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Young reviews 'Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development' by Stephanie Pincetl.

AbstractToronto's Tower Neighbourhood Renewal (TR) programme is a municipal government initiative tackling aging high‐rise apartment building clusters in need of physical upgrades. One strategy for a more vibrant future for those clusters is densification or new infill housing. The main argument of the essay is that the unique urban structure of Toronto's inner suburbs challenges the implementation of TR's densification strategy. The proximity of many residents occupying privately owned single‐family homes close to the tower neighbourhoods has implications for the governance of TR in Toronto. Having created place‐frames firmly linked to their own identities as single‐family homeowners, these residents reject an encroachment of the 'urban' (through higher residential densities) and of the 'Other' (through a potential increase in low‐income, immigrant and visible minority tower renters). A 2011 design charrette in the Toronto neighbourhood of Weston serves as a case study, exemplifying the tensions between neighbourhood resident place‐frames and the goals of the TR project. This essay is based on an analysis of public policy documents and public participation reports, as well as notes from direct observation during the Weston 2021 Design Charrette.

Introduction: Socialist and Post-Socialist Urbanisms / Lisa B. Welch Drummond and Douglas Young -- Part 1: Housing Experiences and Life Trajectories -- From Socialist Moderns to Urban Poor: Gender and the Housing Question in Post-Reform Vinh City / Christina Schwenkel -- From ABC to Post-Industrial Suburb: Living in a Vision / Bo Larsson (Translated from Swedish by Aidan Allen) -- The Rise and Fall of Collective Housing: Hanoi between Vision and Decision / Lisa B. Welch Drummond and Nguyen Thanh Binh -- Wrestling with the Soviet State: A Life History of Housing in Leningrad / Thomas Borén and Michael Gentile -- Part 2: Planning and Architecture: Designing Socialist and Post-Socialist Urbanisms -- Only Visions: The Case of South City, Prague / Steven Logan -- Phnom Penh During and after Socialism: Permanence and Reshaping of the Urban Centrality / Gabriel Fauveaud -- Planning for "Renaissance": Vanguard Urbanism in Addis Ababa / Jesse McClelland -- Recuperate, Recycle, Reuse: Adaptive Solutions for the Socialist Architecture of Bucharest / Laura Visan -- The Paradox of Preserving Modernism: Heritage Debates at Alexanderplatz, Berlin / Markus Kip and Douglas Young -- Part 3: Governance and Social Order -- China's "New" Socialist City: From Red Aesthetics to Standard Urban Governance / Carolyn Cartier -- Property Relations and the Politics of the Suburban Living Place in the Post-Communist City: Transition Stories from Tirana, Albania / Marcela Mele and Andrew E.G. Jonas -- Urban Natures in Managua, Nicaragua / Laura Shillington -- The Reshaping of Post-Socialist Hồ Chí Minh City: Leisure Practices and Social Control / Marie Gibert and Emmanuelle Peyvel -- Mapping Khujand: The Governance of Spatial Representation in Post-Socialist Tajikistan / Wladimir Sgibnev -- Conclusion / Douglas Young and Lisa B. Welch Drummond.

AbstractIn the urban studies literature, urban politics is usually considered in two distinct locations: the city (often understood in quite conventional centralist ways) and the suburb (understood as spatially peripheral and politically at odds with the central city). At the metropolitan scale, the two types of urban politics are discussed in relation to one another. More recently, the metropolitan scale of urban politics has been expanded to regional dimensions. We pose the question of location of urban politics from a specific deficit in the geography of centre, suburb and metropolis. We argue that in today's regional political socio‐spatiality, politics will have to be found 'in‐between' the old lines of demarcation. Following Tom Sieverts' (2003) advice to look at the 'in‐between' cities that are neither old downtown nor new suburb but complex urban landscapes of mixed density, use and urbanity, we reveal the political vacuum that is at the heart of the urban region today. Using the politics of infrastructure in Toronto as our empirical example, we will show that vulnerabilities and risks for urban populations in that Canadian metropolis' in‐between city are co‐generated by the failure of conventional political spaces and processes to capture the connectivities threaded through those places that are in‐between the centre and exurbia.

The reconciliation of global trade interests, regional transportation necessities, and urban everyday life and politics is at the centre of the emergence of new infrastructures in general, and new transportation networks in particular. In Toronto recent rescaling and restructuring of regional government provide a potential opportunity for new modes of regional governance. Will transportation in the Toronto region remain bifurcated into a premium network of transport infrastructure systems, on the one hand, and underserved community-based systems, on the other hand? We argue that the existing transportation situation has become a bottleneck for the continued globalization of the region, because global and local circuits of mobility are not well coordinated and various scales of decision making do not visibly interact for the regional good. At this point we ask whether there is an emerging collective actor (or collective actors) to remedy the situation, or whether we can instead expect the anarchic governance model of the recent past, with its biases towards suburban road building, to continue. We are particularly interested in casting light on the institutions that have been created (or dismantled) to deal with comprehensive transportation planning in the region. We posit that, in the context of recent institutional reforms, transportation agencies had to adjust, and we pose a series of research questions as a means of exploring and understanding those adjustments.