Community Morphology
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The Importance of Territory
The most common and most traditional meaning of community is undoubtedly the one that refers to villages, neighbourhoods, towns or regions, not only by their territorial boundaries, but also by their specific characteristics, whether language, culture or, more generally, destiny. OLMCs have historically constituted such territorial communities. They are thus often historic communities that in the past colonized the land, established villages and towns, built churches, businesses and factories, and established the foundations of what are still occasionally referred to as rooted English or French communities, even though today they find themselves in a minority setting. Some urban neighbourhoods have succeeded in perpetuating this historical continuity, for example, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce in Montréal or Saint Boniface in Winnipeg. More infrequently, urban neighbourhoods are built around gathering points or symbols of the official language minority, for example, around the Faculté Saint-Jean in Edmonton.
The first finding with regard to the vitality of OLMCs associated with specific territories, both for Anglophones and Francophones, is that these communities are not all the same. Several variables are cited to explain the differences: urbanization, the deconcentration and regionalization of services, regional economic shifts and inequalities, territorial concentration or dispersal, the influx from internal migration and immigration from abroad.
The minority communities are often described and analysed in terms of their relationship to space (their concentration/dispersal, the presence and visibility of institutions and activities organized on a local or regional basis) or else in terms of demographic changes at the municipal, provincial or national level. Some of these interpretations have become archetypal images. French-language minority populations have been described as being concentrated in the "bilingual belt" from Moncton to Sault Ste. Marie (Joy, 2nd ed., 1972). Another image, that of the "archipelago" (Louder and Waddell, 1983; repeated by Thériault, 1989), reflects an extremely fragmented space. In Quebec, Anglophone populations were and still are viewed as divided between two universes (Caldwell and Waddell, 1982): one concentrated in the pluralistic environments of the Island of Montréal, the other dispersed among the towns, villages and rural areas mainly in the Ottawa Valley, the Eastern Townships, Gaspé and the Magdalen Islands, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, and in the city of Québec and along the Saguenay River.
These images were illustrated and categorized by the first language maps produced by Statistics Canada in connection with demolinguistic community profiles, following the 1986 Census of Canada (Dallaire and Lachapelle, 1990). Canadian Heritage subsequently updated the profiles, using the Census databases produced by Statistics Canada. This work was then taken up by the Quebec Community Groups Network and Voice of English Quebec (1997) and the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne (2000, 2004). These sources depict the geographic spread and most striking characteristics of the populations in question.
Territory is undoubtedly an important dimension in economic and community development, as it combines the natural resources that lie within it, the human resources living there (Beaudin and Boudreau, 1994; Beaudin, 1999) and the cultural resources that give it life. In the decade 1980-1990, several studies documented how, for example, cultural and community centres (Groupe de recherche en gestion des arts, 1991; Piché and Robitaille, 1991; Farmer, 1996) and community media (Harvey, 1992; Delorme, Foy et al., 1994; Torje, 1994) contribute to the development of local and regional communities, a phenomenon that has since been verified (Haentjens, 2001).
