RE S E A R C H NO T E
A HISTORY OF CANADA’S UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES
A Legacy of Jeanne Wolfe, CM, FCIP BY BETH MOORE MILROY, PHD, FCIP AND BRIAN OSBORNE
PURPOSE
When Jeanne Wolfe died in December 2009, she was trying to finish a research project on Canadian utopias. Jeanne had been gathering this information in her spare time for well over 30 years while managing other important obligations such as running the School of Urban Planning at McGill, teaching, working on behalf of cip-icu, and many other undertakings. The authors of this paper were approached by Jeanne’s family and colleagues with the request that we bring her Canadian utopian project to completion. Jeanne was fascinated by Canadian utopias.
Recognizing the abundant, rich, and exciting literature relating to utopian experiments worldwide, her con- cern was that little had been written on the Canadian manifestations, even though the history of Canada is studded with attempts to create ideal communities. Indeed, she argued that Canada probably had more intentional settlements per capita than any other coun- try in the world, largely because of the great success of some of the major 19th and early 20th century immi- grations of disaffected groups. While some individual utopian settlements have received attention, particu- larly those in the four western provinces, there is no
comprehensive examination of this type of settlement nationwide. Accordingly, Jeanne initiated her own research proj-
ect; our intention is to bring her work to completion in the form of an encyclopedia of Canadian utopian settle- ments dedicated to the memory of Jeanne Wolfe. As her colleagues, friends and former students, a group of us is now turning to the expertise of others and inviting plan- ners across the country to participate in this project.
OBJECTIVES The concept of “utopia” is notoriously hard to define.
As such, we are carrying on as Jeanne did, refusing to get tied up in too many knots over the definition, and accepting her broad assumption that these communities were attempts at escaping contemporary realities found to be unacceptable by their founders and followers. To that end, Canadian utopians often sought refuge in spa- tially isolated or socially disconnected refuges in order to construct new social-economic-cultural orders. Predictably, Jeanne’s preliminary work encompassed a diverse set of descriptors for such utopian communities: communist, communal, communitarian, socialist, coop- erative, intentional, paternalistic, despotic, and sybaritic.
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