Julie-Anne Boudreau

Making new political spaces: mobilizing spatial imaginaries, instrumentalizing spatial practices, and strategically using spatial tools

This paper explores space as the object of mobilization (rather than focusing on space as resource or constraint, or on the spatial configuration of actors within the organizational structure of a movement). In the context of state-restructuring processes, it is argued that new political spaces result not only from social movement activities (as in the drive for ‘free spaces’), but also in a dynamic interaction between state and civil society actors. The author asks what it takes to create a new, effective, and significant political space. Three elements are explored empirically and theoretically: the production of allegiance and legitimacy through spatial imaginaries, the instrumentalization of spatial practices and of the political culture, and the strategic use of spatial tools. In light of the case of Toronto, where a new regional political space eased the normalization of neoliberalism, it is concluded that new political spaces create the conditions for political exchange, but do not guarantee emancipation, democracy, and justice. Overall, the authors aim is to discuss the concept of political space and the analytical advantages provided by its openness to fluidity, uncertainties, uninstitutionalized interactions, and various forms of rationalities (imaginaries, everyday practices, as well as strategic calculation) in the state-restructuring and rescaling debate.

The Politics of Territorialization: Regionalism, Localism and other isms … The Case of Montreal

ABSTRACT: In a general context of state reforms, there is an emerging consensus on the strategic role of city-regions in the global economy. As it is the case in other city-regions, state-led regional reforms in Montreal are enmeshed in a series of clashes between the Left and the Right, the Provincial government and local municipalities, and the inner city and the suburbs. However, Montreal also presents an intriguing case of territorial struggles centered on cultural identities nested in multiple scales. Beyond the more recurrent arguments for and against consolidation, Montreal is also the theater of a struggle for linguistic rights. The use of territorial claims as a political strategy for influencing city-regional governance reforms and by the same token gaining more local autonomy to protect life in English in Montreal is explored as an indicator of the rescaling of claims for political autonomy.

‘Living with culture’: creative citizenship practices in Toronto

This paper addresses the contemporary creativity ethos through the lens of citizenship. The paper builds upon governmentality scholarship to examine how creativity and cultural participation are being recast as moral duties of active citizenship. It notes the development of governmental projects that seek to optimize the creative capacities of individuals toward a variety of ends. The paper develops these observations through an examination of cultural planning practices in Toronto. It notes how the citys cultural policies are viewed in increasingly therapeutic terms as technologies of creative citizenship. Emphasis is placed on the proliferation of participatory arts festivals and arts-based community development projects that enlist urban denizens into creative citizenship practices. The paper then explores a paradox at the centre of this emergent regime of creative citizenship. It describes how the creative citizen is construed in cultural planning practice as a heroic agent of innovation and civic renewal, and, at the same time, as an object of continual monitoring, assessment and risk-management.

Taking the bus daily and demonstrating on Sunday: Reflections on the formation of political subjectivity in an urban world

This paper explores the reasons behind people’s engagement in political action, particularly the marginalized and threatened. Using the example of the marches against immigration reform in the USA, the paper follows immigrant women in an effort to understand what made them participate in those demonstrations despite risks of deportation, lack of experience in demonstrating and fear. Based on fieldwork with domestic workers in Los Angeles, we suggest that in a condition of urbanity (understood as a historically situated condition characterized by a mode of living based on interdependencies, mobility, uncertainty and speed), there is much continuity between everyday life and political events. Everyday life is constituted by personal biographies, which we define as the accumulation of experience and emotional trajectories. Most social movement theories tend to emphasize the extraordinariness of political events, focusing on ruptures with everyday life. In this paper, we argue that radical urban theory ought to remain closer to the feelings experienced in political practice, bringing the obvious continuities into theoretical development.

Is there regionalism after municipal amalgamation in Toronto

This article reflects on the results of metropolitan governance restructuring in Canada’s largest city, Toronto, during the ‘long 1990s’, the time period roughly between the collapse of international property markets in the late 1980s and the events of 9/11/01. We alsodiscuss more recent developments including the establishment of more moderately liberal and social democratic administrations in Ontario and Toronto. Based on this context, we develop our arguments about globalization and unequal re‐scalings, and the re‐territorialization of political action and social movements. Through a discussion of the search for new ‘fixes’ at the city‐regional scale in Toronto, particularly in the sectors of competitiveness, transportation and the environment, we highlight how social movement demands have been rearticulated in the period following revisions of municipal governance mechanisms such as the debates about the municipal charter in Toronto.

Introduction: A processual approach to informalization

This introduction briefly reviews the intertwinement of ‘informality’ and ‘modernization’ and their implications for the theory and practice of the city. The editors identify the importance of recognizing uneven processes of informalization, emphasizing the need to compare the quality of state–citizen–market relations more than the quantity of ‘informality.’ In the process they ask whether and how informal and formal practices can help to rethink modern concepts such as citizenship, universal infrastructural access, organized resistance, and the state itself. One way to do so is to reposition these concepts as relational processes involving various actors, spaces, and temporalities rather than as essentialized objects. Such epistemological moves will shed light on the extent to which basic social needs such as the distribution of justice, the production of authority, and the regulation of class relations are not the sole terrain of the state, but negotiated relationally. The article concludes by proposing three epistemological devices – iterative comparison, ambiguous categories, and the use of hermeneutics – that can help scholars avoid the biases associated with essentialized categories.

Reflections on the Academic and Economic Environment

When we took up the job as editors, we felt the heavy weight of responsibility that comes with being assigned the task of building upon 35 years of brilliant work, and continuing IJURR’s mission. Our sense of responsibility was also heavily gendered. Although women have a place in IJURR’s history, the past three years have been the first time that IJURR has been edited by two women, with the incredible support from an all-women editorial office: Terry McBride, the managing editor who also holds the archival and living memory of the journal, alongside assistant editors, Mel Goodsell and Angela Yeap. These past years have been very rich in experience and knowledge building, and we now want to take stock and reflect on this, and on IJURR’s future direction. Over the last few years, IJURR has become even more international in scope and more ‘successful’ as far as bibliometrics are concerned. With over 500 article submissions annually, we have increased the number of issues from 4 to 6 per year, to provide space for the excellent articles we receive. Although most of IJURR’s readers are familiar with the fact that IJURR is a leading journal in the field, surprisingly few people know that IJURR is also one of the few independent journals in the field. This means that any surplus generated by the intellectual labour of its editors, editorial board members, referees and authors, is actually given back to the academic community. All of IJURR’s surplus profit goes to the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (FURS), which acts as a charity to distribute studentships and research grants to young scholars from Group B and C countries, according to the World Bank classification. This way, the intellectual labour of academics generates new possibilities for young scholars. Everyone on the Editorial Board is committed to continue making our labour matter, by keeping the journal independent. As our Advisory Board Member, Harvey Molotch once put it, IJURR is a ‘labour of love’, and we are grateful to the committed authors, referees and editorial board members who support this effort. However, IJURR’s success poses a number of challenges. Apart from the operational and managerial challenges that come with handling a large number of submissions, we are faced with a number of intellectual challenges. IJURR’s intellectual project and aims have always focused on: 1 Enabling the development of ‘concepts and research methods independent of the dominant powers’; 1

Local Integration Experiments in the New Urban Areas of Hanoi

In the peri-urban zones of many South East Asian cities, capital has flowed into the development of new, middle class urban enclaves. A significant body of scholarship sees these places as embodying some of the worst elements of American-style suburban, gated communities: sterile, disconnected from their surroundings, isolating wealthy people from the surrounding urban life, etc. While it is no doubt true that such a negative view is frequently warranted, through a closer examination of two projects in peri-urban Hanoi, the authors show that Vietnams new urban enclaves can hardly be assimilated into the hermetically sealed enclaves described in much of the critical literature. The study cases from Hanoi reveal much more porosity: a strong influence of traditional modes of housing production and allocation, a mixing of built forms and the integration of the new enclaves into the surrounding communities.

Youth-Driven Tactics of Public Space Appropriation in Hanoi: The Case of Skateboarding and Parkour

Starting in the 2000s, there has been a rise in youth-led appropriation of public spaces in Hanoi, Vietnam. Through case studies of skateboarders and traceurs (practitioners of parkour) in two of the citys formal public spaces, we explore and analyze the tactics deployed by these young urbanites to claim a part of the characteristically overcrowded and socio-politically restrictive public spaces of the Vietnamese capital. These case studies show that, by seeking to access public spaces for their new activities, skaters and traceurs have had to confront multiple sets of rules, imposed by not only the state, but also corporate actors and resident-driven surveillance. We find that skateboarders and traceurs deal with these forms of control largely through small-scale, non-ideological, and non-confrontational tactics. As a result, these youth practices have become normalized in Hanois public spaces. These findings broaden the discourses on everyday urbanism and social-political transformations in post-socialist urban contexts, and shed light on the ways in which contemporary youths engage with the city.

Uneven state formalization and periurban housing production in Hanoi and Mexico City: Comparative reflections from the global South

In the early 2000s, Vietnam and Mexico turned to the private sector to respond to increasing housing demand and tame the growth of uncontrolled periurban settlements. Around Hanoi, such arrangements fostered the construction of vertical developments while large subdivisions of single-family houses spread over former lakebeds in the peripheries of Mexico City. A stronger role of the private sector in the planning and provision of housing is often seen as an outcome of crisis-driven and crisis-inducing neoliberal reforms. However, the cases of Vietnam and Mexico suggest that a fuller understanding of housing production strategies currently favoured by each state needs to account for important elements of continuity in social, political, and economic practices. This continuity is demonstrated through the comparative analysis of three aspects of the restructuring of housing production in Mexico City’s and Hanoi’s periurban areas: (i) the discourses of ‘order’ used to legitimate heightened private sector involvement, (ii) legislative reforms facilitating periurban land appropriation for redevelopment, and (iii) the socio-spatial outcomes of these recent changes in terms of housing affordability, liveability, and quality. We conclude that both city-regions, despite important differences in their institutional and economic systems display enduring state/market/civil society relations associated with processes of ‘uneven state formalization’. This continuity and unevenness, we argue, better explains recent transformations of periurban housing production than an emphasis on the ruptures resulting from neoliberal reforms.