The Violence of Planning (and Its Resistance)

From Adrian Blackwell and Kanishka Goonewardena, Poverty of Planning: Tent City, City Hall and Toronto’s New Official Plan, in Planners Network, Winter 2003:

“While the [new official plan of the city of Toronto] represents a victory for the ruling classes of Toronto... some of the background documents prepared for the plan reveal traces of a struggle, even within City Hall. Toronto at the Crossroads, for example, includes a crystal clear map of the concentrations of ‘socially vulnerable areas’ in the city. It illustrates the growing economic polarization and pockets of poverty that form a ring running through the outer suburbs and around the inner city. Any reasonable official plan aiming to build a sustainable and equitable urban life would have started with these realities — the majority of existing people in the city — rather than banking on an exodus of dot.com millionaires and other pipe dreams of the ‘knowledge economy.’

The urgent question is this: What will happen to the various socially vulnerable groups in the city whose neighborhoods are either ignored in this plan or earmarked for gentrification?

The plan actually paves the way to remove people from strategic downtown neighborhoods, concentrating poverty in high-density suburban spaces whose reality is deliberately hidden in its three-lens vision. Complementing this violence of eviction is the alienating physical and symbolic violence constantly inflicted on individuals forced to live in these suburban spaces. These have a number of real effects.

• The physical distance between social classes protects affluent people from the violent power and frustration that economic exploitation creates.
  
  
• The physical separation prevents middle- and upper-class Torontonians from experiencing poverty firsthand, allowing them to indulge a fantasy of equality, while breeding stereotypes about people they don’t have to interact with everyday.
  
  
• Separation organizes the city so that affluent people have much better access to not only luxury goods, but also to essential services like healthy food, a clean environment, healthcare, public transportation, parks, public spaces and jobs.
  
  
• Isolation atomizes the very communities that could otherwise create unified resistance to this alienating condition. One of the lasting legacies of Toronto’s high-density modernist housing is that people are both concentrated and isolated from one another at the same time.

Real separation and isolation are symbolically overcome in the image of the beautiful city. The objective of urban design here is to mask beneath the spectacle of dazzling urban space the potentially explosive realities of the new amalgamated city of developers, taxpayers and global capital.”

The authors are members of Planning Action:

“A group of urban planners, architects and activists who work with diverse communities of Toronto struggling against economic, cultural, and ecological injustice to open spaces for people to imagine, transform, and enjoy the city.”

Their objectives:

• To collaboratively promote social and environmental justice by planning for affordable housing, food, public transportation, public space and accessible education and recreation for all residents and workers of the city.
• To democratize planning practice to foster greater participation and control over the creation and maintenance of the city.
• To build an organization that is committed to radically democratic and socially just practices within its own operation, in its partnerships and collaborations, as well as in the city.

Their work includes:

• popular education and outreach;
• planning, design, and advocacy for individuals and communities marginalized from traditional planning and legal systems;
• promotion of participatory planning that creates alternatives to municipal, competitive, and corporate-driven planning practices; and
• public comment and criticism of development projects, international trade agreements, and city practices, plans, policy, and processes.