Imagining an ecological right to the city in Toronto through drama-based research

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the possibilities in harnessing drama-based research methodologies in examining youth’s ‘right to the city’ during the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency [Lefebvre (1996). Writings on Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers]. Using ‘auto-topography’ [Heddon (2007). “One Square Foot: Thousands of Routes.” PAJ 29 (2): 40–50. doi:10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.40] as a drama-based methodological prompt, the research considers how the right to the city is summoned, imagined and articulated by youth in one virtual Grade 6 classroom amid the alienation and isolation of a COVID lockdown in Toronto in November 2020. Specifically, this article attends to how auto-topography brought the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ city into the virtual classroom, via Deleuze and Guattari’s [(1985). “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression.” New Literary History 16 (3): 591–628] concept of ‘the minor,’ to contest majoritarian constructions of ‘nature,’ ‘culture,’ and urban citizenship. In particular, such ‘minor’ desires for the city, made appreciable by the imaginative and affective capacities of theatre and performance genres, gesture towards a politics of co-flourishing, where enchantment, generosity, gratitude, strangeness, surprise and hilarity– and, crucially, obligation and reciprocity – are integral to youths’ right to the city in these times of pandemic and ecological instability.