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Abstract
This paper examines governance reform in the Toronto area through the lens of literature on state rescaling. Over the past 20 years, Toronto has been the site of numerous initiatives to shift the spatial contours of urban governance. Viewing these as varied manifestations of the practice of state rescaling allows for a broad analysis of empirical patterns and trends, and informs the empirically underdeveloped literature on state rescaling with new evidence. The paper presents an inductive, historical, and agent-centered account of governance reform in Toronto. It finds that while state rescaling often originates as a response to the policy challenges arising from social change, economic restructuring, and urban growth, actual rescaling practices are shaped by a variety of locally contingent institutional and political factors. It also argues that in recent years, the long-standing practice of jurisdictional rescaling, which involves comprehensive scalar shifts in governing authority, has largely been replaced by task-specific rescaling, characterized by problem-driven initiatives to mobilize governing authority across multiple governing scales. The paper discusses the causes and the broader implications of this shift.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Gabriel Eidelman, Annika Hinze, Andrew Sancton, James M. Smith, and two anonymous reviewers for reading earlier drafts of this paper and providing valuable ideas. The paper is stronger for their input. I also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting much of the research on which this paper is based.
Notes
1. This paper does not report results from a single research project. Rather, it draws on primary documentation and research conclusions derived from several past and current research projects conducted by the author. These include work on amalgamation (Horak Citation1998), multilevel policy-making (Horak Citation2008, Citation2012; Horak and Young Citation2012), and neighborhood revitalization in Toronto (Horak and Dantico forthcoming), as well as current research on transit governance in large Canadian cities. It also draws on other published work on Toronto politics and governance.
2. The state rescaling literature has also engaged with the rescaling of authority from the public to the private sectors in the urban field (Buchs 2009), but this paper restricts its focus to rescaling among state institutions.
3. The ability of the state rescaling literature to examine the role of ideological conflict in a nuanced manner is limited by a tendency to group distinct ideological positions under the broad umbrella of neoliberalism, often through the use of terminological qualifiers such as ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (cf. Peck, Theodore, and Brenner Citation2009).
4. I use the capitalized term ‘City’ to refer to the municipality of Toronto, as opposed to the ‘city’ as an urban form.
5. Toronto now leads Western cities in high-rise construction. By 2015, the city will be home to 44 high-rises exceeding 150 meters, more than triple the number in 2005 (Pigg Citation2012).
6. Amalgamation later became a province-wide strategy. The1999 Legislative Act that rolled this out was tellingly named the ‘Fewer Municipal Politicians Act.’
7. The new costs in Toronto were partly offset by provincially mandated pooling of social service and social housing costs across the GTA, introduced in response to intense lobbying by the new City of Toronto. Mandated pooling was abolished in 2013 by the provincial Liberal government.
8. The New Deal campaign also introduced a task-specific rescaling demand – namely, a push for restoration of intergovernmental funding support for transit infrastructure, which had disappeared in the downloading of the late 1990s. Space constraints prohibit discussion of this initiative, but see Horak (Citation2008) for more.
9. In addition to suburban transit infrastructure projects, Metrolinx is currently managing construction of a rail link from downtown Toronto to Pearson International Airport and is coordinating the rollout of an integrated transit fare card for GTA, the Presto card.