SPE 74 - Studies in Political Economy - University of Toronto

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investment and mobile segments of new urban middle classes. In Toronto, .... (TWRC) Board meetings to the public.18 The Toronto Board of Trade repre-.
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FROM SURF TO TURF: NO LIMITS TO GROWTH IN TORONTO? Gene Desfor, Roger Keil, Stefan Kipfer, and Gerda Wekerle

As in the 1960s and 1970s, when the modern metropolis took shape in

Toronto, Canada’s primary urban region is currently experiencing tremendous growth. Fuelled by increasing levels of economic activities and large numbers of new migrants who make Toronto their home when they arrive in Canada, it is estimated that the city region will add about two or three million people during the next generation. This expected growth is adding pressure to already stressed physical infrastructure, increasing tensions in social relations, and weakening environmental conditions. Two approaches have been suggested to cope with these trends: one urban and central, dominated by theories and practices of inner city reformers who want to extend the concepts and practices that built “the city that works,” and another dominated by suburban and exurban developers who would blanket the urban periphery with square kilometres of single family home subdivisions in cul-de-sac streets. Two distinct and oppositional regimes appear to be at work, whereby one — the urban version — is seen to deal rationally with growth pressures by heightening densities, expanding public transit, and encouraging a vibrant street life, while the other — the exurban version — would continue to extend a sprawling mess of unsustainability in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). We argue, however, that framing these growth visions as divergent, or even oppositional, is an oversimplification. In this paper, we explore these polar positions and argue that recent growth politics and planning in the GTA has been complicated by significant shifts in central city development politics and a politicization of sprawl at the outer edges of the urban region. The two discourses identified above — the urban and the exurban — are Studies in Political Economy 77

SPRING

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simplified reflections of a contradictory growth dynamic. We examine this picture in three steps. First, we contextualize Toronto’s recent planning history as a “competitive” city. We then discuss the changing governance of waterfront development and focus on recent planning practices as expressions of capitalist growth politics and the contradictory roles of reformers. Finally, we redirect our view from the lake’s edge to the other visible physical boundary of the urban region, the Oak Ridges Moraine to the north of the city, and the conflicts around planning that have arisen there. Here, residents and others who link sprawl to environmental and social justice issues are contesting growth models dependent on the continual expansion of suburbanization. At the same time, suburban and exurban municipalities are subject to intensified pressures to increase their tax base through real estate development and address the budget gap caused by provincial downloading and funding cutbacks. Planning for Growth and Decline in Toronto In the spring of 2003, Toronto was once again engaged in an exercise of reinventing itself. An elite group of 45 so-called civic leaders, the Toronto Summit Alliance, published “Enough Talk: An Action Plan for the Toronto Region.” Not the first of its kind in the past decade, this plan continues a great number of traditions in Toronto planning, and breaks with a few. The plan recognizes and addresses the central contradiction of planning in today’s Toronto: the discrepancy between the urban region’s booming economic and demographic success and the dramatic underfunding and destructive urban policy environment created by upper-level governments. The report continues another tradition: the handing over of elected and accountable power to the rather undefined regions of governance by elite citizen committee. This depoliticization of planning has long been part of Ontario urban policy. Important examples are the Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront, the Sewell Commission on Planning Reform, the Golden Commission on the Future of the Greater Toronto Area, and David Crombie’s “Who Does What Panel,” which, between the early and late 1990s, recommended far-reaching changes to the governance and planning of growth in the region. 132

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As urban elites regrouped in the spring of 2003 in yet another citizen committee, The Toronto Summit Alliance — beset by a string of real or imagined misfortunes, from the loss of the 2008 Summer Olympics to the implications of the SARS outbreak — groped for substantive changes to its image and international competitiveness.1 Toronto discovered “culture” as the newest prospective catalyst for urban development. Like in Bilbao, Barcelona, Glasgow, San Francisco, and other cities where cultural policies have allegedly enhanced a city’s standing in the global interurban competition, Toronto has now pegged its fortunes to investment in an infrastructure of museums, theatres, music venues, and a sociostructure for a new creative class. For neoliberals, these creative city strategies will lead to the right kind of growth.2 How did we get here? The Toronto metropolitan area became a prime site of modernist planning in North America after World War II. Guided by progressive metropolitanists and implemented by paternalist politicians, such as Fred Gardiner, Toronto’s planning in the 1950s was not unlike that in other North American and European cities at the time. The automobile ruled — expressways were a sign of sure progress — and the built environment grew upward into residential highrises and office towers downtown and along major transportation arteries in the suburbs, and outward into a patchwork of suburbs. Despite these similarities with other cities, Toronto became a model for metropolitan governance on the continent. Some of the specific differences between Toronto and American cities can be traced to the establishment of the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto in 1953 as a regional government for six local governments: Toronto, Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke, East York, and York. Metro Toronto represented a contradictory territorial compromise between inner-city and postwar suburban municipalities. Its metropolitan structure facilitated suburban expansion against the objections of inner-city planners, who gave priority to slum clearance over expressways and the development of suburbs. This meant milking the tax base of the inner city for suburban infrastructure without directly threatening the property politics in the suburban municipalities, which had successfully resisted full-scale amalgamation. The postwar compromise, 133

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however, rationalized urban services across the urban region, which contrasted with the prevalence of home rule, public choice, and fragmentation in US cities. Particularly in the 1960s, Metro Toronto spread public transit and public housing to new suburban neighbourhoods, occasionally overriding resistance by politicians and homeowners. The Rise of Urban Reform and the Impasse of Modernist Planning The metropolitan compromise reached a double impasse in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Strategies to extend regional governance outside the boundaries of Metro Toronto failed. The “Toronto-Centered Region Plan” of 1971 was intended to concentrate growth and services in a strip along Lake Ontario and limit sprawl with a green belt and compact urban reform. It was defeated by a coalition of exurban landowners, developers, and politicians and undermined by the growth-oriented infrastructure and commuter transit policies of the provincial government.3 In hindsight, the failures of the 1970s keep haunting Toronto. They are now enshrined in the tensions and competitive pressures between the newly amalgamated City of Toronto (the 416 telephone area code) and the exurban cities and regional municipalities (the 905 area code). Rational comprehensive planning also hit a wall in the inner city. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, residents battled expressway plans and renewal schemes. In Toronto, a tenacious liberal and conservative bourgeoisie supported regional modernization but remained cocooned in lively innercity quarters. This context was favourable to Toronto’s powerful conservationist movement, which had strong roots in the bourgeois quarters of the inner city and was ideologically buttressed by the support of America’s leading critic of postwar planning, Jane Jacobs, who had moved to Toronto from New York in the late 1960s. Out of a victory against the inner-city Spadina Expressway in the early 1970s grew a local political culture centred in downtown and midtown neighbourhoods in the City of Toronto. During the 1970s and 1980s, this reform constellation welded social democratic currents together with a strongly urbanist orientation of a liberal and “red Tory” (socially minded conservatives) constituency.

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Toronto reform politics in the 1970s was the product of the activism of ratepayer groups, working-class neighbourhood organizations, tenant activists, and the cooperative housing movement. Ultimately, the radical wing of the reform movement never managed to gain dominance over the modest, process-oriented red Tories under Mayor David Crombie, who reconstructed a compromise with local power brokers. Toronto reform politics remained civic, middle class, and conservative in social values, and marginalized more radical, working-class, or new social movement-based alternatives.4 Not even in its strongest moments — during the mayoral tenure of maverick city councillor John Sewell (1978-81) and the unsuccessful mayoral campaign of Left social democrat Jack Layton in 1991 — did Left currents manage to construct a concerted force similar to the parties and electoral alliances in Montreal and Vancouver. Even so, reform measures in the 1970s had an impact on the direction of development in this emerging global city. Although inner-city neighbourhoods were stabilized and protected from real estate speculation and redevelopment, this made them more attractive for investment by middle-class gentrifiers and concentrated development in the rapidly rising Central Business District (CBD).5 Restructuring and Shifts in Reform Politics Under the disciplining impact of the (comparatively short-lived) recession in the early 1980s, planning in the City of Toronto had adopted an entrepreneurial stance. Planners became preoccupied with making deals with developers and extracting some small public benefits, such as childcare or open space, in exchange for higher densities in the ensuing downtown office boom. At this time, new generations of social movements became more visible forces in the arena of municipal politics: the politics of antiracism (in areas of employment equity, settlement, land use, police reform, and education), the women’s movement (in areas of housing, transportation, and land-use planning), and queer politics (in policing and public health). Poverty, homelessness, and precarious employment became subject to antipoverty activism and antiracist labour organizing. At the same time, civic environmental groups redirected mainstream reform planning towards ecological modernization. Urban intensification, 135

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“main street” development, soil remediation, and new urbanist planning were important parts of these strategies of ecological modernization. David Crombie, the former Toronto mayor who later chaired the Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront in 1988, publicized “ecosystem planning” as a key urban discourse. Indeed, the City of Toronto’s “City Plan” of 1991 and Metro Toronto’s “Livable City Plan” of 1992 echoed many of the environmental health-oriented, win-win scenarios of the ecosystem approach that proposed to orient planning along the waterfront towards a symbiosis of economic, environmental, and social goals. At a provincial level, planning reform measures were implemented in the areas of rent control and land-use planning. Under the social democratic New Democratic provincial government (1990-1995), former mayor John Sewell spearheaded a modest reform of planning legislation that would have encouraged urban intensification and limits to sprawl.6 When John Sewell published his report for planning reform in 1993, opposition from the development industry and from exurban and rural regions exploded, expressing fear of too much environmental regulation. The Neoliberal Onslaught and the Competitive City In hindsight, planning reform in Toronto rested on the strength of the liberal downtown bourgeoisie and remained caught in the sphere of influence of a specific urbanist cohort, which has formed the political class in Toronto since the 1960s. In the meantime, a different, more neoliberally oriented conservatism rooted in the exurbs came to govern Ontario in 1995.7 The Planning Reform Act was among the first pieces of legislation to be rescinded under the new Tory regime. Another central planning effort to develop a unified planning regime for the Greater Toronto Area met a similar fate. A report by a provincial taskforce headed by Anne Golden in 1996 had proposed a powerful version of progressive competitiveness as an armour for the Toronto region in the global interurban competition.8 Instead, Premier Mike Harris and his “common sense revolution” proceeded to consolidate Metropolitan Toronto, which included only the core city of Toronto and its postwar suburbs, rather than the Greater Toronto Area as a whole.

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The Conservative provincial government tied its aggressive agenda to a re-engineering of the local state, taking its cues from Thatcherite Britain and Right-wing Republican state governments in the United States. Encouraged by federal policies of transfer cuts and fiscal downloading, the government implemented one of the most far-reaching reorganizations of the local state in twentieth-century Canada, but it refused to integrate the city into an effective regional governance system. This perpetuated intercity competition between the City of Toronto and surrounding exurbs. In a qualitative shift of provincial-municipal financial arrangements, the provincial government made deep cuts to provincial transfer payments, revamped the property tax system, and downloaded the costs for social housing, public transit, and a number of other social programs to the municipalities. This burdened Toronto with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional budget pressures on its property tax base, thereby forcing it to cut back municipal services and its public sector workforce. In the suburban and exurban municipalities, practically the only way to cope with the burdens of this municipal restructuring was to expand their property tax base by granting approvals for low-density sprawl development. The Province also deregulated urban planning and development controls, facilitated the privatization of municipal utilities, deregulated rent controls, stopped social housing construction, enacted workfare, centralized control over public education, and undermined the (already limited) civilian control of policing. Conservative policies triggered widespread resistance in Toronto and the rest of Ontario, but by late 1997 this resistance had been defeated, fragmented, or demobilized. In Toronto, provincial policies and the failure of middle-class movements to stop the amalgamation of Toronto’s central municipalities facilitated a consolidation of longer-standing entrepreneurial trends into what we call competitive city politics.9 Competitive city politics treats cities as homogeneous entities that compete with each other for investment and mobile segments of new urban middle classes. In Toronto, it rests on a ruling alliance made up of Bay street finance and real estate interests, property owners in postwar suburbs, the expanding downtown gentry, and politicians, planners, consultants, and architects with ties to the urban reform regimes of the 1970s and 1980s. This form of compet137

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itive city politics is not only a neoliberal doctrine but also attempts to reorder the moral landscapes of cities and re-establish bourgeois hegemony over urban life as embodied in the tastes and sensibilities of gentrified and exurban milieus. Competitive city politics has been pursued in three ways in the City of Toronto. Entrepreneurial policies have advanced supply-side economic policies of cost competition. This has meant imposing selective financial austerity and marketization imperatives on the local state. This reinforces the dominant global city industries: finance, producer services, media, information technology, tourism, and entertainment. Differentialist policies have tried to integrate an aesthetic of diversity into urban development and economic competitiveness:10 Toronto’s multiculturalism and vibrant gay subculture are promoted to attract tourism, and waterfront revitalization efforts are branded as hallmarks of cosmopolitan “beauty” and the “creative city.”11 In the meantime, the City’s long-standing commitment to proactive equity programs directed at marginalized groups and communities has been reduced to a strategy of diversity management and community engagement aimed at containing potential conflicts arising out of the city’s highly racialized and gendered situation of social polarization. Finally, the city has promoted a number of law-and-order campaigns that foster revanchist consent about the need to combat crime by fighting pathologies of urban disorder and promote competitiveness by making urban space safe, clean, and secure for investors, real estate capital, property owners, and the new urban middle classes.12 Land-use planning is an integral part of competitive city politics. Under new provincial planning laws that have greatly strengthened the power of landed capital, urban planning in the City of Toronto is mainly about waiving zoning and density requirements, striking permissive deals with developers, facilitating real estate reinvestment in strategic areas, and promoting regressive (if “beautiful”) bourgeois utopias of waterfront revitalization. One central concern of city planners has been to use the previous City of Toronto’s policy of facilitating loft and condominium construction by deregulating zoning and density provisions on underutilized inner-city warehouse and industrial districts close to the CBD as a model to facilitate 138

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land-use conversions in other city districts. This policy concern is central to the City’s new official plan, which aims to promote urban intensification (“reurbanization”) and discretionary, design-focused planning to facilitate real estate investments in strategic locations in the City of Toronto. In the language of ecological modernization, the City of Toronto has linked its growth strategies to pressures on the exurban fringe.13 By attracting population and investment to the core, urban intensification is branded as smart growth and a weapon against sprawl at a regional scale. Yet in the absence of effective regional planning and controls on the displacing effects of central city property-market inflation, urban intensification is, paradoxically, a safe recipe for continued urban decentralization. In this sense, reurbanization in the new Toronto is best understood as a new phase in the “embourgeoisement” of central Toronto, building as it does on three decades of gentrification and the more recent condominium and loft boom. These successive waves of gentrification and high-end urban renewal have replaced tens of thousands of low-income residents with managerial and professional new middle-class residents. The latter function as the social base for differential policies to promote sophisticated, so-called cultured and beautiful urban spaces and revanchist strategies directed against “outdated” land uses (e.g., manufacturing, warehousing, rooming houses, public housing) and unwanted elements (e.g., panhandlers, unruly youth subcultures, loitering lowincome people, squatters, and radical anti-gentrification activists). One area where this strategy has been particularly visible is on the Toronto waterfront. Waterfront Planning and Growth in Toronto In anticipation of attracting the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, representatives of the three levels of government jointly proclaimed the formation of a Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Task Force to formulate plans for an urban space on which to choreograph Toronto’s bid. Having an opportunity to consult an impressive array of unfulfilled waterfront plans and studies,14 the task force completed its work in just over four months. Its report called on Toronto to maintain its role as a major world city.15 Although key pieces of the waterfront development puzzle still remain highly uncertain and controversial (e.g., removal of sections of the above139

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ground Gardiner Expressway), the establishment of organizational structures for developing the waterfront is largely in place. The Task Force’s report concluded that the essential first step in waterfront revitalization must be the creation of a “small, efficient, action oriented corporation” that would have “primacy over the existing government organizations on the waterfront on any matter relating to the Corporation’s revitalization mandate.”16 Following some delays, the Province of Ontario adopted legislation creating this corporation.17 During debate of the bill at the Province’s Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, the City of Toronto argued for recognition of its planning powers, a strong conflict of interest policy, and the opening up of Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) Board meetings to the public.18 The Toronto Board of Trade representative argued, alternatively, that the corporation’s powers should not be compromised and that a strong market-oriented corporation is required.19 The adopted legislation stipulates that TWRC must “have regard to the Official Plan of the City of Toronto in carrying out its objects,”20 but this does not mean that the City’s established planning procedures and practices will be followed. Our concern relates particularly to the planning procedures of having publicly available information and to holding meaningful participation programs. Both of these are essential for individuals and communities to be meaningfully involved in decision-making. Board meetings, however, are open to the public only when legal or land issues or other items specified by the Municipal Act, 2001, are not being discussed. In such cases, the Board meets in camera. As Robert Fung noted, “It would mean that 99.99% of the corporation’s work would have to be dealt with in camera.”21 Another issue with the legislation is conflict-of-interest provisions. According to the adopted legislation, conflict of interest is defined by the Ontario Business Corporations Act. The City had argued that it should be governed by the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, which is more stringent (for example, the definition of a conflict of interest is broader and the ability of an interested member to discuss a matter is more restricted). Most importantly, the consequences of a person violating the Municipal Act are significantly more onerous than under the Ontario Business Corporations Act. 140

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The TWRC as an Urban Development Corporation The TWRC will develop the waterfront in accord with the dominant model of accumulation, that is, neoliberal globalization. The urban development corporation is intended to mediate influences of globalized market forces and operate effectively within the web of local enterprises and increasingly international markets, financial institutions, labour markets, and capital flows. Its ability to tailor financial, technological, labour, and political considerations in accord with local conditions is considered necessary in the rapidly changing demand-and-supply condition of a global economy.22 Fung sees the corporation as driving an economic model: At its core, the revitalization of Toronto’s waterfront is an infrastructure project driving an economic model. What this means is that we are going to leverage public investment in land remediation and services to attract substantial private sector investment in strategic projects and industries. The result [of the corporate plan] will be to strengthen Toronto’s, Ontario’s and Canada’s global competitiveness.23

Similar goals are expressed in TWRC’s corporate vision for the future.24 This business plan provides the necessary framework for waterfront development in general, and of contaminated sites in particular. The report and recommendations are an example of aggressive urban revitalization and neoliberal entrepreneurialism that often ignore the social costs of such urban strategies. It talks of the need to transform Toronto to keep up with the new global economy as well as the creation of a new kind of development zone, a “convergence community” to be located in the Portlands, where Toronto may take advantage of opportunities for interaction between the new media and the new high technology and knowledge-based economy. The report points at both the achievements and opportunities for Toronto in a Biomedical and Biotechnology Cluster, a Business and Professional Services Cluster, an Information Technology and Telecommunications Cluster, and a Media Cluster.25 The establishment of these clusters will certainly shape the types of businesses and workers that are drawn to Toronto, yet it may not increase employment opportunities for many of Toronto’s unemployed. It is also 141

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predicated on accessing public funds to redevelop the waterfront lands, thereby making fewer funds available for other parts of the city or other civic needs. The recommendations represent a further “strategic shift in how Toronto situates itself in the comparative landscape of cities”26 and how globalization continues to shape Toronto’s planning and growth. While the waterfront growth frontier is being replanned with powerful new institutional actors, urban sprawl continues to plague the region at its other end. Growing Out of Bounds: Sprawl and the Regions Faith in growth and relaxation of controls on development in favour of the private market are at their most blatant outside the boundaries of the city. Here, the exurban landscape is virtually indistinguishable from that found on the edges of American cities — a sea of new single family houses sweeping away agricultural land, forests, and wetlands. Major employers, including car and auto parts manufacturers, the back offices of financial institutions, and big-box retail complexes also locate on this periphery to benefit from cheaper land costs and lower taxes. In the absence of any overall regional planning body, these developments are scattered and poorly planned with no coordination of planning for housing, transportation, or services. Urban sprawl, which develops in a piecemeal fashion throughout the region and creates demands for massive new expenditures for infrastructure, has reached a flashpoint as a critical political and planning issue. The discourse of sprawl has been popularized by daily newspaper headlines, special reports, and citizen campaigns and mobilization. It has developed as a crosscutting regional problem that spans the interests of citizens and employers, downtown residents, and exurbanites. Growth in the GTA will continue to be accommodated primarily by new low-density single family housing developments built on greenfield sites on the edges of the city.27 For the first time, the population in the 905 region has outstripped the population in the newly amalgamated City of Toronto, growing at an average of 17 percent per year — more than four times the rate of growth of the city — between 1996 and 2001.28 The region surrounding Toronto is characterized by suburban development patterns and exurban expansion that includes large-lot housing estates, population 142

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growth of villages and hamlets, and an influx into rural areas of residents who commute to the city for employment. While a majority of new immigrants continue to settle in the urbanized core, large numbers are also choosing cities within the region. Foreign-born residents constituted 44 percent of the population of the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area in 2001; 39 percent of this population was identified as belonging to visible minority groups. 29 In the suburban edge city of Mississauga, more than one-third of the population was identified as belonging to a visible minority group in 1996.30 Specific immigrant populations have also concentrated in some cities and not others. In 1996, 50 percent of the city of Vaughan’s population claimed Italian origin, most were immigrants prior to 1970; of the one-third of Markham residents who claimed Chinese as their ethnic origin, most had immigrated after 1981.31 Suburban and exurban sprawl in the GTA is exacerbated by the structure of governance. Development in the 905 area is under the jurisdiction of three levels of government: the province, five regions, and a second tier of municipalities, towns, and villages within each region. The only agency with any responsibility for regionally coordinated planning, the Greater Toronto Services Board (to which the provincial government had given only limited responsibility for a regional transportation service), was disbanded by the Province in 2001. The regions and local municipalities had been unwilling to cede any authority over land-use planning or transportation to this agency. To deal with environmental preservation and sprawl at a regional scale, the provincial government has imposed new structures of governance that include appointed task forces, new legislation, and quasiautonomous agencies to implement growth management policies.32 Sprawl and its Discontents The rapid and unregulated growth in the Toronto region has generated substantial public debate on the effects of urban sprawl. For the housing development industry, single family housing units built on greenfield sites continue to be the most lucrative form of housing, particularly because a large part of the infrastructure cost is borne by provincial, municipal, and regional governments. Suburban and exurban municipalities are driven to approve these developments because develop143

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ment charges constitute a substantial portion of the municipal budget (e.g., 44 percent of the budget of the town of Markham in 2003), thereby keeping property taxes artificially low and allowing these communities to compete for investment. Citizens’ most visible and organized opposition has focused on developments that threaten the ecosystems of the Oak Ridges Moraine, a geological formation that extends 160 km north of Toronto. Called the rain barrel of Ontario, the moraine is the source of drinking water for 500,000 people who rely on its aquifers, the headwaters of major rivers that flow into Lake Ontario, and it provides ecosystems for endangered species, pristine forests, and recreational trails and open space for urban dwellers. Proposals to develop thousands of hectares of the moraine for housing and recreational uses have mobilized exurban and rural residents and environmentalists to actively challenge local and provincial government approval of development plans in a region-wide movement to challenge growth.33 Over the last 30 years, various provincial governments have grappled with ways to limit sprawl and protect the natural ecosystems of the moraine. Several factors encouraged sprawl on the moraine: its proximity to the City of Toronto, relatively cheap farmlands conducive to large-scale development, oligopolistic forms of land ownership, scenic landscapes, the infrastructure of sewers and water mains in the Yonge Street Corridor, and the ease of constructing individual water and septic systems on the sands of the moraine. A combination of the GTA’s future growth projects and sprawling, relatively unplanned developments on the moraine forced the Province of Ontario in the early 1990s to express an interest in protecting the Oak Ridges Moraine. Intense development pressures in the Yonge Street Corridor, the most developed part of the moraine, provoked citizen opposition in 1989 when a coalition of environmental, homeowner, and citizens’ groups, called Save the Oak Ridges Moraine (STORM), was formed. In 1991, a provincially appointed Oak Ridges Moraine Technical Working Committee (a multistakeholder initiative that involved, among others, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, and STORM) drafted an interim strategy for land-use management on the moraine. Between 1991 and 1994, the Technical Working Committee worked towards developing a comprehensive long-term strategy for the 144

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protection and management of the moraine. It commissioned 15 background studies to investigate the effects of development and land-use practices on the ecological integrity of natural ecosystems on the moraine and to propose alternatives to existing patterns of planning and design. Although a final report was drafted, it was never made public. The election of a neoliberal and Conservative provincial government in 1995, which declared the province open for business, ensured that the previous government’s growth management plans remained on the shelf. Early on in this government’s first term, major changes in the planning regulatory framework sped up the approvals process for new development proposals and made it easier for developers to sidestep local councils and appeal directly to the provincially appointed Ontario Municipal Board for development approvals on greenfield sites. This became a flashpoint for suburban, exurban, and rural residents living in the heartland of political support for the provincial Tories then in power.34 In response to public pressure and almost daily media attention, on 28 June 2001 the Ontario Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing appointed an Inter-Ministry Team and a 14-member Advisory Panel to hold public consultations on the future of planning on the moraine. The panel included representatives from municipalities, conservation authorities, aggregate producers, agriculture, the development industry, and environmental groups. The public consultations were scheduled in mid-summer and at short notice. The Advisory Panel’s recommendations were released in mid-August, with one month allowed for further public consultations that included about 2,100 people. On 1 November 2001, the provincial government announced the “Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan,” and in December 2001 it passed the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act. Over the past five years, several issues have mobilized public debates on the negative effects of sprawl in the Toronto region: quality of life, environmental preservation, and social justice. Crossing political jurisdictions and jumping scales from the built-up urban areas to the region and surrounding countryside, the City of Toronto declared its interest in the moraine because the headwaters of all the watersheds in Toronto originate in the moraine, which is a significant recreational resource for city residents. The City also 145

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argued that limiting development on the moraine would make intensification of urban lands, especially on brownfield sites, more attractive. In arguing that population growth in the region could be accommodated best by intensifying land uses in the city, the City sought to expand its own tax base and avoid the pattern of US cities, where the cores have been hollowed out when middle-class white residents abandoned the city centres for suburban housing and employment locations.35 For all of these reasons, Toronto City Council formed the Oak Ridges Steering Committee. When the Ontario Municipal Board ruled that the City had no standing to oppose development in Richmond Hill, Toronto Council allocated $1.6 million to environmental groups opposing housing developments on the moraine in Richmond Hill and Uxbridge, thereby becoming a key player in a regional environmental battle. The provincial Tory government sought to buy time and defuse demands for action on urban sprawl by setting up five Smart Growth Panels across Ontario comprised of politicians, bureaucrats, developers, business leaders, environmentalists, and academics. The Central Ontario Smart Growth Panel, which covered the Toronto region, released its report36 recommending more funding and better integration of regional transit systems, coordinated planning for land use and transportation, revitalizing waterfronts, and investments in social infrastructure.37 However, like previous reports, there was no strong commitment to a regional coordination body, growth boundaries, or protected agricultural preserves. Missing were any recommendations to promote a regional justice agenda, including tax sharing or a requirement to construct affordable housing in the growing exurbs. Maintaining competitiveness with other urban regions remained the principal motivator.38 Exurban and rural residents who already live in places that are designated for settlement areas have mounted the most sustained opposition to further development. These residents have chosen larger lots and rural amenities, but with all of the advantages of urban opportunities.39 The intensified city does not attract substantial numbers of people back to the city from the suburbs. “New urbanist” suburban projects which seek to emulate the density and design features of traditional neighbourhoods in the city core suggest that it is not necessary to choose between city and suburbs. 146

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The best known of these in Ontario is Cornell in Markham, Ontario, a neighbourhood designed by architects Duany and Plater-Zyberk.40 Suburban gridlock and the accompanying demand for new highway construction is another way in which sprawl threatens quality of life.41 Demands from municipalities that the provincial government provide more funding for public transit ignore the linkage between local approvals of lowdensity and fragmented housing, employment and service centres, and the massive growth in car ownership in the 905 region. In 2000, only about 50 percent of the region’s population lived in areas sufficiently dense to make bus service economical.42 The environmental damage caused by sprawl and the destruction of ecosystems and farmland has been a major argument used to oppose sprawl. In response to two years of concerted citizen opposition, the Province passed the Oak Ridges Conservation Act in 2002, protecting 90 percent of the moraine from development through designated core protected areas, greenways to link natural features, and settlement areas on the moraine. The Province cushioned the deal for developers with a process to swap moraine land with government land in Pickering. In March 2002, it also allowed thousands of units to be developed on the moraine through ministerial zoning orders that could not be appealed. This led some environmentalists and citizens to reinterpret as failures the protections they had claimed as partial victories. One consequence is that development pressures have intensified elsewhere: threatening agricultural preserves in Pickering in the eastern part of the region, the Oakville Moraine to the south, and lands to the north of the moraine that do not receive protection from development. Sprawl has also been challenged on social justice grounds. Suburban municipalities try to approve primarily high-cost, low-density, owneroccupied housing to minimize demands for social infrastructure, including schools. Virtually no rental housing is built, and there are limited housing options available for seniors, adult children who have grown up in the suburbs, new immigrants, and residents who require social housing.43 Due to the lack of provision for diverse needs in the regions, the city of Toronto attracts a disproportionate share of the GTA’s elderly, poor, homeless, and people receiving social assistance.44 In recognition of the city’s higher social 147

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welfare obligations, as part of the amalgamation of Toronto, the provincial government required the regions to transfer funds to the city of Toronto for this purpose. The regions are now challenging these transfers. Implications This paper began by analyzing and interpreting Toronto’s growth and expansion since World War II. We suggest that two discourses have been prevalent in this dynamic spatial process. The first has been characterized as urban and has been dominated by central-city residents with a reform approach to governance and city planning. It has emphasized liveability, centrality, and the need for a human dimension as the basis for a built environment. Such a vision of the city is seen to be a remedy for pervasive patterns of divisive and fractured globalized cities. The second is more neoliberal and conservative, and is dominated by an exurban bourgeoisie and corporate developers who have expanded urban settlement areas by constructing large-scale subdivisions with single-family housing on curvilinear roads in relatively low-density patterns. Yet, such polar discourses are oversimplifications. More complex spatial accounts are needed to illuminate contradictory shifts and transformations in both central city and exurban parts of the Toronto urban region. Since the 1950s, Toronto has prided itself on avoiding the urban decline and social polarization associated with many American cities. One way this was achieved was by embracing a two-tier level of metropolitan governance that provided coordination of key urban services, such as fire and policing, and a method for sharing costs. As growth expanded beyond the boundaries of this metropolitan city, however, no comparable regional form of governance emerged. This reflected the failure of the downtown liberal urban reformers to sway the more conservative exurbs. The lack of a regional governance body can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. The dynamics of this sociospatial struggle are defined by a Conservative voting bloc in the exurbs and rural areas, counterpoised to a predominantly LiberalNDP core city and postwar suburbs. Under the guise of a neoliberal ideology of leaner and more efficient municipal government and lowering or flatlining property taxes, municipalities such as Markham and Mississauga in the 905 area were able to compete successfully with the City of Toronto’s core area 148

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for head offices and the high tech sector, thereby emulating the core-suburban competition for growth found in many US cities. In turn, neoliberalism was becoming more prominent in the central city as well, first with the entrepreneurial turn of municipal politics in the 1980s and then under the influence of a deep recession in the early 1990s. The 1995 election of the Right-wing Government of Ontario marked the breakdown of efforts to construct a more positive process for integrating inner city and exurban expansion. This newly formed government, which had received strong electoral support in the exurban communities surrounding Toronto, promptly implemented a far-reaching reorganization of the local state that privileged this constituency at the expense of the inner city. One of the casualties of this government was a failure to establish a functioning structure to deal with the urban region. In response to demands from their key constituency, including the Board of Trade and the major banks, and alarmed at the threat gridlock and sprawl posed to the Toronto region’s competitive position, the Province and the regions established a neoliberal version of smart growth panels. There was a limited commitment to establish a form of regional governance, establishing urban growth boundaries that could have some influence on private developers, or limiting the ability of municipalities and regions to outbid one another for housing or employment opportunities. In the absence of such a coordinating body, there is now unproductive competition between the recently amalgamated city of Toronto and the outer regions for investment, jobs, and housing. Moreover, disagreement continues about a regional transportation authority, regional cost sharing for social welfare, and the amount of affordable housing and where it should be located. Our two cases nicely illustrate Toronto’s regulatory and institutional mechanisms for handling competing pressures for future growth. In the 1990s, there was limited opposition to the widespread remaking of the inner city’s urban landscape through in-fill developments, high rise megaprojects of luxury condominiums in the core area, loft conversions of warehouses, and projects that created private barriers to the lake. Urban intensification, as presented in the recently approved plan for Toronto’s Central Waterfront, is ostensibly in accord with smart growth principles: priority should be given 149

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to growth in existing urban areas, it should support compact development, and it should make efficient use of existing infrastructure. Three levels of government have joined forces in creating a new planning and implementing organization for waterfront development: the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC). In the words of its president, this organization will “operate like a conventional development corporation.” If implemented, TWRC’s plans to construct a gaggle of luxury condominiums, cultural and entertainment centres, convergence zones of information technology, biotechnology, telecommunications, and media clusters will not only serve the interests of an elite “creative class,”45 but also foster further decentralization of growth. Moreover, given the lack of transparency of its governance structure, we will be surprised if this corporation avoids conflict-of-interest scandals similar to those that have plagued recent City operations and development projects. In the urban periphery, citizen resistance to the growth machine has emerged when exurban residents challenge the ravaging of countryside environments and uncontrolled growth of villages and hamlets. Resistance has come from residents attempting to maintain their quality of life, environmental groups objecting to unsustainable growth, and from equity and social justice groups concerned about the prevalence of high-cost housing, the lack of diversity, and limited opportunities for seniors, the poor, and those on social assistance. This has opened up public debate on regional governance, the provincial role in planning, the weakness of local government in controlling powerful development interests, and the need for an ecosystems approach to planning in the region. With the passage of greenbelt legislation in 2005 and a proposed regional growth management plan, exurban antisprawl resistance may be said to have given rise to a measure of regional reform for the urban region. What can we learn about urban growth from the Toronto case? Toronto demonstrates that a city with strong demographic and economic growth has various options for distributing the emerging pressure on existing and not-yet-developed areas. However, what appeared as clear alternatives at first glance were, rather, two sides of the same coin. Current authoritarian and grandiose waterfront planning is threatening Toronto’s inner-city style 150

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of growth, often praised for its capacity to produce heterogeneous, progressive urban communities. The inner city becomes more homogeneous and disurbanized while the sprawling exurban growth on the slopes of the iceage moraine encounters its own ecological and political limits and contradictions. In this situation, a commitment to democratic processes of urban development is necessary. The aggressively pro-growth and undemocratic Progressive Conservative provincial government was chased from office by the Liberal Party’s landslide victory in October 2003. One of the Liberal’s key election promises was to halt development and sprawl on the ecologically sensitive Oak Ridges Moraine — a promise they could not keep due to potential legal liabilities from developers with housing projects that had already been sold to buyers. On other fronts, the Liberal government moved quickly to signal its determination to curb sprawl and manage growth. It proposed Bill 26, the Strong Communities Act, which sought to undo some of the previous Conservative government’s measures. Bill 26 sought to rein in some of the powers of the Ontario Municipal Board by increasing timeframes for appeals and requiring development proposals to “be consistent with” provincial policy statements. The government also introduced Bill 27, The Greenbelt Protection Act, 2003. This set out a Greenbelt Study Area that extended from Burlington to Oshawa. It imposed a one-year moratorium on new development beyond existing urban areas. The government set up a Greenbelt Task Force to conduct public consultations and stakeholder meetings between April and June 2004. In mid-July 2004, the Province released a policy document, “Places to Grow,” that outlines initiatives to curb sprawl, preserve farmland, and channel development into existing built-up areas. These proposals consolidate planning power in the hands of the Province and fail to address the need for a regional form of government that would implement the recommendations, including dealing with regional problems such as transportation, water, and waste disposal in addition to the costs of social welfare and competition within the region for industries and commercial development. One political commentator questions whether the Province, with its province-wide constituency, can 151

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effectively engage in overall planning, coordination, and priority-setting for the city-region.46 In the City of Toronto, the particular fractions of the growth machine linked to Mayor Lastman and the provincial Tories also faced a setback on 10 November 2003, when social democrat David Miller was elected the new Mayor of Toronto. Miller’s election victory over four other leading candidates was built, among other things, on his strong opposition to the construction of a bridge connecting Toronto City Centre Airport to the mainland, thereby effectively preventing expansion of air traffic on the waterfront. The other major plank in his election platform, symbolized on bumper stickers and campaign posters by a broom, was to clean up the urban political process and make it more democratic and transparent. As his first symbolic act of office, the Mayor scuttled plans for a fixed bridge to the island airport. His second major act was to call a series of meetings during which he and city staff sought advice from citizens on spending priorities for his initial budget. Miller seems to be pursuing a strategy different from his predecessor for achieving a competitive city. Yet his opposition to the airport extension is consistent with his enthusiastic support for already existing plans to gentrify and develop the waterfront. Despite the rhetoric of the Toronto Waterfront Redevelopment Corporation, we believe (and Miller seems to agree) that those plans would have been in serious jeopardy if the bridge were to be built and airport traffic increased. The present situation of growth policies and planning in Toronto is contradictory. Growth and intensification are supported by both the City’s “Official Plan” and the provincial government’s modest proposals to curb sprawl by focusing growth on existing built-up areas. The city requires further growth, and the assessment increases it brings, to make up budgetary deficits created by provincial downloading of municipal services and infrastructure costs. However, in its focus on the city’s budgetary crises and in drawing upon the business community for support in making its economic arguments, this narrative of economic growth has become hegemonic. In this context, the Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, with an appointed Board dominated by business interests, is seen as an appropriate means for cutting through bureaucratic red tape and jurisdictional in-fighting. Absent 152

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from this discourse of growth and competitiveness are goals of improving the quality of life for less affluent residents and workers in the city and issues of social justice for those who are excluded from high-priced housing and entertainment complexes on the revitalized waterfront. By relying on corporate models and self-appointed elites to represent citizen interests, the city has also virtually abandoned its commitment to local democratic governance and the engagement of citizens in a meaningful planning process. Similarly, the centralized role of the provincial government in imposing growth management policies on the range of urban, exurban, and rural communities in the Golden Horseshoe, some of which have put in place their own policies to manage growth, also calls into question its commitment to democratic governance and local solutions. Anti-sprawl initiatives in the exurbs and rural areas fail to address issues of social justice directly, including the access to affordable housing, jobs, and services needed by lower-income groups, immigrants, and visible minorities throughout the region. Growth, as it is supported and managed by the City and the provincial government, is assumed to benefit all, if only by osmosis. Thus, it would seem that neither the provincial government nor the City of Toronto recognizes that the urban region is the spatial scale at which to address environmental and social justice. Notes Gerda Wekerle acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for research on environmentalism and planning on the Oak Ridges Moraine. She thanks her colleagues in this joint project, Anders Sandberg and Liette Gilbert, and graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University: Teresa Abbruzzese, Lucrezia Iandoli, and Susan Robertson. 1. K. Wirsig, “Compete or Die: Toronto at the Mercy of an Old Imperative,” Canadian Dimension 38/4 (July/August 2004), pp. 21–2. 2. R. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It Is Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); M. Knelman, “Cultivating the Creative,” Toronto Star (19 April 2003a), p. B1; M. Knelman, “Heralding the Cultural Revolution,” Toronto Star (19 April 2003b), p. A1; M. Knelman, “Starring Role for Waterfront,” Toronto Star (21 April 2003c), p. B1. 3. F. Frisken, “Planning and Servicing the Greater Toronto Area: The Interplay of Provincial and Municipal Interests,” in D. Rothblatt and A. Sancton, (eds.), Metropolitan Governance: American/Canadian Intergovernmental Perspectives (1993); P. Filion, “Balancing Concentration and Dispersion? Public Policy and Urban Structure in Toronto,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 18 (2000), pp. 163–89.

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29. Statistics Canada, “Ethnocultural Portrait of Canada,” 2001 Census of Population (2003a), ; Statistics Canada, “Immigration and Citizenship,” 2001 Census of Population (2003b), . 30. City of Mississauga, “Statistics and Facts: Demographics,” (2001). 31. M. Wallace and F. Frisken, “City-Suburban Differences in Government Responses to Immigration in the Greater Toronto Area,” Research Paper 197 (Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, 2000). 32. R. Keil and D. Young, “A Charter for the People? Research Note,” Urban Affairs Review 39/1 (2003), pp. 87–102. 33. G. Wekerle, “Civil Society: A Challenge to Planners,” Planners Network Journal 142/3 (2000), pp. 16–17; G. Wekerle, “Resisting Urban Sprawl: Environmental Challenges and Sustainable Regional Planning,” Leading Edge: Focus on the Biosphere Reserve (Niagara Escarpment Commission Conference Proceedings, 2001), pp. 1–5, < http://www.escarpment.org/ leading_ edge /LE01/webpages/papers6.htm>. 34. Keil and Graham, Remaking Reality, pp. 100–125. 35. Desfor and Keil, Nature and the City. 36. K. McGran, “McCallion’s ‘Billions’ Dollar Dream,” Toronto Star (18 April 2003). 37. K. Gillespie, “Smart Growth Strategies Released,” Toronto Star (19 February 2003). 38. R. MacIsaac, “Will Take Money and Power — Regional Thinking,” Globe and Mail (24 June 2002). 39. J.S. Davis, A.C. Nelson, and K. Dueker, “The New ‘burbs: The Exurbs and their Implications for Planning Policy,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60/1 (1994), pp. 45–59; G. Walker, “Urbanites Creating New Ruralities: Reflections on Social Action and Struggle in the Greater Toronto Area,” The Great Lakes Geographer 7/2 (2000), pp. 106–118. 40. P. Calthorpe and W. Fulton, The Regional City (Washington: Island Press, 2001); A. Duany, E. Plater-Zyberg, and J. Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000); U. Lehrer and R. Milgrom, “New (Sub) Urbanism: Countersprawl or Repackaging the Product,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7/26 (June 1996), pp. 49–64. 41. Neptis Foundation, The Neptis Program in Urban Futures: Modelling Growth in the TorontoRelated Urban Region to 2031. 42. Ibid. 43. K. Gillespie, “Lack of New Rental Housing a Taxing Problem in 905 Areas,” Toronto Star (25 March 2002). 44. M.J. Doucet, Toronto in Transition: Demographic Change in the Late Twentieth Century (Toronto: Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement, 1999). 45. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. 46. I. Urquart, “GTA Kept on Sidelines Over Sprawl,” Toronto Star (19 July 2004).

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