Summary

Cities and Polarization

Thursday March 27, 2003 - Breakout

Caroline Andrew, Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, opened the discussion of the ways in which urban space creates social inclusion and exclusion.

She noted that very little is known about the role of practical, local interventions in combatting poverty and exclusion, and pointed to a particular problem in the failure to fully report front-line initiatives in the academic literature: Students’ social reality is shaped by the written materials available to them, so that “there is a misreading of history, a misreading of practice”.

Andrew reviewed some of the theoretical links between social exclusion, poverty and urban form, including a relatively new suburbanization of immigration that leaves new arrivals, particularly women, with very limited access to jobs and services. She stressed the need to study front-line interventions that support social inclusion, adding that a new research agenda should include:

• Further work on the spatial concentration of inequality;
• Development of better methods for measuring social exclusion and the processes that produce it;
• More in-depth study of processes and interventions that build social inclusion;
• Development of new relationships between project partners and research participants.

Facilitator/provocateur Jean-Pierre Collin of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique suggested an additional avenue for research, aimed at clarifying the relationship between poverty and polarization. European countries have developed a sophisticated series of political and social interventions for neighbourhoods in crisis, he said, and similar work might be called for in Canada.

Participants raised the following points in discussion:

• The research agenda should reflect the reality of housing discrimination in communities like Toronto, where the racial composition of two otherwise similar buildings can vary dramatically.

• The literature often misses the positive ways in which tenants in many social housing communities work together to advocate for resources and programming. Access to community space has a big impact, and is a major issue for social housing communities.

• Too often, the research agenda on social exclusion is set by the “included”.

• A participant asked how the knowledge-based society and information technology are linked with the polarization of urban space. Andrew said there have been some examples of projects that used technology in a socially inclusive way. Collin noted that the new technology sectors receive considerable attention and support in Montreal, even though they only account for 5% of the employment.

• A participant said the field of health promotion has ample literature on effective interventions, but experience shows that there is no single approach that will work in all situations. Andrew said researchers know a fair bit about what works, but less about how successful front-line projects are governed, controlled and held accountable.

• The participant said her key research question is why no one “gets it”—if all the information is out there, what’s holding communities back? Another audience member stressed the need to draw on health promotion research as a way of getting at a series of inter-related, self-perpetuating barriers to opportunity that are increasing the relative disadvantage of many communities. He said information is already available on some of the front-line interventions that have been attempted.

• There is a need to bring social concerns together with the traditional range of urban issues—regional land use planning, labour markets, urban investment, transportation planning. Andrew commented that urban politicians in Canada have tended to be clever about evading explicit responsibility for social issues, with the unfortunate result that the design of cities is not generally seen as a social question. The exception is Ontario, where the province shifted most of the social policy agenda back to local governments. A participant replied that the past 10 years have seen increased municipal interest in social policy.

• Research on urban polarization should be linked more closely with the literature on social movements, and a more deliberate effort is needed to combine academic research with knowledge created by the broader public.

• Much of the change in urban settings comes from grassroot initiatives, but relatively few community organizations were represented at this conference. Bursaries should have been put in place to enable people from front-line groups to participate in the discussion, meet each other, and compare notes on what works.

• Andrew said it’s fascinating to see the differences in neighbourhood planning across wealthier and less-wealthy communities, based on the professional resources at their disposal and their own sense of their rights and entitlements. Planning outcomes vary accordingly.

• Community empowerment can work against social inclusion. Some neighbourhood councils have worked hard to prevent social housing or group homes in their back yards.

• It may be useful to focus on the balance between holism and institutional specificity. When broad initiatives are applied universally, it’s often possible to put resources in many peoples’ hands, but generally at the expense of program flexibility. At the local level, there is more opportunity to be very specific in meeting the needs of individual neighbourhoods and households.

• Research on the city as a site for social change could focus on who controls the allocation and distribution of urban space, for whom, and why, how those actors can be influenced, and how urban space can be reallocated to serve the goals of social justice and well-being. A key concern is that, for all the community development work that has gone on in some settings, excluded neighbourhoods often remain excluded.

• Ruth Levitas expressed concern about the construction of urban settings as private versus public space, suggesting that a great deal of urban infrastructure has been ripped down and rebuilt in the interest of capital. Andrew replied that cities are indeed built as “very efficient producers of economic profit for a lot of people”.

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For more information about the conference, contact:
 
Sarah Zgraggen
The Willow Group
Tel: (613) 722-8796;
Fax: (613) 729-6206;
e-mail: szgraggen@thewillowgroup.com