Village in Crisis by Peter R. Sinclair and Kenneth Westhues

This book, written in the mid 1970s, tackles the issues encountered by villages on the fringes of cities as they face urbanization and expansion. The authors use a southern Ontario town, referred to only as Fringetown to examine what makes a village and the challenges villages encounter in the modern, industrial and heavily capitalist world.

Fringetown is described as being “on the fringe of Toronto.” This description along with talk of a gorge, the first apartment buildings and other notable landmarks, clued me into the real identity of Fringetown quite early. The town examined in this small volume is in fact Elora, a tourist trap not far from my own town.

Whatever the town may have been in 1974 when this book was printed, the town is not that anymore. I call it a tourist trap, because that’s what it is. Old buildings are picturesquely restored and kept up, small shops sell tea and you don’t have to walk far in the downtown to stumble upon an antique or craft shop. It’s the kind of stifling place that on a Saturday in August you would have trouble walking down the sidewalk without finding a crowd of tourists. It’s one of those pretend small towns. In a pretend small town, if a general store exists it is for the benefit of the tourists, not the locals.

Village in Crisis does not touch much on tourism. The authors in their research are more concerned with the friction between what they call old-timers (those who have lived in Fringetown 7+ years) and new-timers. Ideology, value of religion, class differences and age are all considered.

 In Fringetown, it seems, part of the population wanted to preserve the town as it was, keeping out apartment buildings and anything that appeared too urban, like a plain car wash. The other part of the population hungered for the material prosperity of the cities that had been denied to them over the past decades because they lacked urbanization. It was mostly the new-timers that sought to preserve and the old-timers that sought urbanization and economic prosperity. Few of the old-timers had any problem with the apartment buildings that were proposed and then built.

The authors propose one theory that attributes the split in opinion to a split in the value of the village to the two groups. The new-timers arrived in the village looking for a physical setting that they did not wish to change. They valued the village for its aesthetics, while the old-timers valued the village for the sense of community it created. The authors suggest that the old-timers were more urbanized then the new-timers who had fled the city, because the old-timers saw urbanization as something that would economically benefit the community. They had no problem with things like apartment building because they did not see a building as a threat against the sense of community. While this theory has sense, I’m sure it was and is not quite so black and white.

What caught me off guard in my reading of this volume was the sudden turn to Marxism in the final chapter. Sinclair and Westhues suggest that as Fringetown becomes more and more urban and more a part of mass society, the individual will become alienated. The authors directly quote and refer to Marx’s theory of alienation, in which the worker is alienated from his work because he has no control over the final products of his labour. This is considered, by Marx, an unnatural state.  

Alienation, Sinclair and Westhues suggest, will occur, with the demise of the traditional village. The village, as it urbanizes, becomes less and less of an autonomous economic unit, but despite the urbanization and industrialization, technology has had very little change on the distribution of wealth. In other words, the people of the village will not really be better off.  The book effectively closes with the authors announcing that Canada’s capitalist structure has a tendency to perpetuate this alienation.

As someone who endorses many of the values of socialism and as someone intrigued by the writings of Marx, I find this volume, as a whole, thought provoking and satisfying. It doesn’t matter whether the readers finds themselves agreeing or disagreeing with Sinclair and Westhues, the authors offer, in Village in Crisis, a fascinating and thought provoking study of the effects of urbanization on the small town.