UNI320Y: Canadian Questions: Issues and Debates

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UNI320Y Canadian Questions Issues and Debates

• Week 10 Sanitizing Public Space
• Professor Emily Gilbert
• http//individual.utoronto.ca/emilygilbert/

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Sanitizing Public Space

• The Production of Urban Space
• Claiming Urban Citizenship
• Sanitizing Public Space

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I The Production of Urban Space

• Private space vs. public space
• Who has a right to which spaces?
• Who belongs, and on which terms?
• Urban planning and decisions regarding land use
• Individual land use, but also collective
• Opportunity for public/community consultation
• Site of conflict an tensions, eg NIMBYism

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II Claiming Urban Citizenship

• Making collective claims to rights and belonging
• Participation and influence over citys economic,
  social, cultural and political spheres
• Street parades, demonstrations, media presence,
  park and civic square permits
• BUT ALSO
• Formal and institutional areas eg elections,
  places of worship

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• Talim-Ul-Islam Mosque, North York
• Canadian Islamic Trust Foundation Mosque,
  Mississauga
• El-Noor Mosque, Former City of York

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• We show how the universal sameness of liberalism
  produces a containment of racialized Others
  across firm and visible borders that are both
  symbolic and spatial (Isin and Siemiatycki 193)
• Importance of spatial strategies to be
  constituted as social group, and relevant in
  social and political space
• citizens wrest from space new possibilities, and
  immerse themselves in their cultures while
  respecting those of their neighbours, and
  collectively forging new hybrid cultures and
  spaces (Leonie Sandercock in Isin and
  Siemiatycki 206)

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III Sanitizing Public Space

• Global cities
• Globalization and international urban hierarchy
• Global cities are command centresesp. economic,
  but also politics, culture, mobility
• Cities become entrepreneurial, place-marketing
• To be globally competitive
• New forms of legality
• Deregulation
• New forms of urban culture
• tourism, entertainment
• Urban investment
• Saskia Sassen

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• Global cities competition encourages
• Appeal to capital, investment, tourism eg
  megaprojects
• Investment in urban culture, decreased
  investments in social and public services
• Gentrification, revanchism
• Increased social inequities cities within cities
• Increased law-and-order politics
• Increased homogenization of urban space
• Increased internationalization, over local
  culture
• Increased commmodification of space, of identity

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• Prohibitive public regulations
• Eg panhandling, squeegeeing, sleeping, loitering
• Anxieties around marginal figures
• Panhandling entails monetary transactions, with
  poor people, in public space (Collins and
  Blomley)
• Money as gift non-market
• Poor people money, authentic need,
  responsibility
• Downtown investment, retail, social polarization

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• Ontario Safe Streets Act 1999
• Limits when, where, how
• Targeting disorderly people
• All in the name of safety, security,
  citizenship
• By 2002 2400 charges laid under the Act
• Summer of 2000 80 people came forward who had
  been charged under SSA to challenge the
  legislation
• 67 charges were withdrawn
• 13 defendants 9 charged under section 3 for
  soliciting on the roadway 3 under the amended
  Highway Traffic Act 1 under section 2 for
  soliciting in a persistent manner
• August 3, 2001 after six months of
  deliberations, 13 homeless men (mostly squeegee
  workers) were convicted
• Constitutional challenge underway only federal
  court has right to impose criminal law

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• The public sphere
• the public sphere makes a truly democratic
  politics possible, by carving out a site within
  which free, rational discourse can occur between
  citizens, distanced from the particularities of
  the state, the economy and the private domain.
  Within the public sphere informed, robust
  conservations on the common good and constructive
  commentaries on political life and citizenship
  can occur. The public sphere allows for a
  politics in the richest sense (Collins and
  Blomley 55)

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• Politics is a matter of people sharing a common
  world and a common space of appearance in which
  public concerns can emerge and be articulated
  from different perspectives. For politics to
  occur it is not enough to have a collection of
  private individuals voting separately and
  anonymously according to their private opinions.
  Rather these individuals must be able to see and
  talk to one another in public, to meet in a
  public space so that their differences as well as
  their commonalities can emerge and become the
  subject of democratic debate (Howell in Collins
  and Blomley 56)

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• Division of public and private spaces
• Classification of space
• Rules become taken-for-granted
• What are the implications arising from the
  privatization of public space?
• Who benefits from maintaining differentiations
  between public and private space?