Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021
Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a wello... more Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a wellorganized tenants' movement and the election of progressive governments spawned a series of legal and policy changes that strengthened tenants' rights in the city. During the same period, however, an emerging police, government and media discourse cast Black communities as criminal 'ghettos', and a variety of mechanisms, including new policies meant to protect tenants' rights, were used to evict criminalized Black tenants. Guided by recent work on property and Black geographies, respectively, this article examines how racial subjects are constituted in struggles over tenants' rights. The racial limits of tenants' rights in Montreal, it argues, are traceable to the socio-spatial relations of slavery and the intensifying criminalization of Black life in the 1980s, each of which nullified Black spatial belonging in the city. The tenant, the article concludes, is never just a tenant, but also a racial subject-a subject formed at the edges of blackness. In a terrain forged by slavery and its afterlives, the possibility of expansive tenants' rights presupposes a right systemically denied in advance for Black people in the Americas: the right to exist here in the first place.
Community policing is a varying operation. Recent scholarship has attempted to grapple with this ... more Community policing is a varying operation. Recent scholarship has attempted to grapple with this variation by examining differences in the way community policing operates across space (e.g., from neighbourhood to neighbourhood), but has problematically overlooked the issue of variation over time. Aiming to analyze both geographical and historical variation, this article examines community policing in the city of Montreal between 1978 and 1994. In this period, I argue, community policing embodied at least three distinct logics, each of which were linked to variations in the racial politics of the city: (1) a logic of collaboration, (2) a logic of compromise, and (3) a logic of counter-insurgency. These three logics, emerging at specific points in time, were also specific in their geography. Documenting geographical and historical variations in community policing, I conclude, can help to link diverse forms of policing to the differentiated socio-spatial hierarchies that shape it and better contribute to the making of what Gilmore (2017) "abolition geographies."
Racial profiling is an increasingly well-studied problem in Quebec. Efforts to combat this proble... more Racial profiling is an increasingly well-studied problem in Quebec. Efforts to combat this problem, in contrast, are virtually nonexistent. Seeking to address this gap, this article examines the 10 long struggle to combat racial profiling in Montreal. This struggle began in earnest in 1979. It saw its most significant achievements between 1984 and 1991 and it saw most of these achievements watered down and rolled back between 1992 and 1997. The struggle was finally reborn in 2008, with an activist-led movement that 15 led to a new strategic plan on racial profiling in 2018. Tracing the history of this struggle serves two purposes. First, it reveals the divergence between the narrow range of measures adopted by the City of Montreal and the wider range demanded by Black, antiracist, and other progressive actors. Second, it shows that the 20 current strategic plan, while touted as "the most ambitious and farreaching" effort in the city's history, is actually a diluted version of the actions taken between 1984 and 1991, actions that did little, if anything, to reduce racial profiling. The present strategic plan signals a failure to learn from the past and points toward a pair of 25 possible futures: one in which the status quo endures and racial profiling continues unabated, and one in which social forces are transformed, driven by the actions of people and organizations that have demanded more from the City, and that proposes a new political vision and a wider set of actions. Q1
This article explores the connections between urban planning and a particular form of biopolitics... more This article explores the connections between urban planning and a particular form of biopolitics. These connections are investigated by looking at the emergence of ''enjoyment'' as a planning concern in late 1960s Halifax, Nova Scotia. This new concern, the article suggests, emerged as a result of a political struggle involving activist groups, a newly formed state agency, and elements of the post-World War II political establishment. Wedded to this concern were two essential planning policies: the promotion of ''amenity'' (especially in the downtown) and the introduction of structured ''citizen involvement'' in planning decisions. Together, these two policies inaugurated a new form of planning and biopolitics. The promotion of amenity aimed to create a more enjoyable life through the alteration of prevailing conditions of life, while citizen involvement routed planning decisions -including the precise meaning of amenity -through ''liberal'' practices of government. Most importantly, the new policies were shaped by the enactment of normative divisions within the population, a characteristically biopolitical effect. The result of these divisions was a highly unequal process of citizen involvement and a correspondingly uneven terrain of enjoyment: a terrain whose development and use would provide enjoyment for ''normative'' populations, while leaving ''pathological'' populations unaffected or worse.
In early twentieth-century Halifax, municipal policies of property taxation and assessment became... more In early twentieth-century Halifax, municipal policies of property taxation and assessment became an important object of political discussion and contestation. Central to these political contests was a particular, theoretically informed distinction between "land" and "improvements." This distinction would ultimately ground a set of changes in municipal taxation and assessment (introduced between 1914 and 1918) and would help to constitute a new and consequential logic of state action within property relations. Drawing on the literature on property "enactment," this article examines how early twentieth-century struggles over municipal taxation and assessment reshaped the prevailing understanding of real property in the city of Halifax. Consistent with existing research, I demonstrate how a new perspective on property -including a new distinction between land and improvements-gradually came into being through a series of performances, practices and material devices. Embedded within this new perspective, crucially, was a specific logic of dispossession, a new and calculative rationale for the expropriation and redevelopment of the city's "underimproved" land. While the literature on property enactment has quite often investigated practices of dispossession, I point out that its analysis of dispossession's logic or rationale has tended to be confined to a single property theorist, John Locke, and his justifiably famous distinction between land and improvements. Emphasizing the rather different, post-Lockean conception of property that emerged in early twentieth-century Halifax, I suggest that more attention ought to be paid to the multiple and varying logics of dispossession that are liable to be contained within prevailing property enactments.
This article examines the contingent connections between moral regulation and the production of s... more This article examines the contingent connections between moral regulation and the production of scale in the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the early twentieth century, a group called the Halifax Local Council of Women (HCW) unveiled an important program of moral regulation. Targeting the lives of the city's children, this program aimed to inculcate moral norms primarily through the reorganization of space. In the interest of morality, the HCW campaigned against various unwholesome spaces in the city and sought to introduce new, more wholesome spaces for the city's children. At first glance, the HCW's program of moral regulation would seem to involve a transfer of women's activities and capacities from the scale of the 'home' to the 'local' scale; rather than caring for children in the home, the HCW would now be caring for them wherever the 'little life unfolds.' A closer examination, however, shows that the local scale was not so much occupied as it was produced by the HCW and its morality program. In tracking the co-production of moral regulation and geographical scale, this paper aims to reveal the spatial conditions through which one group of people seeks to manage the lives of others.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2013
A constant and largely unquestioned characteristic of contemporary studies of urban movements is ... more A constant and largely unquestioned characteristic of contemporary studies of urban movements is their conception of the activist 'subject'-the reflective agent or 'doer'who participates in, and shapes, urban movements. Whereas it has become increasingly common in other scholarly research to regard the subject as a contingent, context-specific outcome or creation, studies of urban movements have not been swayed. The latter, even as they proceed to conceptualize more and more of the urban scene in terms of malleable 'processes' rather than inert 'structures', have continued to regard the makeup of the activist subject as universal and invariable. This article, in contrast, proposes and explores a different approach. Through a review of the recent urban movements literature, a focused consideration of potentially complementary literatures, and a demonstrative case study, this article aims to show that it is possible and indeed worthwhile to examine how political subjects are contingently remade both prior to, and through, their active participation in contentious urban politics. The remaking of political subjects, it concludes, is often central to the formation and achievements of urban movements. Devoting increased attention to this process -alongside other, already-recognized political processes -could, therefore, promote a richer, more complex understanding of activism and the ever-changing city.
Spurred by the conviction that not only financial capital but also changes in finance and changes... more Spurred by the conviction that not only financial capital but also changes in finance and changes in its relations with non-financial activities have immense and complicated consequences for ongoing processes of urban redevelopment, this article puts the presently separate financialization and urban redevelopment literatures in conversation. The article begins with a review of the financialization literature, outlining and evaluating four different approaches to the topic and seeking to consider what, if anything, they might have to offer to an area of inquiry that has long considered finance to be a central concern. The second section examines how financial capital has been analyzed in the urban redevelopment literature since the pioneering work of David Harvey in the 1970s. The final section examines how financialization has played out in the medium-sized port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Drawing on interviews with financiers and property developments, as well as secondary research materials, the study describes how a recent urban design process in Halifax enlisted urban images and ideas to rewrite development regulations, eliminate popular political involvement in the development approvals process, and lever open the downtown landscape to the whims of worldwide financial markets. The essay concludes that studies of urban redevelopment would indeed gain something by engaging with the financialization literature, so long as the former continue to attend not just to financial capital but also to the material and ideological mechanisms through which property is continually reproduced as a financial asset.
Perspectives critiques et analyse territoriale. Montreal: Presses de l'Université du Québec , 2019
L a ville moderne, tout comme la société moderne en général, est produite et gouvernée à la crois... more L a ville moderne, tout comme la société moderne en général, est produite et gouvernée à la croisée de plusieurs systèmes de pouvoir. Parmi ces derniers, le capitalisme est peut-être le mieux compris par les chercheuses et les chercheurs urbains. Une longue lignée de travaux, surtout depuis les années 1970, a contribué à dénormaliser la ville capitaliste et à documenter son fonctionnement à la fois comme site et comme résultat de la lutte contemporaine des classes
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021
Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a wello... more Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a wellorganized tenants' movement and the election of progressive governments spawned a series of legal and policy changes that strengthened tenants' rights in the city. During the same period, however, an emerging police, government and media discourse cast Black communities as criminal 'ghettos', and a variety of mechanisms, including new policies meant to protect tenants' rights, were used to evict criminalized Black tenants. Guided by recent work on property and Black geographies, respectively, this article examines how racial subjects are constituted in struggles over tenants' rights. The racial limits of tenants' rights in Montreal, it argues, are traceable to the socio-spatial relations of slavery and the intensifying criminalization of Black life in the 1980s, each of which nullified Black spatial belonging in the city. The tenant, the article concludes, is never just a tenant, but also a racial subject-a subject formed at the edges of blackness. In a terrain forged by slavery and its afterlives, the possibility of expansive tenants' rights presupposes a right systemically denied in advance for Black people in the Americas: the right to exist here in the first place.
Community policing is a varying operation. Recent scholarship has attempted to grapple with this ... more Community policing is a varying operation. Recent scholarship has attempted to grapple with this variation by examining differences in the way community policing operates across space (e.g., from neighbourhood to neighbourhood), but has problematically overlooked the issue of variation over time. Aiming to analyze both geographical and historical variation, this article examines community policing in the city of Montreal between 1978 and 1994. In this period, I argue, community policing embodied at least three distinct logics, each of which were linked to variations in the racial politics of the city: (1) a logic of collaboration, (2) a logic of compromise, and (3) a logic of counter-insurgency. These three logics, emerging at specific points in time, were also specific in their geography. Documenting geographical and historical variations in community policing, I conclude, can help to link diverse forms of policing to the differentiated socio-spatial hierarchies that shape it and better contribute to the making of what Gilmore (2017) "abolition geographies."
Racial profiling is an increasingly well-studied problem in Quebec. Efforts to combat this proble... more Racial profiling is an increasingly well-studied problem in Quebec. Efforts to combat this problem, in contrast, are virtually nonexistent. Seeking to address this gap, this article examines the 10 long struggle to combat racial profiling in Montreal. This struggle began in earnest in 1979. It saw its most significant achievements between 1984 and 1991 and it saw most of these achievements watered down and rolled back between 1992 and 1997. The struggle was finally reborn in 2008, with an activist-led movement that 15 led to a new strategic plan on racial profiling in 2018. Tracing the history of this struggle serves two purposes. First, it reveals the divergence between the narrow range of measures adopted by the City of Montreal and the wider range demanded by Black, antiracist, and other progressive actors. Second, it shows that the 20 current strategic plan, while touted as "the most ambitious and farreaching" effort in the city's history, is actually a diluted version of the actions taken between 1984 and 1991, actions that did little, if anything, to reduce racial profiling. The present strategic plan signals a failure to learn from the past and points toward a pair of 25 possible futures: one in which the status quo endures and racial profiling continues unabated, and one in which social forces are transformed, driven by the actions of people and organizations that have demanded more from the City, and that proposes a new political vision and a wider set of actions. Q1
This article explores the connections between urban planning and a particular form of biopolitics... more This article explores the connections between urban planning and a particular form of biopolitics. These connections are investigated by looking at the emergence of ''enjoyment'' as a planning concern in late 1960s Halifax, Nova Scotia. This new concern, the article suggests, emerged as a result of a political struggle involving activist groups, a newly formed state agency, and elements of the post-World War II political establishment. Wedded to this concern were two essential planning policies: the promotion of ''amenity'' (especially in the downtown) and the introduction of structured ''citizen involvement'' in planning decisions. Together, these two policies inaugurated a new form of planning and biopolitics. The promotion of amenity aimed to create a more enjoyable life through the alteration of prevailing conditions of life, while citizen involvement routed planning decisions -including the precise meaning of amenity -through ''liberal'' practices of government. Most importantly, the new policies were shaped by the enactment of normative divisions within the population, a characteristically biopolitical effect. The result of these divisions was a highly unequal process of citizen involvement and a correspondingly uneven terrain of enjoyment: a terrain whose development and use would provide enjoyment for ''normative'' populations, while leaving ''pathological'' populations unaffected or worse.
In early twentieth-century Halifax, municipal policies of property taxation and assessment became... more In early twentieth-century Halifax, municipal policies of property taxation and assessment became an important object of political discussion and contestation. Central to these political contests was a particular, theoretically informed distinction between "land" and "improvements." This distinction would ultimately ground a set of changes in municipal taxation and assessment (introduced between 1914 and 1918) and would help to constitute a new and consequential logic of state action within property relations. Drawing on the literature on property "enactment," this article examines how early twentieth-century struggles over municipal taxation and assessment reshaped the prevailing understanding of real property in the city of Halifax. Consistent with existing research, I demonstrate how a new perspective on property -including a new distinction between land and improvements-gradually came into being through a series of performances, practices and material devices. Embedded within this new perspective, crucially, was a specific logic of dispossession, a new and calculative rationale for the expropriation and redevelopment of the city's "underimproved" land. While the literature on property enactment has quite often investigated practices of dispossession, I point out that its analysis of dispossession's logic or rationale has tended to be confined to a single property theorist, John Locke, and his justifiably famous distinction between land and improvements. Emphasizing the rather different, post-Lockean conception of property that emerged in early twentieth-century Halifax, I suggest that more attention ought to be paid to the multiple and varying logics of dispossession that are liable to be contained within prevailing property enactments.
This article examines the contingent connections between moral regulation and the production of s... more This article examines the contingent connections between moral regulation and the production of scale in the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the early twentieth century, a group called the Halifax Local Council of Women (HCW) unveiled an important program of moral regulation. Targeting the lives of the city's children, this program aimed to inculcate moral norms primarily through the reorganization of space. In the interest of morality, the HCW campaigned against various unwholesome spaces in the city and sought to introduce new, more wholesome spaces for the city's children. At first glance, the HCW's program of moral regulation would seem to involve a transfer of women's activities and capacities from the scale of the 'home' to the 'local' scale; rather than caring for children in the home, the HCW would now be caring for them wherever the 'little life unfolds.' A closer examination, however, shows that the local scale was not so much occupied as it was produced by the HCW and its morality program. In tracking the co-production of moral regulation and geographical scale, this paper aims to reveal the spatial conditions through which one group of people seeks to manage the lives of others.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2013
A constant and largely unquestioned characteristic of contemporary studies of urban movements is ... more A constant and largely unquestioned characteristic of contemporary studies of urban movements is their conception of the activist 'subject'-the reflective agent or 'doer'who participates in, and shapes, urban movements. Whereas it has become increasingly common in other scholarly research to regard the subject as a contingent, context-specific outcome or creation, studies of urban movements have not been swayed. The latter, even as they proceed to conceptualize more and more of the urban scene in terms of malleable 'processes' rather than inert 'structures', have continued to regard the makeup of the activist subject as universal and invariable. This article, in contrast, proposes and explores a different approach. Through a review of the recent urban movements literature, a focused consideration of potentially complementary literatures, and a demonstrative case study, this article aims to show that it is possible and indeed worthwhile to examine how political subjects are contingently remade both prior to, and through, their active participation in contentious urban politics. The remaking of political subjects, it concludes, is often central to the formation and achievements of urban movements. Devoting increased attention to this process -alongside other, already-recognized political processes -could, therefore, promote a richer, more complex understanding of activism and the ever-changing city.
Spurred by the conviction that not only financial capital but also changes in finance and changes... more Spurred by the conviction that not only financial capital but also changes in finance and changes in its relations with non-financial activities have immense and complicated consequences for ongoing processes of urban redevelopment, this article puts the presently separate financialization and urban redevelopment literatures in conversation. The article begins with a review of the financialization literature, outlining and evaluating four different approaches to the topic and seeking to consider what, if anything, they might have to offer to an area of inquiry that has long considered finance to be a central concern. The second section examines how financial capital has been analyzed in the urban redevelopment literature since the pioneering work of David Harvey in the 1970s. The final section examines how financialization has played out in the medium-sized port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Drawing on interviews with financiers and property developments, as well as secondary research materials, the study describes how a recent urban design process in Halifax enlisted urban images and ideas to rewrite development regulations, eliminate popular political involvement in the development approvals process, and lever open the downtown landscape to the whims of worldwide financial markets. The essay concludes that studies of urban redevelopment would indeed gain something by engaging with the financialization literature, so long as the former continue to attend not just to financial capital but also to the material and ideological mechanisms through which property is continually reproduced as a financial asset.
Perspectives critiques et analyse territoriale. Montreal: Presses de l'Université du Québec , 2019
L a ville moderne, tout comme la société moderne en général, est produite et gouvernée à la crois... more L a ville moderne, tout comme la société moderne en général, est produite et gouvernée à la croisée de plusieurs systèmes de pouvoir. Parmi ces derniers, le capitalisme est peut-être le mieux compris par les chercheuses et les chercheurs urbains. Une longue lignée de travaux, surtout depuis les années 1970, a contribué à dénormaliser la ville capitaliste et à documenter son fonctionnement à la fois comme site et comme résultat de la lutte contemporaine des classes
This article reviews Ami Harbin's recent book, Disorientation and Moral Life (Oxford University P... more This article reviews Ami Harbin's recent book, Disorientation and Moral Life (Oxford University Press, 2016). It summarizes and affirms the book's attention to the moral and political significance of moments of disorientation, moments in which people lack certainty regarding what to do, how to do it, or both. It also suggests two ways in which the book's analysis could be extended, including an exploration of more extensive and systemically produced disorientations.
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