The emphasis is on urban society, with new essays on social structure, the family, ethnicity and immigration, and religion. Other sections are devoted to urban growth, the physical environment, and urban government and reform.

This collection offers an in-depth look at municipal voting behaviour during local elections in eight of Canada's largest cities.

Architect and artist Roger Kemble has demonstrated his ideas of urban design with images from sixteen major Canadian cities—among others. He has walked, measured, and sketched their streets, squares and places, scanned their horizons, probed the relationships between structures, land and landscape with unprecedented energy. More significantly, he has reacted to the negative effect that all the busy business of urban development is having on our daily lives and he has had the courage to offer concrete remedial plans. If, as Kemble (quoting Ruskin), reminds us: 'Architecture is the mother of the arts', then time spent with his bold, imaginative, idiosyncratic view of the making (and unmaking) of cities—drawn with passionate hindsight and compassionate foresight—will be a moving and healing experience. Through the beckoning text of The Canadian City and its 144 illustrations, we will come to know the map of our own country and city as never before. The long shadow cast by this knowledge will make us more aware travellers abroad, too. Principles of city living and city building will accompany us everywhere, with an unsuspecting vividness. There is only a short step from Roger Kemble's studio to the world.

Municipal elections in Canada don’t look much like those held at the federal and provincial levels. A key difference is a significant discrepancy in voter turnout, but relatively little is known about why far fewer people vote in city elections. Voters show less interest in local government, seeing it as less influential than other levels, yet they believe their views matter more to local politicians. Political Engagement in Canadian City Elections explores this apparent contradiction by asking who participates in politics, how they go about it, and why. Drawing from the Canadian Municipal Election Study, a novel survey of electors in eight large cities across the country in 2017 and 2018, contributors consider factors ranging from the universal – such as the demographic profile of voters or how economic conditions affect them – to the specific – for example, participation in school board and council elections. There are more municipal elections than any other kind in Canada. The discoveries in Political Engagement in Canadian City Elections collectively represent a major leap forward in our understanding of voter activity at the community and municipal level.

Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. In September 2008, Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabe resident of Winnipeg, arrived in the emergency room of a major downtown hospital. Over a thirty-four- hour period, he was left untreated and unattended to, and ultimately died from an easily treatable infection. McCallum and Perry present the ways in which Sinclair, once erased and ignored, came to represent diffuse, yet singular and largely dehumanized ideas about Indigenous people, modernity, and decline in cities. This story tells us about ordinary indigeneity in the city of Winnipeg through Sinclair’s experience and restores the complex humanity denied him in his interactions with Canadian health and legal systems, both before and after his death.