Dr. Matthieu Caron

I am a historian of urban governance whose work examines how cities are made—how municipal authorities use law, policing, and regulation to transform political visions into lived urban landscapes. I primarily focus on the governance of public space, tracing how efforts to order sex, consumption, and the urban environment give material form to specific imaginations of safety, morality, and economic growth.

My first book, Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City (2025), analyzes how efforts to position Montreal as an international metropolis reshaped the governance of its streets at night. Drawing on municipal archives, court records, and the press, I show how debates over nightlife became debates about order, economy, and belonging — often resulting in expanded regulatory frameworks and increased police funding. By situating nightlife within broader projects of urban branding and economic development, the book demonstrates how aspirations to global-city status transformed Montrealers' relationship to the night.

My current research extends these questions westward to Vancouver's False Creek, tracing how settler urbanism, land redevelopment, and mega-events transformed industrial and working-class districts into spaces of spectacle and real estate speculation. This project situates post-industrial redevelopment within longer histories of land ownership, displacement, and legal restructuring, foregrounding how municipal governance structured belonging and exclusion as Vancouver reimagined itself as an emergent international metropolis.

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Research interests

• Canadian History
• Cities
• Law and Governance
• Sexuality
• Environment

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Educational credentials

• BA, McGill University (2013)
• MA, Université de Montréal (2016)
• PhD, University of Toronto (2023)