Space has symbolic importance for Canadian culture, in part because of the vastness of Canadian geography coupled with its sparse population, and in part because a sense of distance in Canada has tended to create regional tensions based on the isolation of the larger pockets of the population. Most Canadians live in towns and cities, a trend away from rural residence not unlike that found throughout the rest of the industrialized world. Canadian cities are found at important hubs of interchange between agriculture and manufacturing, such that most Canadian cities emerged as points of connection between farm production and industrial development. Because of this, Canadian cities have tended to develop haphazardly as the larger scale processes of industrialization and changes in farming have developed. Such historical processes are not amenable to planning.
Canadian cities look like cities almost anywhere in the industrialized world, save the fact they tend to be cleaner due to an effect of the way that orderliness has been a dominant feature of the history of Canadian material culture. Canadian cities, even during phases of urban decay, have tended to be more carefully planned and better run, at least in terms of amenities and services, than those in many other industrialized nations.
Unlike European cities, however, space in Canadian cities tends to be privatized. While most cities have some space, such as a formal plaza at a city hall, at which public events are held, in general there are no large communal spaces in which social interactions occur. Instead, Canadians in cities of whatever size socialize in private spaces: their homes or commercial sites, such as restaurants. Like cities throughout North America, space in Canadian cities is dominated by movement, and Canadian cities are designed as networks through which goods, vehicles, and people move on their way to or from some place. As such, streets are designed to control the flow of vehicular traffic, to in some way isolate foot traffic, and in all instances to direct traffic toward destinations rather than allow traffic to accumulate. This has led, over the last several decades, to the gradual disappearance of urban commercial streetscapes, replaced by indoor shopping malls as a key destination of traffic flow. Rural towns, however, counter this trend somewhat. Many smaller towns have endeavored to revitalize their commercial streetscapes in recent decades and the decline of this streetscape is often seen as a sign of the decline and decay of the town as a whole.
Residence in Canadian cities is generally private rather than communal, dominated by private homes or residences. Vertical residence structures, such as apartment buildings, dominate much of the urban renewal of core areas in cities, while expansion of cities has been dominated by the development of large tracts of private single-family dwellings.
Official architecture in Canada has, historically, been neoclassical though not to the same extent as one finds in the United States. While official buildings in the early part of the twentieth century were often modeled on massive classical buildings, in the latter part of the century these buildings took on shapes not unlike other functional commercial buildings. Key symbolically important buildings, such as courthouses and city halls, are often grand in scale; what marks them today is their diversity rather than the application of a single stylistic model.
