Darwinism and its influence on the cultures of the modern city.
Humans move. Movement is the primary indicator of human vitality, from beating heart to subsisten... more Humans move. Movement is the primary indicator of human vitality, from beating heart to subsistence. Scholars of the human experience striving to represent its condition accurately account not only for Thomas Hobbes’ 17th-century observation that “life is but a motion of limbs,” in Hobbes 1968 (cited under General Overview on Historical Mobilities); they also document our general practice of mediating this “motion” with technologies, while analyzing the social and cultural consequences of both. Mobilities and historical mobilities apprehend that heterogeneous movement and its mediation occupy a central place in earthly life, whether cell mitosis or container ships.
Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity, 2018
‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. It exists not only in tandem with modern constru... more ‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. It exists not only in tandem with modern constructions of mobility, speed, rhythm, and time–space compression, but also with infrastructures, technologies, practices, and emotions associated with the experience of the ‘mobilizing modern’. ‘Hurry’ is not simply speed. It may result in congestion, slowing-down, or inaction in the face of over-stimulus. Speeding-up is often competitive: faster traffic on better roads made it harder for pedestrians to cross, or for horse-drawn vehicles and cyclists to share the carriageway with motorized vehicles. Focusing on the cultural and material manifestations of ‘hurry’, the book’s contributors analyse the complexities, tensions, and contradictions inherent in the impulse to higher rates of circulation in modernizing cities. The collection includes, but also goes beyond, accounts of new forms of mobility (bicycles, buses, underground trains) and infrastructure (street layouts and surfaces, business exchanges, and hotels) to show how modernity’s ‘architectures of hurry’ have been experienced, represented, and practised since the mid nineteenth century. Ten case studies explore different expressions of ‘hurry’ across cities and urban regions in Asia, Europe, and North and South America, and substantial introductory and concluding chapters situate ‘hurry’ in the wider context of modernity and mobility studies and reflect on the future of ‘hurry’ in an ever-accelerating world. This diverse collection will be relevant to researchers, scholars, and practitioners in the fields of planning, cultural and historical geography, urban history, and urban sociology.https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/geoggeolfacbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp
Historical geography and urban historical geography barely exist as sub-disciplinary idioms in ge... more Historical geography and urban historical geography barely exist as sub-disciplinary idioms in geography department curricula across Canada. Yes, historical geography research flourishes, but the teaching of historical and urban historical geography has all but vanished, except in a tiny number of larger departments. This article asks why—especially given historical geography’s sub-disciplinary commitment to social and environmental justice. But it also wonders whether this circumstance is lamentable, or simply more of the same: change over time, which historical and urban historical geographers document ceaselessly.
... consumption, the material manifestation of bourgeois class-membership and loyalty through the... more ... consumption, the material manifestation of bourgeois class-membership and loyalty through the consumerist flaunting of one's disposable income. ... itself on moral probity (Valverde 1991; Strange 1995; Mackintosh 2005a), and has been known by the sobriquet, Toronto the ...
Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity , 2018
To one standing at the corner of King and Yonge streets when the employees of
business houses an... more To one standing at the corner of King and Yonge streets when the employees of
business houses and workshops are going to their homes at the close of the day, it
is obvious that Toronto is a growing city. He observes it in the closer throng on the
walks, in the greater scramble for the cars, in the tenser look of human faces, and
in the hurry, hurry, hurry of human feet.
In the 1890s, Toronto's city engineers participated in a modernizing impulse that included th... more In the 1890s, Toronto's city engineers participated in a modernizing impulse that included the widespread use of asphalt pavement. The engineers' recommendation of asphalt for Toronto's particular traffic circumstance demonstrates an ideological commitment to the belief that asphalt promoted aesthetics and hygiene in the physical and human space of the city, in spite of the pavement's ruinous effects on certain streets. Asphalt facilitated the appearance in the streets of fashionable cyclists, in a city suffering the deleterious effects of industrialism. In short, asphalt symbolized modernism in the streets. "As a man is judged by his linen, a city is judged by its streets." Charles Mulford Robinson, 1899 Resume Dans les annees 1890, les ingenieurs municipaux de Toronto ont ete engages dans un elan de modernisation qui menait a l'adoption a grande echelle du pavage en asphalte. Leur recommandation d'utiliser l'asphalte, dans la situation particu...
American Freemasonry is as much a spatial as sacred practice. Emerging from arcane Enlightenment ... more American Freemasonry is as much a spatial as sacred practice. Emerging from arcane Enlightenment origins, Masonic theology and practice brim with a spatiality representative of Masonry’s compulsion to make men moral. Moral masculinity reflects in Freemasonry’s “sacred space,” Masonic geography fixed with symbols vital to the moral, social, and spiritual growth of potential and actual Freemasons.
Masons have routinely embedded sacred geography in architecture from stylish Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian “temples,” to humble lodges occupying multi-use back rooms or above street-level shops. Masonic historical preoccupation with spatiality evokes Victorian faith in moral environmentalism: the impulse to effect virtuous and civil behavior through orderly manipulations of environment. Indeed, the dedicated employment in the lodge of Masonic furniture and furnishings loosely mimics the Victorian middle-class parlor’s preoccupation with order, design, and moral aesthetics. Masons call this ritual and allegorical décor the lodge’s form, support, covering, furniture, ornaments, lights, and jewels. Such furnishings figure in Masonry’s performance of rituals, and, together, they both produce sacred space in the lodge and substantiate the rites’ moral masculine transformation of Masonic candidate and Mason alike.
Masonic spatiality includes a waning penchant for racial and sexual apartheid, originating in early modern American misapprehensions of biology, anthropology, and gender. Accordingly, “black” Masons have attended separate lodges. Prince Hall Freemasonry has existed since the late 18th century and is named for its eponymous founder, although “black” Masons join “white” lodges today. Women Masons or “matrons” are initiated in an appendant Christian rite: the Order of the Eastern Star, which includes a Prince Hall form, was developed for evangelical Protestant women followers of Jesus intentionally to distract them from the deism of the men’s rituals in a milieu of 19th century Christian anti-Masonry.
Recognizing the lodge as sacred space contributes to its existence as sacred “place.” Thus, the lodge-as-place becomes a “sacred retreat” for Masons who dwell outside its precincts.
Micro-geographies of the Western City, c.1750–1900, 2021
As liberal Canada’s unofficial “English” capital, Toronto has deep pockets of liberal culture rea... more As liberal Canada’s unofficial “English” capital, Toronto has deep pockets of liberal culture reaching into numerous streets and neighbourhoods of the old central city. One prominent locus of liberalism, circa 1900, was Brunswick Avenue. Known as the heart of “the Annex,” the primary inner suburb to the northwest of the core, Brunswick homed many of Toronto’s liberal elites. With its proximity to quintessential liberal institutions—the University of Toronto, the Laurier Club (of the Liberal Party of Canada, at McBean’s Hall at the corner of Brunswick and College), the Church of Christ (on 161 Brunswick)—the street nevertheless waxed paradoxically illiberal regarding the utterly prosaic issue of paving. When, in 1898, City Engineer Edward Keating recommended a brick pavement in the four-block stretch from Bloor to Ulster Streets, the subsequent turmoil and discord rent the social fabric of one of Toronto’s foremost neighbourhoods. In aligning for and against the recommended pavement that would pass their homes, an upgrade Brunswickers themselves would freely choose and purchase under Toronto’s local improvements bylaw, home owners demonstrated how property, money, and aesthetics bred contention, deception, and fraud. Throughout the paving process, the people of Brunswick Avenue subverted and maligned their own micro-geography of polite liberalism in Toronto, and doubtless created rifts in Brunswick society for years afterward.
Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity, 2018
Late moderns assume the common sense of mobility. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century cities, ... more Late moderns assume the common sense of mobility. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century cities, this means taking for granted the concrete and asphalt street surfaces symbolizing the modern commitment to time and space compression. Curiously, in the age of infrastructure modernization, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, no such ‘common sense’ existed. Modern mobility was not a given, especially to an urban, property-owning, rate-paying class that financed infrastructure improvements to the distinctly organic urban world they inhabited – gravel, wood or stone paved streets hemmed by plank or flagstone sidewalks. Such was the case in Toronto, where property owners possessed the democratic right to determine the nature and quality of the infrastructure they were legally required to purchase, by order of the city engineer, under local improvements by-laws. This one fact – Toronto property owners’ right to decide the materials constituting the street surfaces on behalf of the city – meant that modernization and mobility halted over cheap wooden, stone and gravel roads and plank sidewalks for decades. Rather than privilege an architecture of hurry, Toronto property owners preferred an architecture of affordability, an architecture of ‘good enough’ – an architecture of sluggishness.
Humans move. Movement is the primary indicator of human vitality, from beating heart to subsisten... more Humans move. Movement is the primary indicator of human vitality, from beating heart to subsistence. Scholars of the human experience striving to represent its condition accurately account not only for Thomas Hobbes’ 17th-century observation that “life is but a motion of limbs,” in Hobbes 1968 (cited under General Overview on Historical Mobilities); they also document our general practice of mediating this “motion” with technologies, while analyzing the social and cultural consequences of both. Mobilities and historical mobilities apprehend that heterogeneous movement and its mediation occupy a central place in earthly life, whether cell mitosis or container ships.
Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity, 2018
‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. It exists not only in tandem with modern constru... more ‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. It exists not only in tandem with modern constructions of mobility, speed, rhythm, and time–space compression, but also with infrastructures, technologies, practices, and emotions associated with the experience of the ‘mobilizing modern’. ‘Hurry’ is not simply speed. It may result in congestion, slowing-down, or inaction in the face of over-stimulus. Speeding-up is often competitive: faster traffic on better roads made it harder for pedestrians to cross, or for horse-drawn vehicles and cyclists to share the carriageway with motorized vehicles. Focusing on the cultural and material manifestations of ‘hurry’, the book’s contributors analyse the complexities, tensions, and contradictions inherent in the impulse to higher rates of circulation in modernizing cities. The collection includes, but also goes beyond, accounts of new forms of mobility (bicycles, buses, underground trains) and infrastructure (street layouts and surfaces, business exchanges, and hotels) to show how modernity’s ‘architectures of hurry’ have been experienced, represented, and practised since the mid nineteenth century. Ten case studies explore different expressions of ‘hurry’ across cities and urban regions in Asia, Europe, and North and South America, and substantial introductory and concluding chapters situate ‘hurry’ in the wider context of modernity and mobility studies and reflect on the future of ‘hurry’ in an ever-accelerating world. This diverse collection will be relevant to researchers, scholars, and practitioners in the fields of planning, cultural and historical geography, urban history, and urban sociology.https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/geoggeolfacbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp
Historical geography and urban historical geography barely exist as sub-disciplinary idioms in ge... more Historical geography and urban historical geography barely exist as sub-disciplinary idioms in geography department curricula across Canada. Yes, historical geography research flourishes, but the teaching of historical and urban historical geography has all but vanished, except in a tiny number of larger departments. This article asks why—especially given historical geography’s sub-disciplinary commitment to social and environmental justice. But it also wonders whether this circumstance is lamentable, or simply more of the same: change over time, which historical and urban historical geographers document ceaselessly.
... consumption, the material manifestation of bourgeois class-membership and loyalty through the... more ... consumption, the material manifestation of bourgeois class-membership and loyalty through the consumerist flaunting of one's disposable income. ... itself on moral probity (Valverde 1991; Strange 1995; Mackintosh 2005a), and has been known by the sobriquet, Toronto the ...
Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity , 2018
To one standing at the corner of King and Yonge streets when the employees of
business houses an... more To one standing at the corner of King and Yonge streets when the employees of
business houses and workshops are going to their homes at the close of the day, it
is obvious that Toronto is a growing city. He observes it in the closer throng on the
walks, in the greater scramble for the cars, in the tenser look of human faces, and
in the hurry, hurry, hurry of human feet.
In the 1890s, Toronto's city engineers participated in a modernizing impulse that included th... more In the 1890s, Toronto's city engineers participated in a modernizing impulse that included the widespread use of asphalt pavement. The engineers' recommendation of asphalt for Toronto's particular traffic circumstance demonstrates an ideological commitment to the belief that asphalt promoted aesthetics and hygiene in the physical and human space of the city, in spite of the pavement's ruinous effects on certain streets. Asphalt facilitated the appearance in the streets of fashionable cyclists, in a city suffering the deleterious effects of industrialism. In short, asphalt symbolized modernism in the streets. "As a man is judged by his linen, a city is judged by its streets." Charles Mulford Robinson, 1899 Resume Dans les annees 1890, les ingenieurs municipaux de Toronto ont ete engages dans un elan de modernisation qui menait a l'adoption a grande echelle du pavage en asphalte. Leur recommandation d'utiliser l'asphalte, dans la situation particu...
American Freemasonry is as much a spatial as sacred practice. Emerging from arcane Enlightenment ... more American Freemasonry is as much a spatial as sacred practice. Emerging from arcane Enlightenment origins, Masonic theology and practice brim with a spatiality representative of Masonry’s compulsion to make men moral. Moral masculinity reflects in Freemasonry’s “sacred space,” Masonic geography fixed with symbols vital to the moral, social, and spiritual growth of potential and actual Freemasons.
Masons have routinely embedded sacred geography in architecture from stylish Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian “temples,” to humble lodges occupying multi-use back rooms or above street-level shops. Masonic historical preoccupation with spatiality evokes Victorian faith in moral environmentalism: the impulse to effect virtuous and civil behavior through orderly manipulations of environment. Indeed, the dedicated employment in the lodge of Masonic furniture and furnishings loosely mimics the Victorian middle-class parlor’s preoccupation with order, design, and moral aesthetics. Masons call this ritual and allegorical décor the lodge’s form, support, covering, furniture, ornaments, lights, and jewels. Such furnishings figure in Masonry’s performance of rituals, and, together, they both produce sacred space in the lodge and substantiate the rites’ moral masculine transformation of Masonic candidate and Mason alike.
Masonic spatiality includes a waning penchant for racial and sexual apartheid, originating in early modern American misapprehensions of biology, anthropology, and gender. Accordingly, “black” Masons have attended separate lodges. Prince Hall Freemasonry has existed since the late 18th century and is named for its eponymous founder, although “black” Masons join “white” lodges today. Women Masons or “matrons” are initiated in an appendant Christian rite: the Order of the Eastern Star, which includes a Prince Hall form, was developed for evangelical Protestant women followers of Jesus intentionally to distract them from the deism of the men’s rituals in a milieu of 19th century Christian anti-Masonry.
Recognizing the lodge as sacred space contributes to its existence as sacred “place.” Thus, the lodge-as-place becomes a “sacred retreat” for Masons who dwell outside its precincts.
Micro-geographies of the Western City, c.1750–1900, 2021
As liberal Canada’s unofficial “English” capital, Toronto has deep pockets of liberal culture rea... more As liberal Canada’s unofficial “English” capital, Toronto has deep pockets of liberal culture reaching into numerous streets and neighbourhoods of the old central city. One prominent locus of liberalism, circa 1900, was Brunswick Avenue. Known as the heart of “the Annex,” the primary inner suburb to the northwest of the core, Brunswick homed many of Toronto’s liberal elites. With its proximity to quintessential liberal institutions—the University of Toronto, the Laurier Club (of the Liberal Party of Canada, at McBean’s Hall at the corner of Brunswick and College), the Church of Christ (on 161 Brunswick)—the street nevertheless waxed paradoxically illiberal regarding the utterly prosaic issue of paving. When, in 1898, City Engineer Edward Keating recommended a brick pavement in the four-block stretch from Bloor to Ulster Streets, the subsequent turmoil and discord rent the social fabric of one of Toronto’s foremost neighbourhoods. In aligning for and against the recommended pavement that would pass their homes, an upgrade Brunswickers themselves would freely choose and purchase under Toronto’s local improvements bylaw, home owners demonstrated how property, money, and aesthetics bred contention, deception, and fraud. Throughout the paving process, the people of Brunswick Avenue subverted and maligned their own micro-geography of polite liberalism in Toronto, and doubtless created rifts in Brunswick society for years afterward.
Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity, 2018
Late moderns assume the common sense of mobility. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century cities, ... more Late moderns assume the common sense of mobility. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century cities, this means taking for granted the concrete and asphalt street surfaces symbolizing the modern commitment to time and space compression. Curiously, in the age of infrastructure modernization, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, no such ‘common sense’ existed. Modern mobility was not a given, especially to an urban, property-owning, rate-paying class that financed infrastructure improvements to the distinctly organic urban world they inhabited – gravel, wood or stone paved streets hemmed by plank or flagstone sidewalks. Such was the case in Toronto, where property owners possessed the democratic right to determine the nature and quality of the infrastructure they were legally required to purchase, by order of the city engineer, under local improvements by-laws. This one fact – Toronto property owners’ right to decide the materials constituting the street surfaces on behalf of the city – meant that modernization and mobility halted over cheap wooden, stone and gravel roads and plank sidewalks for decades. Rather than privilege an architecture of hurry, Toronto property owners preferred an architecture of affordability, an architecture of ‘good enough’ – an architecture of sluggishness.
In Newspaper City, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh scrutinizes the reluctance of early Torontonians to ... more In Newspaper City, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh scrutinizes the reluctance of early Torontonians to pave their streets. He demonstrates how Toronto’s two liberal newspapers, the Toronto Globe and Toronto Daily Star, nevertheless campaigned for surface infrastructure as the leading expression of modern urbanity, despite the broad resistance of property owners to pay for infrastructure improvements under local improvements by-laws. To boost paving, newspapers used their broadsheets to fashion two imagined cities for their readers: one overrun with animals, dirt, and marginal people, the other civilized, modern, and crowned with clean streets. However, the employment of capitalism to generate traditional public goods, such as concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, regulated pedestrianism, and efficient automobilism, is complicated. Thus, the liberal newspapers’ promotion of a city of orderly infrastructure and contented people in actual Toronto proved strikingly illiberal. Consequently, Mackintosh’s study reveals the contradictory nature of newspapers and the historiographical complexities of newspaper research.
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Papers by Phillip Gordon Mackintosh
business houses and workshops are going to their homes at the close of the day, it
is obvious that Toronto is a growing city. He observes it in the closer throng on the
walks, in the greater scramble for the cars, in the tenser look of human faces, and
in the hurry, hurry, hurry of human feet.
Masons have routinely embedded sacred geography in architecture from stylish Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian “temples,” to humble lodges occupying multi-use back rooms or above street-level shops. Masonic historical preoccupation with spatiality evokes Victorian faith in moral environmentalism: the impulse to effect virtuous and civil behavior through orderly manipulations of environment. Indeed, the dedicated employment in the lodge of Masonic furniture and furnishings loosely mimics the Victorian middle-class parlor’s preoccupation with order, design, and moral aesthetics. Masons call this ritual and allegorical décor the lodge’s form, support, covering, furniture, ornaments, lights, and jewels. Such furnishings figure in Masonry’s performance of rituals, and, together, they both produce sacred space in the lodge and substantiate the rites’ moral masculine transformation of Masonic candidate and Mason alike.
Masonic spatiality includes a waning penchant for racial and sexual apartheid, originating in early modern American misapprehensions of biology, anthropology, and gender. Accordingly, “black” Masons have attended separate lodges. Prince Hall Freemasonry has existed since the late 18th century and is named for its eponymous founder, although “black” Masons join “white” lodges today. Women Masons or “matrons” are initiated in an appendant Christian rite: the Order of the Eastern Star, which includes a Prince Hall form, was developed for evangelical Protestant women followers of Jesus intentionally to distract them from the deism of the men’s rituals in a milieu of 19th century Christian anti-Masonry.
Recognizing the lodge as sacred space contributes to its existence as sacred “place.” Thus, the lodge-as-place becomes a “sacred retreat” for Masons who dwell outside its precincts.
business houses and workshops are going to their homes at the close of the day, it
is obvious that Toronto is a growing city. He observes it in the closer throng on the
walks, in the greater scramble for the cars, in the tenser look of human faces, and
in the hurry, hurry, hurry of human feet.
Masons have routinely embedded sacred geography in architecture from stylish Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian “temples,” to humble lodges occupying multi-use back rooms or above street-level shops. Masonic historical preoccupation with spatiality evokes Victorian faith in moral environmentalism: the impulse to effect virtuous and civil behavior through orderly manipulations of environment. Indeed, the dedicated employment in the lodge of Masonic furniture and furnishings loosely mimics the Victorian middle-class parlor’s preoccupation with order, design, and moral aesthetics. Masons call this ritual and allegorical décor the lodge’s form, support, covering, furniture, ornaments, lights, and jewels. Such furnishings figure in Masonry’s performance of rituals, and, together, they both produce sacred space in the lodge and substantiate the rites’ moral masculine transformation of Masonic candidate and Mason alike.
Masonic spatiality includes a waning penchant for racial and sexual apartheid, originating in early modern American misapprehensions of biology, anthropology, and gender. Accordingly, “black” Masons have attended separate lodges. Prince Hall Freemasonry has existed since the late 18th century and is named for its eponymous founder, although “black” Masons join “white” lodges today. Women Masons or “matrons” are initiated in an appendant Christian rite: the Order of the Eastern Star, which includes a Prince Hall form, was developed for evangelical Protestant women followers of Jesus intentionally to distract them from the deism of the men’s rituals in a milieu of 19th century Christian anti-Masonry.
Recognizing the lodge as sacred space contributes to its existence as sacred “place.” Thus, the lodge-as-place becomes a “sacred retreat” for Masons who dwell outside its precincts.