The Murals of Moose Jaw: Commodification or Articulation of the Past?
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
The three-model screen
all 1,000 screened works →All three models called this out of scope.
Cultural geography study of the murals of Moose Jaw as commodification of the past.
It studies historical murals and local economic development rather than research practice.
Historical geography of tourism murals and local economic revitalization, not metaresearch.
Abstract
By the late 1980s, the 35,000 citizens of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, were faced with the harsh reality that their community was in decline. A global decrease in prices for agricultural goods and the reduction of rural transportation, culminating with the closing of VIA rail passenger service in 1990, had taken their toll on the collective psyche of the city’s residents. Many of Moose Jaw’s businesses were dependent to a significant extent on the local farming community for support and they struggled as agriculture, the mainstay of the rural economy in the province, declined in importance—a trend evident in statistics showing Saskatchewan’s changing labor force employed by industry (Table 1). Table 2 further demonstrates the community’s economic and population stagnation during the 1970s and 1980s. While total population changed very little between 1975 and 1991, the dependency ratio remained quite high, reflecting a decreasing youth component and an increasing percentage of the elderly. Economic stagnation, as revealed in declining construction starts and values, stimulated out-migration among the young. This limited development of employment opportunities and an aging population placed greater pressure on the city to support services and facilities. A sense of desperation was in the air as elected officials and private citizens attempted to devise tactics aimed at diversifying and revitalizing the local economy. It was during this low ebb that leaders began to consider alternative development strategies, including schemes geared towards the stimulation of tourism. One such plan centered on the idea of developing a series of historical murals in the downtown area. This strategy was based on a similar project undertaken in Chemainus, British Columbia, developed after a sawmill closure in the late 1970s forced the small Vancouver Island community to either diversify or perish. The success of the Chemainus murals, the major force in attracting 300,000 visitors and $26 million in business in 1991, 1 appealed to Moose Javians; in the summer of 1989, a
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
The record
- Venue
- Historical geography
- Topic
- Public Spaces through Art
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- PopulationCommodificationEconomic growthGeographyEconomicsEconomyPolitical scienceSociologyDemography
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes