Capitalizing on culturalism in the city of difference: an analysis of urban policy
discourse in Toronto
Lorina Hoxha July 2019Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for
Degree of Master of Arts (Urban Sociology)
University of Amsterdam, Graduate School of Social Sciences
12186783
Supervisor: Olga Sezneva
Second reader: Marguerite van den Berg
Abstract
This thesis conducts a discourse analysis of two sets of policy frameworks guiding Toronto’s economic and social development: the “Creative City” strategies and the reports associated with the “Strong Neighbourhood” area-based policy, respectively. Its inquiry stems from the seeming paradox that in the early 2000s moment in which “creative city” discourses emerged alongside discourses of urban security, the city’s cultural diversity was simultaneously cast as a tool of economic growth and an object of political fear, particularly in relation to violence in the city’s “declining” inner suburbs. Beginning with frameworks released in 1999 following Toronto’s amalgamation into a “mega-city,” this thesis reads these policies together in order to examine how selective uses of culture are used to legitimate strategies for exclusionary economic growth. It argues that these policies rely on a characteristically Canadian multicultural ideology in order to recast the racial and class-based inequalities increasingly defining the territorial relationship between Toronto’s inner suburbs and its downtown into matters of cultural inclusion, therefore foreclosing the possibility of more transformative anti-racist social policies.
Preface & Acknowledgments
For the last three years I have tried and failed to write something coherent about growing up in Toronto’s inner suburbs, about life in an immigrant family, about the sense of relief and betrayal I felt after a scholarship enabled me to move downtown and see for myself what a wide gulf could exist between our experiences of this city. Each time I wrote I failed to understand what it was that I wanted to emphasize, or perhaps more precisely - who I wanted to blame. At first, I defaulted to writing about the behind-the-scenes of immigrant familial life. I wrote about my then-eleven year old brother, for whom immigration meant a complete upending of the world he had just begun to tread confidently and a paranoiac need to defend whatever he had left of that world: family, language, national belonging. I wrote about my parents: of their exploitative first jobs in dry cleaning, their struggle to pay for our cockroach-infested apartment, of their explosive fights and emotional absence. Of their loneliness. Of the gender politics of Balkan marriage, and how the exigencies of immigration could amplify these dynamics tenfold.
A Professor that read my writing asked me why I was absent in these narratives. I always thought I was writing about my family because for them the wound was much deeper, and this surely meant that something more profound could be learned from their experiences than from those of a five-year-old girl that adapted quite easily to a new country. I did not want to take up space because I did not face a first-wave trauma, and I knew very well how wide the gulf between the first and second generation was. It was the source of much guilt for me. Yet when I wrote about my parents I was participating in a contemptible cultural pastime of paying homage to the hardworking and sacrificial immigrants who must remain, conveniently, overworked and sacrificed. My parents’ story was one amongst many in an endless compendium of testimonies to immigrant suffering that were forgotten just as they were acknowledged. What these testimonies often do is naturalize the entanglement of immigrant life with poverty. Short of any meaningful political critique of these conditions, testimony here is at best a means to appease the guilt of the child benefactor, and at worst an ideological acquiescence.
I tried to excavate memories of my own first perceptions of Canada that were not vicarious absorptions of my parents’ trauma. The first thing I thought about was concrete. Canada was an unimaginable expanse of concrete and greyness: endless highways, enormous streets, and buildings taller than I’d ever imagined. Looking down from the fourteenth floor balcony of our high rise apartment, the world had become less human. More than anything else I missed the vernacular of the environment I grew up in. Returning to Albania three years later I wanted to kiss the dusty, unpaved streets of my former neighborhood that held my first memories of play - to me they represented a childhood of being-in-the-world that I had been shut out of.
In many ways, this thesis has been a long overdue exercise in thinking more politically about the differing territories through which I have come to know Toronto and the kind of relationships they hold to each other. While I grew up resenting my cultural heritage because it represented a major obstacle to my parents ability to integrate - and thus to modernize - it wasn’t until gaining access to wealthier (and whiter) circles of the downtown that I began to think that maybe they were never supposed to. I obtained access in their place: a white, native-English speaking and now university-educated woman, I am armed with all the privileges required for acceptance to the comfortable circles of Canadian life. But I am still my parents’ daughter, and I am left feeling that we deserved something better. For the immigrants that continue to arrive in this city under worsening conditions, over half of whom will live in poverty, I am left feeling that they deserve better too.
Growing up second generation in a state that loudly declares its multicultural acceptance while constantly marginalizing its immigrants can be confusing. For most of us, having our material needs met and an easy command of English gives us more freedom to define ourselves as politically conscious subjects over our parents, who were interpellated into essentialist cultural categories that often marked them as conservative, backward, or misogynistic against the backdrop of a Western liberal triumphalism. I hope that we can use this freedom to think about difference in more thoughtful and politically productive ways. This excerpt from Paul Gilroy’s Against Race felt especially incisive:
The idea of diaspora offers a ready alternative to the stern discipline of primordial kinship and rooted belonging. It rejects the popular image of natural nations spontaneously endowed with self-consciousness, tidily composed of uniform families: those interchangeable collections of ordered bodies that express and reproduce absolutely distinctive cultures as well as perfectly formed heterosexual pairings. As an alternative to the metaphysics of "race," nation, and bounded culture coded into the body, diaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging. It disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness (123).
This dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance of my supervisor, Olga, who has challenged me more than any mentor I’ve had before to think rigorously about the relationship between the questions I want to pursue and the methods by which I go about answering them. I am in awe of the care she puts into her teaching and grateful to her for the growth I’ve observed in myself as a scholar this year. I am very thankful as well to my second reader Marguerite van den Berg for her insightful feedback and compelling lectures, many of which have shaped my understanding of the issues I take up in this paper. Thank you both for your mentorship and patience with me throughout this arduous process.
Table of Contents
Introduction………...6
Research approach………..12
Conceptual framework………...15
Political economy of neoliberal urbanism……….16
Aestheticized economies of consumption………...18
Urban revanchism & security………..20
Toronto’s socio-economic restructuring………...22
Public housing ……….23
The rise of condo-ism………...24
Socio-spatial polarization………...26
Multicultural Canada and its urban manifestations………..31
Multicultural policy in Canada………..32
Cultural politics of urban reform in 70s and 80s Toronto………..34
Document analysis………...35
Background to area-based policies……….36
Emergence of neighbourhood strategies in Toronto……….39
Creative city strategies………..46
Conclusion………..58
Figures List
Figure 1: 1960 to 1970 Income Maps and Charts ………...27 Figure 2: 1960 to 2012 Income Maps and Charts”………..28 Figure 3: Immigrant population in the “Three Cities within Toronto ... 29 Figure 4: Picture of young girl pointing to a sign saying “Life is tough. But I am tougher”………….52
Introduction
My research for this paper stemmed from an encounter with a 2005 article by Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena, in which they ask why, in a city as diverse as Toronto, there is an absence of a strong subaltern urbanism that could reshape everyday life and revitalize left politics. By this they did not mean that immigrants and non-white people had not significantly changed Toronto and engaged in brave forms of resistance, but that their presence and efforts had not yet coalesced into what Mike Davis (2001) described about the social practices of Los Angeles’ Latino immigrants as a “magical urbanism” - a kind of process by which non-white and immigrant populations build an effective social power through which to make collective claims unmediated by the state. Goonewardena and Kipfer were reflecting on this question in a moment in which Toronto had already begun its transition into a “competitive city” and was responding to the increasingly pronounced effects of decades of austerity with revanchist law-and-order campaigns (Kipfer & Keil 2002) that targeted predominantly immigrant and non-white neighbourhoods in the inner suburbs. To my surprise, their speculation targeted Canadian multiculturalism as the major barrier to rethinking difference and the role it plays in contemporary Canadian society, particularly in cities. They problematized the very character of multiculturalism in Canada as a national discourse and ideology (Kobayashi 1999): a liberal-nationalist project rather than a triumph of anti-racist struggle since its inception, multiculturalism has largely remained a vague and incoherent policy readily exploited for the performance of liberal conscience in all levels of government, with very little positive impact on non-white communities. In the urban context of the newly amalgamated City of Toronto of 1998, multiculturalism was the reference point for a wide range of policies and practices categorized under the umbrella of “diversity management” (Kipfer & Goonewardena 2005), of which the priority neighbourhood strategies later became a key element. Given the success of these policies to propel an image of Toronto sharply at odds with its lived reality, Kipfer & Goonewardena argue that this ensemble of strategies, knowledge forms, and everyday sensibilities that we call ‘multiculturalism’ “has absorbed subcultural practices and socio-political aspirations into dominant processes of capitalist urbanization” (671). This is to say that the potential for a more radical politics of difference in Toronto has been symbolically captured by
processes of bourgeois urbanism, which capitalize on a superficial and easily marketable conception of ‘cultural diversity’ (672).
That the City of Toronto differentiates itself by maintaining a resolutely “warm” position with regard to cultural diversity (Valverde 2012) in comparison to many European and US cities where the subject still sparks some contention comes as no surprise: as Himani Bannerji (2000) has argued, Canada relies on multiculturalism and its associated category “visible minorities” to legitimize its nationhood and obfuscate the contradictions of its transition from a settler colony to a liberal democracy. Following suit, Toronto has made multiculturalism and diversity the centerpoint of its global brand and its principal ‘asset’ in its transformation into a creative-competitive global city. As Jacobs argues, “through such multicultural planning, a politics of difference - which is also the uneven politics of race - is aestheticised” (116). The point however is not simply that this aestheticization is taking place, but that it sets certain parameters for engaging with difference that have foreclosed more radical alternatives.
What intrigued me most about Kipfer & Goonewardena’s reflections was what they could offer to an analysis of the territorial relationship between Toronto’s downtown core and its inner suburbs in the context of today’s extreme spatial segregation based on race and class. Bourgeois urbanism in Toronto has led to a deeply uneven spatial restructuring, wherein investments are almost all directed to gentrifying inner city areas that are becoming increasingly white, all in the name of - paradoxically - diversity and social mixing (Kipfer & Petrunia 2009). This uneven development is hardly acknowledged in area-based policies for social development and policing, in which ‘declining’ inner suburban neighbourhoods can only hope to overcome their supposed pathologies by aspiring to the lifestyles of the gentrified downtown. Though home to a great diversity of cultures, the inner suburbs are defined in terms of deprivation and as threats to the economic prosperity of the downtown. In a liberal and multicultural city like Toronto however, managing the risks posed by growing inequality cannot simply take the form of explicitly coercive mechanisms such as targeted policing. It must also involve mechanisms of “inclusion” such as community arts programs that seek to cultivate the creative talents of “at-risk” youth. In this context, culture indeed becomes a bourgeois commodity. This thesis is dedicated to analyzing how the policy frameworks guiding the city’s economic and social development sustain a particular territorial relationship of domination between
Toronto’s downtown core and its inner suburbs by recasting racial and class-based inequalities into issues of cultural inclusion, therefore foreclosing the possibility of more transformative anti-racist social policies. Over the course of this thesis I will demonstrate that the “inclusive” neoliberal agenda of a city like Toronto is not invested in punishing marginalized people so much as it is invested in relegating them to peripheral low-value land in the city and tackling the racialized poverty produced by structural changes in the economy with targeted interventions that seek to make poor residents “self-reliant,” “resilient” and “enabled” actors in the market.
The primary materials analyzed in this thesis begin from the period around 1998, when the surrounding municipalities of Toronto had just amalgamated with the old City and Toronto was facing an “identity crisis” that it has since tried desperately to fill, though perhaps to no avail. Still, this moment marked a turning point in municipal policy. Decades of welfare state retrenchment, the decimation of a social housing program, growing concentrations of racialized poverty, along with a Conservative and resolutely anti-urban provincial government that offloaded its fiscal obligations to services such as public housing to the municipality led to the emergence of a new strategy and vision for managing the city’s tightening budget. This was a vision of Toronto as a creative-competitive ‘global city.’ As Kipfer and Keil (2002) note:
In Toronto, competitive city governance must be seen as a new form of managing and regulating the longer process of restructuring by which the Toronto region was transformed from the core city of the Canadian political economy into a second-tier global city for transnational finance capital and the most diverse destination point for non-European immigration in North America (Carroll 1989; Kipfer 2000; Todd 1995)
Almost twenty years have now passed since Toronto officiated its transition into a city of “unrivalled diversity” and “exciting culture”, during which time it has also become a city in crisis: of growing socio-economic polarization, of racial segregation, of lack of affordable housing, of dysfunctional urban politics, and of crumbling infrastructure (Joy & Vogel 2015). Non-white working classes and immigrants, who have been targets since the 1989 recession led to a wave of racist, anti-immigrant debates, have been hit hardest by Toronto’s economic restructuring (Saberi 2017:53). Despite much talk of inclusive economic growth, the new immigrants of Toronto the ‘global city’ are faring much worse than generations before (Siemiatycki 2011; Joy & Vogel 2015).
Much has been said about how creative city strategies exemplify the ethos of neoliberal urbanism: they are tied to an individualization of responsibility, to the promotion of ‘self-reliant’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ models of citizenship, and to the production of urban space for the purposes of attracting transnational finance capital and spurring generalised gentrification and displacement (Smith 2002). My research draws on much of this scholarship to understand the Toronto context, where creative city strategies ‘dress up’ the economic restructuring of the city so as to “[find] another rationale to privilege in public policy the desires and aspirations of capital and the affluent” (Roger & Keil, 846). Central to this rationale is the notion of cultural diversity and Canada’s unique multicultural tolerance. At around the same time in which there was a heightened fear in the city over violence in ‘immigrant neighbourhoods,’ Toronto business and political elites peddled an economic growth strategy that centered on the ways in which the city’s cultural and ethnic diversity gave it a unique advantage in becoming a first-tier city in the new global and creative economy. These discourses of urban boosterism began to gain traction at the same time as the city was reinforcing its urban security apparatus with a host of new targeted area-based social development and policing strategies.
My interest in examining the discursive strategies through which cultural diversity is deployed in urban policy discourse has to do with the apparent paradox of it simultaneously being an instrument of economic growth and of political fear. Existing studies of creative city strategies in Toronto have largely focused on their gentrifying impacts on neighbourhoods in the downtown core, leaving undisturbed the city-suburb binary that is ubiquitous in urban research and yet wholly inadequate in illustrating the situation in Toronto. More recent studies (Young & Keil 2010) have drawn attention to the territorial relationship between the inner suburbs and the downtown, though these have focused primarily on issues of distribution of housing and transportation infrastructure. This thesis is focused on how the economic-territorial relationship between these regions is regulated by downtown elite forces through cultural-symbolic discourses. I examine how ethno-cultural diversity is represented in these documents in order to understand what kind of work it is doing, implicitly or explicitly. While creative city strategies uphold Toronto’s diversity as its primary “asset” in becoming a globally competitive city, priority neighbourhood strategies - which are targeted policies directed at neighbourhoods that are predominantly immigrant and racialized - show a distinct absence
of any affirmative mention of cultural diversity, and are framed instead in terms of deprivation and lack. Within this framework of urban security, ethno-cultural diversity - as it is embodied by the presence of racialized immigrants in the inner suburbs - poses a threat to the image and economy of the increasingly opulent and white inner city, where cultural diversity is more of a commodity than a lived experience. The ‘cultural diversity’ heralded by downtown planners and policy makers is thus not much more than an aestheticized abstraction of cohesive urban multicultural body. My contribution is focused on deconstructing the culturalist discourse of the forces shaping the city in order to understand how they mediate and sustain a core-periphery relationship increasingly organized by racial hierarchy.
To the extent that urban policy discourse plays a major role in framing narratives around economic development as well as social welfare, policing, and safety in the city, it constitutes a useful object of analysis. What I include in the umbrella of “urban policy discourse” is more broad than reports, policy frameworks and statements coming directly from municipal government. As Harvey argues (1989), urbanization is often steered by coalitions of actors such as local financiers, business leaders and real estate developers working to advance their class interests rather than by urban governments that often lack power and play a facilitative role in the production of space (6). This is especially relevant to Toronto and Canadian cities in general, where historically there has existed “a politically active, culturally hegemonic, and socially conscious urban bourgeoisie (Stadtbürgertum), which greatly influences urban discourse and decision making even in an era of globalization ” (Kipfer & Keil 2002: 231). As a result, as Kipfer & Keil note, municipal politics in Canadian cities have often been characterized “by nonpartisan, business-friendly politics, weak local socialism, and an orientation towards property and homeowner interests” (Gunton 1982; Sancton 1983; Weaver 1979, quoted from Kipfer & Keil 2002: 231). In Toronto and elsewhere, the technologies of power mobilized in urban governance are increasingly privatized, which has not only led to obstacles for public accountability but has also changed how people are interpellated by the state (from citizens to market actors). Urban policy discourse is thus constituted not just by the City of Toronto, but the various corporate and non-profit bodies that they work with to produce research and inform policy. As such, policy frameworks, particularly when they outline spatial strategies, are important reflections of the interests of both the private and public actors that possess real power to shape urban life.
This thesis contains four parts. I begin with an overview of the theoretical literature that has
helped frame my understanding of the political and economic restructuring Toronto has undergone over the last two decades, and how this has influenced its aestheticization of diversity. After situating Toronto within this larger network of literature on neoliberal urbanism, I zone in on the city itself, providing a review of how socio-spatial polarization has been produced in Toronto over the last decades of economic restructuring. I posit that growing socio-spatial polarization based on race and class both fuels and is intensified by the combined effects of policies of urban boosterism - which seek to capitalize on valuable central city land and labour market restructuring - and policies of urban security, which seek to contain and pacify the grievances of those that bore the brunt of this restructuring.
In the third part of this thesis, I describe how multiculturalism has come to be defined in Canada, and how it has manifested in the urban context of Toronto. I describe the origins of multicultural policy in federal government, and the various ideological responses to it. Then, I describe how multicultural politics were negotiated in the 70s and 80s urban reform movement, a crucial time in which the city was seeing a striking change in its racial composition as a result of the new ‘colour-blind’ immigration system. As Saberi (2019) notes, what is most interesting about Toronto is the hegemony of liberal multiculturalism. While it shares many similarities with other cities with regard to its ‘immigrant neighbourhoods,’ the ways in which it intervenes in these neighbourhoods is articulated through a liberal humanitarian ideology that it does not share with France, the UK, or the US. Saberi (2019) argues that this liberal humanitarian ideology has a deeply neo-colonial dimension, intervening in immigrant neighbourhoods through not only securitization but also tutelage. The figure of the immigrant within this liberal pluralist discourse is not that of the irredeemable urban savage (though popular Toronto journalist Rosie DiManno certainly thinks so), but rather a subject of liberal inclusion that is only in need of enablement in order to become the resilient, entrepreneurial, self-reliant subject that the state would like them to be. A close reading of the Strong Neighbourhoods Strategies and other urban security related policy documents released by the city over the last few decades makes these logics very transparent.
In the final part of this thesis I provide a document analysis of the creative city strategies that emerged at the turn of the century, reading them together with the area-based urban policies now
renamed the “Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy”. My comparative analysis of these documents serves to illustrate the dissonance between Toronto’s brand-world commitment to multicultural tolerance, and the ways in which this ideology is actually implicated in issues of urban security. What my reading of these documents has revealed is that in the real implementation of policy - particularly policy relating to urban security and policing - the figure of the immigrant is, as Saberi (2017) argues, deeply territorialized and racialized. But in the world of creative-city marketing, the immigrant is something else entirely - a member of an aestheticized egalitarian multicultural body in which all differences in political and socioeconomic power are erased. I argue that the ease with which ‘culture’ has been instrumentalized to pursue an economic growth strategy that excludes those who bring that ‘culture’ in the first place is emblematic of the larger purpose that multicultural ideology has always served in Canada: to neutralize legitimate class-based and political conflict through an empty recognition of “cultural” difference with no corresponding recognition of its socio-economic, political and gendered contours (Bannerji 2000). That the aesthetic of Toronto’s “diverse” brand is one that necessitates various race and class-based forms of exclusion is not contradictory to but an extension of the multiculturalist ideology on which it’s based.
Research approach
“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” - Louis Althusser, 1971: 257
My research approach is based primarily on a critical discourse analysis of two sets of municipal policy regimes that have heavily influenced Toronto’s development since the turn of the century: creative city strategies and priority neighbourhood strategies (later renamed the Strong Neighbourhood Strategy in 2012). I read these documents as expression of two distinct and important themes of municipal policy and planning, that of urban boosterism and of urban security respectively. The logic of reading them together stems from the recognition that the project of bourgeois urbanism, buttressed as it is by the neoliberalization of urban policy and the privatization of urban life, relies on the project of confinement of marginalized populations that is embodied by urban security policies. These policies are thus already entangled in many ways, as can be gleaned from the fact that
neighbourhood-based research and policy experienced a renaissance at about the same time as “global city” competitiveness became an obsession amongst the business and political elite.
My method of reading these documents pays mind to the three-dimensional framework of analysis that Norman Fairclough outlines in Discourse and social change (1992): text analysis, discursive practice, and social practice. Rather than just examining the linguistic structure of these texts, I situate them within the political context in which they emerged as it was defined through media and political discourses. While these discourses are not my primary object of research, I use them to supplement my reading of these policies because they provide crucial context for their interpretation. This is particularly true for the Priority Neighbourhood Strategy and various anti-violence strategies they are associated with, which arose in a deeply politicized moment in Toronto, where large spikes in gun violence in the city’s inner suburbs reverberated with events happening around the globe - in particular the uprisings that broke out in Paris’ banlieues in 2005 - such that major news media began speaking of Toronto’s “Paris Problem.”
The third dimension of Fairclough’s analytical framework, social practice, refers to the conceptualization of “the more general ideological context within which discourses have taken place” (Lees 2004: 104). What draws me most to the task of researching these policies is attempting to understand the kind of ideologies that they bespeak. Critical discourse analysis concerns itself with the discursive dimensions of relations of dominance and inequality so as to understand the ways in which these relations are reproduced (van Dijk, 1993). As such, the aim of its critique is a structural understanding of power relations and the ways in which hegemonic ideas are articulated and reinforced. My theoretical approach is heavily indebted to Gramscian and Althusserian ideology critique and a Foucauldian constructionist perspective. Louis Althusser’s (1971) work on ideological state apparatuses and the ways in which they work in consort with repressive state apparatuses has been particularly influential in my understanding of the ways in which “Creative City” and “Strong Neighbourhood” strategies have become entangled (especially with relation to the phenomenon of “community policing”).
My paper is ultimately concerned with understanding how the ideology of Canadian multiculturalism manifests itself in an urban setting in order to sustain spatial relationships organized around racial hierarchy. As Bannerji (2000) notes, Canadian multiculturalism is not a thing, but “a
mode of the workings of the state, an expression of an interaction of social relations in dynamic tension with each other, losing and gaining its political form with fluidity” (120). Despite the relative lack of exploration of the urban in security studies, we would do well to remember that urban policies are not categorically different from state imperial policies, but an extension of them (Saberi 2017). Area-based urban policies have a history of being used to contain the “threat” of poor racialized populations (particularly those that espoused a radical politics in the US in the 1960s) (Saberi 2017) and this is no less true of Toronto, where area-based urban policies were first used to contain immigrant and working class suburbanites that were considered a threat to the white, middle-class norm (Cowen 2005). My paper reads the discursive moments in which institutional actors instrumentalize Canada’s supposedly unique multicultural character as expressions of an ideology which continues to repress immigrant claims-making in a city which some decades ago was still a deeply white, Anglo-Saxon, parochial place. The success with which notions such as ‘culture’ and ‘diversity’ have been leveraged in creative city strategies to spur economic growth that systematically excludes immigrants is part and parcel of the larger hegemonic nature of multicultural ideology in Canada whose proponents, as Goonewardena & Kipfer (2005) note, “operate with fundamentally culturalist conceptions of identity, while maintaining a symptomatic silence on socio-economic divisions that are especially influential in the everyday life of big cities” (674). When reading creative city strategies and priority neighbourhood strategies together, I seek to understand how the power-neutralizing ideology of multiculturalism is being enacted in an urban setting in order to maximize profits and carry out widespread, racialized gentrification.
The following policy documents make up the bulk of my primary research. Those I place in the domain of urban boosterism include “The Framework for the New Official Plan of Toronto” (1999a), “Toronto Competes: An Assessment of Toronto’s Global Competitiveness” (2000a), “Toronto Economic Development Strategy” (2000b), “Toronto at the Crossroads: Shaping Our Future” (2000c), “Culture Plan for the Creative City (2003), “Imagine a Toronto” (2006), “Creative City Planning Framework” (2008), “Agenda for Prosperity (2008), “Creative Capital Gains: An Action Plan for Toronto (2011), “From the Ground Up: Growing Toronto’s Cultural Sector (2011), “Collaborating for Competitiveness” (2013), “Making Space for Culture” (2014), “Making Toronto a
space where businesses thrive” (2016), and “Economic Development and Culture Divisional Strategy (2017).
Those I categorize as urban security strategies include: “Toronto. My City: A Safe City: A Community Safety Strategy for the City of Toronto” (1999b), “Enough Talk: An Action Plan for the Toronto Region” (2003), “Poverty by Postal Code (2004), “Why Strong Neighbourhoods Matter”(2004), “Strong Neighbourhoods: A Call to Action (2005)” “Strong Neighbourhood Strategy 2020” (2012), “Strong Neighbourhoods: Responding to the Call to Action” (2012), TO Prosperity: Poverty Reduction Plan (2014), and “The Opportunity Equation in the Greater Toronto Area (2017).
The scope of my research covers the last twenty years, in order to trace how Toronto has been changing since the transition it faced at the turn of the new millennium, shortly after it became amalgamated. I used Atlas to review these documents, and organized my data using both descriptive and in-vivo coding, both of which proved useful for tracing themes of both content and rhetoric throughout these documents. I discuss the various rationalities I sought to map through these codes in my document analysis section.
Conceptual framework
This thesis borrows many insights from urban studies, political theory, and cultural studies, some of which I will address in later sections. In this section I will expound on several important concepts from literature in urban studies that deals with the transformation of urban political economy and governance brought about by neoliberal urbanism and the ways in which this process has been buttressed by the aestheticization and reification of cultural difference. Since many of these texts are by now canonical in urban studies, I will focus less on summarizing their main ideas and more on engaging with key concepts that are useful for analyzing the changes in Toronto. They can be loosely categorized into three parts: governance, aesthetics, and security.
Particularly influential for me has been Lefebvre’s (1978;1991) concept of the “urban” as a level of mediation between macro-political economic forces and everyday lived experience, Harvey’s (1989) work on entrepreneurial urban governance, Smith (1998;2002) on generalised gentrification and revanchist urbanism, Brenner (2000) on neoliberalism as an embedded process, Wacquant (2006)
on advanced marginality, Zukin’s (1995; 1996) prolific work on the symbolic economy, Goonewardena (2005) on the “urban sensorium,” Kohn (2004) on landscape aesthetics as mechanisms of exclusion, Jacobs (1996) on the aestheticization of difference in contemporary cities, and Valverde (2012) on the ways in which taste, aesthetics and cultural norms are embedded in municipal law in Toronto. These works are important for understanding the political-economic changes that have occurred in Toronto in the wake of the neoliberal dismantling of Fordism and the new technologies of power that have emerged in this process, of which area-based policies for economic development as well as targeted social investment and policing play a key role.
Governance
Harvey (1989) argues that the 1970s shift towards “entrepreneurialism” reshaped the model of urban governance from one of managing the provision of benefits, services, and amenities to residents to one of actively fostering economic growth through a variety of strategies. Central to this entrepreneurialism is the public-private partnership, which has often involved cities taking the risk of speculative building for place-specific economic development projects, resulting in the diversion of resources from more regional or territorial improvements whose benefits would be more widely felt (8). In Canada and the US, urban entrepreneurialism was provoked in large part by deindustrialization, widespread unemployment, and fiscal austerity that was leaving cities impoverished, as well as a rising neoconservative movement that preached market rationality and privatization (Harvey, 5). This shift can be in large part attributed to the dismantling of the Fordist-Keynesian regime of a more locally-confined process of capital accumulation to one of “flexible accumulation,” where the hypermobility of multinational capital has turned the task of urban governance increasingly into one of luring enterprises and their associated financial and consumption flows into the city through the speculative construction of ideal production places, whether this is achieved through labour supply, generous taxation, or exorbitant infrastructure projects (11). While the ways in which this process has been enacted in various cities is certainly not uniform, urban entrepreneurialism has remained “a persistent and recurrent theme” since the 1970s, and has had major macroeconomic effects (5). Toronto represents a quintessential example of this shift.
As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, Harvey rejects the habit of seeing cities as active agents shaping their own development, arguing instead that urbanisation should be understood as a “spatially grounded social process in which a wide range of different actors with quite different objectives and agendas interact through a particular configuration of interlocking spatial practices” (5). When we speak of capitalist urbanization, we are talking about the capture of the urbanization process by a coalition of actors interested in maximizing their capital accumulation. In Toronto, much of this capital accumulation is happening through the rapid construction of condominiums. As Walks (2014) argues, Toronto’s transition into a “third wave urbanization” over the last few decades has led to what Harvey calls a “structured coherence,” in which the economic interests of the developers and the state have become so aligned with “the new urbane yet privatized residential preferences, lifestyles, and consumption interests among consumers” (Walks, 290) that the development of unaffordable real estate that is gentrifying much of the inner city is unlikely to stop short of anything but a disruption in profits. I discuss the socio-economic consequences of condo-ism in more depth in a later section.
The case of Toronto makes a clear argument for what Neil Brenner (2002) has called the embeddedness of neoliberalism. Rather than thinking about neoliberalism as a standardized logic and policy regime that is simply applied from above onto various contexts, neoliberalism must be understood as a deeply contextually embedded process, “defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles” (349). Toronto’s neoliberal restructuring has been in large part produced by a regulatory landscape that affords provincial government a disproportionate amount of power over cities. Keil (2002) discusses the ways in which the interventionist policies of the Conservative provincial government of Mike Harris (1995 - 2002) set the conditions for Toronto’s neoliberal turn. Provincial policies that downloaded many social service programs to the local level, strategically attacked public-worker unions, loosened planning restrictions, and forced the amalgamation of the old city with its surrounding municipalities (despite a municipal referendum where 75% voted against amalgamation, which was not recognized because Canadian cities have no autonomy over provinces) were all part of a process of state rescaling in Toronto (Keil 2002; Kipfer & Keil 2002; Joy & Vogel 2015). But as several scholars note, to simply cast the municipal government as a victim in this process would be far from the truth. As Keil argues, “the Harris agenda could only have been successfully implemented with a high degree of collusion and
complicity in society and other levels of the state” (594). While provincial government plays a great role in making the rules, the local state does have some control over how these policies are implemented - whether they are met with great contestation that leads to compromise or whether they are readily adopted and supported through corresponding municipal policies that push privatization, deregulation, and austerity (Keil, 594). The economic development strategies put forth by “Creative City” plans are one important example of roll-out neoliberal policies that represent the conjoined interests of the neoconservative provincial government and “the emerging downtown-centred metropolitan planning vision of the new Toronto” (Kipfer 245). The economic rationale of “Creative City” plans has brought forth a major restructuring of the labour market through dualization as well as the uneven spatial restructuring in the city by directing investments towards the intensification and gentrification of the inner city and central business districts (Kipfer 1998: 17, Walks 2014).
Aesthetics
As the fact that even Mike Harris supported “Creative City” planning might suggest, at the heart of these strategies is the exploitative commodification of culture for economic gain. Toronto is emblematic of what Sharon Zukin (1995) has called the “cultural turn” of dominant capitalist economies: vast investment in media and entertainment, and employment growth concentrated in cultural production and the service sector. As Zukin rightly points out, organizing economic growth around culturalism was politically useful because culture represented “a relatively consensual means of managing economic decline and envisioning possibilities of economic growth” (Zukin 1996: 227). So long as one could center development on aestheticized culturalism, one could more easily sideline the material consequences of neoliberal urbanism on the everyday lives of working class people in cities. In this symbolic economy, the production of space around cultural assets and practices has become a major modality of capital accumulation and reproduction, as well as a source of worsening inequality (Harvey 1973). Insofar as capital accumulation depends on being able to control the visual aesthetic of urban space, power in cities can largely be understood as “the power to impose a vision on a space” (Zukin, 226). The various “culture strategies” that were being rolled-out in major cities across the US and Canada in the 1980s and 1990s shared one thing in common: they reduced “the multiple dimensions and conflicts of culture to a coherent visual representation” such that culture as a social
practice was reified into cultural products that could be “displayed, interpreted, reproduced and sold in a putatively universal repertoire of visual consumption” (227).
Urban design plays a crucial role in crafting this coherent visual representation. In the neoliberal city, urban design is tasked principally with the beautification of high-value central urban space so as to accommodate the tastes and interests of profitable businesses, luxury housing developers, high-paid professionals in primarily FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) and creative industries, and shoppers (Zukin, 235). The visual order that these urban designs bring about also functions as a method of social control - the language of “revitalization,” “renewal” and restoration suggests the return to some prior time in which an area measured up to commonsense notions of civility for the middle classes (Zukin 1996). As Zukin argues, symbolic cultural practices do not just “represent” material interests: when “mediated by material resources, they may produce, perpetuate, or diminish inequalities” (224). This has led to a variety of post-Marxist critiques that have attempted to elucidate the ways in which relations of domination are reproduced through cultural practices and categories that are not entirely reducible to the traditional categories of production systems and social classes (226). At their best, what these critiques deconstruct is “how cultural strategies isolate, denigrate, mitigate, or compensate...how culture creates its own material structures” (224). In my document analysis, I trace the various “visions” expressed in creative city strategies, not just for urban landscapes and infrastructures but also for urban citizens, and deconstruct the kinds of material structures on which these visions rely.
A major consideration of this paper is the ideological function of visions of the creative city. In the context of Toronto, where the socio-spatial polarization that has been produced by capitalist urbanization is creating enclaves of wealth while peripheralizing racialized poverty, the question of how increasingly curated urban spaces shape our consciousness of everyday life is an important one. In other words, how is the globalized restructuring of urban economies and social relations, the totality of which we have no access to as individual subjects, nonetheless finding symbolic representations in our urban surroundings? David Harvey has described the urbanization of capital as capitalism building a landscape “in its own image” (1985: xvii). What this implies is not simply class domination over state apparatuses, “but also over whole populations - their cultural and political values as well as their mental conceptions of the world (Harvey, 2012: 66). Several scholars of Lefebvre have expanded on his
notion of the “urban” as a level of mediation between macro-political economies and the lived experience of everyday life (Kipfer & Petrunia 2009: 112; Goonewardena 2011) to think about how urban neoliberalism has restructured the everyday. Keil (2002) argues that the change in socioeconomic conditions brought about by neoliberalism creates an associated change in the way in which “identities, social conflicts and ideologies” are articulated, such that they become cultural matters (578). In Brave New Neighbourhoods, Kohn describes what she calls “imagined communities”: groups that are “sustained by perceived similarities in lifestyle and absence of conflict...reinforced by similar patterns of consumption and cultural cues rather than shared activities and practices” (2004:123, quoted from Walks 2006). Goonewardena reflects on this in relation to what he calls “the urban sensorium” - the totality of aesthetic stimulation provided by urban space, where “aesthetic” is here defined as the entire domain of human perception and sensation counterposed to that of conceptual thought (2005). He asks what ideological function the aesthetics of urban space serve, particularly in a context in which forces of gentrification and privatization have curated experiences of everyday life so as to exclude marginalized Others and any signifiers of social antagonism. When such controlled landscape aesthetics become normalized, they change the ways in which individuals understand themselves and the world, and reinforce worldviews that naturalize racial and class-based privileges. As Kohn (2004) discusses in Brave New Neighborhoods, the privatization of urban landscapes facilitates social exclusion on aesthetic grounds, and pattern that has grave implications for democratic politics. In considering how privatization impacts the public sphere, she argues: “we need free speech and public spaces not because they help us reach consensus, but because they disrupt the consensus that we have already reached too easily” (81).
Law & Security
The aesthetic control of urban space through the removal of marginalized others is facilitated by technologies of power that secure its maintenance. Neil Smith’s concept of “revanchist urbanism” denotes the wave of law-and-order style reactionary policies that followed the dismantling of liberal urban policy and the philosophy of social welfare that it stood for (1998). In the revanchist city social policy is increasingly replaced with penal policies of control. Signs of this shift began to occur in Toronto in the 1990s. In 1999, the new Waterfront Revitalization Task Force was announced in the
same week as The Safe Streets Act, a provincial law that made it illegal for “squeegee” kids to offer windshield washing at intersections and for homeless people to panhandle in an “aggressive” manner (Kipfer 246). In a speech about the announcements, Mel Lastman, then Mayor of Toronto said: “First item on the speech is a commitment to revitalize the waterfront, and I love it. Also for the 2008 Olympic bid. I think that’s great. The crackdown on squeegees is overdue, and it’s great, it’s terrific” (1999).
In Everyday Law on the Street (2012), Mariana Valverde provides an illuminating look at how municipal law maintains landscape aesthetics by serving a very different function and governing differently than state law. While state law is tasked with governing persons through the protection of individual rights and sovereign authority, municipal law is concerned with the organization and governance of space, and often on aesthetic grounds. State laws govern according to the harm principle, but municipal laws can penalize you for something as harmless as aesthetic deviation, as evidenced by the numerous laws in Toronto governing how the grass on one’s lawn should look or whether one can grow vegetables on their private property (Valverde 2012). While in the Canadian Constitution we are persons with rights to various fundamental freedoms regardless of our propertied status, what is relevant in municipal law is our presence in space (54). By now the ways in which state law engages in creating exclusionary spaces through ordinances targeting marginalized people has become clear. In the case of Ontario’s Safe Streets Act (1999), which targeted panhandlers and “squeegee” kids, the justification was still based on a doing of harm. Municipal laws are constantly regulating behaviour in space in similar ways and often excluding the same kinds of people, but they do so through aesthetic regulations such as anti-loitering or anti-noise by-laws, that end up being more coercive towards the propertyless and other street-involved people. The standards on which these regulations are based rely on “reasonable person” measures for what defines a “tranquil” environment, and most often, judges are likely to define this according to white, middle class, property-owning tastes (Valverde 89). Valverde argues “law quietly shapes both the built space and the social interactions that take place in it. And as it does so, certain cultural values are literally built into the urban fabric” (39). For Valverde, it is important to recognize that the law is just as much in effect on a peaceful and orderly street corner as it is in more explicitly coercive situations (75).
In Urban Outcasts, presents his concept of ‘advanced marginality,’ which is useful for understanding socio-economic shifts in Toronto. He defines advanced marginality in spatial and economic terms, as a “novel regime of socio-spatial relegation and exclusionary closure (in Max Weber’s sense where a collective restricts ‘access to the opportunities (social or economic) that exist in a given domain) that has crystallized in the post-Fordist city as a result of the uneven development of the capitalist economies and the recoiling of welfare states” (3). For Wacquant, the emergence of the ‘hyperghetto’ in the American context ultimately comes down to the collapse of public institutions in the post-Fordist economy; it is an urban space abandoned by both the labour market and the welfare state, and consequently invaded by an oppressive police and penal apparatus that seeks to contain the black (sub-)proletariat (3). The ‘advanced marginality’ that characterizes the conditions of existence in post-Fordist poverty tends to concentrate in desolate districts that are entirely eroded of a sense of ‘place’ as a result of this deproleterianization and the destitution brought about by state abandonment (Wacquant, 6). The public disorder created by dispossessed youth in cities across North America and Europe is a response to this violence.
Crucially, Wacquant calls for a critical analysis of discourses that, “under cover of describing marginality, contribute to moulding it by organizing its collective perception and its political treatment” (8). Over the course of this thesis I will argue that the priority neighbourhood strategies are emblematic of this kind of discourse, both because of the way they attempt to explain criminality and violence through the designation of arbitrarily defined neighbourhood spaces as sources of this violence, the ways in which the media has responded to these neighbourhoods, and the ways in which these strategies foreclose the possibility of more radical claims to universalist social programs by focusing on targeted service provision that absolves governments of responsibility in pathologizing people for not being sufficiently ‘self-reliant.’
Toronto’s socio-economic restructuring
“To forget that urban space is a historical and political construction in the strong sense of the term is to risk (mis)taking for ‘neighbourhood effects’ what is nothing more than the spatial retranslation of economic and social differences.”
-Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts
Toronto’s post-war suburbs… are baffling physically and incoherent socially as their counterparts anywhere, and fully ecologically destructive and as ill-suited to service by public transportation. -Jane Jacobs
Like many other cities in North America, during the 1980s and 1990s, the trade liberalization, deindustrialization, and fiscal austerity that had become trademarks of Canada’s economic policy had a particularly harsh impact on Toronto. In this section I will provide a review of some of the extensive and valuable research already completed on Toronto’s neoliberal restructuring in order to provide some necessary context for the sets of policies I will discuss later on. I will focus on the consequences of economic restructuring on Toronto’s housing, the subsequent rise of “condo-ism” as a crucial feature of the urbanization of capital in Toronto (and for the corresponding reorganization of consumption), as well as the territorial segregation on race and class lines that these economic policies have produced.
Neoliberal economic restructuring had a catastrophic impact on Canada’s social housing stock, the largest concentration of which was located in Toronto. After decades of a robust nationalized social housing program that oversaw the construction of thousands of purpose-built high-rise towers (these towers continue to be the housing typology in which the majority of Canadians live today - about five hundred thousand of them in Toronto), the federal government’s decision to offload its fiscal and social policy obligations to the provinces (Suttor, 125) led to the end of further production of social housing, the privatization of much of the existing stock (96% of Canada’s housing is market housing), and the abandonment of the remaining stock to oftentimes severe disrepair. With the election of a conservative provincial government in 1995, the cost of social welfare and transit was further downloaded to the municipality, and local government’s ability to generate revenue through taxation or other funding instruments was limited by the province, putting the city in severe fiscal constraints (Keil 2002; Kipfer & Keil 2002). Combined with growing income inequality as growth in wealth became concentrated in the upper quintile of the population, the 80s and 90s-era depletion of affordable housing stock contributed significantly to not only the proliferation of homelessness (homelessness was almost non-existent in Canadian cities in the 60s), but also its transition from a
predicament that primarily affected single men to one that affected diverse groups, including children and families (Myra Piat et al., 2369). While growing demand for more affordable rental stock continues to be neglected, housing construction in Toronto is actually booming and supply is greater than ever - at least for those that can afford access to homeownership (Gaetz, 22). This production of housing for ownership became one of the main drivers of wealth inequality leading up to the turn of the century (Procyk, 23), as those with financial means benefitted from capital gains and low-interest debt, while those without became increasingly burdened by high-interest debt and skyrocketing rental prices.
The policies of the late twentieth century brought forth a new reality of underfunding and depletion for public sector housing development, which consequently spurred a wave of private sector development through condo construction that is unparalleled in North America. The process of ‘condo’-ization that has taken place in Toronto does not simply describe the massive proliferation of a certain housing typology, but the transformation of the urban tenure structure from a renter-dominant one to one predominated by a mix of homeowners with varying responsibilities (Rosen & Walks, 290). Condominiums offer residents a new form of “double ownership”: unlike rental apartment buildings, individual units are owned by buyers, but they share ownership of the condominium’s residential common property, which can range from areas internal to a building such as lobbies and elevators, but also extend to streets and private roads (Rosen & Walks, 290). As many scholars have noted, this ownership structure signifies “a shift toward new forms of urban living, private urban governance, and private property rights” (Rosen & Walks, 299; Nelson, 2005; Webster & Lai, 2003). During the most recent condo boom that began in the 1990s, condo development became an immensely profitable business because it tapped into a market of renters that felt pressured with homeownership and were newly empowered by low interest rates and increasingly accessible credit (Rosen & Walks, 302). What this has meant for Toronto is that mortgage credit has replaced industrial expansion as “the primary driver of the economic growth machine” (Rosen & Walks, 290). When housing prices boomed in the early 2000s and many began to face unmanageable household debt, speculator-investors took advantage of the decline in affordability and purchased multiple condo units with the intention of renting them out (Rosen & Walks, 302). By and large, the effect has been a radical transformation of the state of rental tenure in Toronto, from one managed by “larger entities
and clearly defined roles (landlords, etc) easily regulated by state policy,” (Clewes 2012) to one dominated by private investors embedded in processes of capital accumulation through buying, selling, owning, financing, and speculating (Madden & Marcuse, 31). Scholars now argue the gentrification and socio-spatial polarization characteristic of the financialized city has “been achieved almost exclusively through the reproduction of the condominium form” (Rosen & Walks, 299).
Condo-ism and the inequalities it produces are deeply territorial. Before the passage of the Condominium Act in the early 1970s, residential land in the city was zoned for either rental or ownership housing (Hulchanski, 5). All areas zoned for medium or high residential densities were rental districts, while owner-occupied housing was reserved for lower density districts (Hulchanski, 5). The province’s Condo Act changed this zoning structure such that rental providers would have to compete with condo providers for the same high-density land, which has completely disincentivized purpose-built rental development because much more immediate profits can be reaped from condo sales (Rosen & Walks, 302), and has almost always led to condo developers outbidding rental housing developers because they have more capital (Hulchanski, 5). As a result, the city has steadily been losing rental housing because of the demolition or conversion of apartments and rooming houses to condominiums (Gaetz, 22). To make matters worse, despite being a primary driver of Toronto’s affordable housing crisis, condo development is increasingly represented as its only solution: condos have now become the main source of rental housing (some estimates argue that as much as 80% of new condo units built in the city are bought by investors to be used for rental (Rosen & Walks, 303), and the city is forced to make concessions on density in exchange for urban infrastructure and public benefits. In the absence of robust public resources, cities trying to meet social needs have little recourse but “deal making” with private entities whose financial exchanges are inaccessible to the public and who profit immensely from the intensified segregation, displacement, and in fact colonization of working-class spaces in the city (Smith 2002; Rosen & Walks 2014) that their developments produce. Rather than a private sector takeover of urban strategy however, condo-ism has emerged as a development ethos that links both private and public sectors (Rosen & Walks, 299). As Rosen & Walks argue:
have come together in the current conjuncture to promote condominium development over the alternatives, and around which public policy is increasingly organized. Condo-ism represents the crystallization of a set of intersecting factors characterizing the post-Fordist, post industrial restructuring of the city, including financialization, deindustrialization, and gentrification.
The municipality’s creative-competitive city strategies are one of the principal means through which these processes are promoted, as vague notions of Toronto’s vibrant “culture” and “diversity” are leveraged to rebrand the inner city for white middle class urbanites while displacing immigrant working-class communities and “siphoning away development and capital from the older suburbs where most blue-collar workers live” (Rosen & Walks 306). What emerges is an unprecedented socio-spatial polarization in the city that is not just economic, but also very racialized.
The impact of the last decades of economic restructuring (particularly through housing) on territorial segregation in the city based on race and class cannot be understated. It is not controversial for social scientists to now argue that such wide gulfs exist between the average individual income of residents in various census tracts in the city (a gulf exacerbated in large part by the enrichment of property owning classes over renters) that Toronto can now be described as three cities in one: a city for the wealthy, a diminishing middle-income city, and a burgeoning low-income city (Hulchanski 2007). As Wilson & Keil (2008) note, during the accelerated dismantling of Fordism over the last decades, Toronto has transitioned from a city in which 80% were in the middle income category and only 10% were poor to now seeing only 20% of its population in that middle income category, and 40% impoverished (845). While the fact of cities being divided into separate socioeconomic enclaves is not new, what is new about these changes is that these three groups of neighborhoods are growing or diminishing at very different rates: lower income neighborhoods are growing rapidly, higher income neighbourhoods are also growing though more moderately, and middle income areas are being decimated (Hulchanski 2007). Maps by The Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership tracing socio-spatial polarization over the last four decades show just how stark this transition has been:
Figure 1
Source: Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership, “1960 to 1970 Income Maps and Charts” (2015).
In 1960, when residents of Toronto were still benefiting from mass affordable housing, federal funding of social services and jobs in manufacturing industries offering decent pay, much of the inner suburban areas of the city were middle income, while the inner city was poor, though very intense poverty was relatively rare. By 2012, what emerges is nothing short of an almost total reversal:
Figure 2
Source: Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership, “1960 to 2012 Income Maps and Charts” (2014).
Many parts of the downtown core, particularly along the subway line have become wealthy or middle-income. Meanwhile, a large majority of neighborhoods that used to be middle income have seen their average individual incomes drop significantly. As Parlette (2012) argues: “in the last thirty years we have seen the incomes of wealthy neighbourhoods near subway lines in the core increase by 71%, while those in many neighbourhoods in the postwar suburbs have dropped by 34%” (74). As the 1960 map shows, the inner suburbs were once places settled by the wealthy and middle classes, but they very quickly became disfavorable amongst residents with means. The question that begs asking is who is settling in the postwar suburbs today.
Figure 3
