Note to reader: This essay was written in 2018 for a graduate course at the University of Toronto. No doubt that so much has changed in Parkdale, in Toronto, and in cities broadly since that time. I have ideas to return to this subject someday and provide some sort of update. Until then, please keep this context in mind as you read.
This is the second and final part of this essay. Read part one here.
2. Advocacy and activism constitute citizen engagement
Citizen engagement, or public participation, in urbanism terms, represents both the principle people should be involved in decisions that impact their lives, [26] and a hot of technical procedures to facilitate or manage public involvement in administrative decision-making. As with gentrification, urbanist perspectives address procedural dimensions of citizen engagement. It is common for urbanists to speak of engagement procedures as “tools,” implying they are external objects, to be “added-on”to planning exercises if needed. By extension, the publics involved are external and dormant until “engaged” and “brought in” to the planning process by participatory procedures [27]. Even with growing concern among urbanists as to the quality and accessibility of citizen engagement procedures, scholarship has identified a deeper, but equally limiting, common assumption that without education or “capacity building” the knowledges and interests of the public will be irrelevant or not useful [28]. It is fair to say that the urbanist philosophy reaffirms the hegemonic authority of planning experts and the privileged status of planning expertise [29]. Such taken for granted notions diminish the visibility of other types of knowledge publics may bring to the procedure.
The Parkdale anti-gentrification movement is an excellent case study in example of citizen engagement, but those cemented in the above way of thinking risk missing it entirely. This is because for most of the movement, the primary format of engaging local peoples has been community organizing through advocacy and activism, two practices not easily explained in discrete processual or methodological terms. Furthermore, from the urbanist perspective, advocacy or activist practices are generally perceived as an intrusion or breakdown of the engagement process, and the discouragement of these practices is commonplace [30]. This exclusion is ignorant of the many examples of grassroot campaigns impacting government policy and decisions [31].
Just in the past year, tenants in some of Parkdale’s rent-controlled apartment buildings, with support from Parkdale Community Law Services [32] and Parkdale Organize [33], mobilized two rent strikes to fight above-guideline rent increases initiated by their landlords. At the end of March, residents of a high-rise on King Street West successfully blocked an rent increase sought by the landlord after staging a ten week rent strike [34]. This comes after another group of Parkdale tenants organized a rent strike campaign which involved nearly 300 people living in a dozen buildings under a single corporate landlord. The strike lasted six months before the landlord stood down in October, 2017 [35]. Both campaigned successfully resisted the rent increases, thus preventing further impoverishment and possible evictions of the hundreds of tenants living in this buildings. Groups in Parkdale have for many years worked together to intervene early in the eviction process in hopes of mitigating impacts to residents and the potential of displacement. When the Queen’s Hotel evictions were happening, for example, PARC and the Red Cross were prepared to support residents to stay and fight the evictions, but none chose to remain [36]. When none chose to remain, PARC, the Red Cross, and the Parkdale community stepped up to connect those who were displaced with housing and legal services [37] (though sadly many ended up in shelters or on the street [38]).
The value of counting these practices as part of citizen engagement is not so they can be added to our urbanist’s “toolkit”. Instead, looking at these practices alongside standard participatory methods (examples of formal participatory procedures used in the movement are discussed below), opens up a more comprehensive picture of empirical behaviours and phenomena that make up citizens’ practical democratic involvement in matters crucial to their everyday lives. For example, the development of civic capacity, defined as “the extent to which different sectors of the community… act in concert around a matter of community wide import,” [39] is significant to the study of both community organizing and citizen engagement. Taking a perspective that recognizes the parallels between organizing and engagement, an urbanist might inquire as to the capacities of the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement to bring people together (mobilizing) and cooperatively problem solve (planning).
Consider why it is that the citizens of Parkdale have the capacity to be active in all these ways when so many of them are marginalized and struggling. The Parkdale anti-gentrification movement supports a myriad of collective action: eviction prevention, political organizing, participatory planning, and policy advocacy on issues of shelter capacity, rooming house preservation, rent control, inclusionary zoning and the Government of Canada’s long-term housing strategy [40] The overlapping character of these efforts is a significant community asset which contributes to a “collective readiness” in the neighbourhood. Through collaboration and solidarity, relations and capacities are developed not only between organisations but also within a broader coalition of ordinary people living in the neighbourhood, creating a positive feedback loop in the overall organizing capacity of Parkdale [41].
Groups within the anti-gentrification movement continue to advance and innovate their efforts building of the community capacity which the movement helped to develop. This point is further illustrated by the community-led research methods used in two major participatory planning and research projects initiated by the Parkdale Community Economic Development Project (PCED) and the Parkdale
Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT). Those projects each culminated in a neighbourhood planning study: the Parkdale Community Planning Study and the Parkdale Rooming House Study, respectively.
Two years ago, PCED completed the Parkdale Community Planning Study, [42] a comprehensive, community assets and needs inventory, visioning and strategizing exercise to develop a community economic development plan that addresses the growing inequality and poverty in Parkdale stemming from inequitable processes of urban change. The study’s analysis integrated, in addition to a typical array of demographic, housing, economic and public health data, the experiences and observations from community residents and frontline service workers using community action research, stakeholder engagement and participatory planning methods. Over the entire 18 months of the project, PCED held 20 consultation workshops and one community forum, created seven working groups, and conducted “over 50 one-on-one interviews with representatives of local community organizations in Parkdale, city [of Toronto] staff, and other stakeholders,” [43].
Last year, PNLT commissioned a study “to assess the impact of gentrification and real estate speculation on rooming house loss,” which is happening at an alarming rate [44]. The resulting Parkdale Rooming House Study used a community-led research approach, hiring five PARC members with personal experience living in rooming housings, in Parkdale and elsewhere, as researchers on the project team. PARC offered the five community researchers orientation and training. The community research, along with teams of volunteers, more PARC and PNLT members and Parkdale residents, conducted an inventory of Parkdale rooming houses using door-to-door and street surveys, and interviews with tenants, landowners, service providers and City of Toronto staff [45].
As one PARC staff member describes these projects, “It’s not just a partnership on a project basis, but also thinking about how we actually start to align much bigger missions,” [46]. In this way, the relationships and coalitions that constitute the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement operate like an infrastructure of participatory governance [47]. This insight would be missed if not for the deliberative consideration of the advocacy and activism.
Conclusion
The authors of the Parkdale Community Planning Study write that the neighbourhood’s story is one of “the encroaching forces of neighbourhood change and the aspiring visions for more equitable and inclusive Parkdale,” [48]. If this is true, then the people, communities, and organizations that comprise the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement must be some of the story’s main characters. For, as this brief introduction to the movement shows, the full story emerges only when looking at the daily practices and experiences related to actually existing gentrification and the violence of displacement, and various ways ordinary people organize, mobilize, and collaborate in resisting these force of these processes on their home.
There is more to the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement than can be written here. Indeed, there is a growing body of literature around gentrification, displacement, and community organizing, some of which are cited in this text. But there remains much for others to dig into. Moreover, the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement is not one isolated case. There are other anti-gentrification movements across the world. Examples of movements similar to Parkdale’s include the Brooklyn Anti-gentrification Network [49] , Eviction Free San Francisco [50], and, also in the Bay area, the Anti Gentrification Mapping Project [51].
Although it was the goal of this article to inspire other urbanists to take interest in Parkdale, those who are so inclined must carry along the two lessons discussed here. These lessons is not directed any one urbanist individual or group. Rather, it is a reminder to those of us with intellectual or professional commitments to this thing called urbanism (including your humble author) that expert knowledge gives a limited impression of urban life.
One, remember that displacement caused by neighbourhood gentrification is violence against the most vulnerable people in society. No advantages or combination of advantages to gentrification equal the distress, disruption, and harm caused by forced relocation. When participating in discourses on Parkdale or any other gentrifying neighbourhood, it is essential to seek to understand the daily experiences of the displaced leading up to, during, and after displacement occurs.
Two, be cognizant that thinking in terms of “process” and “tools” is useful only in certain situation. In order to learn from the practical capacities (ie. Community organizing, direct action, etc.) constituted in the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement’s resistance against the stresses and crises caused by market forces and state restructuring [52] , urbanism needs to accept such practices as legitimate forms of civic engagement. On the other hand, since advocacy and collective action are traditionally invested in outcomes [53], urbanists, with their honed capacity to understand things in processual terms, could have a discussion on public fora that hybridize advocacy and activism with technical procedures of democratic participation [54].
References:
[20] Snider, P. “Paul Snider’s Story of Eviction from Queen’s Hotel,” last modified March 29, 2017, http://www.pnlt.ca/paul-sniders-story-of-eviction-from-queens-hotel/
[21] Ibid.
[22] “Gentrification is the tip of the iceberg,” This Is Parkdale 2 , no.2 (2017)
[23] Strabrowski, 2014
[24] Thompson Fullilove, M. & Wallace, R. “Serial Forced Displacement in American Cities, 1916-2010,” Journal of Urban Health 88, no.3 (2011)
[25] Hartman, C.,“The Right to Stay Put.” i n Land Reform, American Style, ed. C. Geisler & F. Popper (Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984)
[26] Shipley, R. & Utz, S. “Making it Count: A Review of the Value and Techniques of Public Consultation,” Journal of Planning Literature 27, no.1 (2012)
[27] Chilvers, J. & Kearnes, M., “Remaking participation: science, environment and emergent publics,” (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016)
[28] Lane, M. “Public Participation in Planning: an intellectual history,” Australian Geographer 36, no.3 (2005): 283-299
[29] Chilvers & Kearnes, 2016
[30] Forester, J. “Planning in the face of power,” (Berkeley: UC Press, 1989)
[31] “Toronto Disaster Relief Committee: 14 years of advocacy, activism and action,” Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (2012)
[32] “Community Development – Overview,” Parkdale Community Legal Services, accessed March 30, 2018 http://www.parkdalelegal.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53&Itemid=41
[33] http://parkdaleorganize.ca
[34] “Parkdale Rent Strike Defeats Rent Increase,” Parkdale Organize, last modified March 27, 2018, http://parkdaleorganize.ca/2018/03/27/parkdale-rent-strike-defeats-rent-increase/
[35] Parkdale Organize, 2017
[36] “Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre finds homes for seven tenants of the Queent’s Hotel,” toronto.com, last modified Aug. 10, 2015, https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5791603-parkdale-activity-recreation-centre-finds-homes-for-seven-tenants-of-the-queen-s-hotel/
[37] “Parkdale Community Groups Confront Gentrification,” Torontoist , Sept. 22, 2015,
[38] Snider, 2017
[39] Stone, C. “Civic Capacity: What, Why, and From Whence,” in The Public Schools, eds. S. Furman & M. Lazerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): pp. 596
[40] PARC staff member, interview by A. Morgan, March 7, 2018
[41] Kamazaki, 2016
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.
[44] “Parkdale Rooming House Study Released!, ” Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (2017) http://www.pnlt.ca/
[45] “ No Room For Unkept Promises, Parkdale Rooming House Study,” Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust, May 2017
[46] PARC staff member, 2018
[47] Defillipis, Foster, & Shragge, 2006
[48] Kamizaki, 2016 pp.88
[49] Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network, https://bangentrification.org/
[50] Eviction Free San Francisco, https://evictionfreesf.org/
[51] Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, https://www.antievictionmap.com/
[52] Pares, Blanco & Fernandez, 2018
[53] Irazabal, C. “Realizing planning’s emancipatory promise: Learning from regime theory to strengthen communicative action,” Planning Theory 8, no.2 (2009): 115-139
[54] Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., Barthes, Y. “Acting in an uncertain world: an essay on technical democracy,” (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009)