Reconnecting the disconnected: The politics of infrastructure in the in-between city
Section snippets
A politics of infrastructure
When we speak of a “politics of infrastructure”, we refer to a growing awareness that “governing and experiencing the fabric of the city” (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008, p. 363) involves political acts that produce and reproduce the infrastructures of urban regions. We therefore follow McFarlane and Rutherford’s advice to open up “the ‘black box’ of urban infrastructure to explore the ways in which infrastructures, cities and nation states are produced and transformed together” (McFarlane and
The changing pattern of (sub)urbanization
The newest – 2006 – census figures in Canada reveal that 70 percent of the population live in metropolitan areas.1 However, within those urban areas they increasingly live outside of urban cores in a new kind of urban landscape. Interestingly, more Canadians also work in the suburban parts of metropolitan areas. The number of people working in central municipalities increased by 5.9% from 2001 to 2006 whereas the
Out of scale: the topology of the in-between city
Based on the recent spatial developments in Europe, German planner Tom Sieverts has proposed the term Zwischenstadt or “in-between city” (Sieverts, 2003). This concept is meant to grasp the novel urban form that has emerged beyond the traditional, more compact, uni-centred European city. Sieverts notes that this new urban form is now pervasive and home as well as workplace to a growing percentage of Europeans. Similarly, Dutch scholars Hajer and Reijndorp have pointed to the fact that we now
Infrastructures in-between
One of the most important areas of concern in the in-between city is the provision of infrastructure, its use and accessibility to it. The place-making effects of centralized rail-based transportation infrastructure in the industrial city are well-known: the topology of radial rail networks created the centred urban structures typical of many European and North American cities. During the 20th century, most urban regions experienced metropolitanization of industrial, commercial and residential
Metropolitan infrastructures: the political challenge
The renewal and expansion as well as the reform of governance of infrastructures are now top agenda items for most governments and elite groups. One of the responses to the world financial crisis of autumn, 2008 put forward at meetings of the G20 countries is that national governments should spend heavily on infrastructure (Jackson, 2008). The new American Obama Administration has pledged billions of dollars in infrastructure funding, while the first order of business of a fledgling, yet
Politics of change or war of attrition?
In our study area, the most powerful collective political actor is the provincial government. It has used its constitutional authority to radically upscale regional thinking to include a large portion of central Ontario now referred to as the Greater Golden Horseshoe, a region of some 8 million people. This upscaling has been supported by two key pieces of provincial legislation – a Greenbelt Act and a growth management plan called Places to Grow. As noted above, the province of Ontario is,
Conclusion
How can renewal come to the politics of infrastructure in the in-between city? The ideology of neo-liberal governance seemed so deeply ingrained that, in spite of ever-increasing tallies of infrastructure maintenance shortfalls and the reality of bridges and light standards collapsing onto freeways, the likelihood of governments in Canada (or Ontario or Greater Toronto) generating and freeing up the billions of dollars necessary for basic infrastructure maintenance appeared remote. The
Acknowledgements
Research for this paper has been funded by a grant under the direction of Roger Keil, Patricia Wood and Douglas Young. The project is called “In-between Infrastructure: Urban Connectivity in an Age of Vulnerability”. It was sponsored under the Peer Reviewed Research Studies (PRRS) program of Infrastructure Canada. Some financial support was also provided by Toronto Community Housing Company, one of the community partners to the project.
We thank Rob Fiedler for producing the maps for this
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