Toronto’s Tent Encampments: Excavating Northwestern Informalities and State Ambiguities

This Major Paper examines the ambiguities of municipal state regulation in relation to the dwelling practices of Toronto’s unhoused and the difficulties navigating urban space by marginalized publics in the context of two overlapping crises: an affordable housing crisis and a public health emergency. This paper argues tent encampments are a persistent mode of urban informality in the global northwest, where tents and other small structures provide a source of housing when faced with limited access and affordability. Throughout the pandemic, tent encampments proliferated across the City of Toronto, an increase linked to the heightened risk of COVID-19 transmission within congregate emergency shelters. However, tent encampments are not a novel occurrence and typically occupy the ‘interstitial' spaces of the city. Using the case study of Toronto, the analysis investigates how urban informality is (co)produced and (co)mediated in and through the state and civil society. The findings suggest the local state—at times ambiguous and negotiated relative to an array of civil society actors, property relations, and desirable formalities—routinely enforces encampment clearances on public property and influences encampment demolitions on private property. The paper explores alternative conceptualizations of tent encampments before proposing an urbanism of empathy aimed at centring those at the forefront of the discussion: unhoused people experiencing homelessness in Toronto.