Metropolitics in Motion: The Dynamics of Transportation and State Reterritorialization in the Chicago and Toronto City-Regions

Abstract

The global economic crisis exposed the instability of financialized urban governance at precisely the moment when governing coalitions have launched ambitious, expensive plans to reimagine urban transportation infrastructure, driven by the imperatives of restoring accumulation amid intensifying economic and regional competition. In Chicago and Toronto, processes of urban restructuring and state reterritorialization disclose contradictory tendencies in the city-regions’ modes of urbanization. Tracing the contingent path-dependencies of transportation crises highlights tensions between, and within, preexisting metropolitan dynamics and an ascendant neoliberal city-regionalism. The mobilization of collective regional agency appears necessary to overcome the inertia of divisive metropolitan politics, yet the specific political–economic contexts of the case city-regions significantly condition the structural capacity of actors producing, and the potential articulation of, emergent city-regional governance.

Key words:

• urban restructuring
• governance
• transportation
• city-regions
• comparative urbanism

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the project entitled “Comparing Metropolitan Governance in Transatlantic Perspective: Toronto, Montreal, Paris and Frankfurt,” and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship provided by the Government of Ontario's Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism, and Elvin Wyly for his editorial support and encouragement. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the suggestions of Roger Keil, Robert Fiedler, Jeffery Strickland, Valerie Preston and Larry Bourne in developing the ideas present here, and extend my gratitude to the interviewees who took the time to share their expertise. All errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the author.

Notes

² Despite the tendency to construct a binary between the city and suburbs, Harris (1994) and Keating (2002) stress the heterogeneity of Chicago's suburbs in terms of social composition, political culture and urban form.

³ The multiplicity of city-regional spaces and political frameworks has led some critics to decry the “fuzziness” of the city-region concept, which is rendered further problematic by the contentious relationship between “abstract theorizing” and applied policy work (Markusen, 2003; Jonas and Ward, 2007b; Neuman and Hull, 2009). There are certainly grounds to these critiques, but, as Harding (2007) posits, the utility of the “city-region” centers on disclosing the relational geographies of territories which exhibit functional integrity, but lack administrative definition.

⁴ Spatial imaginaries, as “collectively shared internal worlds of thoughts and beliefs that structure everyday life,” alter social and political practices to become “‘permanences’ in the social process” (Boudreau, 2007, pp. 2596–2597).

⁵ The CTA was formed in 1945 and has owned and operated mass transit in Chicago and its inner suburbs since 1947, taking over from a series of bankrupt rapid transit and streetcar companies.

⁶ Given its importance to Chicago, the CTA was not restructured and was only subject to budgetary oversight by the RTA. The RTA's primary functions included adopting budgets, financial and capital plans, and coordinating and planning transit improvements (Young, 1998).

⁷ On March 19, 1974, following a heated campaign, voters in the six-county area narrowly approved establishing the RTA. Voting reflected the Chicago region's fragmented city-suburban geography with the 71% “yes” vote in the city of Chicago carrying the overall poll by a mere 12,979 ballots. The timing of the referendum to approve the RTA proved crucial (Tecson, 1976). Amendments to the Illinois Constitution in 1970 endowed the suburbs with new political power, but in 1974 they were not mature enough to oppose the power and dominance of the City of Chicago and Mayor Richard J. Daley's political machine (Allen, 1996; Bennett, 2010).

⁸ Metro's authority also included regional planning powers beyond its municipal borders.

⁹ The TTC-the public body owning and operating transit in Toronto-was established in 1921 as the Toronto Transportation Commission, in part out of the necessity to extend mass transit into the developing areas of the city where private transit firms refused to extend their operations (Frisken, 1984). The Commission was restructured as the Toronto Transit Commission with the creation of Metro, and assumed responsibility of providing transit within Metro's boundaries.

¹⁰ That Toronto had been able to continue with such developmental politics is in stark contrast to Chicago which had already developed an extensive built form and transit network by 1910. However, while development-driven politics declined in Metro, pro-development policies introduced by the Province have rapidly accelerated growth in the suburban municipal-regions since the 1980s. Only now are the limits of such urbanization being felt, notably in Mississauga where low taxes and municipal services have been supported by green-field development fees under the three-decade mayoralty of Hazel McCallion (Urbaniak, 2009).

¹¹ The Common-Sense Revolution fundamentally restructured the relations between Ontario's levels of govern- ment as Harris devolved “hard services” (property/infrastructure) to municipalities and uploaded “soft services” (education/health/welfare) to Queen's Park. Provincial transfers to public sector institutions decreased and subsidies to public transit agencies were drastically cut (Keil, 2002; Hackworth and Moriah, 2006).

¹² The Illinois Auditor General (2007) confirmed that existing financing mechanisms left Chicago-area transit underfunded, but pointed to competition between the CTA, Metra and Pace, high salaries, labor absenteeism, and poor regional leadership by the RTA as exacerbating the problem.

¹³ he RTA receives 15% of regional transit sales taxes and distributes the remaining monies between the CTA, Metra and Pace. The CTA receives all transit sales taxes collected in Chicago and 33% of Cook County revenues; Metra nets 55% of Cook County and 70% of collar county transit sales taxes while Pace obtains 15% of Cook County and 30% of collar county taxes.

¹⁴ The federal New Starts program is the primary financial mechanism funding locally planned and operated grade separated or fixed right-of-way transit projects (including heavy, light and bus rapid transit). Major infra-structure projects across the United States compete for funding with the Federal Transit (footnote continues) Administration evaluating applications and placing restrictions on where money can be spent. While Chicago's plans for transit expansion-extensions to the Red, Orange and Yellow “L's”, and a new inner-city Circle Line-were not eligible for stimulus monies (as projects were required to be shovel-ready), transit infrastructure financing is buffered, to a degree, from the impact of local and macroeconomic crises as projects are locked into New Starts. The process of selecting and prioritizing which projects enter the New Starts process, however, remains political; the prioritization of the Circle Line reflects the City's commitment to boosting development in the heart of the global city over investing in rapid transit for poorer areas on the urban periphery through the Red Line extension (Fig. 1).

¹⁵ While reflecting a regional spatial imaginary, Metrolinx Board initially internalized the metropolitics of munici- pal jurisdictions, and was comprised of: two appointees from the Province; four from Toronto (including Mayor Miller and TTC chair Giambrone); one each from Hamilton, Durham, Halton, Peel and York Regions (Government of Ontario, 2006).

¹⁶ Although the federal government's Economic Action Plan injected funding for infrastructure into the Canadian economy, Ottawa targeted these investments at revitalizing existing facilities (Government of Canada, 2011) and demurred further funding to Metrolinx (Munro, 2010).

¹⁷ By framing Transit City as LRT, the City and TTC intended to distance the technology from existing streetcars and to project an image of European urbanization. LRT would serve a different function to subways in Toronto's suburbs, providing more localized service and frequent stops, and be visibly integrated into redevelopment efforts in priority neighborhoods.

¹⁸ Several scholars have pointed to an abandonment of public transit's social goals under neoliberalism (Grengs, 2005; Farmer, 2011), but the historical trajectories of transportation planning and policy in Chicago and Toronto reveal that discourses of economic competitiveness, urban growth and environmental sustainability (notably in response to the Oil Crises of the 1970s) characterized the infrastructural politics of spatial Keynesianism in North America