Liette Gilbert

Practices of urban environmental citizenships: rights to the city and rights to nature in Toronto

This paper examines the conflicts and confluences of urban and environmental rights. To this end, we offer a brief summary of Henri Lefebvres conception of ‘right to the city’, followed by an exploration of contemporary expressions of environmental rights and citizenship. We assert that citizenship should be critically understood not only as rights granted by a government, but also as practices through which the limits of established rights are (re)defined and (re)affirmed. Emphasizing a dialectical relationship between environmental and social relations, we present two Toronto, Canada case studies which we consider as enactments of re-appropriation of fundamental urban and environmental rights: home and water. These particular claims directly challenge the naturalness of dominant forms of discrimination and marginalization in the urban environment. We contend that these two cases push the boundaries of conventionally understood urban and environmental rights and emerge as claims to socio-natural or socio-ecological rights.

Building bioregional citizenship: the case of the Oak Ridges Moraine, Ontario, Canada

In the last 20 years, the Oak Ridges Moraine in Torontos metropolitan region has changed from a scarcely mentioned landscape feature into an environmental icon for residents and environmentalists and a conservation object for the provincial government. In efforts to save the Moraine from urban sprawl, the concepts of bioregion and bioregionalism have been invoked to create a suburban/exurban defence of non-human nature and to promote an ethic of place. We identify three dominant currents of bioregionalism: ecocentrism (a concern for the intrinsic value of non-human nature), scientific managerialism (focused on the setting aside of natural areas), and socio-environmental considerations (centring on environmental justice). We note that invocations of ecocentrism and science are NIMBYist or shallow, and references to environmental justice issues are absent. We conclude that a concept of bioregional citizenship that sees beyond a physically defined bioregion recognises the emotional ties people feel beyond their immediate living space, and includes environmental justice as a useful concept to advance the bioregionalist agenda.

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.