Luisa Sotomayor

In 2023-2024, the Ontario government proposed dissolving Peel Region, a two-tier governance structure serving one of Canada’s most diverse and rapidly urbanizing suburban areas. While framed as technocratic restructuring, the initiative was underpinned by political calculation and populist appeals to local autonomy, revealing deeper tensions in how territory, governance and social service delivery are imagined and politicized. Approaching territory as a relational and contested construct—an active force in decision-making and a site of social relations imbued with meaning—the article critically examines the political stage surrounding the proposed dissolution and foregrounds how a network of non-profit social service providers, the Metamorphosis Network of Peel, became a key territorial actor resisting top-down reforms. Although the dissolution plan was ultimately abandoned, it exposed the fragility of state-led governance and opened space for alternative imaginaries and re-territorialization grounded in networks of care infrastructure and embedded forms of expertise. Tracing how Metamorphosis mobilized place-based advocacy and service-oriented networks, we argue that this coordinated response, while not municipalist in a classical or insurgent sense, reflects an incipient form of regionalist praxis that we call here “social service regionalism.” The Peel case contributes to international debates on re-territorialization by advancing a processual, post-sovereigntist account of spatial politics. It illustrates how regional governance is recalibrated in practice not through bureaucratic engineering but through polycentric spatial politics and embedded networks more attuned to local realities.

Non‐status people face a socio‐legal precariousness that contradicts the promises of an inclusive city. Marking Toronto's tenth anniversary of its “sanctuary city” policy, our research assesses the progress and potential of social planning and municipalist agendas to support irregularised residents. Drawing from interviews with service providers, city officials, and non‐status citizens in Toronto, we propose a decolonial politics of urban citizenship recognition we call “non‐status citizenship”. This concept addresses specific paradoxes related to irregularisation, access, jurisdiction, and regularisation. By framing our discussion around these paradoxes, we highlight the discomfort and transformative potential of non‐status citizenship for immigration regimes in sanctuary cities. We argue that recognising non‐status citizenship goes beyond notions of urban citizenship to claim formal recognition and security, which resolves the four paradoxes theoretically, politically, and practically. We also emphasise the role of cities in expanding service delivery and calling out the failure of planning across levels of government.

Access to adequate and affordable housing for all is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Across the world, rents and house prices have risen much faster than incomes, and housing precarity and homelessness have intensified, although in uneven ways. This chapter focuses on the contributions of feminist scholarship to global studies of housing and homelessness. These contributions shed light on the diverse housing challenges confronting women in distinct settings and how global trends intersect with differentiated housing needs and the everyday experience of home. Crucially, while exposing the contradictions of social reproduction under capitalism, feminist scholarship underlines the profoundly gendered and relational character of housing and homelessness. Recently, by insisting on the vital role of infrastructures of care in society - as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic - feminists have opened new fronts for housing policy and practice, connecting women’s situated knowledge to struggles and strategies to pursue multi-scalar changes.

Despite Toronto's motto of diversity and inclusion, the municipality has recently mobilised exclusionary spatio‐legal tools against unhoused populations using claims to law and order. This article examines one such case of legal action, its precedents, and its constitutive effects on urban citizenship and governance. In 2021, amidst a homelessness crisis aggravated by COVID‐19, Toronto police executed violent raids against encampment residents in three public parks. In response to the public relations backlash, the municipality changed course, issuing suspension notices to encampment leaders that barred them from public spaces and services. The suspension notice, while unenforceable, allows municipal administrators to exclude those whose conduct allegedly disturbs the quiet enjoyment of property from public space. Building on critical planning and socio‐legal debates on propertied urban citizenship, we use legal research and semi‐structured interviews to identify how these arbitrary yet legal tools exacerbate permanent displaceability, banishment, and colonial modes of governance.

Toronto is in a housing crisis. Many residents lack access to adequate and affordable housing. In response, neoliberals and reformers have radicalized their advocacy for more market housing as the only possible alternative. Drawing attention to the role housing plays in the reproduction of labour power and the crisis-ridden dynamic of capital accumulation, we highlight the inability of market housing to meet a range of social needs. We tackle crucial weaknesses of the housing supply argument, including, first, its quantitative orientation; second, its impatience with those who defend existing housing options; third, its historical amnesia; fourth; its pop-economist (mis-)understanding of housing markets; fifth, its superficial critique of zoning, and sixth, its illusory embrace of seemingly alternative ways of organizing housing spatially: mixed-use and inclusionary zoning. Reflecting on the recent municipal by-election in Toronto, we also consider what it would take to shift course towards decommodified and decolonial housing futures.

This article examines studentification in Toronto’s Chinatown, a centrally located neighborhood experiencing increases in student populations due to nearby university expansion. This expansion has been met with land-use planning policies of intensification and containment, and market-driven development propelling substantial density increases. We seek to answer, first, what types of development and residential trends result from rising student housing demand; second, how are commercial uses influenced by a growing student population of young, largely racialized adults and their lifestyle choices; and, third, what types of neighborhood tensions and micropolitics play out in this context. We show that the growing university intake of international students—particularly from China—living near Chinatown has created class-based and generational tensions in response to coethnic and market-driven neighborhood change. We highlight opportunities for multistakeholder collaborations to preserve Chinatown as an affordable intergenerational neighborhood where residents (old and new) find communities of arrival and belonging.

Este artículo analiza la suspensión del proyecto de transporte BRT Trans-milenio por la Carrera Séptima de Bogotá a través de demandas judiciales. Con base en 23 entrevistas y una revisión de documentos legales y judiciales, mostramos cómo la creciente judicialización de la planeación urbana en Bogotá está reconfigurando las formas de hacer política urbana, abriendo nuevas formas de incidir en decisiones de ciudad y empoderando a ciertos actores y discursos en la gobernanza urbana. En este caso, propietarios, ciudadanos educados de clase media y políticos lograron suspender el proyecto y defender sus intereses y visiones de ciudad a través de la movilización de conocimiento legal. El artículo concluye resaltando la necesidad de conceptualizar mejor las posibilidades y límites de la judicialización para democratizar la planeación y la política urbana, algo que no se ha tratado con la suficiente atención en los estudios urbanos latinoamericanos.

In the past decade, there has been a rise in legal action around urban policy and planning in Colombia. Legal expertise has been mobilized by a plethora of actors, including social movements, local politicians, neighborhood groups and individual citizens. This has resulted in legal experts and judges often dictating how social housing, transport corridors, public space, or waste management schemes ought to be implemented by municipal administrations. In this context, mayors and planners complain that the increasing involvement of the judiciary in urban planning drains local resources and undermines the power of mayors to set and implement the political agenda they were democratically elected to execute. In this article, we analyze the rise of legal action against urban planning in Bogotá and conclude by proposing a research agenda for socio-legal and urban scholars interested in further exploring the potential implications of the increasing mobilization of legal expertise in urban planning.

This paper examines the emergence of Purpose-Built Student Accommodations (PBSA) in Canada and the role of neoliberal policies in reshaping the governance and territoriality of higher education. In doing so, it reflects on the implications of these socio-spatial shifts for current notions of studenthood. Using a case study from a university located in Toronto’s low-income inner suburbs, we question, first, the extent to which policy changes have enabled PBSA development in Canada; second, the particularities of PBSA implementation in this context, and third, the ensuing filtering of student bodies along class and student status through stratified housing options. We argue that if universities are to fulfill their public interest goal of enabling social mobilization through equalizing opportunities, then student housing should be considered a fundamental space where democratic societal objectives may materialize. This may require a “new grammar of politics” that foregrounds nuance in students’ identities, trajectories, and experience.