Gene Desfor

Ecological modernisation in Los Angeles and Toronto

This article presents the results of a comparative study of environmental policy making in Toronto and Los Angeles. The study was intended to explain how social formations at the urban scale play an increasingly important role in constructing environmental policy and practice as articulated in docu ments, rhetoric and political actions. It is suggested that environmental policy is embedded in broader and more long-term political goals, and that ecological discourse is not only about the environment but also brings together various social projects under the environmental protection flag. The four case studies— in Toronto, contaminated soil and the Don River were examined, and in Los Angeles air pollution and the Los Angeles River—revealed considerable vari ation but all reflected an agenda of ecological modernisation. In particular it was found that demands for maintaining or improving environmental integrity and coherence have lost legitimacy to concerns for efficiency, competitiveness, marketability, fle...

Every river tells a story: the Don River (Toronto) and the Los Angeles River (Los Angeles) as articulating landscapes

Case studies of the Don River in Toronto, and the Los Angeles River in Los Angeles, inform a discussion of governance of urban landscapes in North America. The analysis and discussion in the paper centres on the way urban environments are part of the governance of a complexity of globalized urban areas. The empirical base of the paper is a set of interviews conducted between 1995 and 1997 with government officials, environmental and social activists, and business people. The stories of the two rivers indicate that urban ecological politics may be hegemonic or anti-hegemonic, supportive of existing regulatory structures or counter-regulatory. We suggest that in Toronto, urban ecological politics is civic, whereas in Los Angeles, it is socio-economic. More than in Toronto, urban natures in Los Angeles have been linked with contentious social struggles around justice, culture and democracy. Copyright

RESTRUCTURING THE TORONTO HARBOUR COMMISSION: LAND POLITICS ON THE TORONTO WATERFRONT.

Abstract Drawing on the theoretical approach of the French regulation school, this paper examines changes to a port authority, the Toronto Harbour Commissioners, both from an historical perspective and within the context of global, national and local forces. Following a discussion of the Commissions establishment, the paper focuses on the most recent wave of waterfront redevelopment beginning in the late 1960s. During this period, the Commission faced serious challenges resulting from the urban region moving toward a Fordist regime of accumulation. Contrary to the expectations of a regulation approach, the Commissions institutional mandate and organizational structure remained intact. By the late 1980s, however, the Commission was being assailed by the local state, by business, community and environmental groups, by the national government, and by the global production system. This ensemble of voices for change will bring about new institutional arrangements which will reflect a fuller correspondence with the current regime of accumulation.

Contested and polluted terrain

Abstract This paper examines the new Ontario guidelines for the clean‐up of contaminated sites using Toronto as an empirical case. The contention of the paper is that Ontarios new soil clean‐up policy is the product of a set of embedded understandings about the economy, about the environment and about deep interconnections between the environment and the economy. These understandings are, to a large degree, specifically local. We contextualise the new guidelines by arguing that they contribute to restructuring the political economy of Toronto from an industrial to a global city. The analysis is based on, among other sources, a series of interviews with policy makers, scientists, bankers, insurance representatives and other knowledgeable individuals in the debate on polluted soil clean‐up. Substantively, the paper focuses on the introduction of various risk‐assessment processes into the debate on contaminated sites. The paper concludes that these processes need to be made subject to democratic rather than...

Making local environmental policy in Los Angeles

Abstract In this paper we attempt to illuminate the process of making urban environmental policy in Los Angeles. We suggest that in the current post-Fordist period, a multiplicity of voices in civil society contribute to the construction of a local environmental policy space. Within this space, struggles occur concerning the regulation of societal relationships with nature.

Binary station choice models for a rail rapid transit line

Abstract Using two independent data sets, alternative binary station choice models were successfully calibrated and tested. The regression and probit models are based on a two stage decision process: first the commuter selects his mode of travel, and then, given the use of rapid transit, he chooses a station. The station choice models focus on the second stage of the decision process. The models estimate the relative frequency a station will be selected by commuters from a Census block group, given a modal choice of rapid transit. This proportion is a function of the trip cost difference between that station and the next least cost station.

Zivilgesellschaft, lokaler Staat und urbane Umweltpolitik in Los Angeles und Toronto

Bei diesem Text handelt es sich um einen vorlaufigen Bericht uber ein Forschungsprojekt zur Gestaltung der stadtischen Umweltpolitik in Toronto und Los Angeles. Ausgangspunkt unserer Forschungsarbeiten ist die Beobachtung, das Prozesse der stadtischen Entwicklung in zunehmendem Mase mit okologischen Belangen verknupft werden. Wir bemuhen uns um ein Verstandnis von stadtischer Politik, die auf der Ebene des „lokalen Staates“ definiert wird und Stadtentwicklung mit okologischen Verbesserungen verbindet. Dabei interessiert uns vornehmlich die Frage, ob es dabei gelingt, eine Vielzahl von Interessen verschiedener Gruppen der Zivilgesellschaft miteinander in Einklang zu bringen.

13 Socio-ecological Change in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first Centuries: The Lower Don River

On 2 February 2007, Waterfront Toronto, the city’s lead waterfront development corporation, announced an international design competition intended to secure a world-class plan for developing forty hectares of land at the mouth of the Don River. The task given to firms selected for the competition was an ambitious one: they were to envision the ‘renaturalizing’ and revitalization of an area that has been marginalized for years. Waterfront Toronto had called for a plan for the Lower Don Lands that would establish a ‘common vision for this area’ and would construct an ‘iconic landscape’ to bring new urban life to the area (Waterfront Toronto 2007a: 7).1 The initiative of Waterfront Toronto to reinvent the mouth of the Don River marks a major reversal in changes to the Don that began in the late nineteenth century. It is part of an ongoing process aimed at re-imagining, reconfiguring, and reshaping a problematic area of the waterfront. It is particularly appropriate that the final chapter in this volume focuses on a comparison between contemporary plans for ‘re-naturalization’ of the Don River and the changes made to the river in the late nineteenth century. The volume begins with chapters that discuss the ways Toronto’s waterfront was transformed in conjunction with an industrially oriented era of development and ends with discussions of the more recent wave of development. This chapter uses the particular case of the Don River to compare the ways that socio-ecological changes in the two periods were similar and different. Late-nineteenth-century city builders constructed plans for the Don that spoke ambivalently of nature both as exalted and outside the bounds of human control, but also as requiring improvement as the key to unlocking its productive capacity in support of urban growth. In contrast, contemporary plans

5 A Social History of a Changing Environment: The Don River Valley, 1910–1931

Not far from the spot where, at present, the Don-street bridge crosses the river, on the west side and to the north, lived for a long time a hermitsquatter, named Joseph Tyler ... His abode on the Don was an excavation in the side of the steep hill, a little way above the level of the river bank ... To the south of his cave he cultivated a large garden, and raised among other things, the white sweet edible Indian corn, a novelty here at the time; and very excellent tobacco. Scadding 1873: 228–9

Grenzenloses Wachstum: Die Planung der zukünftigen Wettbewerbsfähigkeit in Toronto

In den sechziger Jahren kommentierte Hans Blumenfeld die auffallende Ahnlichkeit von Bevolkerung und Ausdehnung seiner neuen Heimatstadt Toronto und seiner Geburtsstadt Hamburg. Naturlich war Blumenfeld von der enormen Unterschiedlichkeit der urbanen Formen und Dichte der beiden Stadte irritiert. Trotzdem fand er, dass Hamburg und Toronto, im Hinblick auf stadtisches Wachstum, eine ahnliche Problematik hatten. Es ist erstaunlich, dass es, wahrend Toronto und Hamburg in den sechziger Jahren etwa die gleiche Dichte in ihren Stadtkernen und im gesamten Stadtgebieten hatten, in Hamburg „eine erheblich grosere Bevolkerungsgruppe auserhalb der Gemeindegren-zen“ als in Toronto gab — dies obwohl die Hamburger Bebauung zu drei Vierteln aus Geschosswohnungsbau bestand, und es in Toronto weniger als ein Viertel Geschosswohnungsbau gab. Auserdem gab es in Hamburg seit uber einem halben Jahrhundert den Schnellbahnverkehr, den motorisierten Individualverkehr verstarkt erst seit 1954, wahrend in Toronto das Auto seit den zwanziger Jahren verbreitet war und die erste U-Bahn erst 1954 eroffnet wurde (Blumenfeld, 1979: 290).