Townshend, Ivan

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Stockyards Districts as Industrial Clusters in Two Western Canadian Cities
(Western Division, Canadian Association of Geographers, 2004) MacLachlan, Ian; Townshend, Ivan
The stockyard was the nucleus of the livestock and meat processing agroindustry, one of the key propulsive forces in the rapid growth of western Canada at the turn of the century. In metropolitan centres such as Calgary and in smaller cities such as Lethbridge, stockyards functioned as transhipment points for livestock in transit and as markets for meat-packing plants. The activities typically drawn together by stockyards created a distinctly western Canadian industrial complex which benefited from agglomeration economies and industrial inertia. Nevertheless, public stockyards are now a relict urban land use and have all but disappeared from the urban landscape. The factors contributing to the waning role of stockyards are identified, with implications for the application of the theory of agglomeration economies and industrial clusters to resource-based industries.