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1. TOWARD CLAIMING SPACE:Theorizing racialized spaces in Canadian cities
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
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I ncreasing numbers of racial and ethnic minorities in Canada continue to be drawn to urban centres. In the current context, this demographic fact enables various levels of government to point, reassuringly, to objective evidence of racial diversity and the dominant ideology of multiculturalism. However, closer examination reveals that celebrated Canadian markers of racial diversity and racial harmony that are spatially managed through systems of domination are in fact commodified versions of multiculturalism in the forms of “ethnic culture,” “ethnic neighbourhoods,” and “ethnic restaurants .” Easily consumed and packaged versions of race in Canadian cities have been used to market and strengthen Canada’s position in the global economy (Abu-Laban & Gabriel, 2002). As Damaris Rose (2004) notes, the ability of urban communities to compete in a knowledge-based global economy and to draw capital are tied to a city’s ability to sell the desirability of racialized culture in their cities. In exchange, the majority of the racialized urban populations—particularly new immigrants, who are essential to the workings of globalizations—are simply being relegated and, literally, spatially shunned to the status of otherness in terms of their access to better paying jobs, housing, and other resources in urban centres (Teelucksingh & Galabuzi, 2005). Thus, in many senses, race continues to be “mapped,” both materially and symbolically, onto Canadian cities as an important organizing principle in keeping with notions of desirability and undesirability (Sundstrom , 2003; Razack, 2002). The growing numbers of racial and ethnic minorities in cities, and discourses of multiculturalism, either in combination or alone, do not explain why racial meanings are proliferating in Canadian urban centres. In many 1 TOWARD CLAIMING SPACE Theorizing racialized spaces in Canadian cities Cheryl Teelucksingh 1 Canadian cities, the dominant stakeholders, those with power, frame problems associated with education, policing, health, and the media as racial issues that reproduce racial hierarchies. Ronald Sundstrom (2003) argues that“when we sort people by categories, we do so spatially. Our system of race carries with it a spatial extension” (p. 93). This suggests the need to explore how spatial conditions in Canadian cities are simultaneously part of and influenced by racial domination and racial resistance (Anderson, 2002). The quintessential example of Toronto’s Dundas Square draws attention to the material and symbolic construction of racialized, undesirable bodies via the spatial workings of racialized power. Prior to 2003, if one approached Toronto’s greatest shopping centre, the Eaton Centre, from the southwest corner of Yonge and Dundas streets, one would be immediately bombarded with the mix of street vendors, massive digital plasma advertising, traffic congestion, street performers, and crowds of shoppers, business people, and passers-by. The corner was an ideal urban spot due to its easily accessible subway, close vicinity to downtown schools, and nearby inner city residential housing. However, despite being a nexus of commercial and business activity in Toronto’s downtown core, the area around Yonge and Dundas had, in the past, been commonly“viewed by some as unsafe, decrepit and in serious need of a makeover” (Cohen, 1999, p. 18). The Metropolitan Toronto Police, which had a community station established visibly close to the Yonge and Dundas entrance to the Eaton Centre, actively monitored and deterred loitering, pickpocketing, and other petty crime. Over the years, black youth had made this corner their place to meet and hang out. By virtue of their race, clothing, and presence, black youth were assumed by police and others to be “up to no good” (James, 1998), including potential crime, drug dealing, and gang activity. In 2003, the southeast corner of Yonge and Dundas was redeveloped into “Dundas Square,” heralded as Canada’s version of New York’s Times Square. Dundas Square is designed to serve multiple purposes as a tourist attraction, gathering place, advertising site, and entertainment space (Novell, 2003). The new commercial potential associated with Dundas Square has increased local pressure from businesses, potential billboard advertisers, and City of Toronto municipal government officials to clean up the area of all undesirable people and activity. In order to prevent the activities associated with the southwest corner of Yonge and Dundas from creeping across the street, the City of Toronto, which manages Dundas Square, has set restrictions on activities such as skateboarding and vending, implemented high rates to lease the square, and installed private security guards and surveillance cameras (Ruppert, 2003; 2005). These actions serve to privatize the public space, and to reproduce dominant ideologies about inclusions and exclusion that 2 Toward claiming space [54...