Much attention has been given to increasing dominance of the post-war suburbs, and the concomitant rise of 'suburbanism' in ways of life in the 'post-metropolis'. However, the meaning of suburbanism ...is rarely specified and there have been insufficient attempts to theorise its relationship to the urban. Drawing on the dialectical analyses of Henri Lefebvre, this article presents a theory of suburbanism as a subset of urbanism, with which it is in constant productive tension. Six distinct dimensions of the urbanism–suburbanism dialectic are identified, derived from extrapolating Lefebvre's urban theory into second- and third-order analyses. These aspects of suburbanism are conceptualised not as static characteristics but as qualities that dynamically flow through, rather than define, particular places. Suburbanism is thus conceptualised separately from those places often termed suburbs, opening up the potential for interaction between these dimensions and the lived realities of everyday urban life and politics.
While urban inequalities have become ubiquitous globally, there is still much debate on how we might conceptualise the forces that produce, reproduce and govern them. As an introduction to this ...themed issue, the present essay situates its contributions as a critical intervention with the Urban Age thesis. In particular, we focus on the prevalent Urban Age narrative that couples a standardized prescription for economic growth with a risk-management agenda to govern the political expectations, environmental pressures, large-scale migrations, and industrial creative destruction inherent to rapid urban growth. The most prominent alternative to this discourse, the Planetary Urbanization thesis, draws on the Marxist work of Henri Lefebvre, who foresaw the urbanization of the globe and argued that in the future urbanization instead of industrialization would become the driving force of capitalist accumulation. Despite some excellent insights into understandings of the urban as a global process, the Planetary Urbanization literature has yet to dig deep into just how urbanization might drive future accumulation, and even more, how inequalities might be structured and governed in such a world. We argue that the production and governance of urban inequality are intrinsically intertwined with an urbanization-driven capital accumulation. However, such a conjuncture is wrought with contradictions, notably the political limits to rising inequality.
•Condominiums transform the social and physical geography of the metropolis.•Condos are an important segment of housing construction in central cities.•Condo-ism counters dispersion and is linked to ...changes in meanings of urbanism.•Condo-ism resettles the city on behalf of the middle class.•It imposes the logic of exchange value into urban governance and social life.
Many of North America’s cities have begun to shift from a dynamic pattern of development driven by changes at the edge, to one driven by dynamism at the center. One aspect of this that has not received sufficient attention is the role of the condominium, a form of private urban governance that overlaps with, but is distinct from, gated communities. Using quantitative data from Canada and the United States, and qualitative survey data for respondents in key cities in Canada, we demonstrate that condominiums have been key to the growth of new housing in the central cities of large metropolitan areas. “Condo-ism” refers simultaneously to the self-reinforcing processes re-producing intensification, downtown living and gentrification via condominium-tenure, as well as to the financial-construction nexus at the heart of condominium development, and the social, cultural and political transformations that they are begetting.
While condo-ism is a force that is countering decades-long trends toward dispersion, it is also associated with changing social attitudes and values of city residents, and cultural meanings of urbanism. Condo-ism resettles the city on behalf of the middle class, and imposes the logic of exchange value into the fabric of urban governance and social life. Condo-ism is thus an important factor in the private production and reproduction of the contemporary city.
Cities have been sites of some of the most visible manifestations of the evolution of processes of globalization and population expansion, and global cities are at the cutting edge of such changes. ...Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance, Development and Activism examines changes in governance, property development, urban politics and community activism, in two key global cities: London and Toronto. The analysis is inherently comparative, but not in the traditional sense – the volume does not seek to deliver a like-for-like comparison. Instead, taking these two cities as empirical cases, the chapters engage in constructive dialogues about the contested and variegated built forms, formal and informal governmental mechanisms and practices, and policy and community-based responses to contemporary urban concerns. The authors position a critical dialogue on three central issues in contemporary urban studies: governance, real estate and housing, and community activism and engagement. Their less traditional approach to comparative framing seeks to understand London and Toronto from a nuanced perspective, promoting critical reflection on the experiences and evaluative critiques of each urban context, providing insight into each city’s urban trajectory and engaging critically with wider phenomena and influences on the urban governance challenges beyond these two cities.
Privately owned high-rise condominiums have been increasing as a proportion of all housing units built in the Greater Toronto Area for many decades. This has inspired a growing literature theorizing ...both “condoism” as an emergent planning-development regime and the implications of “condoization” and “condofication” for urban governance and everyday life in cities like Toronto. Building on this literature, this article assesses the implications of Toronto’s increasing reliance on (mainly vertical) condominium development for the socio-spatial transformation of the housing market, particularly for renters. Analyzing time-series data from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the Census of Canada to quantify the effects of the city’s condoization, we answer three key questions: How important is condominium development for understanding the restructuring of Toronto’s economy? How has condoization contributed to the ongoing gentrification of Toronto’s inner city? How is condoization restructuring Toronto’s rental market? Building on previous research categorizing and mapping the gentrification of Toronto’s inner city, we find that condoization is an increasingly defining element restructuring the city’s rental market, while this restructuring also plays a central role in the advancing gentrification of the city’s core.
While traditional forms of gentrification involved the conversion of rental units to owner-occupation, a new rental-tenure form of gentrification has emerged across the globe. This is driven by ...financialization, reduced tenant protections, and declining social-housing production, and is characterized by the replacement of poorer renters with higher-income tenants. Many poorer renters are in turn being displaced out of the inner city and into older suburban neighbourhoods where aging apartment towers had provided a last bastion of affordable accommodation, but which are now also targeted by large rental housing corporations. These dynamics are increasingly dominated by what we call ‘financialized landlords,’ including those owned or run by private equity funds, financial asset management corporations, and real estate investment trusts (REITS). Such firms float securities on domestic and international markets and use the proceeds to purchase older rental buildings charging affordable rents, and then apply a range of business strategies to extract value from the buildings, existing tenants and local neighbourhoods, and flow them to investors. This paper documents this process in Toronto, Canada's largest city and a city experiencing both sustained gentrification and advanced suburban restructuring. The financialization of rental housing in Toronto was enabled by neoliberal state policies to withdraw from social housing, deregulate rental protections, and decontrol rents – creating an affordability crisis for tenants and an opportunity for investors to profit. The paper maps out the history and locations of buildings that have been purchased by various financial investment vehicles, and analyzes the various strategies that such firms have adopted. We document two key strategies for extracting value, which we call squeezing, and gentrification-by-upgrading and show how these two strategies are conceptually and spatially linked in speeding up the restructuring of the social geography of the city.
Gentrification in the form of "neighborhood revitalization" is increasingly touted as one way of decreasing the social exclusion of residents of poor inner-city neighborhoods and of increasing levels ...of social mix and social interaction between different classes and ethnic groups. Yet the gentrification literature also suggests that the process may lead to increased social conflict, displacement of poorer residents to lower quality housing elsewhere, and, ultimately, social polarization. Much of this hinges on whether gentrifying neighborhoods can remain socially mixed, and whether neighborhood compositional changes result in more or less of a polarized class and ethnic structure. However, the impact of revitalization and gentrification on levels of social mix, income polarization, or ethnic diversity within neighborhoods remains unclear and under-explored. This study addresses this gap by examining the relationship between the timing of gentrification, changes in the income structure, and shifts in immigrant concentration and ethnic diversity, using census tract data for each decade from 1971 to 2001 in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. This research demonstrates that gentrification is followed by declining, rather than improving, levels of social mix, ethnic diversity, and immigrant concentration within affected neighborhoods. At the same time, gentrification is implicated in the growth of neighborhood income polarization and inequality.
Vulnerability resulting from debt is part and parcel of the risk society and a salient characteristic of current neoliberal times under financialized global capitalism. Rising indebtedness increases ...the susceptibility of homeowners to housing and labor market restructuring, and if the degree of leverage is very high, can threaten the solvency, living standards, and social stability of local communities. However, very little is understood regarding how levels of household indebtedness are spatially distributed within or across cities, and how private debt maps onto the geography of race, class, housing, urban form, and other social variables, especially outside of the United States. It remains unknown whether and how higher and unsustainable levels of indebtedness might be associated with urban growth, decline, suburbanization, gentrification, immigration, racialization, and/or greying. This article examines the spatial distribution of household debt in Canadian cities at multiple scales of analysis. It analyzes how levels of household debt relate to a number of key socio-demographic and housing variables from the census, including those related to changes occurring over the 2000s. It simultaneously models the geography of debt at the metropolitan and neighborhood scales using multi-level hierarchical linear modeling methods, and in doing so, it identifies some key drivers and correlates of household debt and the scales at which they operate. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the empirical findings for understanding the role of the emerging urban debtscape in the restructuring of the social geography of the city.
This article interrogates the politics of automobility in Toronto under the regime of mayor Rob Ford, who came to power in 2010 promising to 'stop the war on the car.' The election of Ford, and the ...thrust of his subsequent agenda, came as a surprise to many in the city, due to Toronto's reputation as a cosmopolitan diverse transit-friendly global city. The Toronto case study allows for the analysis of the relationships between Fordism, automobility, and the politics and rationalities of neoliberalism. Instead of seeing neoliberalism as something external or imposed, its contested politics are rooted in diverging social and economic interests directly derived from Fordism and the system of automobility, with opposing political-economic factions both drawing on different elements of neoliberalism. Authoritarian populist neoliberal regimes like the Ford administration in Toronto, and the roll-back austerity they promote, are not antithetical to automobile Fordism, but on the contrary represent an attempt to protect and reinvigorate it in the face of the forces of de-industrialization and financialization. As such they receive their support from social groups irrevocably invested in the continuation, and irrationalities, of the Fordist system of automobility. This has implications for how the politics of neoliberalism might unfold in the future.
The asset-based welfare approach, which has foremost encouraged homeownership, has led to rising homeownership rates, house prices and household debt levels. While this shift has helped raise the net ...worth of some among the middle and working classes who own property, the implications for the spatial distribution of wealth in cities have not yet been explored. This paper examines the spatial implications of the rise of policies promoting asset-based welfare, by examining statistically how variables related to homeownership rates and housing prices relate to measures of urban wealth segregation among neighbourhoods. Canadian cites are used as the main case study for the empirical analysis. The findings suggest that while homeownership in general has an equalizing effect, rising rates of homeownership (and to some extent, rising house prices) are associated not with greater spatial equalization and dispersal of wealth, but instead with greater spatial segregation and concentration of wealth within cities.
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