Nuisances (e.g., noise, smoke, odours, blight, unwelcome flora and fauna) have historically represented substantial challenges to the liveability and overall prosperity of economically diversified urban areas. Their intractability relates to their paradoxicality: they are both a result of and hindrance to local economic activity. We can intuitively think of many ways in which this paradox finds expression in the political theatre of the urban growth machine. Nuisances pit locally oriented businesses against those using the city’s amenities (e.g., skilled labour and access to distribution channels) to generate products for broader markets, short-term profiteers against stewards for the region’s long-term development, and, of course, homeowners and recreational property owners against airports and heavy industry. As their conflicts are channelled through the political system, elected officials and city planners become implicated in formulating and implementing a collectively binding outcome. Whatever shape it takes—be it a comprehensive planning program, a nuisance bylaw with a bureaucratic office undertaking enforcement, or no action at all—it represents an attempt by government officials to balance competing articulations of the imperatives for economic prosperity and, ultimately, to arrive at an acceptable (albeit, fleeting) resolution to the nuisance-growth paradox inherent in modern urban life. The historical study of urban nuisance contestation in North America (including Canada) has blossomed in the past decade and a half, accompanying the firm establishment of environmental history as an interdisciplinary issue area within the formal discipline of history and the increasingly formal discipline of environmental studies. This proliferation of research has built upon contemporaneous and historical studies in other disciplines aimed at explicating theoretical points specific to debates in those fields. Collectively they are necessary to enrich the historical record, but they also serve as historical context for theory building and knowledge development relevant for making sense of contemporary efforts to manage the contradictions inherent in the process of urbanization. Yet considerable gaps in knowledge persist, limiting our capacity to track temporal change and continuity in North America and Canada. It is time to examine this interdisciplinary urban-political-historical-environmental domain again. This special issue of Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine explores political contestation over urban nuisances with a specific focus on Canadian cities. We ask, How have Canadian governments responded to urban nuisances and, in doing so, balanced the imperatives of growth and liveability? Who have been the leaders in formulating policy and encouraging action (e.g., government officials, business elites, property owners, engineers) and how have their interests been represented? Recent studies have spelled out a special role for technology in facilitating “ecological modernization” solutions to nuisances, bringing about relief in an economical way while concurrently enabling businesses to pursue economic activity with minimal disruption. Thus, we further ask, to what extent has the availability of abatement technology enabled mutually acceptable outcomes among concerned political actors? For the historical accounts herein, we adopt a broad understanding of what constitutes an urban nuisance. They are socially constructed as nuisances and, as such, have mutable identities as they are discursively represented by interested individuals and organizations and as these actors’ imperfect understanding of the environmental problem’s social costs shifts (often seamlessly) with the introduction of new ostensibly reliable knowledge. One person’s or one era’s nuisance is another’s public health threat, to the extent that such a distinction is made. We thus consider as a nuisance any contemporaneously acknowledged environmental pathology resulting from economic activity and impinging upon the urban milieu. This includes, but is not limited to, noise, smoke and smog, odours, weeds, animals, and unattractive buildings. The objective of this introduction to the special issue is to provide an overview of the authors’ contributions and suggest …