5
Globalized Agendas Confront
Local Priorities
Transfusions of global capital into big urban-development projects have been typically met with citizen protest and resistance at the community level, particularly when citizens see concentrated burdens and immediate costs arising from such investment. Transportation-infrastructure plans and projects tend to trigger intense mobilization and activism by citizens because of the significant expenditures they require, the concentration of new or newly manifested ills (e.g., noise, pollution, disruption, and disconnection from surrounding places), and the fact that transportation is a highly visible, everyday influence on how citizens experience the public realm. In this chapter we reconsider the saga of how Canada’s three largest cities created their major mobility infrastructure during the twentieth century, by adopting a street-level perspective that highlights the input of the people who would be most affected by that infrastructure.
Almost everyone living in a city has strongly held opinions about transportation-infrastructure planning and performance. Residents tend to evaluate transportation options at two levels. First, there is a general perception about whether the urban transportation system is meeting their mobility needs in an affordable and efficient manner. Second, there are specific reactions to mobility’s impacts on one’s community, which can include parking issues, road traffic, noise, pollution, and severance from adjacent places through the barriers created by elevated expressways or railways. Many people think that, just like managing a restaurant or coaching a sports team, they can plan transportation as well as the professionals do, if not better. And because people experience directly the effects of transportation-planning decisions on a daily basis, this personal experience often informs sophisticated and fervently held positions.
Popular perspective thus sets the stage for political conflicts over major mobility infrastructure, some of which have precipitated defining moments in city histories. Such disputes have punctuated the urban-development trajectories in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver as each city has seen pitched battles over expressways, the outcomes of which have yielded an enduring legacy. Debates over rapid-transit infrastructure have been less consistent, but no less significant, in their outcomes.
Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver each have dense networks of neighbourhood organizations and local institutions that tend to be suspicious of the agendas and priorities that are imported along with the inflows of global capital. These networks resist both the political and the physical intrusions of the associated infrastructure, especially when projects are planned from above, which was the twentieth-century norm for major mobility. Such resistance does not lend itself to simple categorization. As we have discovered, local communities engage with major mobility plans in ways that are asymmetrical and inconsistent. The results of these interactions are critical, however, because the outcomes reflect and reveal the historically and geographically specific circumstances of each city’s reconciliation of community and mobility.
Canada’s three largest cities display distinctive patterns of local organizing, influenced by myriad local and exogenous factors (Lee 2007; Wellman 2006; Ley 1994, 1988, 1977; Kaplan 1982; Nowlan and Nowlan 1970). The civic visions that have been forged under the pressure generated by local power confronting global capital in each urban region have become foundational narratives. These stories continue to help explain the development of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, but each story has to be carefully contextualized within particular regional histories and specific attributes of global-city-development strategies. The distinctive kinds of resistance engendered by each challenge from a local community against major mobility infrastructure reveal simultaneously both commonalities and differences.
Close study of community responses to even a single development proposal uncovers multiple layers of neighbourhood organization, social movements, and protest actions that are typically diverse, surprisingly nuanced, and not easily reconciled. Large-scale development proposals stimulate responses from multiple perspectives with contending political and economic priorities. It is clear, however, that along the axes of development that we are exploring in this book – centred on each city’s episodes of building major mobility infrastructure – disputes about investment, community impacts, and subsequent land-use repercussions have elicited distinctive responses in each of Canada’s three largest cities.
Our attempt to clarify these histories has focused on understanding how the global-city aspirations of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver were pursued, as evidenced by their major mobility infrastructural development over time. Montreal’s urban expressway and rapid-transit networks were extensive due to the opportunities to attract large infusions of capital for global-city building. Provincial and federal governments were leveraged to invest heavily by the commitment to host global mega-events, and investors bought Montreal’s municipal debt to support the local share of these costly infrastructure projects.
Toronto’s global-city vision was more constrained during the twentieth century due to the city’s moderate ability and willingness to engage international circuits of capital for meeting the costs of expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure. Vancouver’s urban expressway ambitions were abandoned earlier than anywhere else in Canada, and were subsequently embraced in outer suburbs, due to the lack of legitimacy and capital that could be mustered for the extensive expressway infrastructure within the urban core that is typically associated with global cities. Vancouver’s urban development has since been tied to a discordant and asymmetric combination of rapid-transit infrastructure and suburban expressways, yielding sprawl punctuated by development clusters around transit nodes.
Each of these transportation trajectories offers evidence that urban social movements were able to mobilize and challenge inner-city expressway plans, as well as rapid-transit schemes, in certain times and places. Although community resistance to urban expressways has been a constant in Canadian history, the magnitude of capital that could be mobilized to build expressways has been variable. We thus want to caution against reading our findings as a judgment on the effectiveness of expressway resistance and/or community-social-capital formation in Canada’s three largest cities. Rather, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver each mounted commensurate resistance to inner-city-expressway initiatives. The resulting confrontations reveal more about the variation in global-city formation than they illustrate variance in modes of community organization. A closer examination and contextualization of how community has confronted capital in each city is thus needed.
THE INFLUENCE OF URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ON MAJOR MOBILITY PROJECTS
Implicit in evaluating the alternative visions of urban development that are generated within local communities is the suggestion that social movements, protests, and grassroots activism can be measured objectively and thus be effectively compared. This is a famously tricky and contentious idea that triggers vibrant responses (Luders 2010; Giugni 1999; Tarrow 1998; Banaszak 1996; Tilly 1978; Piven and Cloward 1977; Gamson 1975; Brill 1971). There is often a subsumed narrative that if social movements succeed in achieving their stated goals, it is because they are able to marshal adequate strength for the task or tasks they have set, halting a particular development, preserving a particular area, gaining representation, forcing a resignation, or changing a policy. The logical conclusion might therefore be that strong movements are successful, and unsuccessful movements must have been, or are, weaker.
Such a simplistic formulation clearly does not explain the full range of real world experiences, conceptually or empirically. There are powerful social movements that have “failed” at certain goals but have had immense influence, often times “succeeding” in unpredictable, tangential, and uncharted ways. One example might be the Occupy movement, which has had undeniable influences on global narratives regarding inequality, capital accumulation, and poverty. But it is difficult to point to many substantive “victories” attributable to this movement, even though it dominated media coverage in North America and Europe for months and attracted millions of people to rallies and occupations across the continent (Chou 2015; Piven 2014).
Conversely there are innumerable examples of small, focused protests and actions achieving significant and visible results. Consider, for example, whistle-blower revelations about financial or military secrets in which a tiny number of informants (even one, in the case of Edward Snowden) can shift the course of history. Or note backroom political protests executed by a few well-connected dissenting individuals that can often create stunning reversals or transformations of policy, largely out of public view and with little popular support or even awareness.
There are also significant challenges in sorting out the influence of causation versus correlation that arise in the search for the ultimate effects of social movements. Consider the possibility that the goals of a highly visible movement might be achieved but without clarity about the effect of any particular mobilization on the outcome. It may be that a movement sees its aims achieved, but the changes might have been already underway or realized through different methods. Some popular movements might be tagging onto or following significant kinds of other work that had been percolating for years. Or, in other circumstances, a movement might be successful, but it is near impossible to disaggregate constituent parts of that mobilization to ascertain the aspects that really mattered (The Economist 2011; Smithey 2009; Bernstein 2003; Schumaker 1991; Mirowsky and Ross 1981; Lipsky 1970).
It seems fair to conclude that there are numerous and varied factors to consider when assessing the strength of any movement and that societal impact also depends upon scale and context (Engler 2011; G. Davis et al. 2005; Andrews 1997; Button 1989). A protest of a thousand people in a small town, for example, will be perceived differently than a thousand people gathering in a large metropolis. The political milieus need to be considered as well. A thousand-person protest in a Canadian city is a far cry from a similarly sized gathering in the city of an authoritarian regime where any protest could result in imprisonment, torture, and worse. The forces that compel a thousand people to publicly demonstrate are very different in disparate political contexts.
Thus there arise the questions of whether social movements can ever be measured precisely and objectively, whether their “success” can ever be quantitatively confirmed, and, if so, what might possibly be measured to determine that success. Should verified numbers of people attending marches or events be a valid measure? Would letters to the editor be useful data? Can submissions to public forums be taken into account? Does the number of people arrested at demonstrations matter to this assessment? And what would one make of the media coverage of mobilization efforts?
There are many other possible metrics, and each throws up questions and problems, especially in historical assessments. Some suggest that even the attempt to quantify, measure, and compare relative levels of social-movement strength is wrong headed in its intention and damages popular and grassroots activism by trying to fix or freeze such dynamic efforts within a quantitative taxonomy (McAdam 1999; Giugni 1998; Tarrow 1998; J. Jenkins and Klandermans 1995; Frey, Dietz, and Kalof 1992). These qualms have not prevented other researchers from engaging the challenges of social-movement measurement. The sociological sub-field that is often described as “social movement impact theory” tends to root itself in two foundational texts from the 1970s: The Strategy of Social Protest by William Gamson (1975) and Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and Why They Fail by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1977). Both books attempted to classify various levels and tactics of social movement successes or failures, and each had a significant impact on the mass-scaled civil-rights, environmental, peace, and social-justice movements that were emerging from the legacies of organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Each of these texts has generated considerable scholarship and debate around the impacts of particular strategic approaches: disruption versus moderation, violence versus civil disobedience versus non-violence, protest versus lobbying, and structured organizations versus organic, agile movements. Each of these debates both reflects and defines the ideological tendencies of observers and becomes entangled with historically contingent parameters of success, which are vigorously contested in and of themselves.
In contrast, for example, to Piven and Cloward’s findings that disruptive, disorganized, and aggressive (even violent) tactics tend to find the most significant successes, others like Gamson and Giugni have argued that more moderate, instrumentalist strategies produce far more impactful outcomes (Giugni 1999; Kriesi 1995; Cortright 1991; Gamson 1975). These kinds of debates rely on contingent and politicized definitions of success that also require critical appraisal. There are fundamental value differences underlying the question of whether the goals of social movements are or should be specific policy changes, regime displacements, shifts in larger cultural and social attitudes, and/or personal changes in participants. Any definitions of success or failure, or of impacts, have to first embrace or reject the deeper values that inform the competing goals to which these movements could aspire.
There is also a wide range of interpretation found in the social-movement literature regarding the intended versus unintended consequences of community mobilization (Suh 2014; A. Martin 2008; Tarrow 1998). Some mobilizations are presented as clearly successful in altering policy, but these accounts of community influence on policy can miss the less positive repercussions that emerge over time. A germane example can be seen in the aftermath of the victory over official planning that Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona residents achieved by halting an expressway that would have dissected their neighbourhood. As Henry Yu (2015) has pointed out, four decades later the effects of community preservation from preventing the intrusion of this infrastructure enabled a more insidious form of exploitation. Much of the neighbourhood that was “saved” from penetration and permanent disruption by an expressway has become thoroughly gentrified and prohibitively expensive for any low- or moderate-income descendants of the broad-based, multiracial, progressive coalition that successfully blocked the expressway. Meanwhile, the only major affordable low-income dwellings in the neighbourhood can be found in the public housing that was built on surplus land that had been bulldozed for the unbuilt expressway (Yu 2015).
It might be argued that the original protests were a success and that the more recent displacements have other causes requiring their own responses. Similarly, although Toronto’s highway-resistance movements substantially halted the intrusion of the Spadina Expressway into the city’s core, it can be argued that the region’s autocentric approach to mobility development was not changed overall. Instead, the resources planned for Toronto’s expressway building were just shifted to routes beyond the urban core such as Highway 401, which vies for the heaviest expressway-traffic volume in North America (U.S. Department of Transportation 2014). Conversely, although its protests did not halt expressway construction through the heart of the city, Montreal retains a distinctly compact, walkable character in many of its central districts, a character that predated the expressways. Furthermore, Montreal boasts one of North America’s best-used rapid-transit systems, which relied upon the same megaproject capital flows that fuelled the expressway construction.
These experiences suggest that measuring social movements and their impacts is complicated, contested, and slippery territory. We concur with Giugni’s (1999) suggestion that a more fruitful approach is to look beyond directly linking social-movement activities with change outcomes and instead seek to understand “the conditions and circumstances of their occurrence … If social movements are conceived of as rational, political efforts aimed at social change, the political conditions of the occurrence of certain changes become central to the analysis of social movement outcomes” (xxviii).
We have found that revisiting the narratives about inner-city-expressway protest movements in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver following several decades of development can shed a new light on both the historical conditions and the community circumstances that yielded such divergent outcomes. What constitutes success is a socially constructed, contingent, and contestable idea, and one that relies on a broadly historicized set of understandings. Making sense of the mobility evolution in Canada’s three biggest urban regions requires considering the legacy of those inner-city social movements that resisted expressway expansion and its associated embrace of global capital.
The social movements resisting urban expressways in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver exhibit both similarities and divergences from one another, and the analytical leverage that each story provides is contingent on understanding the specific historical conditions and the specific global-city formations in each place. In some ways the successes and failures of community mobilizations in each city can be understood in temporal terms. For example, Vancouver’s expressway resistance arose at exactly the right moment in the city’s growth, before global-city processes re-emerged as a decisive influence on policy – but that is not all of it. Gauging the impact of social movements on any given set of municipal policy decisions requires a more nuanced, historicized, and narrative analysis.
Montreal
Montreal enjoys an international reputation for urban savoir faire, which embraces the mobility provided by both an extensive network of inner-city expressways and a network of four underground rapid-transit lines, known as the Metro. While Montreal’s reputation has certainly been shaped by the vicissitudes of Canada’s anglophone-francophone relations amid the ebb and flow of Quebec nationalism, it is also clear that the city’s ability, and agility, in building major mobility infrastructure has made a significant contribution to its urban identity.
Although the extent and the speedy construction of Montreal’s expressways might suggest that there was little citizen opposition to such infrastructure, this assumption is unwarranted. Montreal offers abundant evidence of community mobilization, but the expressway-resistance efforts were confronted by both a greater determination on the part of government to build and a more constrained capacity to challenge expressway construction than activists experienced in either Toronto or Vancouver.
These countervailing factors, which have been previously discussed, included the provincial and federal governments’ willingness to contribute significant financial resources toward expressway infrastructure; a local government with an ambitious international agenda of building a “world-class” city; a powerful and long-serving mayor who was skilled in steamrolling opposition; public enthusiasm for ambitious municipal construction projects through the 1970s; and the hosting of two global mega-events – Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics – less than a decade apart.
Before the capital and corporate flight prompted by the threats and violence accompanying Quebec’s sovereignty struggle had undercut Montreal’s position as Canada’s economic nexus, local resistance to expressway-construction plans was confronted by claims that Quebec’s rightful economic and political ambitions depended upon having a global city as the province’s metropolis, with all the attendant infrastructure to support fully a francophone and Quebecois resurgence. Expressways were not just providing urban transportation; to many across Quebec, they were also the route to a new national destination. The Montreal expressway conflicts and the attendant debates over the city’s global-city aspirations were thus in tension with a much larger anti-colonial cultural and nationalist campaign that found no equivalent in Toronto or Vancouver (Gilbert and Poitras 2015; Hamel and Jouve 2008).
In some ways, it is possible to read Montreal citizens’ resistance to urban expressways as a “failure” because that infrastructure came to be almost completely built out, certainly more so than in Toronto or Vancouver. We suggest, however, that owing to the unique contours that local opponents faced in Montreal, the community push-back took different routes, and although expressway resistance failed by most measures, its impacts were and are being felt in other significant ways.
Reflecting the policy equivocation that has been a feature of both English- and French-Canadian city building, the political responses to expressway opponents took the form of compensatory policies, which have paid considerable dividends over time. For example, Montreal’s rapid-transit infrastructure was expanded in tandem with expressways, perhaps more vigorously than it would have without the extensive expressway building. Alongside the demolition and destruction of inner-city housing for new expressways, several heritage sites in the urban core – including Old Montreal – were preserved, and a number of walkable core communities were nurtured.
These ameliorations left Montrealers with much better urban outcomes than would the typical North American approach of urban expressway expansion coupled with public-transport disinvestment and inner-city decay. With valued urban spaces spared from the physical impacts of expressway construction, at least some of Montreal’s communities were preserved after the expressway infrastructure was rerouted or concealed within tunnels. Montreal’s contemporary urban livability may thus owe a good deal to the resistance against expressway building, which, while not stopping construction, did temper infrastructure’s impacts (Robinson 2012; Germain and Rose 2000; Whelan 1991; Filion 1988).
As early as 1945, Montreal urban planners and politicians had identified inner-city traffic congestion as a key problem and presumed that the solution was to add more mobility infrastructure. The planners were eagerly commissioning studies into the efficacy of a massive, elevated east–west expressway cutting across the island. In 1948 these plans were unveiled and presented to the citizenry as the typical panacea for urban challenges: “Montréal is keeping pace with leading American cities, which have recognized the necessity of rapid and free flowing traffic thoroughfares, in order to relieve congestion and avoid its harmful consequences of mounting accident tolls, great losses in depreciated property values, interference with business expansion forcing decentralization, costly delays in transportation and, in some cases, the spreading of blight” (cited in D. Robinson 2012, 236).
The plan argued that an expressway would not just relieve congestion and increase mobility, but, by being inserted into poor neighbourhoods and blighted areas, the infrastructure would also create significant opportunities for civic regeneration and urban renewal. Moreover, planners argued that a major expressway would knit together the whole city, allow for easy access into and out of the core, and integrate the city better with Quebec’s growing highway network.
These claims failed to persuade those holding the public purse strings, however, and for the next decade expressway plans stagnated in the face of increasingly vocal demands for the preservation of urban heritage along Montreal’s waterfront. The case for community protection was articulated by both city staff and a patchwork of citizens and neighbourhood groups. These critiques fomented public apprehension and press opposition but never fully coalesced into a movement against the expressway, in part because the funding necessary to realize planned infrastructure was never assembled (Kaplan 1982).
City elites remained convinced of the need for an urban expressway, however, and the region’s population growth, combined with rising competition from Toronto as a financial centre within Canada, meant that the interest in launching major mobility infrastructure persisted. Various configurations of municipal agencies and business groups continued to present new studies and formal calls for an expressway until the early 1960s when Mayor Jean Drapeau linked his monumental strategy for global-city development with the first wave of Quebec nationalism that called for government-led change to unlock new opportunity for francophones. His haughty claim was that, while rival Toronto might someday become Canada’s “Milan,” Montreal would always remain the nation’s “Rome.” And Rome was known around the world for its monuments.
Drapeau embraced a frenetic series of projets de grandeur that were intended to shape Montreal into a first-tier global city in the modernist mould. A palatial performing arts centre, known as Place des Arts, a massive exhibition centre named Place Bonaventure, corporate office towers like Place Ville-Marie, and a giant Olympic stadium all required major mobility infrastructure in the form of both inner-city expressways and a rapid-transit network (Hamel and Jouve 2008; Paul 2004; McRoberts 1993; McKenna and Purcell 1980).
The second factor propelling the capital flows needed to realize Mayor Drapeau’s initiative was the Quebec government’s 1963 decision to fast-track expressway development in and around Montreal. The planned network included a circular belt around the downtown core and a rerouted section of the Trans-Canada Highway that would run through the city. A third impetus, which was spurred significantly by the upcoming Expo 67 in Montreal, came from the provincial and federal governments’ reaching of a cost-sharing agreement on the expressway’s substantial price tag.
The $175 million plans for the north–south, fifteen-mile, six-lane route included a mostly elevated riverside expressway, a tunnel-bridge combination across the St Lawrence connecting Longueuil with Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, and a link to the planned east–west expressway. The road, according to the plan, would transition between ground level, elevated, and depressed “as required.” The budget breakdown indicated $100 million of provincial financing, $40 million of federal financing, and $35 million of municipal financing. Federal Minister of Public Works Jean-Paul Deschatelets (1963–65) was careful to note that the project qualified for federal funding through the Trans-Canada Highway Act because it was designated as part of that highway (D. Robinson 2012, 251).
Once the financing had come together, expressway development moved ahead with alacrity. The route was finalized within three months, and expropriations began almost immediately thereafter. Complaints from the residential neighbourhoods in the expressway’s path were dismissed, given the urgency of preparing for a world’s fair.
The velocity of the Trans-Canada project created a wake that pulled in and accelerated the completion of the other expressway-network components including the Bonaventure Expressway, which opened in 1965; the Turcot Interchange; and the Décarie Expressway, which opened just days before the exposition did. The city embarked simultaneously on a massive construction of the city’s road network – widening, extending, separating, and improving – and between 1961 and 1967 “road improvements consumed roughly half the city’s capital expenditures” (Kaplan 1982, 425). The long-hoped-for east–west expressway was the one project that was delayed, with the promise that it would be completed after Expo 67.
It was also only after Expo 67 that Montreal’s expressway resistance coalesced into a movement that was united by opposition to the destruction of the low-income housing standing in the path of the new infrastructure. The Housing and Urban Renewal Committee, an alliance of clergy, academics, neighbourhood groups, municipal politicians, and preservationists – co-chaired by Joseph Baker, a prominent and active architecture professor at McGill University – formed to resist expropriations. The construction of the Trans-Canada Highway extension began in 1969, and expropriations for the east-west expressway started along the waterfront, both of which threatened the loss of thousands of homes.
A groundswell of opposition emerged to resist the post-Expo expressway projects, arguing that the repercussions of additional expressways would be deleterious to the city’s social fabric and that the money should be redirected to other public works such as housing, sewers, hospitals, and rapid transit. Throughout 1969 and 1970, the protests against expropriation and relocation grew. One primary locus of resistance was the Lower Westmount Citizens’ Committee, representing a low-income francophone community that faced considerable displacement. Many of these civic activists appealed directly to provincial and federal officials. The criticism began to have an effect, which became most visible when the leader of the Parti Québécois, René Lévesque, publically opposed the waterfront expressway.
By 1970, labour, socialist, anarchist, and nationalist groups were broadly condemning the loss of housing to expressways. In 1971 the Common Front Against the Highway formed, with a core membership of fourteen high-profile unions, citizens’ organizations, and church groups. The Common Front soon grew into a coalition of more than fifty groups, organizing marches, blockades, legal action, press barrages, and political lobbying and sharing tactics and ideas with Toronto’s expressway-opposition umbrella, Stop Spadina, Save Our City Coordinating Committee (SSSOCCC). By mid-1971 the expressway conflict had even provoked a rhetorical battle in the provincial legislature, when the opposition Parti Québécois claimed that urban expressway expansion was part of an intentional strategy to divert attention from ongoing FLQ and Quebec nationalism crises (Germain and Rose 2000; Kaplan 1982; Leo 1977).
Through all these protests, and despite a burgeoning base of opposition, expressway construction continued. The Trans-Canada Highway extension opened in 1972, with plans targeting completion of all urban expressways in 1974. Construction proceeded steadily, requiring waves of home relocations and demolitions. However, it was met with growing protest – in forms ranging from journalistic exposés of cost overruns, to legal challenges, to public demonstrations. Opponents were emboldened by Ontario Premier Davis’s cancelling of the Spadina Expressway in 1971, and, although Montreal’s expressway supporters claimed that the situations were incomparable, it appeared that the tide was shifting. There was a growing consensus that the huge financial commitment demanded to fully build Montreal’s expressways could be better spent on other public works, notably rapid transit. Even orthodox urban planners were voicing concerns about the loss of primarily low-income housing.
Further extension of the east–west expressway was aborted when the Parti Québécois prevailed in the 1976 provincial election, and shortly after forming a government, it cancelled additional expressway construction. The east–west thoroughfare was “downgraded to an arterial route prior to the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, thus saving several francophone districts on the north end of the Island of Montréal from the road” (D. Robinson 2012, 303). This decision effectively closed the city’s chapter of major expressway-expansion efforts.
Although Montreal’s early and aggressive push saw much of the planned network realized, the combination of sustained and broad-based opposition, an eventual withdrawal of provincial financing, the city’s mounting budget problems, and a change in provincial-government transportation priorities brought Montreal’s expressway megaproject era to a close before the final segment of the planned network could be completed. The end of Montreal’s inner-city-expressway program happened at approximately the same time as Toronto and Vancouver gave up on their efforts, although Montreal had achieved the largest urban network in Canada by the time that the building of inner-city expressways had fallen out of favour.
Toronto
Toronto shares an international reputation as a livable and adroitly planned city with Montreal and Vancouver. Its status rests on a perceived balance of mobility options, a commitment to urban density, and a significant array of walkable, complete communities within the city’s core. This reputation has been attained, in no small part, through initiatives that emerged following the citizen resistance that stymied highway and urban renewal plans for construction of a complete expressway network that would have spatially transformed the urban core to inhibit much of today’s denser, mixed-use redevelopment.
While Toronto’s expressway resistance differed from Montreal’s and Vancouver’s in both the composition and the motivation of activists, the outcome shared important similarities that can offer insight into the nature and meaning of community resistance to global development ambitions. All three cities saw expressway projects in their core cancelled or curtailed to some degree, followed by a redeployment of expressway building in the urban periphery where there were few, if any, people to protest the impending impacts. Unlike in Montreal and Vancouver, however, in Toronto the most visible and effective opposition came from a predominantly middle-class population whose gentrifying neighbourhoods were directly threatened by plans for the Spadina Expressway.
Just as in Vancouver, the factor that prevented expressway completion was a lack of capital. But, unlike Vancouver’s, Toronto’s fiscal constraint hinged on a highly public reversal of policy by a new premier. Thus a double dosage of elitism can be seen in Toronto’s approach to terminating urban expressway construction. Elites within the community articulated the case against urban expressways. Their success in making this case then opened a window to change the policy agenda, which governing elites then used to establish a new direction for Toronto’s major mobility development.
Toronto’s community protests are rooted in Canada’s postwar attempts to embrace modernism in urban design and emulate America’s expansion of inner- and intra-city expressway infrastructure. By 1943 the City of Toronto’s planning board had already drafted an expressway network plan that would open up the whole city region to high-speed automobile travel. In 1953 a regional government tier was launched with a mandate to plan, build, and maintain the municipal infrastructure needed to keep up with rapid growth. Metropolitan Toronto would fully pay for all infrastructure construction, except for roads, whose cost would be split evenly with the Province of Ontario.
This metropolitan governance structure created the conditions for an entrenched and divisive split between the City of Toronto and its surrounding municipalities, where suburban development was in full swing (Sewell 2009). The city was growing swiftly, but metropolitan Toronto’s suburbs were expanding even faster, and the combined increase added urgency to plans for an inner-city expressway grid that could enable full-scale metropolitan automobility. In 1954, Metropolitan Toronto revamped the transportation plan, and expressway construction began. The expressway plan was reworked and expanded in 1959 and then again in 1966. The Gardiner Expressway (initially called the Lakeshore Expressway), running along Toronto’s southern edge, was opened in 1958 and extended in 1962 and again in 1964. The Don Valley Expressway, running more or less north–south through Toronto’s eastern core and eventually connecting the Gardiner Expressway and Highway 401, was opened in 1961.
Toronto’s first two expressways were part of a plan that called for a web of motorways to enable high-speed automobile travel across the whole city. The Crosstown Expressway would cut east–west through the inner city, mostly parallel to the Gardiner Expressway, and then the Spadina Expressway would run north from the Gardiner Expressway through the western core, to complete an expressway grid. Unlike the Gardiner and Don Valley Expressways, the Crosstown and Spadina Expressways would have to pass through and disrupt densely settled neighbourhoods. The Crosstown Expressway, which would have cut directly into the wealthy Rosedale neighbourhood, faded in and out of Metropolitan Toronto’s transportation plans; sometimes it was quietly buried, at other times it was not mentioned at all, and sometimes it was highly qualified. The Spadina Expressway, however, would have to pass through some slightly less upscale communities and thus emerged as the locus of an intensifying debate on building expressway infrastructure in the urban core. Several attributes moved Spadina Expressway ahead of the Crosstown Expressway as a priority.
First, and similarly to what happened in Vancouver, the Spadina Expressway was linked to an ambitious real estate development, the Yorkdale Plaza shopping centre. Yorkdale Plaza’s proponents claimed in 1961 that the shopping centre would generate $1 million ($7.9 million in 2014 dollars) in annual tax revenues (Leo 1977, 31), and thus persuaded public officials to fund an interchange between Highway 401 and the future Spadina Expressway that would also serve their property. The Yorkdale development scheme demonstrated how significant capital flows into suburban land development can motivate and advance urban expressway plans, even in the face of community opposition.
The Yorkdale Plaza development was first conceived by the T. Eaton Company in the mid-1950s. In 1958, after purchasing forty acres of undeveloped land adjacent to Highway 401 at Dufferin Street, the company invited Simpson’s, a rival department store chain, to join it in creating a shopping centre. The mall was opened in 1964 with over 1.2 million square feet of shops, briefly making it the biggest indoor mall in the world. “Yorkdale was developed by Trizec Corp. Ltd., the real estate firm founded when New York mogul William Zeckendorf Sr.’s Webb and Knapp ran out of money building Place Ville Marie in Montreal and Zeckendorf’s British lenders were brought in as partners to avoid foreclosure. Based in Montreal in the 1960s, Trizec would become one of North America’s largest real estate firms. Yorkdale, along with the Halifax Shopping Centre, and Burnaby’s Brentwood Shopping Centre, was among its earliest projects” (Plummer 2012).
Metropolitan Toronto’s close vote approving the Spadina Expressway was justified by some as necessary to enable the Yorkdale development. After forty-five separate ratepayers groups had made presentations to Metropolitan Toronto Council opposing the plan, Metropolitan Toronto’s chairman, Fred Gardiner, gave a stirring appeal to build the infrastructure, and then he cast the deciding vote to approve Spadina Expressway’s initial phase, the northern segment linking to Highway 401. Chairman Gardiner urged Metropolitan Toronto to build expressways in synchronization with commercial development, stating, “Construction should start as soon as Eaton’s and Simpson’s begin construction of their new North York stores to handle the volume of traffic those two stores will create” (Nowlan and Nowlan 1970, 71). Metropolitan Toronto’s infrastructure commitment satisfied the Yorkdale developers, who began construction soon after the expressway construction had been approved (D. Robinson 2012; Sewell 2009; Osbaldeston 2008; Leo 1977; Sewell 1972; Nowlan and Nowlan 1970).
The second reason that the Spadina Expressway became a political flashpoint was that its burdens and benefits exacerbated the emerging centre-periphery tensions across the Metropolitan Toronto area. Suburban communities competed against the city of Toronto over virtually every municipal development decision, the subject of transportation being among the most contentious. Opposition to the Spadina Expressway was widely critiqued by suburban politicians as a move by elitist urban residents to restrict entry to the city by their less-fortunate and spatially dispersed counterparts. As John Sewell (1993, 179) wrote, the fight “pitted one kind of vision about the city against another, a battle between suburban and city values … political lines were more toughly drawn than the city had seen for many decades. The line seemed to run between supporters of the old city and new.”
While Toronto’s suburban housing and shopping centres were being built in green fields, the urban core was being gentrified by a cohort of middle-class professionals who were increasingly attracted to city living. David Ley (1994, 56) identified those who were renewing neighbourhoods such as Cabbagetown, the Annex, and Yorkville as the “new cultural class.” Presaging Richard Florida’s invocation of the bourgeois creative class as a vanguard in restoring urban livability, Ley identified these citizens as a social force for changing the character of the inner city. Toronto’s new cultural class comprised highly educated and well-paid professionals who were working in the public and the private sector. They could afford to refurbish the inner city’s older housing stock and were attracted to the charm and “authenticity” of Victorian-era homes. Toronto’s new cultural class was thus on a collision course with the suburban pressure to reallocate and reshape urban space for access by automobile.
For most transportation planners and municipal politicians, especially those representing suburban constituencies, the Spadina Expressway represented continuity in the advance of automobility (D. Robinson 2012), but for many city residents, including but not limited to the gentrifiers, it posed an existential threat. At the same time that citizen groups were actively organizing to stop the Spadina Expressway within the city of Toronto, there were opposite efforts by suburban ratepayers’ groups in the northern suburban neighbourhoods of Bathurst-Lawrence and Downsview seeking to extend expressway infrastructure into the urban core (D. Robinson 2012, 31).
While suburbanites and their municipal representatives saw expressways as a natural means to move vehicles throughout all of metropolitan Toronto, urban residents could not understand where all the cars and trucks would go if expressways delivered them into the city’s heart. Official plans implied that the Spadina, like any other expressway, would move an already existing and inevitable volume of cars more efficiently than the street grid would. But for those who lived at the receiving end of this traffic pipeline, there was no plausible explanation of how the city would handle the considerable volume of anticipated traffic after it had disgorged into the centre, with all the traffic’s attendant pollution, congestion, and noise (Sewell 1993; Leo 1977; Nowlan and Nowlan 1970).
The Spadina Expressway’s planned route also required immediate destruction of the urban fabric, well before any promised mobility benefits might arise. Both the Gardiner and the Don Valley Expressways had been built mostly through industrial areas and green space – parts of the city with few residents – and thus there was little to disrupt before the traffic began flowing. The Spadina Expressway, however, would penetrate the heart of Ley’s new cultural-class territory, disrupting well-established neighbourhoods like the Annex, Chinatown, Kensington Market, and Forest Hill.
Once the Spadina Expressway’s construction had been approved in 1962, inner-city opposition started to intensify. But construction began in the northern suburbs where support was solid, and disruption of the established community was minimal. By 1964, Spadina’s first segment was opened, along with the Yorkdale Shopping Centre. In that same year Metropolitan Toronto released an official transportation plan proposing a range of options for expressway coverage. In 1966 Metropolitan Toronto endorsed the development of a mix of rapid-transit and expressway infrastructure in a “balanced” plan that still included the full Spadina and Crosstown Expressways. The second segment of the Spadina Expressway was completed to Eglinton Avenue by 1969, bringing expressway infrastructure to the edge of well-established affluent Toronto communities and, just as importantly, depleting the budget that had been allocated by Metropolitan Toronto and the Province of Ontario for building urban expressway infrastructure.
In October 1969, with inner-city expressway construction imminent, a new oppositional coalition emerged. The Stop Spadina, Save Our City Coordinating Committee (SSSOCCC) embarked on both lobbying and large-scale political and community mobilizing to prevent the expressway’s penetration into the city of Toronto. It allied with the recently formed Confederation of Residents’ and Ratepayers’ Associations (CORRA) to advocate an urban agenda that would conserve the space and the places valued by inner-city ratepayers, students, academics, and local businesses (Magnusson 1983). Prior expressway opposition had been mounted by neighbourhood-scale organizations with limited professional experience and political influence. This new alliance elevated resistance against Toronto’s accommodation of suburban automobility and embrace of widespread high-rise tower development. SSSOCCC and CORRA insisted upon a wholesale redesign of the planning process in order to embrace transparency, citizen participation, and a set of transportation and land-use priorities that would meet local needs as defined within the community.
In the spirit of the times, the SSSOCCC deployed vibrant, performative, and energetic organizing tactics, which were both ambitious and radical compared with prior expressway protests. These efforts attracted growing participation, with an estimated 1,500 members by 1970. The demographic composition of the coalition, however, diverged from that of both Montreal’s and Vancouver’s expressway opposition, comprising a large proportion of middle-class and highly educated participants. As Robinson characterized SSSOCCC, “the group’s members were primarily middle-class professionals and many lived in the proposed path of the highway. Chairman Alan Powell was a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, and other key members held similar positions. David Nowlan, for example, was an economics professor at York University, John Sewell was a Toronto Alderman and later served as the Mayor of Toronto, and Colin Vaughan was an architect” (D. Robinson 2012, 35).
When the Globe and Mail reported on SSSOCCC, its elitism was featured, with a reporter noting, “There are no labour leaders on the leadership rolls, and few working-class people in the general ranks … most of the group’s spokesmen have British or American accents … their use of the word city in their ‘Save our City’ slogan smacks of arrogance or selfishness to suburbanites; that too many leading members sound elitely [sic] upper middle class” (MacKenzie 1970).
SSSOCCC’s leaders were also media savvy, and their mobilizations consistently captured public attention through creative actions that included celebrity deployment at protest events. Prominent Torontonians who were recruited to appear at anti-expressway happenings included Pierre Berton, Marshal McLuhan, University of Toronto president Claude Bissell, and Jane Jacobs. The coalition was not just sophisticated and media fluent; it was also politically adept. In the run-up to the 1969 municipal election, for example, the coalition resisted the temptation (advocated by some of its members) to intervene and endorse anti-expressway candidates. Such a campaign could have turned the election into a referendum on urban expressways, with a loss cementing the fate of inner-city neighbourhoods in Spadina’s path. Instead of concentrating on local politics, the committee broadened the scope of its opposition to challenge the financial extravagance of building expressway infrastructure in the urban core. Attacking the Spadina project on this vulnerability expanded the scope of policy actors to include Ontario’s provincial government, which shared the cost of expressway infrastructure with Metropolitan Toronto.
This economic campaign against Spadina was waged in parallel with the political campaign by bringing the issue before the Ontario Municipal Board and the Ontario Cabinet. In 1971 an entity calling itself the Spadina Review Corporation, which was allied with SSSOCCC, raised $56,000 to engage an eminent attorney, John Robinette, to argue the fiscal case against the expressway within Ontario’s municipal oversight bureaucracy. Anticipating that the economic issues would, in any case, end up before Cabinet, the committee began to simultaneously lobby provincial politicians (Leo 1977, 36).
Already by 1969 the first two phases of Spadina Expressway construction had consumed the allocated budget of $79 million, and Metropolitan Toronto had to request permission from the Ontario Municipal Board for additional borrowing to meet its share of further expenditures. When that request was granted, SSSOCCC immediately appealed the decision, which stopped the loans from being executed, and thus halted expressway construction within Toronto at least temporarily. While the bureaucratic appeal process was grinding along, a provincial election was called in 1971, introducing a political leverage point that SSOCCC did not hesitate to seize upon.
Ontario’s Conservative party had governed the province since 1943 and sought to extend its reign through a leadership change. The strategy of party renewal through bringing in the next generation of political leaders carried the day, with forty-two-year-old William Davis being elected leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives and thus becoming premier of Ontario. One way for Davis to demonstrate his suitability to the electorate would be to change an unpopular government policy, and SSSOCCC had succeeded in making the Spadina Expressway a visibly unpopular policy.
Facing demonstrated cost overruns and criticism of wasteful public expenditure on the expressway, vocal and visible grassroots opposition to community destruction, and pointed criticism from the urban elite, Davis made an executive decision to cancel the project. Ontario’s new premier did this with maximum visibility, announcing the decision himself in a speech to the provincial parliament, where he famously declared: “Cities were built for people and not cars. If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop” (Sewell 1993, 179–80).
As with any major policy change, there are a multitude of theories, concepts, and explanatory frameworks available to explain Toronto’s expressway abnegation. The particular blend of rationales that different observers have highlighted over the ensuing decades is always conditional and can be advanced through recursive re-examination. There are many reasons the Spadina Expressway was cancelled, leaving Toronto with a uniquely truncated, half-built urban expressway infrastructure. These reasons include an awakening to issues of pollution and larger ecological degradation, a renewed interest in citizen participation in community planning, growing awareness of the urban impacts of automobility, urban-suburban conflicts over the costs and benefits of reshaping the inner city, and a successful rapid-transit alternative. It is also clear, however, that the particular constitution of Toronto’s citizen resistance – whose vanguard featured a well-heeled, highly educated class of civic reformers protecting both established and gentrifying middle-class neighbourhoods – was critical in the way the expressway-construction machine was derailed much earlier along its path into the city centre than in many other Canadian urban areas and in almost all North American cities beyond Canada. But here we would also highlight the financial issues at play. As Danielle Robinson (2012, 21) notes, “citizen activists upheld the cancellation as a landmark victory for progressive reformers. In reality, the defeat of the Spadina Expressway was due both to the growing costs associated with the scheme and the protests that dominated the public discourse, and the cancellation did not mark a lasting turn away from autocentric planning.”
We submit that expressway opponents in Toronto succeeded in stopping Spadina, and subsequent attempts to introduce similar infrastructure into Toronto’s core, by closing the financial tap on expressways. They could accomplish this because Toronto had not yet outgrown its self-defined status as Canada’s “second city.” Nor had the city (quite) crossed the threshold of being Canada’s corporate and financial gateway to the globe, as occurred soon after the Spadina Expressway was cancelled. With Toronto lacking the global-city identity that was proudly displayed by Montreal, it proved much easier to make the case against monumental infrastructure and lavish public expenditure on reshaping the inner city. A sophisticated and determined local opposition rescaled Toronto’s mobility-infrastructure investment at a time that such downsizing remained possible – the era before global linkages and capital flows took Toronto to another place in its global-city-development dynamics.
Vancouver
Vancouver energetically cultivates a reputation as one of the world’s most attractive and livable (if deeply unaffordable) cities. “Vancouverism” is widely lauded (nowhere more than within its own environs) as a benchmark for wise land-use decisions, innovative building typologies, effective multi-modal transit planning, and high-density urban residential core neighbourhoods (Punter 2003). Central to Vancouver’s urban identity is the apparent absence of an inner-city expressway, but, as noted previously, the Stanley Park Causeway represents a miniature expressway that is well hidden within one of the city’s iconic green spaces. Unlike those of all other major cities in North America, Vancouver’s urban planning regimes over the past four decades have been allowed a unique freedom of redevelopment without the physical or environmental burden of major expressway infrastructure. Planners have taken advantage of this opportunity to build more pedestrian- and bike-friendly neighbourhoods, with complementary infrastructure features such as a seawall along the water’s edge that has turned into a greenway for walking and cycling around the city.
The now-foundational narrative of Vancouver’s urban renaissance suggests that a broad-based, multi-ethnic group of Chinatown and Strathcona residents and small-business owners coalesced to oppose the agenda of global development capital that was being advanced by some civic elites. This elitist urban-renewal agenda embraced a modernist restructuring of the downtown as a single-purpose business centre connected to residential suburbs by newly built expressways. Community opposition succeeded in thwarting such schemes (aside from the completion of two viaducts, which have since been orphaned), and after that victory no expressways have been built within Vancouver.
Over the subsequent four decades since Vancouver’s expressway met its Waterloo in Strathcona, the city has grown immensely, the downtown core has been redeveloped substantially, alternative road and transit infrastructure has been built, and a post-modern urban vision has become entrenched. The idea of building urban expressways is now highly unfashionable and the opportunity to build any expressway within the city of Vancouver has long passed.
It is more than a coincidence that the alternative values and vision of community activists in Vancouver that proved to be influential both locally and globally coalesced at about the same time that the modernist plan for a spatially, functionally, and socially segregated metropolitan area included the launch of an urban expressway. Vancouver was influenced by the same social and demographic change drivers that had catalyzed anti-establishment protests and policy reform campaigns in cities throughout North America and Western Europe during the 1960s, but Vancouver’s resistance to the modernist urban-renewal ethos yielded distinctive results.
Vancouver in the 1960s and 1970s was marked by a particular counter-cultural milieu that was linked closely to an ecological awareness. This distinctive subculture mobilized specific kinds of political engagement, the results of which have yielded legacies that continue to influence thinking and action in the city. Anti-expressway protests and demonstrations helped amalgamate the understanding of advancing social change through direct community action within a defensive politics focused on preserving ecological integrity.
Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver in 1970 and soon made a name for itself at the vanguard of environmental non-governmental organizations that were working to expose, critique, and avert the worst excesses of modernity (e.g., the development of nuclear weapons, the eradication of endangered species, and the destruction of natural habitats). The genesis of such an organization inspired by pacifist and ecological paradigms within a city that was neither at war nor heavily despoiled by environmental degradation might seem paradoxical, but, upon closer inspection, Canada’s changing urban dynamics during the 1960s made Vancouver a fertile incubator for such innovative thinking.
Zelko (2004) points out that Canada’s immigration policy in the 1960s privileged well-educated and highly skilled young migrants who were fluent in English or French. This profile aligned closely with a subset of the US population that risked losing (or not obtaining) draft deferments and then facing military induction and deployment to Vietnam. These young Americans entered a community in which alternative visions and unconventional values were nurtured by Vancouver’s particular urban attributes. Zelko notes that “Vancouver had become a countercultural Mecca. Hippies, yippies, New Leftists, and various alternative lifestylers from throughout Canada, as well as the United States, flocked there to enjoy its relatively mild climate, its spectacular surrounds, and its cheap and abundant stock of inner- city housing” (2004, 216). Although Greenpeace has become associated with dramatic images of protest in remote natural settings, it originated within a distinctly urban space that fostered interaction among environmentalists, anti-war activists, and alternative-lifestyle seekers. These dissenters from the status quo not only encountered one another in Vancouver but also learned from the resident-led efforts to oppose the urban redevelopment inspired by modernist growth-machine principles.
David Ley (1981) highlighted a broader value shift that supported this political realignment. While Vancouver was spawning both local and global protest movements, some citizens organized a traditional vehicle for political change, a new civic party, The Electors Action Movement (TEAM). Between 1968 and 1976 TEAM won enough votes to obtain growing representation on the city council. Once TEAM held a majority during the 1970s, Vancouver officially broke with previous urban mobility and development policies and rejected both expressways and the spatial segregation they encouraged.
The new mayors and councillors, who served between 1968 and 1976, had different backgrounds than their predecessors had. Whereas the vast majority of previous councillors and mayors had been business people, the TEAM councillors were professionals. Ley (1980, 249) notes that on the 1972 Vancouver council, where TEAM held sway, half of the councillors were university professors.
Part of the narrative explaining Vancouver’s rejection of an inner-city expressway draws upon what is now a civic legend about the everyday people who saved the city from itself. Not surprisingly, virtually every politician or civic actor from that period who is alive today takes credit for some role in the drama. It is impossible now to find anyone in Vancouver who will admit to having ever favoured expressway construction or modernist urban renewal. Nor will any Vancouver citizen of a certain age confess to not having been “at the barricades” of the anti-expressway protests. That story has been so widely appropriated that it rings true as a foundational Vancouver narrative.
Rightfully so: the courage, creativity, and success of the local resistance should be celebrated. The lack of an expressway bisecting the city core is central to Vancouver’s particular blend of deep unaffordability and neighbourhood character, and that flexibility is the envy of many urbanists and most real estate speculators far and wide. But, while citizen opposition in Strathcona and Chinatown was unequivocally well organized and effective (Lee 2007), we suggest here that an additional necessary condition for Vancouver’s particular outcome was the retardation of its integration with global financial networks and the level of global-city formation at the time of the expressway conflict. In Vancouver the local networks of social protest and activism were more developed than the global networks of financial investment and corporate leadership when expressway infrastructure was on the urban development menu.
Vancouver’s anti-expressway and anti-blight-removal activists were as creative and persistent as the city’s administration was conventional and conservative during the 1960s. Importantly, however, even in the 1970s Vancouver was not integrated into the global circuits of capital that could muster the requisite levels of infrastructure funding and political support. This absence of influence by global capital is a key factor in understanding why Vancouver’s proposed expressway was never built while Montreal’s was essentially fully realized and Toronto’s network was halfway completed. As Christopher Leo (1977, 43) concluded, “from the viewpoint of Vancouver’s expressway backers, anti-expressway groups were, if anything, a somewhat less galling obstacle than was the pinch of finance.”
Ever since Harland Bartholomew was hired by the Vancouver Town Planning Commission to write the city’s first official plan in 1926, elites had dreamed of remaking their city and advancing under a more rational, master-planned, and capital-friendly regime. Bartholomew’s firm issued a plan in 1928, revised it in 1929, and then wrote several follow-up reports between 1944 and 1948 (E. McDonald 2008; Berelowitz 2005). However, during these decades Vancouver showed little sign of being transformed from a peripheral port city with little international significance and modest global linkages. Although the Bartholomew planning recommendations certainly influenced the design and development of the city, there was never sufficient capital to advance substantially its proposed major reconstructions. Just as with the Lions Gate Bridge, which was constructed with Guinness money, the new city hall, when it was erected in 1936, had to be entirely financed with civic debt, most of it held by private corporations (Harcourt and Cameron 2007).
As the 1950s drew to a close, both the momentum of America’s interstate-highway-building program and a natural resource boom emboldened aspirations for intensifying Vancouver’s mobility infrastructure. New attempts were initiated to redevelop the urban core and connect it with growing suburbs from West Vancouver to Surrey by means of an inner-city expressway network. In consultation with federal and provincial transportation departments and with considerable engagement by business leaders and developers, the City commissioned studies to lay the groundwork for investment in major mobility infrastructure. Starting with the 1959 Study on Highway Planning, continuing with 1962 and 1964 reports on expressway options, and culminating in a series of 1967 highway plans, a whole range of infrastructure possibilities was analyzed. By the end of this exercise, planners had designed a modified hub-and-spoke network that would bring both north–south and east–west expressways together in the city core; they would then run along the city waterfront and span Burrard Inlet via a third crossing (in addition to the already existing Ironworkers Memorial and Lions Gate Bridges) (Berelowitz 2005; Leo 1977). As the studies accumulated and public debate over their recommendations intensified, the Vancouver Sun lamented that by 1967 all the studies had “cost more than $1 million without a single mile of recommended roadways and bridges being built” (Leo 1977, 43). But this complaint was not entirely justified.
The city did undertake substantial preparatory efforts to realize expressway construction and in 1958 froze property assessments and banned home improvements in the Strathcona neighbourhood (Harcourt and Cameron 2007). The southern flank of Strathcona was targeted for renewal and for the expressway’s route that would displace many residents. In 1959 the first ten acres of housing was razed. Then, between 1961 and 1967, in the first two official phases of the expressway project, 3,300 people were relocated and fifty-seven acres of land were cleared. In 1970 the historically Black community of Hogan’s Alley was destroyed to make room for expressway on-ramps, and in 1972 the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts were completed as the first components of expressway infrastructure to reach the downtown peninsula (Harcourt and Cameron 2007; Lee 2007; Berelowitz 2005; Leo 1977; Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972).
This considerable effort to restructure Strathcona was driven by a vision of urban automobility drawn from the paradigm unfolding across North America. Those aspirations articulated modernist ideals and their prescription for generating wealth by redeveloping mixed-use urban lands into a metropolitan centre of commerce, finance, and management. Attempts to prepare for this future were “responding to the growth of white-collar jobs and driven by the closely interlocking relationship between the business elite, the banks, the development industry, aldermen, and bureaucrats … The development industry, downtown business interests, growth-oriented civic officials and aldermen, and Commissioner Sutton Brown all agreed that further development of downtown depended on new freeway access” (Punter 2003, 21).
Strathcona stood in the way of this future, both physically (blocking access to the downtown peninsula) and socially (as a space of alternative urban values resisting dominant, white, and modernist visions of the city). Jo-Anne Lee (2007) wrote:
Strathcona was an affront to notions of rational order and its destruction could be justified in the name of efficient transportation systems and regulated development. It represented theabsolute antithesis of rational planning, efficient land use, and middle-class respectability. With its mixed commercial, industrial and residential land use, the neighbourhood was perceived as chaotic, crowded and dilapidated. Its ethnically diverse, heterogeneous population of families, elderly single men living communally, and single, transient, working-class males, was a blot on the high-minded designs of planners in their quest to build a family residential community and institute rational planning technologies. Armed dually with a mandate to improve the physical condition of the neighbourhood and simultaneously uplift the social condition of its residents, planners and policy makers saw urban renewal very much as an exercise in urban sanitation, rescue and redistribution; an exercise that assumed the universal desirability of a prescribed middle-class standard of living. (Lee 2007, 392–3)
In 1962 Mayor Bill Rathie’s election slogan was “Let’s get Vancouver moving again!” (Harcourt and Cameron 2007), and by the mid-1960s there was significant new office-tower construction in the downtown peninsula, and there was clearly room for much more. The proposed expressway was to run through Strathcona, down Carrall Street, and then along the waterfront at least to the foot of Granville Street where the ominously titled Project 200 skyscraper office block was located.
Project 200 was an audacious redevelopment proposal led by Marathon Realty, the real estate subsidiary of Canadian Pacific Railway, in partnership with Third Properties Ltd., a subsidiary of Grosvenor-Laing Development, an “international real estate and development giant based in England” (Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972). A bevy of other major interests, both local and international, were implicated in the development, including the nearby Woodward’s and Simpson-Sears department stores. Project 200 would have been the largest commercial development in Canada at that time, comprising twenty buildings ranging from twenty to sixty storeys in height that were spread over eight blocks of prime waterfront land. Hotels, department stores, offices, and apartments were envisioned to occupy the air rights rising above the waterfront expressway (Punter 2003; Pendakur 1972; Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972).
The biggest constraint on this ambitious scheme was the capital required to finance expressway building. It has been claimed that Vancouver’s expressway planning was influenced more by tactical manoeuvring to secure financial sponsorship than by strategic thinking about desirable new development patterns (Punter 2003, 24). The City lacked the capacity to fund a waterfront expressway on its own and thus throughout the 1960s engaged in long-running, inconclusive, and contentious negotiations with various federal and provincial departments, while also trying to leverage funds from private developers, primarily the Project 200 group. At one point in 1969 the City issued a temporary approval for the expressway on the basis of the City paying 54% of the infrastructure costs, the federal government (highly aspirationally) contributing 18%, and Project 200 partners covering the balance (Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972).
Vancouver’s expressway-financing approach was unorthodox. Private developers had rarely paid for expressway infrastructure elsewhere in North America. With the generous federal government’s highway funding in the United States they did not have to, but private infrastructure investment was not new to Vancouver. The Lions Gate Bridge crossing of Burrard Inlet had been funded entirely by the Guinness family, who had been persuaded by local entrepreneur Alfred Taylor to purchase huge tracts of land in West Vancouver. As noted earlier, that bridge opened up access to what became known as the British Properties, and the required city-wide plebiscite that approved the construction was paid for by Taylor himself (Woods 2012). The federal government was open to the idea of funding a third Burrard Inlet crossing to link to the federally funded Trans-Canada Highway running along the North Shore, but Ottawa balked at the prospect of contributing to any expressway construction within Vancouver city limits. Their reluctance was in part because private developers were seen as well positioned to pay for the infrastructure that would benefit them immensely (Leo 1977).
Vancouver’s elites scrambled through the 1960s, articulating one haphazard infrastructure planning effort after another. Various expressway configurations were put forth, but each initiative was stymied by insufficient financing. Downtown mega-developments like Project 200 depended on the expressway’s being built, but the capital that could have been mobilized in anticipation of such profits remained aloof. The resources needed to secure approvals for infrastructure construction thus remained elusive. The City’s planning department was poorly organized and hampered by colonial mindsets and methods (Harcourt and Cameron 2007). The revanchist planning regime, combined with fragmented decision making, multiple competing agendas, and a lack of viable financing opportunities, contributed to the highway proposals’ being “very vulnerable to the political attack which was launched by irate citizen’s groups” (Leo 1977, 45).
As soon as demolitions in Strathcona began in the late 1950s, a sustained and fluid coalition of actors including Chinatown business people, Strathcona residents, neighbourhood groups, civic activists, community political leaders, and a few progressive planners organized against the displacement, renewal, and “slum-clearance” plans. As Jo-Anne Lee (2007) has examined in detail, the coalitions, strategies, and tactics that resisted the urban renewal schemes, expressway construction, and displacement took on uniquely creative contours.
Strathcona is often represented as the residential annex of Chinatown, but as Lee (2007) demonstrates, the neighbourhood was far more complex and nuanced. The embrace by municipal officials of the urban renewal and slum-clearance schemes for Strathcona was justified by racialized, modernist, and master-planning ideals that devalued the organic, diverse, and asystematically developed neighbourhood that was full of people who failed to measure up to middle-class norms. Lee (2007) claims that narratives of Vancouver’s resistance to expressway and slum-clearance schemes overlook the integration of gendered resistance, immigrant community organization, and mainstream political activism that was forged by the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA).
SPOTA’s unique blend of ethnic cultural forms and mainstream institutional practice and discourse not only became key strategies in organizing this multi-ethnic, multi-lingual neighbourhood, but it was crucial for the leveraging [of] their own forms of relational power to influence political actors outside the community. This clever deployment of everyday social practices, hospitality and food traditions that Canadians of mainly Chinese and Italian backgrounds traditionally used for cultivating kinship relations and forging social ties, melded with traditional political lobbying practices and transformed a heretofore relatively powerless community group into one that was hugely influential. (Lee 2007, 364–5)
Many researchers and commentators have subsequently noted the culturally and organizationally hybridized character of grassroots Vancouver resistance to urban renewal initiatives and linked its effectiveness to the specific kinds of oppositional tactics deployed (Wai 2016; Fong 2016). The expressway resistance in Vancouver was fiercely creative, nuanced, and resilient. It was also sufficiently effective to drive the mayor, Tom Campbell, to famously exclaim in frustration that the expressway project was being sabotaged by “Maoists, Communists, pinkies, left wingers, and hamburgers [his term for people without a university degree]” (Gutstein 1975, 165). Vancouver’s local community forged a synthesis of local knowledge and global awareness that yielded a powerful alternative to the vision of modernist growth-machine thinking that had sought to rationalize and aggrandize urban space and function.
By 1972 the waterfront expressway was effectively dead, and in subsequent years the city’s rapid development of a very different model of mixed use in the downtown core closed that door permanently, pushing further aggressive highway construction to the margins of Vancouver’s urbanized area. Like in Montreal and Toronto, local resistance was innovative, determined, and powerful, but the failure of local Vancouver growth-machine advocates to sufficiently leverage globalized linkages or to enlist higher levels of government in financing gave the local resistance the room it needed to successfully thwart expressway construction.
OUTCOMES OF INNER-CITY RESISTANCE
TO GLOBAL-CITY MOBILITY DESIGNS
The local outcries and uprisings against the global mobility agenda for reshaping urban cores in Canada’s three largest cities yielded both intended and unintended consequences that influence life both in and around Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver to this day and will continue to do so well into the future. In different ways and with distinct results, the mix of mobility within each urban core was either dialled down or distributed differently than the plans and proposals for globally aligned mega-projects in major mobility had expected. Flows of motor vehicles through the city centre were constrained, either by a slowing down of the speed of traffic or by a shift of a portion of that traffic from roads to rapid transit. This rebalancing of passage had a direct impact on the kinds of places that large Canadian city centres could and did become.
For already established city dwellers, including many of the activists who had stood up against urban expressway development in the 1970s, the results enabled a golden age of better place making. Inner-city neighbourhoods that would have been burdened with noise, pollution, safety risks, and other negative impacts of the increasing automotive traffic channelled into them by expressways were given a new lease on life. Urban community development thus took a different turn, away from the modernist specialization in commercial and corporate functions that were linked to residential peripheries (often located well beyond urban boundaries) by high-speed expressways, which was seen across most US metropolitan areas that had been fully penetrated by interstate highways.
The effects of urban core redevelopment into dense, mixed-use districts that would become known as “complete communities” have been far from an unmitigated blessing, though. Gentrification and displacement have consumed those neighbourhoods not blighted by excessive traffic burdens. The new urbanist development that was enabled around rapid-transit stations added to opportunities for living well in the inner city, primarily for those who could afford it.
At the same time as the Canadian inner city was being recast as a valued and valuable commodity, another trajectory of mobility and development was unfolding in the farmland and the green fields adjacent to the urban cores. The pressure to build new places – from residential subdivisions to strip malls and shopping plazas at lower costs, and with higher profits – did not stop when expressways were cancelled or truncated. Nor did all the urban development capital flock to projects that were adjacent to rapid-transit stations. While the inner city did see a different development trajectory once the mix of expressways and rapid transit had been pointed away from automobile domination, some global capital also moved beyond the gentrifying and upscaling inner-city communities and sought different options and opportunities along the periphery of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. As will be explored in our concluding chapter, major Canadian suburbs – or Canaburbs, as we have labelled them – have unveiled their own mix of mobility and development in relation to and in reaction to what transpired in the urban core.
We are certain that community activists in these three cities did not intend that their expressway opposition and protest would contribute to the reshaping of distant green fields and farmlands in places like Laval, Mississauga, and Surrey. But, as will become apparent when we look beyond the inner city, the unintended consequences of equivocating on major mobility infrastructure in the inner city have had profound effects on the shape and substance of life in the Canaburbs, areas in which far greater numbers of Canadians can now be found than in the inner city. The story of building Canada’s cities was thus transformed by equivocation over urban expressways and rapid transit, not just in the inner city but also in the peripheral regions that are now home to millions of Canadians. The reverberations of these mobility and spatial dynamics will shape the future of Canadian urbanism just as surely as the decisions about starting and stopping expressways and rapid transit shaped Canada’s urban cores in the late twentieth century. It is to this temporal frontier of spatial possibilities that we turn in our concluding chapter.