About the 3City NB Project
exploring urban New Brunswick from a bird's eye view
Welcome to our research project at the University of New Brunswick!
Funded by a New Frontiers in Research Fund - Exploration grant, our team has created a new resource for spatial research into the history of New Brunswick's three largest cities: Fredericton, Moncton and Saint John. Using our carefully-curated and painstakingly-constructed Historical Aerial Photograph mosaics, we invite you to explore 100 years of urban history in the province.
What can aerial photographs reveal about the history of a community, a city, or an entire province?
Historical aerial photography, collected since the 1920s as part of Canadian land inventories, present a wonderful opportunity to study New Brunswick’s past from a new perspective. Captured over decades of change, these images document changing landscapes, neighbourhoods, roads, industries, forests, shorelines, and public infrastructure. They allow researchers to see processes of growth and change that are often difficult to detect in written records alone.
We invite scholars, students, community researchers, planners, and heritage organizations to explore these resources and consider how they can enrich their own work. Aerial photographs are powerful interdisciplinary tools, bringing together history, geography, environmental studies, planning, sociology, archaeology, Indigenous studies, and public policy. They can be used to trace urban expansion, agricultural change, transportation networks, industrial development, environmental transformations, and evolving patterns of land use.
The collection is particularly valuable for understanding the dramatic municipal and provincial changes that reshaped New Brunswick during the twentieth century, capturing decades of the Program for Equal Opportunity. Researchers might view changes and consider government policies, economic development, and infrastructure investments altered communities over time, perhaps revealing connections between public decision-making and the landscapes people inhabited. Whether investigating the growth of Fredericton suburbs, the evolution of resource industries, the impact of municipal reforms, or the changing relationship between rural and urban communities, aerial photography provides an unmatched visual record of change across the province.
These images are important historical records. They are research data that open new possibilities for collaboration across disciplines and institutions. By combining aerial photography with archives, maps, census records, GIS technologies, and community knowledge, researchers can ask new questions and uncover new stories about New Brunswick’s past, present, and future.
