Towers in the Horizon, Spaces of Home: Reframing Toronto’s Housing Crisis

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Towers in the Horizon, Spaces of Home: Reframing Toronto’s Housing Crisis Sneha Sumanth Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Collaborative PhD in Political Economy Carleton University

Abstract Postwar social housing projects in North America were modelled on Les Corbusier’s Ideal City or ‘towers in the park’ architectural typology. Typically located along the edges of cities and composed of clustered regimented concrete block towers amongst lower rise development that sit retreated from the street, these buildings form visible objects in a city’s horizon. In one sense, they resulted from insufficient access to shelter for the working class during the postwar surge of state-supported private home ownership. In another sense, they were created to facilitate the continued growth of the commodification of housing in urban centers. The east and northwest edges of Toronto contain many neighbourhoods constituted by these towers, also known as the inner suburbs, which today house many of the city’s immigrants, lower income, and racialized residents. Within the setting of growing income polarization in Toronto, these neighbourhoods showcase decades of abandonment and neglect. As neoliberal policies infiltrated the city’s housing system in the 1980s, the state retreated from the responsibility of providing shelter through a series of privatizations, deregulations and disinvestments in housing. A continuous decline of federally funded public and social housing projects, and a systematic offloading of state responsibility for daily and generational social reproduction onto the scale of the household, transformed them into derelict relics of the past under attack in all directions by the tentacles of hostile privatism and gentrification. In 2014, the City of Toronto established thirty-one Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIAs), many of which are composed of postwar inner suburb towers. The NIAs are identified as neighbourhoods with extensive poverty and crime, in need of state structured intervention. Behind this veil of state declared incapacity, and despite the austere appearance of the towers, everyday life continues to unfold within them with extraordinary stories of people’s resilience, struggle, solidarity, and despair, forged by the resistance of daily social reproduction against the anvil of neoliberal housing policy. In this paper, I will re-interpret the city’s housing crisis by problematizing a housing system operating under globalized neoliberal capitalism, and refocus the discourse on material and spatial conditions of home through case studies of three Toronto neighbourhoods labelled as NIAs - Jane and Finch, Regent Park, and Scarborough Village. The goal of the paper is to draw out the various interlocking matrices of power dynamics between the neoliberal state and the residents of Toronto, and their resulting transformation of the city’s built environment.


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Towers in the Horizon, Spaces of Home: Reframing Toronto’s Housing Crisis by Snehanjali Sumanth - Issuu