On the Waterfrontier of Scale: Political Economy, Governance, and the Toronto Waterfront, 1879--2005.

摘要

This study uses waterfront redevelopment in Toronto as a lens to understand the rescaling of the Canadian state. This thesis illustrates the social and political processes contributing to the waterfront's importance in the city's overall developmental strategies, especially as related to the city's internationalization. A prevailing atmosphere of neo-liberalization that attempts to transform the legacies of the Keynesian-Fordist national state has pushed the City of Toronto to more vigorously pursue its own interests while simultaneously obtaining the participation of the governments of Canada and Ontario to accomplish this.;It is shown that the importance of the waterfront to Toronto's political economy was not automatic. A series of politicizations at specific conjunctures precipitated "crises" on the waterfront, thereby creating the conditions to make it become a central component of the city's trans-scalar developmental strategies. Thus, the thesis argues that social and political actors have strategically used the waterfront as a means to situate the City of Toronto as the centrepiece of the Canadian political economy.;The French Regulation School, state theory, and the scale literature influence the study's historicized explanation of the Toronto waterfront's politicization. The insights provided by the Regulation School and state theory are combined to show how Canada's prevailing spatial relationships developed, stabilized, and broke apart in the context of Canada's changing state forms. Thus, Toronto's attempts to dislodge Montreal during the First National Policy precipitated the first rescaling of the waterfront as the creation of a federal harbour commissioner forged links between the Toronto and Canada scales. All problems that emerged on the waterfront thus became of national importance, irrespective of its local origins. The scale literature is used to show how the various institutions and levels comprising the Canadian state become reconciled through the actions of scale-specific actors. At the same time, this thesis shows how the global scale, which is constituted through the actions of national states, affects sub-national strategies. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the importance of the local scale. Here, Neil Brenner's spatialization of states is used to highlight how projects initiated by local scales are affected by the historical legacies of inter-scalar relationships.