In Manufacturing Montreal Robert Lewis provides a detailed historical geographic account of a major North American city's industrial landscape from the beginnings of industrialization to the Great Depression. Challenging the traditional view that urban expansion due to industrial decentralization is a twentieth-century phenomenon, Lewis demonstrates that the process of industrial decentralization has been ongoing since the 1850s.

Lewis's overall thesis is that the economic and social imperatives underlying industrial capitalism periodically reshaped the manufacturing geography of Montreal, as it did in many other North American cities. Time and again, the move of factories to the urban fringe shaped the social geography of the city by creating working-class residential neighborhoods. A particular strength of the book is its detailed examination of the role that utilities, transportation, technological change, investment, political control of land use, and labor markets had in the manufacturing of Montreal's factory districts.