Abstract
History matters. Inspired by evolutionary approaches in economics and, more recently, economic geography, the authors present, through the lens of a slaughterhouse development on the city's fringe, a historical model of urban development in the metropolitan region of Calgary, Canada. Their analysis shows how an unanticipated system shock conditioned by strong historical differences in the political and economic aspirations of adjacent urban and rural jurisdictions manifested at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Their narrative explores the intertwined evolutionary trajectories of five key system elements whose pathways converged in 2004, resulting in unintended, and from a regional environmental perspective, undesirable, consequences.
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