Welcome to the fall 2016 issue of Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine. This is the first issue for which I serve as co-editor. Next year one of our associate editors, Harold Bérubé, will join me as the francophone co-editor of the journal. We look forward to guiding UHR/RUH into the next era of its long existence (forty-five years and counting!), building on the excellent work of its outgoing editor, Alan Gordon, its recent co-editor, Claire Poitras, and the many others who have strived to make this the preferred outlet for the finest research on Canada’s urban history. I want to underscore the point that, although our empirical focus is Canada’s past, our orientation is interdisciplinary, and we welcome perspectives on the topic from a variety of scholarly traditions. The study of urban history involves not merely urban areas as sites of activity, but also the historical process of urbanization, which William Solecki and colleagues say is “one of simultaneous transformation of places, populations, economies, and the built environment that creates an urban society.” Their call for an “urbanization science” aimed at improving public decision-making encompasses historical research examining the “intersection [of urbanization] with other environmental systems.” I think you will find that the content of this issue reflects this interdisciplinary approach to the study of Canada’s urban (and urbanization) history. Brad Cross’s article, “Modern Living ‘hewn out of the unknown wilderness’: Aluminum, City Planning, and Alcan’s British Columbian Industrial Town of Kitimat in the 1950s,” examines the planning history of a company town in northern British Columbia. Cross meticulously pieces together the confluence of ideas underpinning Kitimat’s creation. It was meant to be the city of the future, built in the wilderness, yet plugged into a global production system, of which it would serve a central role. One of the important insights of this article is that it reveals the planners of postwar suburbia as radical modernists seeking to engineer a better way of living. Alcan’s industrial product, aluminum, was seen as a futuristic material during the middle of the twentieth century. The company hired a noted American planner to design its workers’ utopia from scratch, allowing him to plan urban settings considered quite forward-thinking at the time (for example, houses facing away from roads, segregated foot and automobile traffic). Richard White made similar observations about Toronto’s postwar planning in his groundbreaking recent book, Planning Toronto. Like Cross, White shows that the suburbia we’ve inherited, and sometimes deride as retrograde, was rooted in an era of scientific and social progressivism. Thanks to Cross’s account illustrating this phenomenon in a seemingly unlikely setting (a company town in a wilderness) this article is a welcome contribution, not only to Canadian urban history, but also to the more specialized literature on planning history. Last year Jessica van Horssen and I guest edited a special themed issue of UHR/RUH on environmental nuisances and political contestation in Canadian cities. It focused on the environmental challenges posed to governments by urban growth, and the measures taken to address them while continuing to foster the conditions for continued growth. The next two articles in this issue, by Mark Kuhlberg and Joshua MacFadyen and me, continue that theme. In “‘An Eden that is practically uninhabited by humans’: Manipulating Wilderness in Managing Vancouver’s Drinking Water, 1880–1930,” Kuhlberg explores the ironies and contradictions that arose as Vancouver’s leaders sought to preserve and (promote) the quality of the city’s drinking water during the early twentieth century. He shows that local politicians and boosters promulgated a myth that, thanks to the region’s bounteous watersheds, Vancouver had drinking water …