At the core and on the edge: justice discourses in metropolitan Toronto

Abstract

Urban justice claims are emerging from the core and the edge of metropolitan Toronto. At the core, justice claims are articulated around ‘the right to the city’ of low‐income immigrants and residents denouncing the devolution and reduction of public services. On the edge, claims defend ‘the right to nature’ and the ecological integrity of environmentally sensitive areas threatened by urban sprawl. Although these justice claims have fundamentally different preoccupations, they are both resisting the processes and politics of neo‐liberal urban development. These two cases contribute to the understanding of urban justice movements because they affirm the urban arena as a space for diverse mobilisations against various forms of injustices produced by the shrinking and/or privatisation of public services and by the deregulation of urban development. The two cases also suggest that, while diverse urban justice mobilisations are ideologically and structurally interrelated at the larger metropolitan scale, social, economic, political and ecological disparities create unresolved tensions between them.