Roger Keil

“Common‐Sense” Neoliberalism: Progressive Conservative Urbanism in Toronto, Canada

This paper argues that urban neoliberalism can best be understood as a contradictory re–regulation of urban everyday life. Based on an analysis of neoliberalism as a new political economy and as a new set of technologies of power, the paper argues that the urban everyday is the site and product of the neoliberal transformation. Governments and corporations play a key role in redefining the conditions of everyday life through neoliberal policies and business practices. Part of this reorientation of everydayness, however, involves new forms of resistance and opposition, which include the kernel of a possible alternative urbanism. The epochal shift from a Keynesian–Fordist–welfarist to a post–Fordist–workfarist society is reflected in a marked restructuring of everyday life. The shift changes the socioeconomic conditions in cities. It also includes a reorientation of identities, social conflicts, and ideologies towards a more explicitly culturalist differentiation. Social difference does not disappear, but actually becomes more pronounced; however, it gets articulated in or obscured by cultural terms of reference. The paper looks specifically at Toronto, Ontario, as a case study. An analysis of the explicitly neoliberal politics of the province’s Progressive Conservative (Tory) government under Mike Harris, first elected in 1995, demonstrates the pervasive re–regulation of everyday life affecting a wide variety of people in Toronto and elsewhere. Much of this process is directly attributable to provincial policies, a consequence of Canada’s constitutional system, which does not give municipalities autonomy but makes them “creatures of provinces.” However, the paper also argues that Toronto’s elites have aided and abetted the provincial “Common–Sense” Revolution through neoliberal policies and actions on their own. The paper concludes by outlining the emergence of new instances of resistance to the politics of hegemony and catastrophe of urban neoliberalism.

Toronto Inc? Planning the Competitive City in the New Toronto

This paper analyses recent developments in urban planning in the City of Toronto. A municipality of 2.4 million inhabitants that makes up the inner half of the Greater Toronto Area, the City of Toronto was consolidated from seven municipalities in 1998. Planning practice, discourse, and “vision” in the new City of Toronto are shaped by the city’s bid for the 2008 Olympics, related proposals for waterfront redevelopment, and preparations for a new official plan. In the context of comparative debates on trends in local governance, we see current planning strategies in Toronto as one of several strategic sites in which Toronto is consolidated into a “competitive city.” Historically, the formation of the competitive city in Toronto must be seen as a result of the impasse of postwar metropolitan planning in the early 1970s, the sociospatial limitations of downtown urban reform politics in the 1970s and 1980s, and the neoliberal restructuring and rescaling of the local state in the 1990s. Theoretically, we draw on the global city research paradigm, regime and regulation theory, and neo-Gramscian urban political theory to suggest that planning the competitive city signals shifts in the sociopolitical alliances, ideological forms, and dominant strategies that regulate global-city formation. These constellations and strategies threaten to reconstitute bourgeois hegemony in Toronto with a series of claims to urbanity.

Progress Report—Urban Political Ecology

In my last report (Keil, 2003), I highlighted some of the main debates and lines of thought in work on urban political ecology (UPE). In the current review, I will build on this matrix and showcase some for the rich and diverse work that has been published recently in journals, books, and conferences. I will identify some trends and acknowledge some major achievements in the field. There is still a reluctance to take UPE on board in both geography more generally and political ecology more specifically. The “urban” in political ecology still has to be asserted in each conversation as it apparently continues to be counter to prevailing expectations that locate nature outside the city. Otherwise brilliant, standard-setting and definitive disciplinary work on political ecology, such as the recent volumes by Tim Forsythe (2003) and Paul Robbins (2004), left the “urban” mostly unexplored. Still, during the last year, UPE enjoyed the spotlight of both science foundations and mainstream popular media. On the academic side, for example, the European Science Foundation (ESF) has given the subject some space it its ongoing Urban Science forward look, especially the workshops on Science, Technology, and Society (held at the SURF Centre in Manchester in January, 2005) and Urban Risk (held at the Umweltforschungszentrum Leipzig in June, 2004). This scientific-political exercise will be influential in the way urban research in Europe is re-envisioned in the coming years and participants in these workshops have placed urban political ecology issues at the top of the agenda. More widely popular than the arcane worlds of science funding are international magazines. The New Yorker ran a compelling article by David Owen on “Green Manhattan” (Owen, 2004), which challenged the common popular (Jeffersonian) North American stereotypes about the natural countryside and the unnatural city: “Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility” (Owen, 2004, p. 111). The counterintuitive and provocative statement that “New York is the greenest

The urban politics of roll‐with‐it neoliberalization

Urban politics has changed during a generation of neoliberalization. This paper argues that next to the notions of roll‐back and roll‐out neoliberalization, which have been put forward to explain this change, a third concept might be helpful: roll‐with‐it neoliberalization. The three concepts refer to phases, moments and contradictions in neoliberalization. Roll‐with‐it neoliberalization captures the normalization of governmentalities associated with the neoliberal social formation and its emerging crises. The paper outlines an immanent critique of roll‐with‐it neoliberalization to determine possible consequences for urban politics in this current phase: (a) neoliberal governmentality has been generalized to the point that it does not have to be established aggressively and explicitly and (b) the far‐reaching crises of regulation that have gripped the capitalist urban system as a result of neoliberal roll‐out now demand new orientations in collective action that involve both ‘reformed’ neoliberal elite practices and elite reaction to widespread contestation of neoliberal regulation. The paper differentiates two ideal types of urban political discourses at the current conjuncture and adds a progressive alternative that points beyond the neoliberal agenda. While the previous era created governance conflicts around social cohesion and economic competitiveness, the current debate moves to new sectors of social concern, which broaden the agenda of urban politics to encompass fields traditionally not included in considerations on urban political regulation. The paper concludes that while roll‐with‐it neoliberalization has changed the game and moved the boundaries of urban politics, it has also created new contradictions that demonstrate its own unsustainability as a mode of regulation. As the financial and economic architecture of global neoliberalism fails, and communities world wide are thrown into the maelstrom of crisis, urban politics and the actors that make it need to be reimagined.

The real creative class

A ‘creative class’ mania now pervades many cities and communities across the global west and beyond. Even in Shanghai, the new kid on the global city block, old warehouses on a recreated riverfront advertise ‘creativity’ in plain view of ‘old economy’ recycling centres and traditional housing quarters. These cities purportedly face a new grim and stark reality—dark and deepening global times— which hovers to batter and sear their economic fortunes. As urban prognosticator Felex Rohatyn (in Scrimger and Everett 1999) noted relatively early on at a US Conference of Mayors Meeting, ‘we can not ignore [how] globalization [and new business people] has obliterated frontiers. Public officials who ignore this do so at their constituent’s peril.’ The proposed antidote is neat and tidy: more entrepreneurialism, economic tautness, and creative-civic beings and spaces. This new pragmatism posits creative subjects and spaces as needing cultivation, attraction, and pampering. The unequivocal call: find these creative people and manufacture these spaces or die. This essay does not interrogate the truthstatus of that global fear. Instead, we argue that the term ‘creative class’ in this urbangrowth rhetoric has been grossly mis-applied and is a class-based, mystificatory concept. We suggest, first, that the real creative class in these cities is the poor. We chronicle their immense contribution to the contemporary urban economy, and their deft resourcefulness and ingenuity in a remarkably creative everyday round. This point reworks creative-class guru Richard Florida’s own assumption that the key features of a creative population is their central contribution to city economic solvency and the use of daily ingenuity. We suggest, second, that applying this revised conception of the creative class to spur city growth and development would be irrational. Cultivating this true creative class and replenishing their creativity (a supposed necessity) would require that public policy keep the poor mired in poverty and spatially managed and controlled. Finally, we suggest that this true creative class (the poor) is Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 9, No. 8, December 2008

Multiple disconnections: environmental justice and Urban water in Canada and South Africa

This paper examines the ways in which environmental justice (EJ)—in its myriad forms—has developed as a concrete and material challenge to the dominant (neo‐liberal) discourse of ecological modernisation. The concept of ‘environmental justice’ is problematised and the fast conceptual transfer beyond the borders of the US, where it originated. The shift in the concept of environmental justice is explored in two urban environments in Toronto, Canada, and Hermanus, South Africa, with a specific emphasis on urban water policies and politics and their relation to concerns of environmental justice. The term ‘environmental justice’ in the context of urban environments must be defined within this context for each site under study; the paper argues against a universalising use of the term. In localising the term ‘environmental justice’, it is not proposed that its use be restricted to a specific site, but that its use is embedded in a multiscalar urban world specific to a particular site. It is argued specifically that what is and is not environmentally just cannot be discussed merely from the point of view of localised differentials in the exposure to environmental costs or benefits. Instead, the articulated scales of justice are explored in and among the case study cities. It is argued that in reality, injustice perceptions and justice demands are constructed through relative, scale‐sensitive political and discursive processes.

Global Cities and the Spread of Infectious Disease: The Case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto, Canada

The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Toronto and other cities in 2003 showed a heightened sensitivity of places in the global economy to rapid changes brought on by the acceleration of social and ecological relationships. The spread of the SARS virus may be a predictable consequence of these processes. The paper investigates how processes of globalisation have affected the transmission and response to SARS within the context of the global cities network. Little work has been done on the relationship of global city formation and the spread of infectious disease. Arguing that this relationship may be central to understanding the intricate capillary structures of the globalised network, the paper focuses on how pathogens interact with economic, political and social factors. These relationships exist both in the network and in global cities themselves, thereby posing new issues for public health and epidemiological efforts at disease containment and tracking.

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...

Going up the Country: Internationalization and Urbanization on Frankfurt's Northern Fringe:

In this paper the current period of urbanization, which to a higher degree than ever before blurs conventional notions of core and periphery, is explored. Cities today appear as multicentered, nodal, flexible, and global. These trends are examined in the case of Frankfurt, with reference to the concepts developed by world city theory, regulation theory, and from the discourse on space and restructuring. Frankfurt presently faces two kinds of growth and two discourses on growth. First, the expansion of the citadel of the world city and, second, the expansion of world-city-related growth into the periphery. Central and peripheral growth are linked in an oscillating movement of mutually reinforcing dynamics. Examples of peripheral urbanization are presented, with emphasis on the specific role of the airport as a new node of development. In this paper the articulation of these growth dynamics with the local political space of the northern fringe of the municipality of Frankfurt, where rapid restructuring of the urban landscape is under way, is examined. It is argued that the new dynamics of growth which affects the urban periphery in an unprecedented way calls for a new regional mode of regulation.

Governing the Sick City: Urban Governance in the Age of Emerging Infectious Disease

Abstract:  Based on a case study of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Toronto, Canada, this article suggests that we may have to rethink our common perception of what urban governance entails. Rather than operating solely in the conceptual proximity of social cohesion and economic competitiveness, urban governance may soon prove to be more centrally concerned with questions of widespread disease, life and death and the construction of new internal boundaries and regulations just at the time that globalization seems to suggest the breakdown of some traditional scalar incisions such as national boundaries in a post‐Westphalian environment. We argue that urban governance must face the new (or reemerging) challenge of dealing with infectious disease in the context of the “new normal” and that global health governance may be better off by taking the possibilities that rest in metropolitan governance more seriously.