John Paul Catungal

Geographies of Displacement in the Creative City: The Case of Liberty Village, Toronto

Creative industries are increasingly associated with employment, tourism and the attraction and retention of talent in economic development discourse. However, there is a need to foreground the interests involved in promoting the creative city and the political implications of such policies. This paper analyses new industry formation in Liberty Village—a cultural industry precinct in inner-city Toronto, Canada. The focus is on the place-making strategies at work in constructing Liberty Village. In particular, the paper explores a series of displacements associated with creative districts, focusing on three scales in particular—the level of the city, the neighbourhood and the precinct itself. An examination of these displacements foregrounds the contested nature of the creative city script.

Placing Power in the Creative City: Governmentalities and Subjectivities in Liberty Village, Toronto

In this paper we analyze the making of Liberty Village as a creative hub in inner-city Toronto. We focus on the role of property developers and the Liberty Village Business Improvement Association in fostering the areas internal economic geography. Drawing on the literature on governmentality, we dissect how the production of a place identity requires both the production of new subjectivities and the exclusion of alternative actors and understandings of organization within the district.

Governing sexuality and park space: acts of regulation in Vancouver, BC

This paper suggests that the coding and ordering of sexuality and space through definitions of which sexual practices and which representations of sexuality are morally appropriate in public space can be usefully understood as a problem of governance. We argue that attempts to hide or make visible specific sexualities in public space are complicated and politically charged because, while written regulations are relatively cut-and-dried, their implementation, by planners, judges, et al., involves significant discretion and leads to contingent, contestable outcomes. Furthermore, the politics of governing sexual morality and public space is made more problematic when the place where a hegemonic norm of behaviour or morality is publically challenged is an iconic park that attracts intense media attention. The paper elaborates these arguments through two interrelated case studies: a debate over the appropriate location of an AIDS memorial in Stanley Park, Vancouver and the reaction to the killing of a gay man who cruised the park for sex. We conclude by linking our argument to recent statements about the future of geographies of sexuality, arguing for analyses that acknowledge both the contingences and potentialities of categories like ‘the state,’ ‘governance,’ and ‘public space’ and also their structural tendencies and their ongoing association with sexual repression.

Neoliberalizing Social Justice in Infrastructure Revitalization Planning: Analyzing Toronto's More Moss Park Project in Its Early Stages

A public consultation process is currently underway to gather ideas on the revitalization of a park and community center in one of Torontos most economically diverse neighborhoods. This project is a partnership between a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)-focused community center, a private philanthropist, and the City of Toronto. In this article, we argue that More Moss Park is illustrative of the neoliberalization of social justice, in which social justice is touted as central to both the end goal of the project and the planning process that will shape it. We focus on three political moves that underwrite the neoliberalization of social justice in the project. The first is the technicalization of social justice as “know-how,” a form of expertise that one of the main partners claims to have gained via its history of working for sexual minority communities and that it claims to be able to offer in other sociospatial contexts. The second is the normalization of an anonymous private donor as a necessary “silent” partner in urban development whose foremost concern is social justice in the form of neighborhood improvements for marginalized communities. The third is the use of crises of neighborhood insecurity and of budget shortfalls as planning problems whose solutions rest on the suspension of normal planning approaches, thus justifying the use of a public–private partnership. These moves illustrate the ways in which social justice has become neoliberalized not only through narrowing its scope but also through using it as ideological armature to mask marginalizations emerging from urban neoliberalism itself.

Book review forum

Ladelle McWhorter Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 440 pp.,

Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities

27.95 paperback,

Circulating Western Notions

75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-253-22063-9). Ladelle McWhorter begins Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-Ameri...

Social Justice and the Creative City: Class, Gender and Racial Inequalities

mation on migration policies and population/economic statistics, followed by a listing of sources for the data shown on the maps. Each of the thirty-nine contributions is presented in a two-page format. A large, fullcolor map is provided for each topic, supplemented with a combination of inset maps, photographs, and charts. The text for each topic is necessarily brief, usually of the order of 500 words—less than this review, which makes it exceptionally difficult to convey extremely complex events such as migration systems. And yet the authors are successful. The juxtaposition of maps, text, and graphics works well and the reader comes away with a cogent overview of the topic. A selection of suggested readings might have been included, however, for those readers wishing to pursue the topics further. There are some minor errors and incongruences between the maps and the text. The discussion of ‘The Great Migration’, for example, provides an overview of the millions of migrants who left Europe and China to make their way to the Americas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Curiously, the maps provided do not include China. Likewise, the section on ‘Nation-Building Migrations’ provides textual discussion of the ‘westward movements’ in the USA, the state-sponsored movement of Han Chinese into Tibet and Xinjiang, and the transmigration programs of Indonesia. While maps are presented for the USA and Indonesia, there is no map for China. Also confusing is the discussion of Japan’s postwar migration of workers (pp. 42–43). The map legend, titled ‘Population Movements in Japan’, is subtitled ‘percentage change in population of prefectures 1948-1970’ (p. 42). The text, however, explains that ‘[i]n Japan, there were particularly high rates of population growth around Tokyo and Osaka, and also around Nagoya, which was then the centre of the Japanese car industry’ (p. 42). Are we referring to population movements or population growth—which would include both migration and natural increase? These quibbles aside, the atlas is well designed and should serve admirably as a supplement to introductory human geography courses and as a broad overview for nonacademics. Both maps and text should provide ample opportunity for discussion.

Contesting the creative city: Race, nation, multiculturalism

The establishment of effective and efficient ties of communication is an important cultural and political process for emigrant Filipinos. This is necessary for a number of reasons, including a personal and practical one, which is that this process allows for Filipinos to stay in touch with relatives and friends and to maintain a constant flow of news, information, moneys and goods between the Philippines and the diasporic Filipino communities throughout the world. The ties that bind Filipinos across political border spaces and across oceans are especially strong during the Christmas season, an important time for the majority Christian Filipino population both ‘at home’ and abroad. It is around Christmas time that many phone calls are made to loved ones back home. It is also around this time that Filipino-style care packages called ‘balikbayan’ boxes (literally “returnee’s boxes”) are sent home. These are filled with an assortment of goods ranging from lotions, soaps and magazines to canned foodstuffs and new and used shoes and clothing.