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Item Open Access Delivering sustainable buildings and communities: eclipsing social concerns through private sector-led urban regeneration and development(Taylor & Francis, 2009-08) Bunce, Susannah; Moore, SusanItem Open Access Developing sustainability: sustainability policy and gentrification on Toronto's waterfront(Taylor & Francis, 2009-08) Bunce, SusannahA “three pillar” concept of sustainability guides the current publicly funded planning and redevelopment process on Toronto’s waterfront. While this concept serves as a guiding framework, sustainability is largely defined in planning and redevelopment policy and practice by multi-level public sector urban intensification policy and a reliance on the private sector-led implementation of new sustainable communities. This study connects perspectives on “policy-led gentrification” and “third-wave gentrification” with an exploration of public plans and development strategies for the new West Don Lands waterfront neighbourhood. It traces how sustainability objectives are integrated into a gentrification process driven by public sector planning and development policies and private sector development interests. Components of the integration of sustainability into gentrification practices are the sale of publicly owned waterfront lands to private developers and public sector financial and educational incentives for private real estate development that meets Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design sustainability targets.Item Open Access Urban Expansion and Industrial Nature: A Political Ecology of Toronto's Port Industrial District(Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008-09) Desfor, Gene; Vesalon, LucianThis article analyses political and economic practices involved with the production of an industrial form of socio-nature - the Port Industrial District - during the early decades of the twentieth century in Toronto, Canada. Informed by historical documents from that period, as well as using contemporary concepts from urban theory, we analyse the creation of a major land mass and southern extension of Toronto within a political ecology framework. We explicitly link the concept of socio-nature with the dynamics suggested by theories of capital and spatial expansion, thereby bringing 'nature' into a more central position in understanding urban development processes. The Toronto Harbour Commissioners, the central organization in this land-creation process, reflected, we argue, more the ideological preferences and economic interests of local elites than an efficient institutional design for solving a multi-dimensional 'waterfront problem '. The harbour commission and its supporters envisioned and promoted the new industrial district, the pivotal section of its 1912 waterfront development plan, as a general strategy for intensifying industrialization and growth of the city. The massive infrastructure project is best understood as a spatio-temporal fix to productively absorb capital through spatial expansion and temporal deferment. A new institutional arrangement consolidated political and economic relations through practices that made possible the production of a new form of socio-nature and reshaped the eastern section of Toronto's central waterfront as an industrial landscape.Item Open Access Changing Urban Waterfronts' Seminar Series Report - Revised(09/06/2008) Bunce, SusannahThis Seminar Series Report summarizes research presentations made by members of York University's Changing Urban Waterfronts' (CUW) research project in the spring of 2008. The Series focused on the central theme of the project - the interrelationship of society and nature in the historical transformation of Toronto’s waterfront. This focus spans a chronological period of approximately one hundred years, culminating in the current redevelopment plans for the waterfront. The project’s emphasis on the intertwined processes of social and natural transformations in the changing landscape of Toronto’s waterfront suggests that political decisions, governance arrangements, engineering practices, and management techniques have a direct role in the shaping of natural places and forms. The natural landscape of Toronto’s waterfront has been produced by multiple human interventions. This focus necessitates an interdisciplinary research approach where researchers address both social and natural processes in their specific substantive areas and geographical sites of waterfront research. The CUW research project is a SSHRC funded project that began in 2005, with faculty and graduate student researchers from the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, the York University Archives, the Department of Geography, University of Toronto, and the Department of Environmental Studies, University of Vermont.Item Open Access Planning and the Development of Sustainability on the Central Waterfront(03/03/2008) Bunce, SusannahThis presentation by Dr. Susannha Bunce examines the current redevelopment plans for the central waterfront area of Toronto’s waterfront, which spans a geographic territory of ten kilometres from Sunnyside Beach at the western end and Ashbridge’s Bay at the eastern end. Based on policy research, interviews with government officials, planning and design practitioners, and land owners, and case study analysis of two specific central waterfront redevelopment areas, the West Don Lands and East Bayfront sites, Dr. Bunce discusses how the concept of sustainability has been integrated into the current redevelopment plans for these sites. Her research findings demonstrate a difference in the level of sustainability requirements between the West Don Lands and East Bayfront sites based upon the presence of sustainable design premiums and their relationship to the land appraisal and land sale processes in these areas.Item Open Access Walking on Water: The Politics of Land Creation(03/03/2008) Desfor, GeneThis presentation looks at how a particular form of socio-nature, the Port Industrial District, was produced through intertwined human and non-human processes and how this new land-form supported wealth accumulation in Toronto during the early twentieth century.Item Open Access Tracing the Social and Environmental History of the Don River(07/04/2008) Bonnell, JenniferThis presentation provides an overview of Jennifer Bonnell's dissertation research on the Don River in Toronto, highlighting among other themes the legacy of "imagined futures" for the river valley, and the competing perceptions of the valley as a "space for undesirables" and a space for regeneration, reflection and recreation.Item Open Access The ecosystem approach and the global imperative on Toronto’s Central Waterfront(Elsevier, 23/02/2007) Laidley, JenneferAs one of the ‘last great waterfronts’ to embrace what has become a near-ubiquitous post-fordist development model, the formerly industrial lands of Toronto’s Central Waterfront are currently being reshaped to provide the kinds of spaces and places that facilitate new modes of capital accumulation. In order to understand how Toronto’s waterfront has come to be mobilized to accommodate the imperatives of 21st-century global economic and spatial restructuring, this paper explores the area’s recent planning history, reviewing the policies and politics of waterfront planning activities undertaken over the past twenty years. A new and novel ‘ecosystem approach’ to waterfront planning was adopted in Toronto in this period that allowed its proponents to resolve historical problems that had formerly impeded new forms of waterfront development. This paper demonstrates that, in so doing, the ecosystem approach – and its use by a succession of influential waterfront planning bodies and processes – set the stage for the Central Waterfront to become a key site for the elite pursuit of world city status in Toronto.Item Open Access Introduction to "Political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations"(Elsevier, 06/04/2007) Bunce, Susannah; Desfor, GeneThis is an introductory chapter for a series of papers which focus on the political ecology of waterfronts in selected cities in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. The papers incorporate emphases on the myriad influences that different scales of social and environmental policy development and implementation, planning decisions, infrastructure funding, investment and ownership practices, and public engagement, for example, have on the social and ecological processes that occur on urban waterfronts. The authors posit that urban waterfronts are interesting and complex spatial locations that, when studied with attention to broader transformative processes as well as the changes that occur within the scale of the urban waterfront, allow for new insights into the production of nature, patterns of social entanglement, and political–economic configurations in cities.Item Open Access Shipbuilding and the Waterfront Plan of 1912(04/02/2008) Moir, MichaelItem Open Access Port City Relations: Global Spaces of Urban Waterfront Development(23/11/2007) Desfor, GeneUrban waterfronts have become key sites where global restructuring processes and local interests are engaged in complex struggles that are influencing the future of cities. The author discusses three issues related to these struggles. First, new waterfront spaces are emerging from a convergence of economic restructuring, globalization and technological changes. Second, port security has become an increasingly important factor in waterfront developments and port-city relations. And third, urban waterfront developments are part of the construction of socio-nature. Following a discussion of these issues, the author suggests that new policies are needed for waterfront development.Item Open Access List of Materials at the Changing Urban Waterfronts' Office(2008) Changing Urban WaterfrontsThis is a bibliographic listing of donated reference materials currently located in the Changing Urban Waterfronts' research office at York University. Health, Nursing, and Environmental Studies (HNES) Building, Room 240 (until March 31, 2009).Item Open Access Keys to the City: Waterfront Development in Toronto(2006-09) Laidley, Jennefer; Desfor, GeneThe article begins with a narrative of David Miller’s 2003 mayoral election victory not only because the waterfront has become, if not materially then certainly symbolically, central to his term of office, but also because it demonstrates how waterfront quays have become places with strategic political, economic, environmental and social value. The waterfront was central to Miller’s election victory and – contrary to the continuing complaint that ‘there’s nothing happening on the waterfront’ – has played a major role in city, regional and even national politics throughout his first term of office. We argue this is the case because the waterfront has become critical for wealth accumulation processes, and control of these processes is a major concern. Cities have long been recognized as prominent agglomerations in economic processes of production and reproduction and, at this particular historical juncture, waterfronts are one of the main sites where this occurs. http://www.socialistproject.ca/relay/relay13.pdfItem Open Access Waterfront News 1(1)(Changing Urban Waterfronts, 2007-01) Changing Urban WaterfrontsA newsletter of the Changing Urban Waterfronts research projectItem Open Access Toronto's Recent Waterfront Struggles: Much Ado About Nothing?(2006-01) Desfor, Gene; Laidley, JenneferThe article analyses a particular case of jurisdictional conflict in planning and developing Toronto's waterfront at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation and the Toronto Economic Development Corporation seemed to have different ideas about how to develop a site on the East Bayfront, and this article describes struggles between the organizations. It suggests that continuing battles betweeen these organizations is much ado about nothing for the majority of Toronto's diverse working class. http://www.socialistproject.ca/relay/relay09.pdfItem Open Access Waterfront News 1(2)(2007-04) Changing Urban WaterfrontsA newsletter of Toronto's Changing Waterfront research project. Current activities of the researchers are provided as is a brief summary of the project.