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Ottawa is often understood only as the seat of the federal government, marked by the neo-Gothic parliament buildings on the hill, and the many government office buildings. Lively, erudite and exciting, Ottawology offers a unique and radical approach to studying the city, injecting it with intrigue and verve, and expanding collective, narrow understandings of Canada’s capital city. Tonya Davidson takes readers on a wide-ranging journey through a city populated not only by power brokers, but also workers, students, seniors, trees, eels, turtles, skaters and rabble rousers. Davidson applies her prodigious sociological imagination to critically explore an essential, but little understood, city.
Davidson’s Ottawa offers a fascinating template for how to scrutinize the interactions between the weight of history and the effervescent motion of everyday life in a city. She draws surprising connections, from the role of the civil service to the acceleration of suburban sprawl, and the one-time incredible success of the city’s bus-rapid transit system, to stories of nightlife, policing, play, libraries, rivers, and malls. Davidson traverses the city’s streets and hidden histories to show how social structures, sustainability, and social life intersect, creating an elegant chronicle of the city’s rich and fraught social life.
— Peter Hodgins, associate professor, School of Canadian Studies, Carleton University
Tonya Davidson has spent many years living in, teaching in, and studying Ottawa. She is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, where she has taught introduction to sociology, a sociology of Ottawa course for first-year students, urban sociology, and a variety of sociology of Ottawa courses in Carleton University’s Lifelong Learning program. These experiences shaped her broad-ranging interest in the sociology of Ottawa, including its parks, schools, workplaces, bars, and so on.
Her earlier research focused on the social lives of a series of Ottawa monuments, published in journal articles and the book
Tours Inside the
Snow Globe: Ottawa Monuments and National Belonging
. She is the co-editor of
Seasonal Sociology
, an introduction to sociology textbook that won the American Association of Publishers award for “Best Textbook in the Social Sciences” in 2021. A second edition of Seasonal Sociology is forthcoming in 2025.
Introduction:: Advance-Ottawa-En Avant
Chapter 1:: Settler Colonial Capital
Chapter 2:: Trees
Chapter 3:: Libraries
Chapter 4:: Work
Chapter 5:: The Civil Service
Chapter 6:: Getting Housed
Chapter 7:: Suburbia
Chapter 8:: Transit
Chapter 9:: Security
Chapter 10:: Markets and Malls
Chapter 11:: Goodnight Ottawa
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