The work of crisis framing: Claims of social justice obscuring a history and, likely future, of uneven investment in Moss Park, Toronto

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the knowledge production practices and mobilizations in public and popular discourse that have discursively shaped the most recent initiative to revitalize Moss Park and the community center located within it—More Moss Park, a US$100 million public-private partnership between the municipal government, The 519, an LGBTQ-focused community center, and an anonymous private donor. We examine the production of territorial stigma vis-a-vis crisis place-frames that characterize Moss Park as a neighborhood in crisis and how this framing shapes the interventions planned for the park and community center. While the planning process has adopted social justice rhetoric within its public participation activities, we argue that this is actually an indication of the neoliberalization of social justice that works to buttress interventions that will exacerbate the already existing inequalities within the neighborhood while simultaneously undermining more socially just approaches. Through historical and contemporary media analysis and qualitative interviews with community stakeholders, we argue these interventions trivially improve the stigmatized elements of the park, including aging public infrastructures and those that seek refuge in the park, while obscuring, and consequently not addressing, the underlying structures that have created the conditions of uneven life experience in Toronto. We believe that analyzing the More Moss Park initiative through a focus on crisis-framing and territorial stigma exposes key barriers to the types of interventions that may enact meaningful change in the well-being of the neighborhood’s stigmatized individuals and families—and in many cases, actually work to reproduce deepening inequities.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the time and generosity of our interviewees who informed this work. Additionally, we would like to thank Thomas Boren, Ilda Lourenco Lindell, and Anthony Ince for their role in initially organizing a series of panels at the Nordic Geographers Meeting in 2017 and their subsequent efforts to realizing this special issue of the Journal of Urban Affairs. Moreover, this paper benefitted from the careful and generative suggestions of anonymous reviewers. Finally, we acknowledge the support for undergraduate research at the University of Toronto through the Research Opportunity Program. All responsibility for claims in this paper are solely ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keisha St. Louis-McBurnie

Keisha St. Louis-McBurnie is a graduate student completing her Master of Science in Planning (MScPl) at the University of Toronto in the Department of Geography and Planning. Her research focuses on processes of neighborhood change and alternative community economic development models.

Nikki Mary Pagaling

Nikki Mary Pagaling recently completed her Honours Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto in Human Geography & Urban Studies. Her research interests include environmental (in)justice, contested urban spaces, and Filipino-Canadian geographies.

David J. Roberts

David J. Roberts is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, and the Director of the Urban Studies Program, Innis College, at the University of Toronto. His research interests include the geographies of race and racialization, urban infrastructure planning, and the politics of public participation in urban knowledge production and policymaking.