Company Houses, Company Towns: Heritage and Conservation by Andrew Molloy & Tom Urbaniak

Author:Andrew Molloy & Tom Urbaniak [Molloy, Andrew & Urbaniak, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Architecture, Historic Preservation, General, Political Science, Public Policy, Regional Planning, Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781772060492
Google: PnD4jgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 33276157
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press
Published: 2016-01-15T07:34:06+00:00

Fig. 8 – Like hundreds of other photographs and promotional documents produced by the company to showcase Arvida, this winter view, staged in 1927 on one of the city’s first streets, testifies to the company’s commemorative intention. Alcoa Papers, Library and Archives Division, Heinz History Center (Pittsburgh).

Although the unfavourable economic situation at the end of the 1920s likely drew workers to Arvida from industrial facilities that were closing throughout the region, a key factor was clearly engineer Wake’s architectural about-face, which was intended to enhance the model city’s drawing power by affirming its French Canadian character. Indeed, it should be noted that a few years earlier, the architect Perry MacNeille asserted that:

Rest for the mind and soul, not just for the body should become the principal aim in designing workingmen’s houses.... An artistic house in a picturesque village makes a pleasanter home to return to, is more restful, more inspiring and increases the family’s pride. (MacNeille 1917: 72)

While it may seem difficult to distinguish labour-retention factors from various other demographic characteristics, what is important above all is that the housing analysis—combined with the fact that a quarter of the “founding nucleus” was assigned to aluminum production—seems to indicate a metamorphosis from a socio-industrial utopia to an “aluminum society” project. This project includes a mosaic of various cultures assembled, like Arvida’s homes, in a unique landscape and a shared egalitarian living space, characterized by both diversity and a sense of rootedness. The proliferation of nationalities, as described in the company’s employment records, and that the heads from Alcoa were themselves foreign to the Canadian landscape, no doubt served to erase typical social and racial segregation. In fact, these were abolished from the moment the city project was announced: “The City,” reveals Arvida’s charter, “shall comprise but one Ward.”13

The identity project espoused by Alcoa thus took shape through a certain type of naturalization, but territorial mediation was not solely restricted to architectural aesthetics in the creation of civic pride.

Heritage-building

Whereas the neo-vernacular structures in Arvida may have led to an immediate desire for ownership, civic pride and loyalty were forged over time. The creation of desirable housing was not enough to induce everyone to readily identify with “their” home, and certainly not enough for the worker—whether Polish, Norwegian or Canadian, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox—to assume the role of active heritage guardian. Above and beyond aesthetics, these dimensions of Arvida’s identity project were attained by way of law. This was achieved through a system of access (leasing, financing, etc.) to the original property and by subjecting properties to the conservation requirements registered in the acts of ownership in the form of constraints, or servitudes, of a rather unconventional nature. The project thus involved creating both a desire and the resources for heritage.

The complexity of undertaking a cadastral survey (of the extent, value and ownership of land) for Arvida’s first neighbourhoods (which took four years to complete) attests to the rarity of such an operation. Two successive cadastral maps were created, including one of a

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