This paper explores the commercial shopping street as a site of racialized class struggle. The argument builds around the study of a disinvested inner-suburban neighbourhood in Toronto, which furnishes an ideal case through which to achieve the paper's objectives of, first, identifying commercial space as an important site of contestation over competing suburban futures; second, delineating how processes of racialization inform the economies of commercial gentrification and urban renewal; and third, highlighting the epistemological and theoretical insights that emerge when research is conducted collaboratively, among academic, community, and activist groupings. The paper argues that such commercial spaces play a key role in making the city accessible to vulnerable and marginalized groups. Two competing planning agendas centred on reordering commercial space, meanwhile, spell the almost-certain demise of such arrangements: a "real estate" vision featuring new condominium developments, and a new urbanist resistance favouring "green" and "creative" alternatives. Our engagements with precarious, predominantly immigrant-owned businesses and community-based researchers reveal the complicity of both modes of development planning with processes of displacement and structural racism. Specifying these dynamics as "racialized class projects" opens up space for intervention and organizing.Retail shopping streets have largely eluded the attention of critical urban scholarship. To the extent that retail figures in studies of urban change, agency has been ascribed primarily to the tastes and desires of the middle class in attracting and shaping capital or conversely to the role of upscale retailers in place-making and the construction of identity. 1 Others imagine instead the workings of an abstract, disembodied, competitive market. Either rendition offers a truncated representation of the diverse institutional arrangements through which commercial streets are built and organized. Meanwhile, the literature on gentrification, source of much insight on class and the city, has yet to dwell extensively on commercial space as a site of struggle over the right to stay put, as Chester Hartmann (1984) once articulated the most
This paper contributes a critical and intersectional feminist analysis and methodological approach to debates about creative city policies and practices. Through a narrative description of community-engaged arts interventions based on action research with the Toronto Free Gallery, an artist-run centre and activist space, I demonstrate how feminist arts activism uncovers the multiple exclusions that creative city policies and practices entrench. In some ways, community-engaged arts interventions can be complicit in exclusionary gentrification dynamics, particularly the production of spaces of white privilege and heteronormativity. But neoliberal imperatives are not always over determining. Feminist artists and activists are also finding ways to performatively and playfully push back at this highly regulated, gendered, and raced regime.
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