CANADIAN URBAN POLITICS: ANOTHER “BLACK HOLE”? GABRIEL EIDELMAN University of Toronto ZACK TAYLOR University of Toronto ABSTRACT: This article supplements and enriches Judd’s and Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe’s controversial diagnosis of a disjuncture between “mainstream” political science and the study of urban politics in the United States by suggesting that Canadian urban political science scholarship is equally isolated. Yet for the most part, the underlying causes of this predicament differ greatly from the U.S. experience. We offer three interpretations—one institutional, one epistemological, and one ontological—to explain the marginality of Canadian urban political science in relation to both mainstream Canadian political science and American urban politics. First, the growth of Canadian urban political science has been inhibited not because there are too few interested scholars, but rather because interested faculty are so thinly dispersed across the country’s academic institutions. Second, unlike the American experience, the historical development of Canadian political science as a discipline has led it to focus on national-level issues at the expense of local and urban politics. Finally, Canadian cities have developed differently from American cities in important respects, again leading Canadian scholars to privilege the national over the local. Twenty-five years ago, one of Canada’s leading scholars of urban politics and public admin- istration referred to the study of local government as an “academic ghetto” (Sancton, 1983, p. 310). This is as true today as it was then. A comprehensive review of the literature leads to the pessimistic conclusion that despite the subfield’s expansion in recent years, few Canadian political scientists have consistently published on urban issues and their work has not added up to a coherent research program (Taylor & Eidelman, 2010). Past reviewers have remarked that scholarship on the institutions, processes, practices, and impacts of Canadian urban politics is anemic compared to the depth of other areas of inquiry and analysis (Higgins, 1979; Rowat, 1983). All too often, the Canadian subfield has consisted of one-off projects by single authors rather than long-term debates among communities of scholars. Simply put, the nature of urban politics and policymaking in Canada remains poorly understood (Graham, Phillips, & Maslove, 1998, p. 1). Direct correspondence to: Gabriel Eidelman, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Room 3018, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada. E-mail: g.eidelman@utoronto.ca. JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Volume xx, Number x, pages 1–16. Copyright C  2010 Urban Affairs Association All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0735-2166. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.2010.00507.x