Toronto Inc? Planning the Competitive City in the New Toronto

This paper analyses recent developments in urban planning in the City of Toronto. A municipality of 2.4 million inhabitants that makes up the inner half of the Greater Toronto Area, the City of Toronto was consolidated from seven municipalities in 1998. Planning practice, discourse, and "vision" in the new City of Toronto are shaped by the city's bid for the 2008 Olympics, related proposals for waterfront redevelopment, and preparations for a new official plan. In the context of comparative debates on trends in local governance, we see current planning strategies in Toronto as one of several strategic sites in which Toronto is consolidated into a "competitive city." Historically, the formation of the competitive city in Toronto must be seen as a result of the impasse of postwar metropolitan planning in the early 1970s, the sociospatial limitations of downtown urban reform politics in the 1970s and 1980s, and the neoliberal restructuring and rescaling of the local state in the 1990s. Theoretically, we draw on the global city research paradigm, regime and regulation theory, and neo-Gramscian urban political theory to suggest that planning the competitive city signals shifts in the sociopolitical alliances, ideological forms, and dominant strategies that regulate global-city formation. These constellations and strategies threaten to reconstitute bourgeois hegemony in Toronto with a series of claims to urbanity.     

“Removes All Obstacles”: Abortifacients in Nineteenth-Century Toronto and Beyond

Exploring the biographies of small artifacts from archaeological contexts is an endeavour that can expose unrealized or forgotten historical and cultural meaning at local, regional, national, and international levels. The recovery of a small glass bottle embossed with the name “Sir J. Clarke’s Female Pills” from a site in Toronto has drawn together the production history and advertising during the nineteenth century of a patent medicine product classed as an abortifacient. Furthermore, it connects the history of women’s health and fertility rights to the social and economic motivations influencing control over family planning.     

Scrutiny in the Modern City: The domestic public and the Toronto Local Council of Women at the turn of the twentieth century: La vigilancia en la Ciudad Moderna: Lo domestico público y el Concilio Local de Mujeres de Toronto en los inicios de siglo XX

In this article I argue that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘white’ Protestant bourgeois women acted publicly and engaged in the production of public space, while disregarding the moral geographies now associated with such women's mobility. Highlighting the urban/social reform activities of the Toronto Local Council of Women, this article argues that their unlimited use of public space combines with domestic ideology's dictate to protect the home. Requiring women to scrutinize public space for threats against their families, home-protection compelled domestic public women to discover, assess and correct city-hazards, irrespective of moral geographies.

En este artículo argumento que a finales del siglo XIX y el principio del siglo XX, las mujeres burguesas, protestantes, ‘blancas’ participaron en la construcción del espacio publico cuestionando las geografías morales asociados con este tipo de movilidad de las mujeres. Subrayando las actividades de la reforma urbana/social del Concilio Local de Mujeres de Toronto, este artículo propone que el uso ilimitado del espacio público que hicieron estas mujeres combinando con la ideología del espacio doméstico contribuyeron a la protección del hogar. Dada la motivación de proteger el hogar, estas mujeres con acceso al espacio público, se vieron forzadas y examinado en busca de posibles amenazas a sus familias y como consecuencia, a identificar, evaluar y corregir ciertos peligros urbanos sin tener en cuenta las geografías morales.     

A Platform for Art: Infrastructural Citizenship Beyond Monumentality in Toronto’s Transit Art

The flourishing of transit art globally reflects a widespread belief in the power of aesthetic practices to promote infrastructural and civic revitalisation. This article analyses how transit art engages spaces and practices of publicness and how art explores ideas of mobility in Toronto. It argues that while arts are frequently deployed to reproduce status quo relations of power and to bolster elite and exclusionary forms of urbanisation, they can also work to challenge these. Through the notion of infrastructural citizenship, I show how arts can unsettle grounds of public space and public life and illuminate the contentious relations that cohere in public transit space. Overall, I claim that transit networks are a key platform through which the politics of public art are staged and that despite existing constraints, there are many affordances for transit art to critically intervene into neoliberal urban processes.     

History repeats itself—flooding in moray in August 1970

GEOMORPHOLOGY

The cycle of Erosion in Different Climates. By Pierre Birot. Translated by C. I. Jackson and K. M. Clayton. 9×6. 144pp. 21 figs. Batsford, 1968. 35s.

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Geography and Regional Administration. By T. W. Freeman. 8 ¼ × 5 ¼. 200 pp. 34 figures. Hutchinson, University Library, London, 1968. 13/6d.

BRITISH ISLES

Eday and Hoy: a Development Survey. R. Miller and S. Luther‐Davies. 10 × 8. 94 pp. Issued by Department of Geography, University of Glasgow, 1968. 12/6d.

EDUCATIONAL

The British Isles: a colour geography, J. B. Goodson, 10×7 ½. Pp 121, 284 illustrations. Nelson, London, 1968. 18s 6d.     

South African Nuclear Development in the 1970s: A Non-Proliferation Conundrum?

ABSTRACT

The 1970s is often argued to be the era marking the beginning of the overall transformation of the international system and the nuclear order, following the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) entering into force in 1970. South Africa challenged this nuclear order from the outset. In addition to regarding the NPT as inherently discriminatory and hypocritical in allowing a difference between nuclear weapon ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, the South African apartheid regime felt threatened by Soviet expansionism into Southern Africa. Facing international condemnation and isolation due to its repressive domestic politics of racial segregation, and gripped in a war against Soviet- and Cuban-backed forces in Angola, the apartheid regime was quick to move from a decision to build one peaceful nuclear explosive device in 1974, to a formal decision in 1978 to design and develop a secret strategic nuclear deterrent. Using knowledge and skills acquired during a period of techno-nationalism and Western collaboration during the 1960s, South Africa was able to cross this threshold in a relatively short space of time, thereby signaling a clear departure from the nuclear non-proliferation regime that the five nuclear powers of the NPT were trying to establish.     

Effecting Equality: Norwegian Health Policy in Finnmark, 1945–1970s

Abstract

At the heart of “the Nordic model of welfare” is a strong will for national integration and social equality between citizens and regions. It is commonly held that that “homogeneity ethnic” is one explanatory factor behind the Nordic model of welfare. On the contrary, we claim that it is the political will to treat the population as homogeneous that influenced the creation of the model, not any factual ethnic homogeneity (which is, after all, a historical fiction, also in the Nordic context). Thus, the pursuit of integration and the strive for regional equality have challenged local autonomy and cultural diversity while at the same time underpinned arguments for a regionalization of politics and, to some extent, for ethnic particularization. Drawn between a strong state and local authority, universalism and particularization, welfare and health policies have reshaped the relationship between center and peripheries and between the majority and ethnic minorities.

The integration of the county of Finnmark into the national system of institutionalized welfare in Norway after World War II constitutes a good case to investigate not only the will, but also the ability, for national integration and equalization along the dimensions of centre–periphery and majority–minority relations, not only because of the county's position furthest to the north, but also because it held the largest minority populations. This article examines Norwegian policies to establish and effect equality between Finnmark and other regions in the field of health care facilities from 1945 until the 1970s, and the attempts to establish equal access to health services between the Sámi minority and the Norwegian majority population in Finnmark. It sheds light upon how the immanent conflict between the ideals of a national, universal welfare policy and particular measures in favor of the Sámi was conceived in the period. (The authors expected multi-culturality to be clearly visible in the sources. It was, but only with regard to one minority group, the Sámi. The Kvens were not discussed by the policy-makers in the period.) Furthermore, it has been argued that in the shaping and implementation of Norwegian health policies in the first years after World War II, primacy was given to expert knowledge. A particular point of interest in this article is how this primacy manifested itself in the choices of political strategies of universalism and particularism within the field of health policy in this particular geographical setting.     

Eyes on the alley: children’s appropriation of alley space in Riverdale,Toronto

ABSTRACT

Recent research suggests that numerous positive physical, cognitive, and social benefits can be derived from independent mobility and play agency amongst children, necessitating an understanding of how physical and social environments facilitate this development. This study involved parents, and children aged 9–13 from twelve households in the neighbourhood of Riverdale in Toronto. Using a mapping exercise to instigate discussion, participants were asked to describe where, how, and with whom play occurs in their neighbourhood. A reoccurring theme emerged amongst households that border a back alley where parents perceived this space as safer allowing them to grant greater independent mobility to their children and use this space as an intermediary tool to prepare their children for greater independence. For children, this space serves as one of creative appropriation, granting them access to more space and friends to play with. Situated within the context of age-friendly cities, this research identifies several socio-spatial qualities found in alleys that have the potential to contribute to the discussion of more inclusive city-building practice.     

“A fine old time”: feminist print journalism in the 1970s

In 1970’s Ireland, a number of feminist activists became the editors of the women’s pages of the national daily newspapers. Their work radically changed women’s access to the role of journalist as well as fundamentally altering the normative perspective applied to news stories. These women introduced “new journalism” to Ireland, writing about issues in the private rather than the public sphere and doing so from an explicitly feminist point of view. These female editors inhabited a workspace and culture that was heavily masculine, but they negotiated bias and sometimes outright discrimination in order to change the gendered nature of Irish print media. In so doing, these women offered a new social understanding of women’s place in news journalism and in Irish society more broadly.     

‘Stepbrothers from the Middle East’: negotiations of racial identity among Jewish-Israeli immigrants in Toronto

This paper explores the complex negotiations of racial identity experienced on migration. Working from a series of 48 interviews with racially diverse Israeli immigrants to Toronto, and drawing on literature on the assimilated Canadian-born Jewish population, I contrast the racial histories of Canadian and Israeli Jews – groups whose identities have historically crossed intersections of race, ethnicity and religion. By exploring the participants’ accounts of being differently whitened and blackened in Israel and Toronto, and their own interpretations of and responses to these processes, I expose the spatial contingencies of racial hierarchies, meanings and identifications. I also introduce the under-studied Mizrahi/Sephardi Jewish community – who are demographically prevalent in Israel yet largely unknown in North America, and are subject to complex racial and ethno-cultural tensions in both spaces – into discussions of Canadian Jewishness.     

Cultural development: a new policy paradigm in the cultural policies of the 1970s in Québec

The common expression of ‘cultural development’ appears in many cultural policy statements without it necessarily arousing questions about its precise meaning. Indeed, we usually spontaneously associate ‘cultural development’ to any governmental intervention that aims at stimulating cultural vitality. However, if we look more closely at the origin of this concept, we soon discover that its appearance on the eve of May 68, in France, corresponds to the rise of new concerns in cultural policy matters and to a radical redefinition of the state’s role in this domain. Still enjoying a strong influence, France’s political transformations were closely followed by some Quebecois politicians and socially engaged intellectuals who were participating, at that time, in the formulation of a new political vision in cultural matters in Québec in the 1960s and 1970s. The objective of this paper is thus to retrace the origin of the idea of cultural development and follow its evolution in Québec.     

Immigrant Policy Developing in Copenhagen and Ishøj in the 1970s

This article analyses the development of municipal immigrant policies in Denmark in the 1970s through a case study of two municipalities, Copenhagen and Ishøj. The two municipalities encountered immigration in the earliest phase of Danish integration policy. In this period, national policies were limited and immigrants’ integration was primarily a municipal responsibility. As a result, the two municipalities had the opportunity and obligation to develop their own local solutions to the problems caused by migration during this period. The cases illustrate two trajectories in municipal policy-making. Copenhagen followed the national tendency to include guest workers and immigrants in the existing administrative body of the municipality and the welfare system, whereas Ishøj chose a different path with a coherent municipal immigrant policy. Through this case study of city-level policy-making in Denmark, this article contributes to research on municipal policy-making as well as research on the development of immigrant and integration policy.     

The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, 1954–1970

This article offers a re-contextualization of the Positivism Dispute between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in the German sociological profession between 1954 and 1970. Investigating the reasons why the German Sociological Association convened in Tübingen in October 1961, it assigns a more peripheral role to Karl Popper and this now famous seminar. Focusing instead on the debate among German sociologists from the mid-1950s which prompted the convention of the seminar and the invitation for Popper to speak, the article maintains that philosophy of history was the central concern of the Positivism Dispute. In this debate, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized contingency in history and society, while sociologists such as René König, Helmut Schelsky, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Arnold Gehlen advocated sociology as the empirical study of ‘given’ social facts. By doing so the article questions the narrative of the Positivism Dispute advanced by Karl Popper and some of his followers, as well as interpretations which have focused on debates during the aftermath of the Tübingen seminar in the 1960s.     

Black-and-White Photography in Batcham: From a Golden Age to Decline (1970–1990)

In this article, I explore the biographies of three professional black-and-white photographers of the 1970s from Batcham, West Cameroon. They are Edouard Fofou, alias Photo-Edouard; Michel Kenne, also known as Photo-Kmichel and Gaspard Vincent Tatang, alias Tagavince. They and their work stands as an example of the very many African photographers whose work could be archived but probably will not be. If we know of a few celebrated names like Malik Sidibe but not Vincent Tatang it is as much by chance as anything else. This then is an exploration of a possible but unrealized archive. What we could call an archival path not taken.     

回眸1970年代

1970年代对于中国大陆来说,是一个万物复苏、承上启下的时代,旧的痕迹依旧,新的气象正在破土。感谢这位叫李晓斌的摄影家,他用镜头记录了当时的情景,数十年过去了,这些图片让我们穿越时空,记起了我们来时的路。     

Marx–Lenin–Rotten–Strummer: British Marxism and youth culture in the 1970s

This article uses the debate on youth culture that took place in the pages of Marxism Today (1973–75) to explore the ways by which cultural changes and identity politics began to challenge, complement and redefine the British left. The debate revealed much about the tensions that ultimately pulled the Communist Party of Great Britain apart. But it also uncovered faultlines that had ramifications for the left more generally and, perhaps, the wider British polity.     

Negotiating Nuclear Control: The Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group in the 1970s

ABSTRACT

In the 1970s, the Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group published guidelines on nuclear trade that drew a line between peaceful and dangerous nuclear technology, defining what was sensitive enough to require safeguarding and what was not. Given the ambivalence of nuclear technology, how was that line drawn? Historically, the understanding of whether a nuclear item is benign, sensitive, or especially sensitive has changed in response to the shifting balance between political, commercial and non-proliferation interests. The 1970s, however, merit special attention; they saw an unprecedented codification of nuclear sensitivity in the form of the published trigger lists that are still used today. In the absence of clear technical criteria, what interests and perceptions determined the sensitivity of specific nuclear items by the nuclear suppliers in the 1970s? Archival sources provide a unique insight into how the trigger lists and guidelines were negotiated and with what aims and considerations. This paper finds that nuclear sensitivity was driven by commercial interests in ensuring a level, and open commercial playing field, political interests in securing co-operation and practical interests in implementation and reputation, all of which outweighed technical considerations of how nuclear technology exports might assist a nuclear weapons programme.