Contesting Neo-Liberalism and Post-Fordism Through Regional Planning from Above and Below in Toronto, Canada

Contesting Neo-Liberalism and Post-Fordism Through Regional Planning from Above and Below in Toronto, Canada

Michael Romandel

 

Abstract: This paper examines the viability of contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordism through regional planning from above and below through a case study of Toronto, Canada. The main argument that is advanced is that regional planning from below represents one of the best ways to contest neo-liberalism and post-Fordism due to the increased importance of the regional scale in the post-Fordist economy and in post-Keynesian state governance, with regional planning from below being necessary to move beyond the depoliticizing Third Way discourse that currently surrounds the regional development and planning process so that better ‘possible urban worlds’ can be created.

Introduction

Since the days of Ebeneezer Howard (1902), regional planning has been seen as a way to deal with the social and environmental problems of the industrial metropolis, including overcrowding and poor environmental conditions in workers quarters. In addition to Howard, the impetus for regional planning can also be seen in the work of other early planning theorists and practitioners, including Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago (Brenner, 2002), Frank Lloyd Wright’s (1932) Broadacre City vision and Hugh Ferriss’ (1929) vision of an ultramodern regional city, as well as the normative positions taken in the later work of Lewis Mumford (1961) in The City in History and Jean Gottmann (1961) in Megalopolis. In recent years, regional planning has risen to prominence once again in academic and policy circles due to increased concern over the environmental and social costs of urban sprawl and the general consensus on the greater importance of the regional scale in the world economy under post-Fordism (Pastor et al., 2000; Sieverts, 2003; Storper, 1997; Brenner, 2000; 1998; 2002; 2004), with the post-Fordist economy and the dissolution of the Fordist-Keynesian social pact between labour and capital also being linked to the social costs of sprawl due to the fact that this regime of accumulation has lead to greater intra-regional inequalities (Pastor et al., 2000; Soja, 2000; Brenner, 2004; Wacquant, 2008).

However, in the post-Fordist, neo-liberal era of capitalist development, several major changes have occurred in the very nature of regional planning and the actors involved in it. Firstly, the shift from government to governance associated with neo-liberalism has led to the involvement of extra-governmental organizations in official regional planning initiatives, with the plans and policy documents of extra-governmental organizations often co-existing with and sometimes even being co-ordinated with purely governmental regional planning initiatives (Brenner, 2004; Kipfer and Keil, 2004; Desfor et al., 2006). Secondly, the shift to neo-liberal governance and post-Fordist industrial organization has ravaged many neighbourhoods, cities and regional economies that were dependent on the Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) and large scale Fordist industry for their well being (Pastor et al., 2000; Soja, 2000), with the damage that this politico-economic shift has done in some locales leading to the involvement of surviving local unions and various social justice and environmental organizations in a sort of regional planning from below that often directly challenges neo-liberal governance and post-Fordist industrial restructuring (Keil, 1994; 1998a; Tufts, 1998; Kipfer and Keil, 2002).

Within the context of post-Fordist industrial restructuring and neo-liberal governance, regional planning from above (or official regional planning) by governmental bureaucracies and extra-governmental organizations as well as regional planning from below by unions as well as environmental and social justice organizations can serve as contestations (Leitner et al., 2007; Mayer, 2007) of post-Fordism and neo-liberalism in so far as they can both challenge the nature of these new paradigms and how they will affect particular regions. While regional planning from above, or top-down regional planning, has sometimes been cited as being a neo-liberalizing force (Brenner, 2004; Keil, 1998a; 2001), this isn’t necessarily the case in all scenarios, as Kipfer and Keil (2004) believe that the Toronto City Summit Alliance, which practices a form top-down regional planning according to the definition provided by Keil (1998a; 2001), has worked to reframe “the competitive city project” (235) in a Third Way manner, representing an example of Third Way urbanism (Keil, 2000). The idea of Third Way urbanism was actually developed by Roger Keil (2000), with Keil being the first researcher to apply this theory of an emerging politics of consensus between the progressive or radical left and the neo-liberal right to the urban scale.  The term ‘Third Way’ was initially used to describe the political orientation of governing regimes at the national scale, with the regimes of Clinton and Blair often being cited as the first to adopt a Third Way politics (Keil, 2000).

‘Regional planning from below’, as the term was originally used by the Coalition to Keep GM Van Nuys Open and then appropriated by Keil (1998a; 2001; Kipfer and Keil, 2002) referred to regional planning by groups traditionally left out of official regional planning efforts and discourses that manifest themselves in a top-down fashion. It is important to point out that this term refers specifically to a counter-hegemonic regionalism led by working class and other subaltern groups outside of official or bureaucratized regional planning circles, with the ‘from below’ part of this term not only referring to spatial or geographical orientation, but also referring to issues of power and class hierarchies, and a certain positionality in regards to power and class structures.  Thus, a regional planning initiative conducted by local business elites that goes unrecognized by government policy makers as legitimate regional planning would not fit within Keil’s (1998a; 2001) conceptualization of this movement (though the likelihood of such a movement being seen as ‘illegitimate’ by government policy-makers is purely hypothetical and would be very unlikely in any locality operating under a vaguely neo-liberal mode of regulation).  Keil (2001) has also used the term insurgent regionalism to describe regional planning from below, while Pastor et al. (2000) use the term ‘community-based regionalism’ to describe such movements, though Pastor et al. have a much more liberal-democratic view of this process and the dynamics of the relationship between community groups and official policy circles than Keil, whose perspective is far more radical and Marxist (1998a; 2001; 2002).  In addition, Keil (1998a; 1998b; 2001; 1994) also believes that an insurgent civil society must emerge to challenge the exclusionary bourgeois civil society, and that this insurgent civil society can benefit significantly by being connected with an insurgent regional planning from below.

Because of the importance of regional planning from both above and below in contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, this paper will focus on how this has occurred in Toronto.  The main argument that will be advanced here is that regional planning from below, by acting on the regional scale and opening up the opportunity for local groups and communities that are often excluded from or unequally incorporated into bourgeois-driven policy and planning circles to shape the production of urban space and geographical scale and inject their own views into the regional planning discourse (Lefebvre, 1991; Brenner, 2000; Herod, 1997), represents one of the best ways to contest neo-liberalism and post-Fordism in the current politico-economic and scalar context; and that regional planning from above tends to contest neo-liberalism and post-Fordism through Third Way politics and a rescaling upwards. In regards to the process of rescaling upwards, this has often been associated with regional planning from above, and represents a form of second-cut Rescaled Competition State Regime (RCSR) according to Neil Brenner (2004), whose ideas on RCSRs will now be explained.

Brenner’s theory of Rescaled Competition State Regimes (RCSRs) is based in his ideas on urban locational policies, which basically amount to the theory that, in the wake of the 1970s crisis of Fordist-Keynesianism, and beginning in the 1980s,

“state institutions at various spatial scales began actively to intensify uneven development by promoting the most strategic cities and city-regions within each national territory as privileged sites for transnational capital investment” (2004: 259).

This had the effect of forming what Brenner refers to as a Rescaled Competition State Regime or RCSR, in which “scale-sensitive political strategies” are used to “position key subnational space (localities, cities, regions, industrial districts) optimally within supranational…circuits of capital accumulation” (2004: 260).  Brenner refers to the above description of the beginning of RCSRs in the 1980s as his “first cut conceptualization of RCSRs” (2004: 261), and differentiates the second cut as an “institutional and scalar evolution” of RCSRs that took place during the 1990s and early 2000s, and that were mobilized as a response to the “chronic regulatory deficits and crisis tendencies” that have permeated “the splintered institutional landscapes of RCSRs”, and have led to a “variety of disruptive, dysfunctional trends that have destabilized the accumulation process and undermined the territorial coherence of political-economic life” (2004: 261).  Brenner outlines three specific types of second cut RCSR initiatives, which are: “a) neighbourhood-based anti-exclusion initiatives; b) metropolitan reform initiatives; and c) interurban networking initiatives” (2004: 261).  While Brenner does believe that all of these second cut initiatives do mediate the uneven institutional and infrastructural development associated with RCSRs, he also believes they are all spatially and institutionally inadequate to end uneven spatial development, and that they all still work to promote the idea of competitiveness between different spaces and territories, though in a way that is significantly rescaled.  For instance, under the 1980s first cut RCSRs, cities would compete with each other regardless of the effect on the other cities in their surrounding regions, while under the second cut RCSRs of the 1990s, metropolitan reform initiatives have sought to co-ordinate competition in the global economy on a regional basis, and have thus rescaled competition from the level of the individual municipality to the level of the region, though have thus only modified and rescaled RCSRs, and have not posed a significant challenge to the basic logic of territorial competitiveness at the heart of RCSRs (Brenner, 2004).

 Before proceeding with an analysis of Toronto, it is important to note that the focus on the importance of the regional scale in contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordist restructuring that this paper will take does not mean that other scales should be ignored or are somehow less important, as it will be argued here that the regional scale is the scale at which actions on local issues rooted in particular neighbourhoods and cities can be best linked to broader state-level and inter-state issues, such as post-Fordist industrial restructuring and neo-liberal governance, and that ‘planning’ at the regional scale simply allows governments and organizations to simultaneously interact with the multiple scales of decision making, governance and economics that affect people and communities on the ground in the 21^st century. In addition, some of the main social, economic and environmental problems that have been linked to the emergence of post-Fordism and neo-liberalism have been worsened by the intra-regional fragmentation of governance and socio-political movements (Boudreau, 2000), as well as uneven intra-regional development, with the regional scale thus being seen as the scale at which these issues must be dealt with, and a significant rescaling upwards occurring through a renewed interest in regional planning from above.

The Case of Toronto

Contestations from Above

            Contestations of post-Fordism really began in Toronto in the late 1970s, with various unions contesting post-Fordist industrial restructuring from below by protesting against the outsourcing of labour-intensive industries to developing countries (Krawetz and Muszynski, 1980: 48-51; Wells, 1997: 248-251), and the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto contesting post-Fordism from above by producing reports detailing the losses of industrial jobs in Metropolitan Toronto between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s (Krawetz and Muszynski, 1980; Muszynski, 1985). Contestations of neo-liberalism in Toronto really didn’t develop until the 1990s, as Toronto was not as significantly affected by neo-liberal policies as other cities were during the 1980s (Boudreau, 2000; Bashevkin, 2006; Keil, 2002; Brenner, 2004; Schmid, 1998). It was not until the economic downturn of the late 1980s and the recession that would follow in the early 1990s that the conditions would be set for the worst effects of neo-liberalism to be felt in Toronto (Kipfer and Keil, 2002; Boudreau, 2000). The early 1990s recession, coupled with the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, led to more neo-liberal policies being implemented by various levels of government during this period, and began to have significant effects on Toronto’s residents, many of whom were in greater need of social services due to the effects of post-Fordist industrial restructuring and job outsourcing on the employability of many of the city’s blue-collar workers (Kipfer and Keil, 2002; Repo, 1998; Campbell, 2001). However, it was not until the election of the Harris Tories in 1995 that the worst effects of neo-liberalism began to be felt in Toronto, with Harris’ ‘common sense’ neo-liberalism (Keil, 2002) involving a significant retrenchment of the provincial state and the downloading of many functions to municipalities without the provision of commensurate funding to maintain these functions (Boudreau, 2000; Bashevkin, 2006). According to the Harris Tories, the purpose of this was to streamline government, with fiscal downloading supposedly being used to create a more effective system of government service provision where only those services that were essential to individual municipalities would remain in place. This fiscal downloading also relates to Harris’ strategy of privatization, as this would inevitably lead to many services that were previously provided by government to be eliminated or significantly scaled back, with private sector service provision remaining as the only alternative to gutted state services (Bashevkin, 2006; Boudreau, 2000; Keil, 2002).

            However, just before the beginning of the Harris regime’s time in provincial power, a significant contestation emerged from within the provincial bureaucracy in the form of the Task Force on the Future of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) (popularly known as the Golden Task Force, for the leader, Anne Golden). This task force called for a regional, Third Way solution to the governance issues in the GTA in which the two-tier Metro Toronto structure would be maintained and extended out to Toronto’s exurbs or outer suburbs, which include the municipalities within the surrounding regions of York, Durham, Peel and Halton (GTA Task Force, 1996; Boudreau, 2000; Todd, 1998; Keil, 2000; Kipfer and Keil, 2004). The final report of this task force was an important document in the history of regional governance and planning in the GTA, as it called for the Toronto region to integrate itself into the global economy in a Third Way fashion that was significantly different from the neo-liberal consensus that dominated at the time of the report’s release (Todd, 1998; Boudreau, 2000; GTA Task Force, 1996).  In addition, the report also called for the maintenance of local democracy and autonomy over many decisions while allowing for co-ordination on a truly regional scale (Boudreau, 2000; Todd, 1998; GTA Task Force, 1996). While the regional focus of the Golden Task Force’s report and its Third Way politics were disregarded by the Harris government due to the regime’s neo-liberal ideology and its interest in protecting the outer suburbs from the higher taxes that would come with their amalgamation into a two-tier GTA-wide government, this report remains as a contestation of neo-liberal hegemony in Toronto policy circles, and its regional orientation could be used to inform the actions of groups deliberately engaged in regional planning from below, as well as the work of critical academics who support these actions (Boudreau, 2000; Kipfer and Keil, 2002). However, what must be realized is that the recommendations of the Golden Task Force did not question the ideas of competitiveness and growth (Todd, 1998; GTA Task Force, 1996), but simply reframed these strategies in a Third Way fashion that took environmental and social issues into account as factors that were important for economic competitiveness (Mayer, 2007: 91). Based on this analysis, the report of the Golden Task Force can be seen as promoting a shift towards a type of second-cut RCSR that involves a rescaling upwards, in a return to past interests in metropolitan regionalism (Brenner, 2004: 274-286; Brenner, 2002). The rationale outlined in the report of the Golden Task Force for this rescaling also generally supports Brenner’s (2004) theory that “the new metropolian regionalism instrumentalizes intra-regional co-operation in order to intensify the process of interspatial competition at supraregional scales” (286). The same type of rescaling upwards was also involved in the formation of the Toronto City Summit Alliance (TCSA) and the development of the Places to Grow Plan, which will now be examined.   

The formation of the Toronto City Summit Alliance (TCSA) in 2002 represents an important instance of a Third Way compromise at the regional scale in the GTA. This organization was formed as a result of the Toronto City Summit Conference, and brought together locally situated elite and pro-growth interests with professionalized community organizations (Thibault, 2007; Mayer, 2007: 92), labour unions and various government policy experts through its issue-specific committees and related research projects (TCSA, 2004a; TCSA, 2004b). The TCSA explicitly sought a regional rescaling upwards of the RCSR in the GTA from the very beginning, and also represents a move away from government and towards governance (Desfor et al., 2006), which Isin (1998) cites as being one of the key defining elements of neo-liberalism, and which Keil (1998a) believes is leading to a dissociation of the urban development and planning process from the broader political process, with Keil (1998a) using the term ‘dissociated governance’ to describe this state of affairs. Interestingly, Kipfer and Keil (2004) specifically cite the work of the Toronto City Summit Alliance as an example of the trend towards the reframing of the “competitive city project in Third Way terms” (235). The same kind of rescaling upwards to the regional scale and the move towards Third Way urbanism that is exemplified in both the report of the Golden Task Force and the consensus-building work of the Toronto City Summit Alliance can be seen in the Places to Grow Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which will now be explored in the context of the related Greenbelt Plan.

            The Places to Grow (P2G) Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe was released in June of 2006 by the new Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal (MPIR) for the purpose of regulating urban growth in the Greater Golden Horseshoe by focusing this growth on certain designated urban growth centres, with a discourse of environmental, social and economic sustainability being used to justify this plan for the regional re-organization of urban development (MPIR, 2006; Sandberg et al., 2006). In doing this, the plan effectively creates a new path-dependent logic of ecological modernization for the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) that re-regulates and scales up planning for urban growth and environmental management to really and discursively manage the exigencies of post-Fordist spatio-economic restructuring and the environmental degradation caused by continued urban sprawl (Sandberg et al., 2006; Keil, 1994; 1996; Swyngedouw, 2006). The P2G Plan can be seen as creating a new path-dependent logic of ecological modernization for the GTA because it works alongside the Greenbelt Plan (Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH), 2005) to re-regulate human-nature relations in the region to meet the needs of post-Fordist capitalism and post-modern society, with this re-regulation reacting to and moving away from the human-nature relations and spatio-economic formations that prevailed under the previous period of capitalist development in which Fordist production methods and modernist culture were the dominant paradigms (Sandberg et al., 2006; Keil, 1994; 1996; Kipfer and Keil, 2002; Desfor et al., 2006). The post-Fordist and post-modern re-regulation of urban nature represented by the P2G plan and the related Greenbelt Plan can thus be seen as a way to discursively mitigate many of the environmental problems directly linked with urban and economic growth during the Fordist-modernist period by linking urban and economic growth with environmental protection. This is done by scaling up the planning of urban and economic growth as well as environmental protection to the regional scale.

The rescaling of the planning of environmental protection and urban growth embodied in the P2G plan and the Greenbelt Plan is interesting within the context of the work of Storper (1997) and Manuel Pastor et al. (2000) on the increased importance of the regional scale under post-Fordism, and can be seen as an example of how the Ontario government has responded to both this challenge and the emergence of a post-modern socio-political culture that challenges any urban and economic growth that does not take environmental protection and ‘sustainability’ seriously, at least in its rhetoric (Boudreau, 2000; Kipfer and Keil, 2002; Keil, 2000; Mayer, 2007). Within the context of the closely related Greenbelt Plan, and the brief theoretical analysis provided here, the P2G Plan can be viewed as being a primary part of a project to discursively and concretely re-regulate human-nature relations in the GGH through a rescaling upwards of planning for urban and economic growth as well as environmental protection. The re-regulation from above embodied in this ‘project’ also effectively creates a post-political, depoliticizing Third Way discourse surrounding both urban and economic growth as well as environmental protection (Keil, 2000; Mayer, 2007), which plays an important role in subsuming the environment and environmental protection within the logic of a post-modern and post-Fordist capitalism (Kipfer and Keil, 2002; Sandberg et al., 2005; Desfor et al., 2006; Mayer, 2007; Keil, 2000). Thus, an insurgent regional planning from below that challenges this post-political, depoliticizing Third Way discourse must emerge if the region is to move towards a more progressive and democratic future.

Contestations from Below

In Toronto, the contestation of neo-liberalism and post-Fordism through regional planning from below has been theorized by Kipfer and Keil (2002) as being embodied in the organizing work of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (representing a form of community unionsism) and the labour/community activism of the Green Work Alliance, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and the Metro Network for Social Justice. However, the research conducted on regional planning from below in Toronto has been rather minimal, with the resulting conceptualization provided by Kipfer and Keil (2002) being somewhat superficial. For instance, Kiper and Keil (2002) list the community unionism of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) as representing a type of regional planning from below, though the sources that Kipfer and Keil cite as evidence of this organization’s regional planning from below (Tufts, 1998; Robertson, 1999) make little reference to the geographical extent of the organizing conducted by this union, with their organizing only seeming to have the potential for regional planning from below by reaching out beyond the traditional confines of the centralized, industrial factory to organize home-workers in Toronto’s garment industry. In addition, in limiting their conception of regional planning from below to community unionism and labour-community activist partnerships, they tend to negate the possibility for labour and community organizations to engage in regional planning from below without creating any sort of cross-sectoral links with each other. While this may be done for very good reasons, these reasons are not stated by Kipfer and Keil (2002) or in Keil’s (1998a, 2001) earlier use of this term, with regional planning from below thus remaining highly under-theorized and under-researched, which is something that Brenner (2002) noted in a footnote of his paper on the ‘newest’ metropolitan regionalism, with the main reason that Brenner gives for this being the fact that “most work on grassroots community activism continues to focus largely upon the neighbourhood or local scale rather than upon the metropolitan region” (11). 

Based on a reading of Herod’s (1997) labour geography, the limiting of regional planning from below to labour-community activist partnerships and community unionism by Kipfer and Keil (2002) and Keil (1998a, 2001) could be construed as being done for the purpose of differentiating this term from Herod’s (1997) conceptualization of labour geography and labour’s ‘spatial fix’, as Herod’s labor geography focuses on the broader geography of labour unions and not specifically on labour-community partnerships or the new community unionism. This differentiation may relate to broader disciplinary differences between labour geography and radical or insurgent planning, as the term ‘regional planning from below’ finds itself academically situated within a disciplinary context of radical or insurgent planning theory purely through its use of the word ‘planning’ (Sandercock, 1998; 2003; Friedmann, 1987), while Herod’s conceptualization of labour geography situates this term within a somewhat oppositional context to the old ‘geography of labor’ to chart the way for a new sub-discipline within geography that breaks with the geography of labour’s focus on capital, capitalists and the bourgeois state as the primary or only actors in producing the geography of labour to highlight the role of labour in producing their own geography and their own spatial fixes. Another reason why Keil (1998a, 2001) likely began using the term ‘regional planning from below’ to refer strictly to labour-community partnerships was because the Coalition to Keep GM Van Nuys Open, who first used the term, would morph into the Labour/Community Strategy Centre, which was so-named due to the labour-community partnerships that were formed through the coalition. However, the fact that this is why Keil (1998a, 2001) decided to use the term in this manner does not justify using it only to refer to labour-community partnerships, as the actual language of the term says nothing about this. However, another potential reason why Keil (1998a, 2001) decided to use the term in the manner that he did was because the term ‘regional planning’ can be seen as implying a more comprehensive perspective than that taken by unions or environmental organizations acting on their own, as regional planning from above often involves some kind of strategy for governing a region or regulating its growth that may include considerations of the environment, the economy and social issues, and generally focuses on issues in the sphere of production, the process of exchange, as well as the sphere of consumption, rather than being focused on only one of these areas (Brenner, 2002). Thus, the analysis conducted here seems to point to this final theory being the best one in terms of its potential usefulness in applying the theory of regional planning from below to movements in particular city-regional contexts, as it effectively differentiates this process from the more broadly defined field of labour geography as well as the regional activities of environmental organizations.

            The theory of regional planning from below that has been outlined above will now be used to analyze how this process has occurred in Toronto, which will look at the relative successes and failures of initiatives in regional planning from below in achieving their stated goals and in contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordism. As mentioned earlier, the community unionism of the ILGWU, while innovative, did not necessarily represent an instance of regional planning from below, as neither Kipfer and Keil (2002) nor Tufts (1998) or Robertson (1999) make any statements about the geographical extent of this union’s organizing activities beyond the fact that they work with community organizations to organize home-workers outside the traditional sphere of production as well as the workers’ own sphere of production (the home). While the type of organizing associated with community unionism could occur on a regional scale, and definitely could result in a movement or coalition that would be able to engage in regional planning from below, there is no evidence available to show that the work of the ILGWU really was regional in its geographical scope. However, the organizing work of the other coalitions and organizations mentioned earlier, which were the Green Work Alliance (GWA), the Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ) and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) were truly regional in scope, and meet the criteria of the definition for regional planning from below that has been provided here. Thus, the ways in which two of these groups (the GWA and the MSNSJ) meet the criteria set up here, as well as their relative successes and failures in contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordism through regional planning from below, will now be discussed.[i]

The Green Work Alliance

            The Green Work Alliance (GWA) was founded in the fall of 1991 in reaction to three primary events or circumstances, with the most prominent one being the closing of a Caterpillar plant in Brampton, Ontario.  The other two were the ongoing and mounting concern of the CAW and other unions with “conflicts and grievances around health and safety, long-term risk and disability” (Keil, 1994, p. 19), and the influence of a group of Japanese workers who visited the Toronto area showing examples of how alternative product designs could benefit the community (1994: 19). In terms of the third factor, the GWA drew inspiration from the Japanese workers as well as the Lucas Aerospace workers from the UK in drafting their own agenda for “socially useful production and co-operative ownership” (Keil, 1994: 19). The main plan of the GWA was to re-open the Caterpillar plant and other closed industrial plants throughout the region for the production of ‘green’ or environmentally friendly products. However, as Keil (1994, 1998) noted, the initiative to re-open the plant as a site of green production was only the central element of a larger project being undertaken by this group, with the group’s main goal being to create a ‘greenbelt not a rustbelt’ as the basis for the rebuilding of the region’s economy. In addition, Keil contextualized the importance of the re-opening of the Caterpillar plant within a post-Fordist economy in which production was becoming more flexible, and many labour intensive manufacturing jobs were moving to the developing world where labour was significantly cheaper, resulting in a decline in industrial jobs in the developed world and the deskilling of labour. Interestingly, the GWA planned to tailor product development to the existing skills of the workers as an alternative to “abstract re-training schemes” that aren’t always tied to real job openings and the deskilling of labour associated with the rise of the service sector and the decline of the manufacturing sector within developed states, with this allowing “workers to retain some autonomy over the use of their knowledge and to put this knowledge to work in the environmental field” (Keil, 1994: 20). This retention of worker-control over the use of their skills, as well as the plans of the GWA for the formation of a workers co-operative, can be seen as being considerably revolutionary, though some of the more radical or left-wing plans of the labour-base of this organization would meet with internal resistance from the more middle class, downtown-based environmental groups that would become important players in the GWA, with the issues surrounding this internal tension being discussed here as part of a broader discussion on how the Alliance practiced a type of regional planning from below.

In Keil’s (1994, 1998b) work on the GWA, he focused primarily on how this group represented a new type of organizing that was compatible with his own conceptualization of regional planning from below, with the GWA representing a type of working class environmentalism that went beyond the confines of the workplace to look at broader regional environmental, social and economic issues, with Keil (1994) understanding the GWA’s goal of creating “a green belt, not a rust belt”, as being “part of the debate on the restructuring of living arrangements in Southern Ontario”. In addition, a document produced by the GWA made the following statement, which is quoted by Keil (1994: 31):

The key is to be active in defining development goals. This means not simply opposing Free Trade, but creating bioregional economies. To do this, we need to be creating our own autonomous forms of finance – People’s Banks and credit unions, and pension funds which invest in the enterprises that sustain community environmental regeneration. We have no need to attract external capital for anything. Workers indirectly own – through their savings and pension funds – all of the capital necessary for creating a conserver economy. We also have great power as consumers – to support regenerative economic activity. (Milani and Arsenault, n.d.)

By outlining a vision for a new regional system of production, exchange and consumption, Milani and Arsenault effectively developed a regional plan ‘from below’ that goes beyond contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordism to contest capitalism itself, though this very radical vision of regional planning from below was internally contested by the more status-quo supporting, downtown based, middle class environmentalist members of the GWA (1994), with the tensions associated with this internal division in the Alliance now being examined.

   In addition to attempting to disprove the false dichotomy that has often been set up between the environment and jobs, and also as part of it, the GWA attempted to bridge the gap between middle class environmentalism and working class environmentalism by incorporating traditional, downtown-based environmental groups within the Alliance, in addition to its base in the labour movement and working class environmentalism (Keil, 1994).  Additionally, there was also an attempt to bridge the gap between the issues of labour unions and the unemployed, which was seen as being necessary under post-Fordism due to the fact that many traditional union members were also becoming unemployed due to plant closings (Keil, 1994). According to Marxist researchers like Magdoff and Magdoff (2004) and Sparke (1994), solidarity between the working class and the members of the reserve army of labour (including both employed, underemployed and unemployed workers) is crucial to any movement to overthrow capitalism and bourgeois rule. However, one of the things that is important to note is that the presence of middle class environmental groups in the GWA, who often held very different views about how the group should orient its re-industrialization plans to the market than the radicalizing[ii] labour unions that formed the base of the group, tended to create a political fissure in the GWA between the middle class environmentalism of downtown-based environmental groups and the more radical working class environmentalism of suburban labour unions (Keil, 1994). These problems regarding the differing political-economic views of the middle class and working class elements of the GWA relate to broader problems of progressive regional organizing in the GTA. These problems are best exemplified by the inability of the downtown and middle class-based C4LD movement against the amalgamation[iii] to reach out to working class groups in the suburbs and construct a truly regional movement against the amalgamation, with this being cited as one of the primary reasons for their failure in preventing the formation of the megacity (Boudreau, 2000; Kipfer and Keil, 2002). Thus, while the GWA encountered internal problems in trying to bring middle class environmentalists from the downtown core and working class environmentalists from the suburbs together under one group with a common mission, their work in bringing these two groups together represented a significant step forward in regional organizing for a more progressive and sustainable future in the GTA, and definitely played a major role in their effort at regional planning from below. Also, while the GWA was unsuccessful in achieving their ultimate goal of re-opening closed industrial plants for the development of green technologies and products (Penney, 2001), their regional organizing work can be seen as an example and lesson for groups engaged in regional planning from below that are attempting to bridge the gap between middle class environmentalism and working class environmentalism and tear down the false dichotomy that has been constructed between jobs and the environment. 

The Metro Network for Social Justice

            Interestingly, before the demise of the GWA, they would partner with the Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ), as the Metro Network for Social Justice essentially serves as an umbrella group that links together various socially progressive community, activist and labour organizations in the Greater Toronto Area (Kipfer, 1998). The MNSJ engaged in regional planning from below through their organization of many diverse groups in the GTA around a common agenda, which is the achievement of “political, social, cultural and economic alternatives that will create justice, equity, and sustainable communities across the City of Toronto” (TorontoRecreation, 2005). While this organizational mission statement only includes the City of Toronto as being within the organization’s geographical purview, and was written after the amalgamation, the organization has been involved in regional organizing in the past that went beyond the bounds of Metropolitan Toronto, with the MNSJ organizing a large number of groups from across the GTA to participate in the political events surrounding the Metro Days of Action in the fall of 1996, which were “targeted against the cutback measures of the provincial government and framed as a resistance to neo-liberalism and ‘the corporate agenda’ ” (Kipfer, 1998).  Thus, although the Metro Network for Social Justice has never explicitly framed their work as regional planning from below or gone beyond the Metro or new City of Toronto scale in their rhetoric and focus, thus staying within the official scalar bounds of governance, they have ‘weakly’ challenged this institutional scaling through their regional organizing work and have ‘strongly’ challenged the bourgeois civil society of official governance circles by attempting to effect major structural changes through their actions, with this organization thus ‘producing’ social space (through their general discursive politics) and real space (through their organization of the spatially focused Metro Days of Action) for an insurgent civil society that works from below to challenge bourgeois hegemony (Lefebvre, 1991; Keil, 1998a; Kipfer and Keil, 2002). 

 

 

Conclusions

            This paper has effectively shown how regional planning from below can open up the opportunity for local groups and communities that are often excluded from or unequally incorporated into bourgeois-driven policy and planning circles to shape the production of urban space and geographical scale and inject their own views into the regional planning discourse, and that regional planning from below thus represents one of the best ways to contest neo-liberalism and post-Fordism in the current politico-economic and scalar context; with this paper also effectively showing that regional planning from above generally contests neo-liberalism and post-Fordism through a Third Way politics and a rescaling upwards of RCSRs, which creates a post-political, depoliticized culture surrounding the urban development process that Keil (1998b) has called a form of dissociated governance.  In addition to this, the analyses that have been conducted in this paper on the theory and practice of contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordism through regional planning from above and below have found that all of the most important aspects of this contestation involve relationships and linkages.  Some of the most important linkages or relationships that have been uncovered here include those between: middle class environmentalism and working class environmentalism; the academic disciplines of labour geography and insurgent or radical planning; regional planning from below and regional planning from above; insurgent civil society and bourgeois civil society; contestations of neo-liberalism, post-Fordism and environmental degradation and the depoliticizing effects of their incorporation into official policy circles through the development of Third Way growth machines, the professionalizatin of activists, a discourse of sustainability and second-cut RCSRs; critical urban research and urban activism; and the relationships between all of these relationships.

            While this paper has been able to delve significantly into some of the important relationships noted above, more research on all of these relationships may lead to a better understanding of them, and the role of critical urban research and activism, which may be the most important relationship listed, in helping to understand these relationships and leading to better ‘possible urban worlds’.  Several particular thematic and geographical areas that research on contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordism through regional planning from above and below may focus on in the future to help move towards better ‘possible urban worlds’[iv] include the following: research on this process in the City of Los Angeles, where the idea of regional planning from below (or at least the term itself) originated; further research on this process in Toronto, where Roger Keil, the first academic to use this term, has conducted the majority of his research in the past decade; research on the importance of the relationship between locally situated urban public intellectuals (such as Mike Davis), and mainstream bourgeois civil society media outlets

(like the Los Angeles Times) (Davis, 1992; Los Angeles Times, 2008), to the power and reach of insurgent civil societies; research on the relationship between critical urban research and insurgent civil society; and research that focuses specifically on the scalar relations involved in regional planning from above and below that relate the production of geographical scale to the production of space.  There are thus many avenues that research on the role of regional planning from above and below in contesting neo-liberalism and post-Fordism could take, with the avenues taken being very important, as they will not only shape academic thought, but will also play a role in shaping the social, economic, spatial, aesthetic and political form of the ‘possible urban worlds’ to come.

 

 

Notes

 

  i.     OCAP has been left out of this analysis primarily due to the fact that the full development of theorizations that aid in the understanding of the regional importance their recent engagement in several actions that could be considered as instances of regional planning from below would require the writing of a paper that focuses solely on OCAP, with more primary research on the geography of OCAP’s actions also being needed to substantiate these theorizations.

ii.     The term ‘radicalizing’ is used here to denote the fact that many of the unions involved in the GWA were in the process of moving beyond their purely workplace and employee based actions to act on issues that are relevant to both employed workers and those who are unemployed, which could be seen as a very radical move for these unions.

iii.     The amalgamation discussed here involved the dissolving of the two-tier Metropolitan Toronto governance structure through the merging of the various ‘inner suburbs’ of Metropolitan Toronto (Scarborough, East York, North York, York, Etobicoke) with the former City of Toronto to form a new single-tier ‘mega-city’ that is known as the City of Toronto, which was incorporated on January 1, 1998 (Boudreau, 2000). 

iv.     Possible Urban Worlds was the name of an International Network of Urban Research and Action (INURA) Conference held between June 16-18, 1997 in Zurich Switzerland as well as a book that was published in 1998 based on the discussions and presentations at the conference (INURA, 1998).

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