On 25 February 1966, despite a typically cold Canadian afternoon, Torontonians were in a celebratory mood. The city’s public transit authority had just extended the subway system eastward to Woodbine Avenue and westward to Keele Street. Only two years earlier almost to the day, on 26 February 1964, Canada’s first enclosed shopping mall (Yorkdale) had opened its doors, to considerable fanfare.

These two events – a subway line extension and the opening of Canada’s first climate-controlled shopping mall – inadvertently set in motion forces that would eventually create the world’s first Business Improvement Area (BIA).

Prior to these modernizations most...

In our introduction we outlined how a combination of curiosity, intuition, and observation led us to explore the topic of small business and its role in urban society. We laid out in general terms our argument that small business is a critical driver of cities’ economic fortunes, as well as a formative influence on the social and psychological identity residents and visitors ascribe to a community. The preceding chapter described the origins and explained the rationale behind Business Improvement Associations, which are designed to give individual small-enterprise operators a collective voice with which to articulate their needs. It is now...

On a warm day in late March, just as the sun begins to heat the sand on the shores of Harrison Lake after a long and gloomy “wet coast” winter, about 150 local government officials, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and other progressives gather at the annual Progressive Governance Forum in Harrison Hot Springs (see exhibit 4.1) organized by the Centre for Civic Governance. The list of attendees is impressive and includes mayors and councillors from the largest municipalities in British Columbia and leading intellectuals in the field of community “place-making” and sustainability.

In attendance are speakers such as Michael Shuman, director...

Toronto, as we have seen from our introduction, was the birthplace of the first-ever modern Business Improvement Area. It is somewhat fitting, then, to end our city-based evaluation of local economic development and small business activity with a closer look at the place in which the BIA movement was born. On the surface at least, the portrait that emerges is one of unbridled success. Toronto is home to the world’s largest concentration of BIAs, and the pace of that growth, for the moment at least, appears unabated. A number of major BIA-led revitalization projects, such as those on Bloor Street...

As seen in Part I ofSmall Business and the City, Canadian BIAs are struggling to represent their members’ interests while at the same time meeting the challenges of twenty-first-century living. They are also highly diverse, covering the full gamut of socio-economic and geographic diversity. In Toronto, for example, they range from the Fifth Avenue-style affluence of Yorkville to the bohemianism of Queen Street West, to the emerging suburban BIAs of Scarborough and North York. In the Vancouver region they range from a single downtown business district not too dissimilar from the downtown BIA found in Halifax to the spa...

In early 2011, Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighbourhood witnessed the closure of a beloved landmark, a forty-seven-year-old Latin grocery store, ushering in the arrival of a Whole Foods Market.¹ Immediately, a large backlash against Whole Foods erupted from within the local community, a unique mix of Latino immigrants, African Americans, university students, and young white professionals.² The most public organization formed to stop Whole Foods from establishing itself in Jamaica Plain was an all-volunteer organization known as “Whose Foods/Whose Community?: The Coalition Against Gentrification.”³ Among the organization’s criticisms of Whole Foods were its high prices, out of the reach of poorer...

Accustomed as we are to believing that the North American economy is dominated by large enterprises (whether public or private), we may take a sceptical view of one of the basic premises of this book – that the current and future success of contemporary Canadian (and for that matter Western) society depends on numerous small, locally based, and independently owned enterprises operating in highly urbanized environments. This premise, we acknowledge, requires some explaining.

The reason for placing such an emphasis on small enterprise and the city is actually quite simple. It is based on four observations about what small businesses...

Throughout this book we have advanced recommendations and offered policy advice aimed at enabling small-scale enterprise to achieve its potential. We have also tried to raise awareness of the power that small economic actors can exert when they begin to act in concert, both internally (through the BIA movement) and externally (with governments, communities, and yes, even large businesses). Some of our recommendations have been directed at governments, while others, as seen in chapter 6, are focused on BIA best practices. Along the way we offered findings from observations in the field, theory, empirical data, and academic research to support...