Dr. Peter G. Goheen

I received my Ph.D.. from the University of Chicago, where I studied with Brian Berry and Marvin Mikesell. Subsequently I taught at the University of British Columbia and the University of Chicago prior to coming to Queen's University.

Credentials:

B.A. (McMaster)
M.A. (Clark)
Ph.D.. (Chicago, 1970)
Research Interests:

My current research focuses on the changing social geography of the modern city, and in particular on the struggle to create meaningful public space in North American cities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The management of public space in today's cities is an important social and political concern, emerging in such forms as the debate over homelessness, demonstrations, and the preservation of open space. The unprecedented growth of the modern city occasioned, among other important processes of adjustment to radically new conditions, the social and economic revaluation of space. My work concerns the creation of new kinds of public space, and the contestation over the management and use of this collective resource.

This research is intended as well to contribute to the lively debate over the decline of public space in the late twentieth century by contextualizing the tensions observed today in the context of a long-standing process of contention, stretching back for a century and more, to create and secure public resources. Public space has always attracted the attention of private interests, and the ways in which these conflicts have been resolved shed light on the present.

I maintain an interest in the role of the city as a centre of communications at a time of technological and social change. My research has examined the creation of postal and telegraph communications networks and the growth of urban systems in nineteenth-century Canada.