No abstract

Since 2005, references to the ‘Paris problem’ have become increasingly frequent among media pundits, urban policy-makers and police agencies to warn about the malaise of Toronto’s low-income, majority non-White neighbourhoods (referred to as ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’). A reference to the rebellion of the French banlieues against state power in France, the ‘Paris problem’ is code for the spectre of ‘race riots’ in Toronto. Here the author looks at the birth of the ‘Paris problem’ and examines the community policing strategies that were rolled out in its aftermath in Toronto. The article demonstrates how these were intertwined with urban policies of social development to which policing was integral. In this, policing needs to be understood holistically as not just coercive in function, but also as ‘productive’; that is, aimed at the manufacture of consent and ultimately of pacification of unruly populations. Underpinning these processes, and also engendered by them, is a racialised and territorialised security ideology crystallised around the figure of ‘the immigrant’ and the conception of ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’. At the heart of such policy-making is a corralling and containing of poor, working-class, ethnically defined communities – youth in particular – that serves to entrench division while maintaining heavy-handed state control.

No abstract

Aided with French and German scholarship, this paper takes stock of Henri Lefebvre’s relevance in contemporary English-speaking urban research on social movements, postcolonial situations, the state, scale, gender, urban political ecology, regulation, and the right to the city. What becomes clear from this survey is that Lefebvre’s capacity to contribute to cutting-edge urban research requires a selective translation of his work. While the modalities of translating Lefebvre vary depending on the subject matter, transfiguring Lefebvre for today is most plausible when taking into account the dialectical nature of his urbanism and the open-ended and integral character of his marxism.

InDriven from New Orleans, John Arena focuses on the contradictory role of nonprofits in facilitating the consensual removal of poor, black residents from inner-city spaces as the result of the privatisation and demolition of public housing. His account is constructive for delving into the on-the-ground struggles around public housing and the complexities of urban politics, and, more importantly, for situating the housing question at the heart of working-class struggles. His emphasis on how the gradual construction of consent was imperative in paving the way for the sudden application of coercive force in the aftermath of Katrina is also a welcome correction to arguments that tend to see the post-Katrina policies as the cause célèbre of the striking and rapid reconfiguration of New Orleans. Arena, however, falls short of providing a historicised analysis of urban politics and the politics of nonprofits.