Teaser

Description

While cities as a whole can be viewed as distinct ecological environments, they also have their own internal ecological order made up of a variety of local niches.  These niches are not independent of one another, but interact to produce and reproduce a characteristic order that persists through time, even as individuals move about and change.  In this study, we examine and develop the notion of the political order of the city as constituting a crucial aspect of urban ecology, using Toronto as a case study but also exploring similar relations in London, UK.  


To do so, we combine insights from urban studies, political science, and geography to examine the spatial articulation of urban politics. We deliberately speak of a “political order” rather than a “political structure” to emphasize relational patterns while allowing for change in, and selective activation of, their ordering principles. We develop a framework for examining urban politics that features three core concepts: order, cleavage, and activation. Regarding order, we suggest that neighborhoods exhibit political patterns that tend to persist across elections. These patterns embody spatially-entrenched cleavages, which inform neighborhoods’ relationships to the city as a polity, as well as other neighborhoods. We suggest that cleavages become politically salient must be activated through mechanisms such as political campaigning, and that activated cleavages may in turn alter the views and experiences of residents in city neighborhoods.

We find that Toronto’s political order revolves around two major cleavages.  One divides the city’s progressive core from its more conservative suburban areas, and turns primarily on features of urban form and transit patterns, such as housing type and commuting method.  The other is primarily intra-suburban, and divides the city’s traditionally upper-status Establishment areas from its more marginalized communities; this cleavage turns on factors such as income, religion, and occupation.  
 

Having described the nature of Toronto’s political order, we then examine how it relates to individuals’ actions and attitudes, showing that individual Torontonians’ voting behavior is strongly connected to the particular political zone of the city in which they reside, and that individuals’ confidence in a range of social institutions shifts depending upon the political fortunes of their neighbourhoods. These analyses show that the meso-level ecological patterns we find are not readily reducible to the demographic characteristics of individuals; rather, the political order is a reality with significance in individuals’ lives, a social fact to which people respond in various ways.

Some interactive maps of Toronto based on this research have been published in the Toronto Star.