1. UNI320Y: Canadian Questions: Issues and Debates Week 10: Sanitizing Public Space Professor Emily Gilbert http://individual.utoronto.ca/emilygilbert/

2. Sanitizing Public Space I.The Production of Urban Space II.Claiming Urban Citizenship III.Sanitizing Public Space

3. 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

4. II: Claiming Urban Citizenship  Making collective claims to rights and belonging  Participation and influence over city’s 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

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

6.  “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)

7. III: Sanitizing Public Space Global cities  Globalization and international urban hierarchy  Global cities are command centres—esp. 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

8. 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

9.  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

10. 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

11.  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)

12.  “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)

13.  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?