Stefan Kipfer

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.

“recolonization” and public housing: a toronto case study

In their study of the redevelopment of public housing in Toronto’s Regent Park, Stefan Kipfer and Jason Petrunia challenge the Third Way urbanism that largely dominates academic and political debate about housing today. Tracing the limits of “place-based” development and social policy, they argue that “the redevelopment project of Regent Park is best understood as a three-pronged, profoundly racialized economic, social, and cultural strategy to recolonize a long-pathologized and segregated, but potentially valuable central city social space in the name of ‘diversity’ and ‘social mixity.’” Borrowing from both Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, they achieve a subtle and nuanced analysis of the local class, racial, and gender relations that underpin interscalar territorial compromises.

Henri Lefebvre Debates and controversies1

Aided with French and German scholarship, this paper takes stock of Henri Lefebvre’s relevance in contemporary English-speaking urban research on social movements, postcolonial situations, the state, scale, gender, urban political ecology, regulation, and the right to the city. What becomes clear from this survey is that Lefebvre’s capacity to contribute to cutting-edge urban research requires a selective translation of his work. While the modalities of translating Lefebvre vary depending on the subject matter, transfiguring Lefebvre for today is most plausible when taking into account the dialectical nature of his urbanism and the open-ended and integral character of his marxism.

Fanon and Space: Colonization, Urbanization, and Liberation from the Colonial to the Global City:

Stimulated by recent controversies about the headscarf in France, this paper offers a fresh look at the spatial and urban dimensions of the work of Frantz Fanon. While there is widespread agreement that the work of Fanon (which preceded the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social theory) includes powerful spatial dimensions, there is no consensus about the status of ‘space’ in Fanons texts. Postcolonial theorists, whose reading of Fanon dominated the Anglo-American academic world until recently, have applauded the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Fanons work as a sign for the latters discomfort with dialectical thought and matters of historical transformation and thus as a sign for ‘third-space’ thinking. Representing a new, heterodox wave of Fanon interpretation and insisting on Fanons Hegelian–Marxist, radical Black, and phenomenological preoccupations with liberation, other readers have detected a shift from spatial to temporal concerns in Fanons work. While building on this latter reading of Fanon, I argue that the spatial aspects in Fanons work are neither a function of a philosophical imperative of nonrepresentability nor in contradiction with his concerns about temporal transformation. Fanon analyzed everyday racism as an alienating spatial relation, treated colonization as spatial organization, and viewed decolonization in part as a form of reappropriating and transforming spatial relations in the colonial city and through the construction of nationwide sociospatial alliances. Fanons complex historical-geographical perspective on everyday racism, the colonial issue, and national liberation makes it possible to link his work to Henri Lefebvres insights into the processes by which postwar French urbanization mediated a shift from colonial war to the ‘colonization’ of everyday life in the metropole. Given the growing role of controlling urban space in the core and peripheries of our neo-imperial world, excavating an urban and spatial Fanon is promising for strategies to emphasize the urban dimensions, microaspects and macroaspects, and multiple scales of what colonization means today.

Reurbanization in Toronto: Condominium boom and social housing revitalization

Abstract Over the past few years, a condominium boom has transformed the City of Toronto: developers have bought up land in industrial and residential areas and built high-rise condominium towers that left their imprint on the urban landscape. This new interest for the inner city was sparked by a combination of legal and political shifts that had the intent to redirect growth to already built-up areas, and to change preferences for housing and planning practices that allowed intensification (as well as gentrification) of neighborhoods. In our contribution we will discuss two examples: the condominium boom driven by developers, and the redevelopment of the largest inner city social housing complex in Canada. Both of them, as we argue, are fostered by a market-based approach to re-urbanization. We will pay particular attention to the role that the social construction of a particular urban lifestyle has in the appropriation of spaces for reurbanization.

Urban Marxism and the Post-colonial Question: Henri Lefebvre and 'Colonisation'

AbstractThe post-colonial has often functioned as a code word for a form of French post-theory. In more recent efforts to reconstruct linkages between metropolitan Marxism and counter-colonialism, the post-colonial refers to an open-ended research field for investigating the present weight of colonial histories. But even in these reformulations, post-colonial research presents formidable challenges to Euro-American urban Marxism. In this context, this paper redirects Henri Lefebvre’s work to analyse post-colonial situations. It traces in particular the notion of ‘colonisation’ as it develops from his critique of everyday life (which signalled an extension of his critique of alienation) to his work on the state (where the notion reappears in discussions of theories of imperialism). We argue that Lefebvre’s notion of ‘colonisation’ (which refers to multi-scalar strategies for organising territorial relations of domination) presents a promising opening to understanding the ‘colonial’ aspects of urbanisation today. Still, for this promise to be realised, Lefebvre’s notion must be refracted through dialectical-humanist counter-colonial traditions.

Still Planning to Be Different? Toronto at the Turn of the Millennium

Toronto is the largest and most populous city in Canada. The metropolis on Lake Ontario has a land area of 622 square kilometers and a population of 2.4 million. After the city was consolidated from previously seven municipalities in 1998, City Council has endorsed the preparation of a new Official Plan. In this paper, we trace the traditions and current challenges of planning reform in Toronto in light of the current process of official plan review which, in the words of the Citys planners “is required to deal with global economic competition, new municipal responsibilities, and the changing social fabric.” We will begin with a few conceptual and theoretical considerations on planning in Toronto at the millennium, provide a short historical overview of postwar planning in this city, and end with a section on current planning issues, based on analysis of planning documents, newspaper and other public accounts, as well as a small number of conversations with leading local planners and politicians.

From “Revolution” To Farce? Hard-Right Populism in the Making of Toronto

Abstract This paper analyses the rise of authoritarian populism in the City of Toronto. We interpret the first term of Rob Ford’s mayoralty (2010–2014) as a racialized attempt to re-organize bourgeois rule within the contradictions of Canadian and Toronto politics. The Ford mayoralty has not congealed in a populist regime. As an unfinished project, Ford-ism does, however, represent a radicalizing moment in the uneven development of the new Right “revolution” that has remade Canada since the 1980s. In Toronto, the unevenness of authoritarian populism is expressed in Ford’s attempt to reinvent and cement a pre-existing political divide between “downtown” and the “suburbs.”

Pushing the limits of urban research: Urbanization, pipelines and counter-colonial politics:

This article confronts debates about extended and concentrated urbanization with Indigenous claims to time and space. It does so in part by discussing the degree to which notions of extended and concentrated urbanization allow us to understand the dynamics of pipeline politics in Canada, notably Indigenous claims leveled at infrastructure projects. It argues that Lefebvre-inspired research is both promising and insufficient in this regard. Their promises can only be realized provided one considers urban research as mediation (between everyday life and the social order), contextualize urbanization as a product of non-linear histories through which ‘city’ and ‘non-city’ are transformed or reinstituted as socio-spatial forms, and take seriously imaginaries that may not only contest but also refuse the expansion of the urban field. Meeting these conditions is not possible without resorting to other, non-Lefebvrean approaches that help us understand the settler-colonial aspects of Canadian urban history and grasp the inter-national dimensions of Indigenous politics. Finally, opening up Lefebvre scholarship to considerations of settler colonialism is impossible without the distinct relational theories of time and space that inform radical Indigenous theories (and some pipeline struggles). Indigenous claims in or against urbanization thus represent a limit case of urban research.

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).