Biography
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.
Research
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.
Publications
Recent Publications
Goheen, Peter G. Urban Reform in the Industrial Era, Journal of Urban
History, 31 (2005).
Goheen, Peter G. The Assertion of middle-class claims to public space
in late Victorian Toronto. Journal of Historical Geography, 29 (2003),
73-92.
Goheen, Peter G. Urban Geography in the 1970s: Competing Visions of the
City. Urban Geography, 23 (2002), 414-22.
Goheen, Peter G. Practicing Historical Geography, Historical Geography,
29 (2001), 77-78.
Goheen, Peter G. The Struggle for Urban Public Space: Disposing of the
Toronto Waterfront in the Nineteenth Century. In Cultural Encounters with
the Environment, ed. A.G. Murphy and D.L. Johnson. Lanham, MD : Rowman
and Littlefield, 2000.
Goheen, Peter G. Public space and the geography of the modern city. Progress
in Human Geography 22 (1998).
Goheen, Peter G. Honouring 'one of the great forces of the Dominion':
The Canadian public mourns McGee. Canadian Geographer 41 (1997). |
Dr.
Peter G. Goheen
Biography