Old Mega-Projects Newly Packaged? Waterfront ...

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00830.x

Old Mega-Projects Newly Packaged? Waterfront Redevelopment in Toronto UTE LEHRER and JENNEFER LAIDLEY

Abstract The mega-project is experiencing revived interest as a tool for urban renewal. The current mode of large-scale urban development is, however, different from its predecessor in so far as its focus is flexible and diverse rather than singular and monolithic. However, the diversity that the new approach offers, we argue, forecloses upon a wide variety of social practices, reproducing rather than resolving urban inequality and disenfranchisement. Further, we suggest that the diversity of forms and land uses employed in these mega-projects inhibits the growth of oppositional and contestational practices. The new mega-project also demonstrates a shift from collective benefits to a more individualized form of public benefit. The article is based on Toronto’s recent waterfront development proposals, which we identify as an example of a new paradigm of mega-project development within the framework of the competitive city. Its stated but paradoxical goal is to specialize in everything, allowing for the pretence that all interests are being served while simultaneously re-inscribing and reinforcing socioeconomic divisions. Our findings are centred on four areas: institutional change; the importance of mega-projects to global interurban competition; the exclusive nature of public participation processes; and the increasing commodification and circumscription of urban public space. We have all agreed on the imperative of revitalizing Toronto’s waterfront (Robert Fung, Chairman, Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation1).

Introduction In November 1999, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Ontario Premier Mike Harris and Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman gathered on the city’s waterfront to announce their tripartite support for a massive, long-term plan for redeveloping the city’s 46 km waterfront. The 30 year, $17 billion plan envisioned ‘a new waterfront for a new millennium’ that would be ‘the most exciting people place in North America’, acting as ‘a green gateway to the City, a destination for people across Canada, and a magnet to tourism and investment from across North America and around the world’ (City of Toronto, 1999: i–3). This waterfront vision was one of diversity of use, including not The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Susan Fainstein and Fernando Diaz Orueta for their constructive comments that helped to improve the article. Various versions of this article were presented at the International Sociological Association, Durban (2006), Critical Geography Conference, Columbus, Ohio (2006), American Association of Geographers, San Francisco (2007), and ISA-Research Committee 21, Vancouver (2007). The support of the Social Science and Humanities Council, Canada, under grants #410-2005-2202 and #410-2005-2071, is acknowledged. 1 Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (2002: 3). © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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only ‘year-round cultural and recreational activities, attractions and facilities’ and a ‘healthy lakefront eco-system’, new wetlands and shoreline protection programs, but also ‘a full range of housing choices affordable to all members of our community’ and ‘new accommodation for tourists’ as well as a ‘better home for Toronto’s growing and internationally-competitive “imagination industries” such as new media, film, animation, and digital creations’ (City of Toronto, 1999: 11–23). Almost a decade later, this vision of revitalization continues to prevail, and hinges on benefits such as accessibility, sustainability, and the fostering of creativity and diversity. In this scheme, economic revitalization depends on social and environmental revitalization. Toronto is not unique in viewing its waterfront as a site from which to respond to the consequences of economic restructuring. Its current wave of waterfront development is in many ways comparable to similar strategies in cities around the world that have used spectacular residential, commercial and cultural projects to turn abandoned waterfront sites into thriving areas attracting global capital. From the deregulated, market-driven project of Docklands regeneration in London (Hinsley and Malone, 1996; Florio and Brownill, 2000) to the ‘quality development’ of luxury housing and high-tech commercial space constructed on Copenhagen’s waterfront (Desfor and Jørgensen, 2004) and the creation of globalized ‘landscapes of desire’ along the Yarra River in Melbourne (Sandercock and Dovey, 2002) among a plethora of other examples (see Malone, 1996; Rodriguez et al., 2001; Swyngedouw et al., 2002; McNeill and TwedwrJones, 2003; Del Cerro, 2007), many Western waterfront cities have been impacted by similar processes of ‘suburbanization’, deindustrialization and the decline of port-related activities that accompanied economic restructuring and technological change, opening up these waterfront spaces for new, highly globalized uses and associated reconfigurations of governance technologies and new (de)regulatory frameworks. As a strategy for urban renewal, Toronto’s current waterfront scheme stands in the tradition of the mega-project, a tradition that throughout the twentieth century was widely used for encouraging major capital investment in the built environment. However, unlike the ‘old’ mega-projects, which were focused on a single purpose, such as hydroelectric dams for energy production or freeways for improved transport of people and goods, Toronto’s waterfront exemplifies a new kind of mega-project. These new megaprojects are the ultimate in mixed-use, including housing with various forms of tenure and size, integrated with retail and office space, surrounded by publicly accessible parkland and natural amenities, and supported by community and cultural facilities. But while this diversity seems to offer all possible options, appearing as the new urban panacea in which the various interests of an imagined ‘everyone’ are purportedly advanced, and while the rhetoric surrounding the new mega-project conveys a concern for plurality, we argue that its reality forecloses upon a wide variety of social practices, reproducing rather than resolving urban inequality and disenfranchisement. Further, we argue that the diversity of forms and uses employed in these mega-projects inhibits the growth of oppositional and contestational practices, fragmenting opposition through the wide range of choices and options offered. This article critically investigates these claims about the new mega-project through an examination of the policies and practices employed in the case of the redevelopment of Toronto’s waterfront. Following a comparison of the forms of historical and contemporary mega-projects, we situate Toronto within the competitive city literature. We then analyse various aspects of Toronto’s waterfront redevelopment as they relate to the new mega-project paradigm: the historical institutional context; the vision for or aspirations of revitalization; participatory planning practices in what we want to call the world class, trickle-down waterfront; and finally the problematic nature of public space in Toronto and its use as an argument in favour of the mega-project. We are particularly interested in the outcomes of the new mega-projects in regard to disenfranchisement and the production of urban inequality. We suggest that the case of Toronto’s waterfront development is a new paradigm of mega-project development within the framework of the competitive city, as its stated but paradoxical goal is to specialize in everything, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Ute Lehrer and Jennefer Laidley

allowing for the pretence that all interests are being served while simultaneously reinscribing and reinforcing socioeconomic divisions.

Mega-projects old and new The term ‘mega-project’ has traditionally been used to describe large-scale capital investments focused on a single purpose, particularly in the case of infrastructure projects such as transportation networks and power facilities, that were historically undertaken in the provision of public goods. While one could argue that large-scale projects have been around at least since the construction of the Egyptian Pyramids, mega-projects became prominent with industrialization, both as large-scale capital investment and as ideology — in North America first in the form of the City Beautiful Movement and then as Urban Renewal policies (Lehrer, 2002). Freeways, airports and train stations are all examples of mega-projects, as are large public housing developments. These mega-projects were often based on the ideal of democratizing society and distributing a ‘fair share’ of their benefits, such as electricity, job security or housing. As such, they stand in the tradition of modernity, being deeply inculcated in prevailing ideologies of societal progress and improvement. Typical of the modernist state-building period and of Keynesian state interventions between 1930 and 1970, these large-scale ‘old’ mega-projects generated increasing levels of resistance from the 1960s on and became emblematic of a destructive approach to development due to their impacts on communities and the environment (Frieden and Sagalyn, 1989: 41–9). Nonetheless, this type of mega-project continues to be built: the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France, the Three Gorges Dam in Guangdong, Toronto’s Pearson Airport Expansion, among many others. Many of these mega-projects, such as the Big Dig in Boston, the Los Angeles Subway line, and the Denver International airport, are legendary for their cost overruns.2 The proponents of such projects were successful by using what Bent Flyvbjerg calls the Machiavellian formula: ‘a fantasy world of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued regional development effects’ (Flyvbjerg, 2005: 18). Based on a study of several hundred projects in more than 20 countries (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003), Flyvbjerg questions the ‘professional expertise of engineers, economists, planners and administrators’ in terms of accountability and argues that ‘their claims about costs and benefits mostly cannot be trusted and should be carefully examined by independent specialists and organizations and should be open to public scrutiny’ (Flyvbjerg, 2005: 22). Based on these contradictions, Flyvbjerg calls the continuing practice of investing in large-scale projects the ‘mega-project paradox’. And yet this paradox continues. But, increasingly, these investments are made in a new kind of mega-project: from the late 1980s on, while the term has increasingly been employed as an analytical concept within the academic literature, its meaning has expanded to include a variety of mixed-use large-scale developments. The early appearance of the term in this context referred mainly to ‘huge private sector commercial development incorporating all kinds of land-use usually associated with a central business district’ (Home, 1989: 119). In the case of Canary Wharf, Home suggests a direct connection with ‘the Thatcherite, deregulatory approach to inner city regeneration’, in that the flexibility of its ‘non-planning’ allowed for an urban renewal strategy which could more easily respond to market demand. In other cases, megaprojects were developed within relatively strict planning rules — for example in the case of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, at least 20% of the building volume had to be devoted to 2 Cost overruns, however, are not always the case: the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Empire State Building in New York City all stayed within budget (Flyvbjerg, 2005: 21). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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residential uses (Lehrer, 2002). Potsdamer Platz also demonstrates the increasing role of residential development in this type of mega-project. And, while these new types of urban mega-projects are most often found in former industrial districts in the inner city, they are also being developed in sub- and exurbia. These new mega-projects take the form of vast complexes characterized by a mix of uses, a variety of financing techniques, and a combination of public- and private-sector initiators (Olds, 2001). According to Kris Olds (2001), this new kind of urban megaproject involves a wholesale transformation of urban space, its built form and its specific land use(s) and, we would like to add, it therefore changes the social practices in these urban landscapes. One major difference that is of interest to us here is that the new mega-project is often undertaken by state actors operating in collaboration with private interests in the pursuit of elevating the position of city-regions within a competitive global system. Toronto’s current urban waterfront redevelopment scheme conforms to this concept of the new mega-project and makes a direct link between this strategy and revitalization: ‘Successful revitalizations are generally large, bold initiatives that generate early economic activity and establish the international presence of the city and its revitalization’ (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, 2002: 27). In order to investigate various aspects of the new mega-project, we turn now to the specific case of Toronto’s waterfront redevelopment. While similar in scale and scope to the megaprojects of old, Toronto’s waterfront illuminates significant differences that point to the changing nature of the institutional frameworks associated with urban development; the importance of mega-projects to urban economic futures; the internally contradictory but ultimately exclusive nature of public participation processes; and the increasing commodification and circumscription of urban public space.

Toronto as competitive city: from the ‘city that works’ to the ‘city that astonishes’ Toronto is Canada’s largest city. With 2.5 million inhabitants, it is the core of an urban region of 5.5 million. Traditionally the economic powerhouse of the country, it has recently undergone huge economic and political shifts. While hailed as the ‘city that works’ throughout the 1980s and 1990s by journalists and scholars alike (Donald, 2002), in 1998 the conservative provincial government forced the city to amalgamate with five neighbouring municipalities into one vast megacity. The provincial government’s rationale for amalgamation was based in large part on an aggressive program of urban competitiveness and the consolidation of an urban region with its own economic dynamics (Boudreau et al., 2007). Under this new political regime, policies and guidelines have shifted from maintaining the city that works to promoting a ‘city that astonishes’ (City of Toronto, 1999: 3) through a series of rebranding exercises and the promotion of various large-scale development projects. Economically, Canada’s ‘global city’ articulates the nation’s economy into global flows of capital, production, trade and consumption. Toronto’s transition since the 1980s from a manufacturing centre into a global city region has meant the displacement of traditional industries from the core (hence the availability of land near the water), the concentration of financial and other business services downtown, and the spread of a complex spatial division of labour throughout the vast urban region. ‘Creative’ industries have taken over the program of economic growth, culture has become a new incubator of urban development, and entertainment and tourism have rebounded from the double crisis suffered through 9/11 and SARS (City of Toronto, 2003a). As one of the main ports of entry for Canada’s continuingly strong immigration, the city-region is home to 43% of all annual newcomers to Canada (City of Toronto, 2006). Roughly 50% of its population are ‘visible minorities’, and the same proportion was born International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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outside of Canada. New waves of immigration are confronted with an increasingly segregated and divided socioeconomic structure, which makes integration a particularly tough task. Indeed, the city is seeing not only a widening income gap between the poor and the rich, but also between immigrant and non-immigrant groups — and particularly ‘visible minority’ groups — as well as increasingly spatially concentrated poverty in areas outside the downtown core (Ley and Smith, 2000; United Way of Greater Toronto, 2004). While in the 1970s Toronto’s socioeconomic map was populated mainly by middle-income earners, in recent years we see an alarming process of bifurcation where high-income earners are becoming dominant in the inner city, low-income earners are increasing in number and concentrating in the inner suburbs, and middle-income earners are rapidly disappearing (Hulchanski, 2007). Urban planning in Toronto has in recent years actively contributed to the construction of a ‘competitive city’: new planning regulations at both the municipal and provincial level have been created which focus on increasing Toronto’s economic attractiveness on a global scale, supplemented by an array of social, cultural, ecological and other place specific assets. The new vision for Toronto is focused on large-scale development projects, including plans for a grand new waterfront (Kipfer and Keil, 2002). As is the case in cities around the world, Toronto’s waterfront is currently being reshaped, literally and conceptually, in ways that respond to and engender the exigencies of global capitalism in a post-industrial, twenty-first century context (cf. Bunce and Young, 2004; Desfor et al., 2006; Laidley, 2007). Since the 1990s, redeveloping the waterfront has become a primary goal of those who wish to increase Toronto’s global competitiveness. In the next section we review the waterfront’s changing institutional framework and indicate the ways in which a series of agencies and bodies have shaped the vision for redevelopment, as well as recounting the details of this vision, its ethos of competitiveness, and the massive scale of its size and scope.

The case of waterfront development in Toronto Planning Toronto’s waterfront under changing institutional frameworks

Not unlike other cities whose history is directly tied to their location next to water, Toronto’s Central Waterfront has been the site of large-scale territorial transformation, economic activity, and public sector investment for nearly 100 years. Historically, a strong role in directing investment activities was played by a variety of governmental institutions. Between 1912 and the early 1940s, a federal-municipal body called the Toronto Harbour Commissioners (THC) invested $25 million in an ambitious program of lakefilling, building nearly 2,000 acres of new land intended to transform Toronto into an industrial and shipping powerhouse (Desfor, 1993). But by the late 1960s, Toronto experienced economic restructuring, technological change and industrial out-migration similar to those reshaping other urban centres. While the intensity of industrial and port-related use originally imagined by the THC had never been fully realized on the waterfront (ibid.), existing industry began to become obsolete or to relocate to more economically beneficial suburban or international sites. The waterfront began to be transformed into a ‘terrain of availability’ (Greenberg, 1996) and the THC, suffering from decreased revenues, began to sell parcels of its publicly held land to developers eager to erect new mixed-use residential and commercial projects (Desfor, 1993). The contentiousness of this practice was equalled only by the development of Harbourfront in the 1970s, a 118-acre residential-commercial-cultural project fronted by the federal government that inflamed public ire by supersizing its allowable densities, resulting in much higher and more bulky buildings than original plans had foreseen. In the following years, the many waterfront-mandated government bodies and agencies could not agree on what the newly available waterfront would become, industrial zoning continued to International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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hold sway, and the public began to complain bitterly about a lack of recreational opportunity and the seeming supremacy of market imperatives and private interest in waterfront development (Laidley, 2007). In 1989, the federal government appointed a Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront to provide suggestions to the various levels of government about how these problems could be rectified. The Royal Commission was headed by well-liked former Toronto mayor David Crombie, whose reputation for having placed limits on development had made him a favourite of the city’s liberal/progressive class. Over the course of the Royal Commission’s four-year tenure, Commissioner Crombie proposed 80 recommendations, integrating them all into an ‘ecosystem approach’ to planning that reconciled a variety of competing interests and ideologies into a single, environmentally focused mode of development. This approach quickly gained currency with both the public and governments and was incorporated into many institutional planning processes. The ‘ecosystem approach’ was also taken up by the Royal Commission’s successor organization, the Waterfront Regeneration Trust (the Trust), which was created as a public agency in 1992 to coordinate waterfront development and work to have the Royal Commission’s recommendations implemented. Under its 7-year public mandate, the Trust hosted a variety of workshops, consultations and planning processes that brought private-sector interests together with public-sector agencies, facilitating agreement on mixed-use zoning and, perhaps most influentially, recommending a system of ‘green infrastructure’ on the waterfront to accommodate public access and recreation concerns while simultaneously encouraging investment through improved environmental health and aesthetics. The Trust also took the rather unusual step of pursuing a bid for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, under the name TO-Bid. While eventually becoming a privatesector initiative, TO-Bid spent considerable time and public-sector funds on the early stages of coordinating interest in hosting an environmentally focused Olympic Games, in order to provide a globally scaled catalyst for waterfront development. The Games would partly take place on waterfront land, and while the bid was widely supported though ultimately unsuccessful, it contributed significantly to the resolution of outstanding waterfront issues. The creation of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC), a publicly constituted tripartite development body mandated to oversee a nearly wholesale reconstruction of the Central Waterfront starting with four Olympics-targeted priority projects, was a jurisdictional compromise that was reached in 2001. The Corporation brought together representation from all three levels of government — although elected officials were categorically excluded from its board — and was given the authority to act as the driving force behind the redevelopment project. In order to facilitate Olympic uses, the City rezoned portions of the waterfront as ‘mixed-use’ areas, opening up formerly industrial lands to a series of new uses and new opportunities. While the Olympic bid was eventually lost, the Corporation (under the new name it assumed in early 2007, Waterfront Toronto) continues to be the primary driver of waterfront redevelopment, coordinating its activities with a Waterfront Secretariat at the City of Toronto and with a variety of agencies operating at all levels of government. The institutional framework under which the waterfront in Toronto has been planned and developed over the past 100 years has changed from a joint federal–municipal body to a corporation that is funded by all three levels of government. This adjustment in institutional framework has been largely driven by a changing understanding of the role of waterfront land in the urban economy and of the various uses to which it should be put, but also by a growing acceptance of the importance of moving large-scale city-building processes away from the supposed inefficiency and self-interested influence of elected decision-makers, giving them over to structures and processes wherein accountability becomes less direct, transparency often declines in importance and public benefit is reconfigured toward private or privatized interests. While serious frustrations had been expressed in the past over the level of accountability demonstrated by the Toronto International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Harbour Commission in its large-scale transformations of the waterfront, virtually no similar concerns have been raised about turning responsibility over mega-project development to a corporate body. Public support has been high for the Corporation and, indeed, for the new waterfront vision as a whole. This level of public support exists despite the fact that the corporations that have encouraged and guided redevelopment of the waterfront have been allowed to make long-term lease and development deals without sharing the details of the contracts, thus circumscribing public accountability. An increasing number of criticisms have been made of this lack of transparency, coming from a variety of interests including the City of Toronto itself. And Waterfront Toronto has been criticized for an almost complete lack of disclosure of the ways in which it spends public funds. While the corporation is required by legislation to hold its board meetings in public, and while it publishes an annual report including audited financial statements, as one Toronto councilor has recently stated, ‘the web site of Waterfront Toronto provides very little information with regard to the description of contracts, their purpose and cost. Very little information, if any, is provided in the Minutes of the Board Meetings which are posted on the web site. Repeated attempts to obtain this information have been refused’ (City of Toronto, 2008: Notice of Motion M20.6). Since its incorporation in 2001, Waterfront Toronto has spent hundreds of millions of public dollars on countless consultants, reports, recommendations and projects. But as a corporation under the Province of Ontario’s Business Corporations Act — essentially a private entity relatively unencumbered by requirements of the public sector — Waterfront Toronto is not subject to the same freedom of information legislation that allows members of the public to obtain details on the expenditures of other government bodies. Despite this lack of transparency, there has been a distinct absence of resistance to waterfront revitalization from among the general public in Toronto. The Corporation has instead drawn kudos from many quarters for having finally taken steps to reunite the city with the lake. The reconnection has been characterized as a process of ‘revitalization’, a powerful term that implies the reintroduction of a lost vitality to the urban core and obfuscates both the object and subject of revitalization itself. The term also, however, acts as a catch-all, integrating a variety of other discourses under its singular and highly flexible rubric, mirroring the multiplicity of uses to which waterfront land will eventually be put and, by extension, implying that the mega-project will provide a variety of benefits, whether socioeconomic, environmental, or in terms of public access. The vision for the new waterfront

In 1999, under the leadership of then mayor Mel Lastman, the City published Our Toronto Waterfront! The Wave of the Future, a vision statement for redeveloping the waterfront and, concurrently, reimagining the city. As Toronto’s millennium project, waterfront redevelopment would provide an answer to the problems plaguing the region: ‘Our new waterfront will be a model to the world of how economic development, environmental protection, and cultural and recreational growth can go hand in hand, each complementing the other’ (City of Toronto, 1999: 3). And with the Olympic bid acting as a catalyst, redevelopment of the waterfront would serve as a magnet to tourism and international investment, transforming Toronto into the ‘city that astonishes’. The vision included recreating wetlands that had earlier been destroyed, building a green corridor along the edge of the city, cleaning up the beaches, constructing a new parks system, making the natural environment hospitable for wildlife and creating entertainment facilities that could operate both in summer and in winter. Two thousand acres of new parkland would be added, almost doubling the already existing acreage, and 100,000 new trees would be planted. In this initial report, the City committed $72 million, an amount that was later increased significantly as other levels of government became committed to stimulating the economy by redeveloping Toronto’s 46 km long shoreline and adjacent lands (City of Toronto, 1999). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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By applying an integrated vision that would unfold over the next several decades, the authors of Wave of the Future argued, Toronto would not only catch up to but ultimately bypass other cities that had also revitalized old industrial sites, such as Barcelona, London, Sydney and New York (City of Toronto, 1999: 5). Development would follow the environmentally friendly principles of cleaning up degraded and contaminated postindustrial lands, allowing access to the waterfront, beautifying the city, and providing a great variety of activities to boost Toronto’s reputation as a tourist destination, and create new investment and jobs. All this would happen with a high level of public participation. Strategic public investment would not only provide long-term benefits but also spark a ‘virtuous cycle’ of economic development through private sector investment, allowing significantly underused areas (such as the 1000-acre Port Industrial District) to be reborn as vibrant mixed-use districts, with residential, industrial, business and recreational activities. The statement therefore explicitly asks for the input and participation of the private sector, including planning and design professionals, as well as the general public (City of Toronto, 1999). Shortly after this initial report, the Waterfront Redevelopment Task Force was put into place. The Task Force was mandated to operationalize the vision of the Wave of the Future document, and to report to Toronto Council on project costs, timing and the ways in which government could partner with the private sector to achieve success. The Task Force’s report provided recommendations on a governance structure, which was a private corporation given autonomous authority and control, a financial plan, made up of initial public sector investment in infrastructure and aesthetic improvements to spur private sector investment, and a land-use plan, which mirrored the mixed-use vision of the earlier report but specified locations for residential, commercial, recreational, and lightindustrial ‘clean and green’ uses. The Task Force report also mirrored the rhetoric of the earlier report, specifically locating waterfront redevelopment within the framework of global inter-city competition — the report states that the project is necessary ‘to maintain [Toronto’s] role as a major world city’ (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Task Force, 2000: 4) and to ‘position Toronto at the forefront of modern cities’ (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Task Force, 2000: 14). In endorsing the Task Force report, the City committed $500 million, with equal contributions coming from the Province of Ontario and the Federal Government of Canada. This $1.5 billion would in part go toward a system of ‘green infrastructure’ — a discursive conflation of hard infrastructure (like sewerage and roads) with green surfaces (like parks, bicycle paths, ‘renaturalized’ habitats and street-side tree plantings) — that would improve public access and recreational opportunities while laying the aesthetic and public services foundation for private development. ‘Green infrastructure’ would, in turn, leverage interest from the private sector in making the much more significant investment necessary — in the order of $13 billion (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, 2006) — to entirely redevelop the 46 km long shoreline and its adjacent lands. The City then set about transforming the vision of the Task Force report into the legal requirements of a new waterfront Secondary Plan.3 Adopted by the City of Toronto in 2003, the Secondary Plan allows for a wide mix of uses on waterfront land, integrating residential, commercial, cultural, recreational and ecological development into a massive revitalization effort that promises, over 30 years, to transform the 2,000-acre waterfront into ‘one of the great waterfronts of the world’ (City of Toronto, 2001). After its incorporation in 2001, the TWRC produced its Development Plan and Business Strategy, which makes this point more directly. The Strategy states that ‘the perceived status of 3 The Secondary Plan is adopted as an amendment to the Official Plan of a municipality and complements its more general policies. The purpose of a Secondary Plan is to guide planning approaches for large areas of lands by outlining goals, objectives and policies that govern its future development and redevelopment (City of Toronto, 2003b). Usually it includes policies related to land uses, development constraints, etc. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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cities around the world is of critical importance to our city’ and that waterfront development would improve Toronto’s status; ‘The end result of this work will be Toronto securing its place as a world class city’ (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, 2002: 6–7). Most recently, the Corporation has made significant progress on remediating contaminated land and beginning construction of a major new mixed-use development and a 17-acre park in the area known as the West Don Lands (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, 2005; Waterfront Toronto, 2008). The boosterism of former mayor Lastman is being continued, albeit in a somewhat subdued manner, by the City’s progressive mayor David Miller who, since his election in 2003, continues to tout the waterfront as a key site of competitiveness for the future. And plans for the redevelopment project continue to be based on the originally envisioned, massive scale of a mega-project: a $17 billion total investment, a 30-year timeframe, 194,000 personyears of employment, 30,000 new full-time jobs, 40,000 new residential units, 7.6 million square feet of new commercial space, 500 acres of new and improved parks and recreational areas, and more (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, 2002: 6–7, 28–29). Nonetheless, the waterfront mega-project has been hampered by continued infighting among major players, putting it into jeopardy on several occasions. The City of Toronto’s arms-length economic development agency, the Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO),4 has been particularly notorious in this regard, making decisions about major development projects that run directly counter to Waterfront Toronto’s plans. Two of its recent land deals — a new 30-acre film production complex in the Portlands called Filmport, as well as an office headquarters for the 1,300 employees of Corus Entertainment on the eastern waterfront — have raised questions about the propriety of TEDCO’s practice of signing long-term leases for public land under conditions that are not shared with the public. For this and other reasons, in a recent major move by Mayor Miller, TEDCO has been dissolved, its control over waterfront lands likely to be handed over to Waterfront Toronto (Hume, 2008). The intention, it appears, is to consolidate all waterfront development authority in Waterfront Toronto, and to create the conditions in which the plans created by the Task Force hold ultimate sway. These plans frame development in terms of its purported cultural and socioeconomic benefits, supported by two rhetorical streams. The first, that of ‘world class culture’, asserts that the waterfront should be developed in ways that will lend an ephemeral aura of distinction to the city and thereby make Toronto more closely resemble other world cities. The other highlights the importance of ‘world class creatives’. The internationally recognized waterfront, this rhetorical strategy asserts, will attract the ‘creative classes’ that have become so desired by urban regions around the world. These new residents, it is declared, will bring with them not only their own disposable incomes but also their entrepreneurial spirit, thereby creating new economic opportunities, spin-off economic benefits such as new jobs, more tax dollars and, through the ‘virtuous cycle’, more municipal services. Both of these streams derive from the well-worn urban development strategy in which the ‘ “real” myth of globalization’ (Swyngedouw, 2000: 64), and more particularly the imperatives of the global economy, override any other, perhaps more traditionally ‘local’ concerns. Toronto’s place in the global world order is primary, it is claimed, and must be secured through a revitalization that recognizes ‘ “place” as a central component of competitiveness’ (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, 2002: 7) in order to contend with its ‘competitor cities’ like Chicago and Boston.

4 Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO) was founded in 1986 as an Urban Development Corporation with the aim of redeveloping unused lands, primarily in the interest of job creation. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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We conclude that, from the inception of the strategy in the Wave of the Future! document, through the report of the Task Force, to the TWRC’s Development Plan and Business Strategy of 2002, and the creation of the City of Toronto’s Central Waterfront Secondary Plan in 2003, the overriding imperative and underlying rationale is to guarantee Toronto’s place on the world stage, to solidify Toronto’s status as a ‘world city’ and to ensure that Toronto is able to compete in increasingly flexible and open global economic and labour markets. Over the past 10 years, this strategy has been actively promoted by the City itself, which has created new semi-public corporations to oversee its implementation. This constitutes a major shift, away from a direct role for the state in financing the mega-project and toward the highly speculative and indirect fostering of private investment in order to ensure the mega-project’s successful construction.

Waterfront development: inscribing disenfranchisement and constructing inequality Public participation and the creation of the ‘city that astonishes’

Beginning in the 1990s, various planning processes for large-scale redevelopment of the waterfront have explicitly promised a high level of public involvement, giving Torontonians confidence that that they would be enfranchised in terms of helping to determine the waterfront’s future. For example, in 1998, TO-Bid chair David Crombie held a series of special meetings to allow Torontonians to comment on plans for developing the waterfront in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games. The meetings were clearly characterized as an opportunity for the public to speak their mind and, according to a TO-bid staffer, they would constitute formal exercises in public participation; ‘records will be kept’ (Infantry, 1998) and, presumably, public input would be incorporated into the plans. Even then Metro Councillor Jack Layton, who opposed the bid for being a ‘circus’ when Torontonians needed ‘bread’, was optimistic that, with the leadership of the socially conscious Crombie, this process would be characterized by a greater respect for the impact of the project on local residents and would include a clear strategy for redistribution of the mega-event’s costs and benefits (ibid.). Not everyone was as optimistic, however. City Councillor Michael Walker felt that the public consultation process was ‘like a sham, consulting after you’ve made all the decisions’. With the $2.3 billion Games bid enjoying a high degree of support from city councillors, the Canadian Olympic Association and corporate donors, ‘it wouldn’t matter what the people said, they’re proceeding’ (quoted in Infantry, 1998). Councillor Walker’s perception of the processes of public participation in Toronto’s waterfront development have largely been borne out over the past decade as the promise of public input has been replaced by the reality of quasi-private planning schemes. As early as 2000, it was clear that waterfront redevelopment would be planned for and decided on behind closed doors. The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Task Force, for example, was made up entirely of private-sector actors, most of whom had particular empathies with the development industry (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Task Force, 2000: 10). As described above, the Task Force’s report, unveiled in early 2000, defined and territorialized the broad strokes of the Wave of the Future report (1999), outlining a development plan that would see the waterfront lands take a particular shape, with the emphasis on attracting global capital. For their report, the Task Force held no public meetings, conducted no surveys of local residents and made no public statements. It did, however, consult with and seek advice from senior real estate and finance executives, corporate strategy experts and urban design, engineering and production consultants (Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Task Force, 2000: Appendix), all of whom have close ties to global corporate networks. These members of Toronto’s growth coalition, by International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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virtue of their proximity to the work of the Task Force, have formed and consolidated particular networked relationships of power with the new governance structures operating on the waterfront that give them the ability to shape the planning process according to their own — and global capital’s — requirements. By contrast, other civil society actors, such as members of anti-poverty organizations, advocates for social housing and many other members of the local polity, have no such relationships and thus their vision for waterfront change remains unvoiced. In integrating the vision of the Task Force into its Secondary Plan, the City of Toronto held a short series of public consultation meetings in the fall of 2001. Characterizations of these meetings show that they were not consultative in any more than a tokenist sense (cf. Arnstein, 1969). Rather, the preconceived ‘grand schemes and ambitious designs’ of the private-sector Task Force were put on display, which the City’s Chief Planner was said to have ‘sold’ to the public (James, 2001). Thus, both the scale and the scope of public participation were reduced to the mandatory legal requirements for consultation as laid out in Ontario’s Planning Act. Since this time, Waterfront Toronto has taken the lead on public consultation. It has hired experienced consultants to run a long and involved series of public meetings, forums and symposia on various areas and aspects of waterfront redevelopment, which have been greeted with enthusiasm by both the City and the public. These public consultation processes have drawn accolades from community-based stakeholders and have even won awards for their scope and quality (Waterfront Toronto, 2008). Despite the praise, however, it should be noted that the majority of people who participated in these processes have been well-established citizens who live in the downtown core, have professional careers and are able to represent their interests by taking the initiative themselves. While consultation meetings were well attended, neither Waterfront Toronto nor the City undertook to actively engage with poorer inner-city neighborhoods, such as Regent Park or Parkdale, or with people living in the increasingly impoverished outlying areas of the city, to get input on their needs for a redeveloped waterfront. Given that waterfront development has been working under an agenda to give access to the lake to all Torontonians (City of Toronto, 1999; 2001; Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Task Force, 2000; Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, 2002; 2003), this lack of concern for anything but already enfranchised populations demonstrates an active disregard for particular populations in this new mega-project. In analysing the Toronto waterfront case as an example of the ‘new mega-project’, we find that while a high degree of consultation with the public has taken place, both the consultation processes and the development vision continue to perpetuate inequality and disenfranchisement through the passive but specific exclusion of particular communities and groups. We conclude, therefore, that the traditional processes of public policy creation on the waterfront — wherein the democratic structures of local government set the vision for redevelopment — have essentially been privatized, giving a small group of globally networked, local private-sector actors with finance capital and real estate development ties the ability to realize their vision and, in the process, reconstitute notions of the public good. Despite the degree to which some segments of the general population have been included in planning decisions, the underlying vision — one of a ‘world class’ waterfront — is the a priori condition on which these decisions rest, which constitutes a process of inscribing inequality and perpetuating disenfranchisement. The accessible waterfront: public space

The provision of public space is a major component of the rationale for Toronto’s waterfront mega-project. Indeed, the waterfront’s accessibility to the general public has been part of the political discourse in Toronto since the 1850s. As industry became increasingly replaced by condominium buildings in the 1970s, the public began to complain about the lack of accessibility to its own waterfront. Through the 1990s, this issue has been used in favour of arguments to dismantle the Gardiner Expressway, an International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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elevated inner-city highway running the length of Toronto’s Central Waterfront, which was blamed for cutting off the city from its water’s edge. A subtext of this discourse was to prime the land around the Gardiner for new real estate investment. By 2000, a large number of condominium towers very close to the Gardiner had been approved and the focus of the discourse of waterfront accessibility moved to the provision of access through the production of public space within the waterfront redevelopment scheme. While the Public Space Framework produced by the TWRC (2003: 1) calls for ‘a series of magnificent and engaging public spaces — the front door to new and emerging waterfront communities’, and while a number of international design competitions with ambitious entries5 have taken place, very little has yet been built. However, a recent experience with the production of public space in Toronto, Yonge-Dundas Square, has shown a highly questionable approach to the issue of accessibility and the public good as such. We therefore want to examine this materialized example of what public space means in today’s Toronto, an example that was strongly pushed by the City of Toronto and the business community. Located at the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets in the heart of downtown Toronto, the development of Yonge-Dundas Square was intended as ‘a catalyst for the regeneration of the main street of Toronto’ (Brown and Storey Architects, website www.brownandstorey.com, accessed 21 May 2006). Yonge Street is not only the historical main street but was also once the place for high-end shopping in Toronto. With the construction in the late 1970s of the Eaton Centre, which — as one of North America’s first downtown shopping malls — turned its back on the street, shoppingrelated street life was pushed off of Yonge Street. A plethora of ‘bargain’ stores moved into the area, along with various social service providers for disenfranchised people. By the mid-1990s this stretch of Yonge Street was described as an area with a variety of ‘downscale’ stores frequented by an ‘undesirable’ clientele whose spending levels did not meet the expectations of city builders hoping to attract high-end retailers. The dominant discourse at that time was that in securing its position as a world-class city, Toronto required a place that would represent its world-class status, and hence the need to construct a public square in downtown Toronto reflecting these aspirations. As points of reference, Toronto looked at other global cities, such as New York and Tokyo. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Times Square became the model, and that the Square’s final form, with its surrounding halo of oversized advertising billboards, borrows from both cities. A number of existing buildings were expropriated and demolished, a two-stage international design competition was held, which was won by a local firm, and the public square was unveiled in 2004. As one aspect of a rejuvenation strategy for the entire area, Yonge-Dundas Square is surrounded by a newly renovated main entrance to the Eaton Centre, construction of a new multiplex movie theatre (which now also provides lecture rooms for the adjacent Ryerson University), two new big-box stores, as well as four new media towers proffering an overabundance of billboards and pixelboards. While the land of Yonge-Dundas Square is in public ownership, the programming for the space is managed by a private-sector ‘Board of Management’ made up of 13 appointees of City Council. In order to stage an event, a permit must be obtained and a user fee paid of up to $2,250 for a 24-hour period. Profits are to be remitted to the City for maintenance and future capital reinvestment in the Square. An eleven-page list of guidelines, indicating the kinds of activities which can and cannot take place, and a ‘Good Neighbour Policy’ must be adhered to.

5 The winning entries received strong support from the local architectural critics but at the same time, a sarcastic undertone was to be heard: ‘If [some of the most respected landscape architects in the world] are able to realize their projects, this city may finally manage to join the 21st century’ (Hume, 2007: A9). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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The construction of Yonge-Dundas Square serves a specific set of interests, and both discounts and stigmatizes certain members of the public (Rahder and Milgrom, 2004; Ruppert, 2006). This kind of public space thus carries with it a number of problems. Clearly, limits are being placed on the types of people, activities and practices that have access to this space. Since its inception, there have been many stories of homeless people, youth and others who were harassed by security guards and forced to leave the Square for a variety of practices, including taking photographs, panhandling and simply sitting for long periods of time. These are all manifestations of the ‘revanchist city’ strategy (Smith, 1996), which ‘denotes a set of policies — policing, workfare, social housing administration, parks management, urban planning, immigration control — that subordinate social policy to crime control and promote the militarization of urban space’ (Kipfer and Keil, 2002: 237). In addition, the Square’s administrative and cost requirements makes it difficult for people who are not familiar with the bureaucratic obstacles of filling out forms and paying relatively high fees, when they want to organize gatherings or events in the public space. This clearly hinders the ability of a variety of individuals and groups to use the public square, and in addition forecloses upon spontaneous uses of the space, as permits must be obtained in advance. Social practices that resist a market-driven approach for using the space have appeared over the years, including a pillow fight at an anti-gun rally in November 2005 (see the website www.newmindspace.com/pillowfight.php [last accessed 21 May 2006]). However, these types of alternate practices have lost out to the kind of neoliberal urbanism in which market-driven rules turn publicly owned spaces into private places, complete with exclusion of those people and practices that do not conform to the needs of the market (Mitchell, 1995; MacLeod, 2002; Wilson, 2004). Given that Yonge-Dundas Square has become the model for how new public spaces should be built in Toronto, serious issues of inequality and disenfranchisement of the general public at the waterfront are bound to result.

Conclusion While the Toronto case follows well-travelled roads of urban redevelopment schemes found in many cities, a primary conclusion to be drawn from it is that the diversity and flexibility found in the uses, built forms and financing models of the new, mixed-use mega-project is mirrored in the diversity and flexibility of socioeconomic, cultural, aesthetic and environmental arguments advanced to justify the massive public cost and private gain which often accompany them. The primary argument, made as much in Toronto as in many other cities (Fainstein, 1994; Haila, 1997; Olds, 2001; Lehrer, 2006) is that, through an array of massive, concentrated and concerted building activities, cities will be integrated into the international property and financial market and/or global socio-cultural networks. Hence, by using the tool of a mega-project, cities can actively reposition themselves within the global economy. This process of globally-scaled imagineering of sites and cities (Rutheiser, 1996) benefits specific groups and interests, but it also means a displacement of other people and their social practices, as well as many forms of nature (Gellert and Lynch, 2003). The diffuse scattering of other discourses — including those which focus on socioeconomic and environmental benefits and positive contributions to public space — accompany this primary focus in Toronto, allowing the new mega-project to appear, if not always behave, as a benefit to a wide range of communities and interests. Mega-projects in their new form have thus become prominent as an urban renewal strategy. The sites for this massive capital reinvestment in the built environment are, as in the Toronto case, often former industrial areas that have become obsolete due to technological change and global economic restructuring. In contrast to their predecessors, the mega-projects of today respond to previous criticisms in that they are International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Table 1 Old and new mega-projects Old Mega-projects

New Mega-projects

Timeframe in which model is/was dominant

1930s–1980s

1980s–today

Initiated by

State

State and private-sector

Costs

Big $$$

Big $$$

Financed by

State

PPP/state investment facilitates private-sector investment

Focus

Unitary — infrastructure such as transportation, power, water

Flexibility and diversity — many uses, many building types

Ideology

‘Progress’

‘Competitive City’; ‘Neoliberal Urbanism’

Physical appearance

Monolithic singular structures extended via networks, connectivity

Complexes/districts

Characterization of public benefits

Democratizing of public goods (water, electricity, roads, etc.)

The appearance of democratizing public space through large-scale improvements intended primarily to catalyze, and thus ensure a return on, private investment

Resistance

High

Low

Criticism

Megalomania; cost overruns; environmental impact; social impact

Relatively absent

not simply focused on building freeways, dams or large-scale housing, but rather are more fine-grained. The new mega-project comes with space for housing, retail, cultural institutions, recreation and a plethora of other features. Table 1 outlines some of the major aspects of both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ types of mega-project derived from our work on Toronto’s waterfront mega-project and presented as the beginnings of a conceptual tool through which to understand mega-projects in the current context. Significant differences between the old and new mega-projects can be identified, in addition to the observations we have made about institutional structures, economic imperatives, public participation processes and responses, and uses of public space. In contrast to the modernist project of ‘progress,’ where the public benefit was celebrated as an expression of democratic objectives, it now has moved toward a much more competitive environment where public benefits are provided in order to attract those who are most desired. With this, a major shift appears to be from a more collective to a more individualized form of public benefits, wherein the new mega-project offers individualized benefits to particular groups, rather than a diffusion of benefit to all. Despite the intention to use the waterfront mega-project to further the aims of global interurban competitiveness rather than those of more local and pressing needs and requirements, it is hardly surprising in this context that resistance against the megaproject has also changed from being relatively high-level to being, at least for the present, strangely absent. While generalizing from the Toronto case to all new mega-projects is not our intent, our work on Toronto’s waterfront redevelopment suggests not only these apparent shifts from ‘old’ mega-project to ‘new’, but also that the new mega-project contains two key aspects that need closer attention. First, while mega-projects seem to have returned as an urban renewal strategy, this reappearance is accompanied by an institutional and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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political-economic framework that redirects public attention away from controversy and, therefore, from the inherent tendency within the mega-project to re-inscribe and perpetuate inequality and disenfranchisement. In answering criticisms about both the cost overruns and the negative social and environmental impacts of old mega-projects, particularly the tendency of Urban Renewal projects to destroy entire neighbourhoods, the new mega-project takes on the guise of a much broader and more responsive socioeconomic framework. As such, it is not contestable in the way that the old megaproject was, which leads to a situation in which even progressive and left-leaning politicians support waterfront development, becoming active agents in the neoliberal project. While mega-projects of today are as much political projects as those of the past — with the ideological difference that old mega-projects were undertaken in support of societal progress while new mega-projects support interurban global competitiveness — there seems to have been inscribed within them a response to the opposition levelled against their predecessors. The mega-project of today is no longer a single-focus project, but instead is made up of a ‘variety of little bits’ — and therefore seemingly provides something for everyone. In addition, the new mega-project explicitly addresses some of the criticisms aimed at ‘old’ ones by employing various discursive strategies about socioeconomic and environmental benefits as well as public space. The problem that we identify therein is that while these benefits, or rather the discourses forwarding these benefits, allow the new mega-projects to be more readily embraced by a variety of communities, they in fact obfuscate their major beneficiaries and ideologies — most often the development industries rather than the local populace, and the quest for urban status rather than the pursuit of urban inclusion. While these benefits may appear real, we suggest that the discourse about these potential benefits leads to an unreflective acceptance of the apparent necessity for these mega-projects. Second, public participation in today’s mega-projects begins, not at the outset of all potential development options, but in the midst of them, foreclosing upon other possibilities from the beginning. There is little or no consideration of options that do not follow the rules of capitalism guided by profit maximization through exchange value. Hence, social practices that are outside the capitalist mode of production are discouraged. In the case of Toronto, examples include not only Yonge-Dundas Square, but also the eviction of people in a squatter settlement along the waterfront called Tent City (Blackwell and Goonewardena, 2004) and the cleaning-up of the various nonconformist social practices taking place at Cherry Beach. We contend that this constitutes a process of urban disenfranchisement and the reproduction of urban inequality. The promise of the old mega-project was to end inequalities; instead, as we now know, they actively created them. And old mega-projects continue to be criticized for their effects on communities and the environment, as well as their deficiencies in the creation of public spaces and their degree of public participation. Our findings for the Toronto case show that, while the rhetoric may imply otherwise, the new mega-project also fails to adequately address socioeconomic inequality and inclusive participation, perpetuating socioeconomic divisions instead. In order to better understand the new mega-project as a distinct approach, as well as the disenfranchisement and urban inequality we see within it, we suggest that further systematic and class-based analysis is required. Ute Lehrer ([email protected]) and Jennefer Laidley ([email protected]), Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 109 HNES, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada.

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Résumé Le mégaprojet connaît un regain d’intérêt en tant qu’outil de rénovation urbaine. Le mode actuel d’aménagement urbain à grande échelle diffère toutefois de son prédécesseur dans la mesure où son orientation est souple et diverse, au lieu d’être unique et monolithique. Cependant, à notre avis, la diversité qu’offre la nouvelle approche exclut une grande variété de pratiques sociales, puisqu’elle reproduit, plutôt qu’elle ne résout, l’inégalité urbaine et la privation de droits. De plus, la diversité dans les formes et les utilisations de l’espace de ces mégaprojets empêche le développement de pratiques d’opposition ou de contestation. En outre, le mégaprojet révèle un décalage des bénéfices collectifs vers une forme plus individualisée de bénéfice public. Les propositions récentes d’aménagement du front de mer de Toronto sont identifiées comme typiques d’un nouveau paradigme du mégaprojet d’aménagement dans le cadre de la ville compétitive. Son objectif affiché, quoique paradoxal, est d’être spécialisé en tout, ce qui permet de prétendre que tous les intérêts sont pris en compte, tout en réimplantant et en renforçant les divisions socio-économiques. Nos résultats portent sur quatre aspects: la transformation des institutions, l’importance des mégaprojets dans la concurrence interurbaine mondiale, la nature exclusive des processus de participation publics, ainsi que l’accentuation de la marchandisation et des délimitations de l’espace public urbain.
