Cities 27 (2010) 87–95

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Cities

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Reconnecting the disconnected: The politics of infrastructure in the in-between city

Douglas Young *, Roger KeilThe City Institute at York University, S702 Ross Building, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M4W 1P9

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 16 December 2008Accepted 14 October 2009Available online 30 November 2009

Keywords:Urban politicsInfrastructureIn-between cityTorontoTransportation

0264-2751/$ - see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. Adoi:10.1016/j.cities.2009.10.002

* Corresponding author.E-mail addresses: dogoyo@yorku.ca (D. Young), rk

a b s t r a c t

This paper explores the politics of infrastructure in the evolving socio-spatial landscape of what we callthe ‘‘in-between city,” that part of the urban region that is perceived as not quite traditional city and notquite traditional suburb (Sieverts, 2003). We posit that this new urban landscape which surrounds urbanregions in many parts of the world is the remarkable new urban morphology where a large part of metro-politan populations live, work and play. While much attention has been on the winning economic clus-ters of the world economy and the devastated industrial structures of the loser regions, little light hasbeen shed on the urban zones in-between. This paper deals specifically with these zones from the per-spective of accessibility issues around urban infrastructures, in particular transportation. It is argued thatonly a combined understanding of scaled and topological approaches allow us to capture the complexi-ties of the politics of urban infrastructures in the in-between city. Conceptually, we outline the definitivecharacteristics of this new landscape with a particular view towards urban Canada. Applying these con-cepts to a North American city, Toronto, Canada, we look specifically at the 85 sq km around York Uni-versity, an area that straddles the line between the traditional suburb and the inner city.

� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A politics of infrastructure

When we speak of a ‘‘politics of infrastructure”, we refer to agrowing awareness that ‘‘governing and experiencing the fabricof the city” (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008, p. 363) involvespolitical acts that produce and reproduce the infrastructures of ur-ban regions. We therefore follow McFarlane and Rutherford’s ad-vice to open up ‘‘the ‘black box’ of urban infrastructure toexplore the ways in which infrastructures, cities and nation statesare produced and transformed together” (McFarlane and Ruther-ford, 2008, p. 364). This ‘‘politicization of infrastructure” (ibid.) in-volves the understanding of how infrastructure policies andplanning are linked to ‘‘the co-evolution of cities and technical net-works in a global context” (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008, p.365). There has always been recognition of the powerful dance ofpolitics and space economics in the production of the suburbs(Knox, 2008), we now point both to a new landscape (the in-be-tween city) and to a new politics of infrastructures that underliethat development (or not). We are, therefore interested, as areMcFarlane and Rutherford (2008, p. 365–6) in following John Al-len’s advice to ‘‘focus on how power’s different modalities are var-iously exercised, how it puts people into place”. These differentmodalities of power and politics are exercised and performed ina dialectics of centres and peripheries, of mobilities and mooringsin which the spaces we are interested in appear as unmarked ter-

ll rights reserved.

eil@yorku.ca (R. Keil).

ritory. The politics that produced the (public) modern infrastruc-tural ideal for the centres and the (privatized) moderninfrastructural ideals for the peripheries, largely treated the in-be-tween cities of our metropolitan regions as residual spaces to befilled by thruways and bypasses. The increased significance ofthese spaces today commands our attention in new and inevitableways. In this sense, the forgotten infrastructural politics of the in-between city implies a de-colonization from the forces that builtthe glamour zones at both ends of its existence: the urban coreand the classical suburb (see Fig. 1).

The edge cities (Garreau, 1991) and exopolis (Soja, 1996) of thepost-Fordist period re-centred and re-regionalized – globalized –capitalist production. New modes of aggressive re-territorializationhave occurred as regions have politically or economically found newreasons for, and institutions of, regionalism (Brenner, 2004; Boud-reau et al., 2007; Collin and Robertson, 2007). At the same time, ter-ritorialization was not the only dynamic at work. Amin (2004),among others, has concisely noted the usefulness of ‘‘a relationalreading of place that works with the ontology of flow, connectivityand multiple geographical expression, to imagine the geography ofcities and regions through their plural spatial connections” (Amin,2004, p. 34). While Amin describes the new forms of economic,administrative and governance regionalism – as well as a politicsof territorial management – he argues ‘‘against the assumption thatthere is a defined geographical territory out there over which localactors can have effective control and can manage as a social andpolitical space. In a relationally constituted modern world in whichit has become normal to conduct business – economic, cultural,

Fig. 1. Map of the Toronto region.

88 D. Young, R. Keil / Cities 27 (2010) 87–95

political – through everyday trans-territorial organization and flow,local advocacy, it seems to me, must be increasingly about exercis-ing nodal power and aligning networks at large in one’s own inter-est, rather than about exercising territorial power” (2004, p. 36). Heinstead opts for a ‘‘relational politics of place . . . that is consistentwith a spatial ontology of cities and regions seen as sites of hetero-geneity juxtaposed within close spatial proximity, and as sites ofmultiple geographies of affiliation, linkage and flow” (2004, p. 38).We will return to these politics below.

The changing pattern of (sub)urbanization

The newest – 2006 – census figures in Canada reveal that 70percent of the population live in metropolitan areas.1 However,within those urban areas they increasingly live outside of urbancores in a new kind of urban landscape. Interestingly, more Canadi-ans also work in the suburban parts of metropolitan areas. The num-ber of people working in central municipalities increased by 5.9%from 2001 to 2006 whereas the number of people who worked insuburban municipalities increased by 12.2%. While there continuesto be growth of the traditional suburban kind, and while inner citiesexperience densification of office and condominium developments,some of the most dynamic growth areas are literally in-between.But the picture in the old suburbs and the enclaves left by the lastperiod of urban growth in Canadian cities is not as clear cut overall.There are areas of aggressive expansion, for example around subur-ban York University in Toronto, where a New Urbanist-styled ‘‘Vil-lage at York” has added 1000 units of residential space. Yet justone block away, the Jane-Finch district continues to lose both in eco-nomic standing and demographically. While these in-between areasin metropolitan regions experience fast paced socio-spatial change,the political and administrative realities that govern them are struc-tured such that the concerns of these areas are literally marginalized.The Steeles Avenue corridor at the northern edge of the York Univer-sity campus, for example, is a major east–west thoroughfare at the

1 Census Metropolitan areas are defined as having a population of at least 100,000.

border of two municipalities – Toronto and Vaughan – that has en-joyed little attention among those cities’ investors and resident com-munities. Planners in the two municipalities have only recentlybegun to think about redevelopment possibilities in the corridor,but their policy-making is largely in isolation from each other. Justwhere the need for articulated urban infrastructure development isgreatest, the capacity to act is least. The linear nature of public tran-sit and other networked infrastructure – which favour either massconcentration of jobs or housing or wealthy enclaves of economicallyor politically influential users (industry, commerce, upper-middleclass residences, etc.) – predestines the places located between des-ignated destinations to lie in a fallow land of unsatisfactory access.This techno-material bias is corroborated by the political decision-making processes that underlie technical allocation. No politician,planner or bureaucrat will champion non-central or non-demarcatedprojects of public expenditure, particularly if inhabited or toiled inby socially less powerful groups. As a consequence, infrastructuresthat are built to connect centres actually disconnect those non-cen-tral spaces that lie in-between. The extended Toronto subway, forexample, which is to connect the Vaughan Corporate Centre withYork University and Downtown Toronto, bypasses the residentialand commercial neighbourhoods on both sides of the designatedline. In addition, we already know that while highways connectsmart centres and movieplexes around the urban region, blue collarworkers in the industrial malls of the sprawling Toronto production-scape rely on irregular buses to get them to and from work.

Empirically, our 85 sq km study area – partly in the City of Tor-onto and partly in the City of Vaughan – is home to about 150,000people and a place that is rich in social and physical complexitiesand contradictions (see Fig. 2). Methodologically, we explore therelative/relational (Harvey, 2006) connectedness of people, placesand urban processes through the lens of infrastructure, with thehelp of photographic documentation, textual analysis, census dataanalysis, and interviews. In an era characterized by ‘‘splinteringurbanism” (Graham and Marvin, 2001) in which urban regionscome to resemble ‘‘archipelagos of enclaves” (Hajer and Reijndorp,2001), uneven access to different infrastructures is particularly vis-ible in the poorly understood and under-recognized ‘‘in-between

Fig. 2. Map of the study area.

D. Young, R. Keil / Cities 27 (2010) 87–95 89

city”. Yet, dramatic inequalities in infrastructure provision and ser-vice delivery in these areas render many urban residents vulnera-ble to unpredictable events – environmental, economic, and social.We argue that casting light on the infrastructure problems of the‘‘in-between city” is a necessary precondition for creating moresustainable and socially just urban regions, and for designing a sys-tem of social and cultural infrastructures that has everything acommunity needs and meets global needs as well. This work is rel-evant to a broad spectrum of urban decision-making processes inthe area of infrastructure and beyond. It involves partners in gov-ernment, the private sector and the community.

Out of scale: the topology of the in-between city

Based on the recent spatial developments in Europe, Germanplanner Tom Sieverts has proposed the term Zwischenstadt or‘‘in-between city” (Sieverts, 2003). This concept is meant to graspthe novel urban form that has emerged beyond the traditional,more compact, uni-centred European city. Sieverts notes that thisnew urban form is now pervasive and home as well as workplace

to a growing percentage of Europeans. Similarly, Dutch scholarsHajer and Reijndorp have pointed to the fact that we now all livein an urbanized field, which appears as an ‘‘archipelago of en-claves” (Hajer and Reijndorp, 2001; see also the notion of post-sub-urbia, Wu and Phelps, 2008).

Much of the more recent attention to metropolitanism, region-alism and regionalization has had to do with the changing scales ofpost-Fordist, globalized and neoliberalizing economies. Regions tosome degree re-defined the space of political economies and shat-tered the methodological nationalism of scholars and practitionersalike. These new regions led to largely two spatial effects: (1) thecentrifugal sprawl away from city centres or new sprawl wherethere was no previous agglomeration and (2) the re-centralizationof economies in downtowns as well as airports, edge cities, busi-ness parks, etc. We argue now that the current period seems atyet another crossroads: between the ‘glamour zones’ of the ‘‘crea-tive” inner (global) city economies on one end and the sprawlingnew regional economies on the other, we now have a new set ofsocio-spatial arrangements which characterize the current periodof urban expansion more than others.

2 We thank Massimo Allamandola for this point and the references to Guldin – firstnoted by Davis (2006) who is also making a direct reference to Sieverts (2003). We arevery grateful to Xuefei Ren who has given us invaluable assistance in tracking downthis source. See also Branigan (2009a,b).

90 D. Young, R. Keil / Cities 27 (2010) 87–95

We are talking here about the in-between cities as the currentlymost dynamic and problematic forms of suburbanization. In NorthAmerica, these in-between cities comprise the old post-WW2 sub-urbs in particular, but also the transitional zones between thosesuburbs and the exurban fringe that has leapfrogged some agricul-tural developments, utility corridors, conservation areas, and thelike. These remnant spaces of Fordist urbanization include large ur-ban landscape forms such as oil tank farms, military sites, munici-pal airports, industrial facilities, large scale housing estates, oftenpublic, marginal agricultural lands as well as ravines, woodlotsand retention ponds, new strip malls, university or other educa-tional institutions, infrastructures such as rail switching yards orfreight terminals, landfills (sometimes expired), entertainmentfacilities such as theme parks and movieplexes; big box retail out-lets, religiously-centred developments, etc. They also contain smallpockets of hugely surprising and diversified urban uses such asethnic mini-malls, mini-ghettos of students or poverty popula-tions, rich enclaves, semi-legal uses such as strip clubs and saunas,as well as niche market entertainment locales such as climbingwalls or go-cart tracks. While – and perhaps because – these in-be-tween spaces assemble a wild and often unexplainable mix of usesuntypical for either the inner city or the classical suburb, they pres-ent landscapes of extreme spatial and social segregation.

In-betweenness is a metaphor that has strong resonance in apoststructural understanding of societies where no fixed bound-aries may exist that separate collective and individual identitiesin ‘‘essential” or ‘‘natural” ways. This is expressed in Sieverts’own admission that ‘‘cultural plurality is a positive characteristicof the Zwischenstadt” (2003, p. 52). Hybridity and creolization areimportant concepts through which to understand the postcolonialworld in which many communities find themselves today (Bhabha,1994; Goonewardena and Kipfer, 2004). Bhabha, for example, takes‘‘the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world . . .

as the paradigmatic place of departure” for looking at our world to-day (1994, p. 21). While it is not possible here to take this thoughttoo far given the different focus of this particular article, it may beuseful to remind ourselves that it is in these less than determinedspaces ‘‘in-between” where urbanizing societies also develop thesocial spaces in which hybridity is cultivated through a mix of(exclusionary) state practices and (liberating) popular activities.In fact, where Wacquant (2008), for example, sees a fundamentaldifference between the ghetto in the United States, which is aspace vacated by the state, and the French banlieue, a space en-tirely occupied and produced by state action, we would point tothe in-between city we study as a mixed product of both, statepresence and state retreat (see Young and Keil (2009) for a furtherdevelopment of these ideas).

On a global scale, hybridity is now written firmly into the spaceswe call in-between cities. Gregory Guldin observes about urbaniza-tion trends in China which he says find themselves in a hermaph-roditic state:

As areas become more prosperous, townization and citizationproceed apace. Villages become more like market and xiangtowns, and country towns and small cities become more likelarge cities. This in turn dampens the ardor of people in villagesand xiang towns to move to county towns, and so on up the line,even when people continue to recognize a higher ‘‘culturallevel” in cities.

The urbanization process unfolding is thus caused not only by astream of rural-to-urban migrants but also by urbanization inplace; that is, entire districts becoming more urbanized at alllevels of the rural–urban continuum. At the lower, townizationlevel, some Chinese have conceptualized this town-villageblending as chengxiang yitihua (urban–rural integration [Zhang,

1989]) [. . .] a form neither urban nor rural but a blending of thetwo wherein a dense web of transactions ties large urban coresto their surrounding regions (Guldin, 2001, p. 17).

During the onset of the current economic crisis, millions ofChinese migrant workers were entangled in a web of work-hous-ing relationships in this in-between world2 and became livingwitnesses to the dissolution of clear town-country relationshipsinto a web of hybrid in-between spaces that can be holding tankfor the reserve army of the global workbench, launching pad forpersonal life trajectories or site of socio-spatial conflict (Branigan,2009a,b).

In a related argument, Yiftachel speaks of ‘‘gray cities”, places‘‘positioned between the ‘whiteness’ of legality/approval/safety,and the ‘blackness’ of eviction/destruction/death” (Yiftachel,2009, p. 89). While conditions in Toronto’s in-between city arenot as drastic as in Palestine, which serves as Yiftachel’s area ofstudy, the principle here is interesting and relates well to ourtheme of hybridity. What is remarkable is the notion that hybridityof this kind is potentially deadly, not a safe space, a space of vul-nerability, invisibility and powerlessness. Yiftachel notes that‘‘[g]ray spaces contain a multitude of groups, bodies, housing,lands, economies and discourses, lying literally ‘in the shadow’ ofthe formal, planned city, polity and economy” (2009, p. 89). Wecan also evoke here the complex of issues that Ananya Roy has re-cently summarized under the title ‘‘exurbanity and extraterritori-ality” which point towards some form of hybridity betweenurban and national spaces where identities are formed in complexlayered interactions (Roy, 2007, p. 9–10).

Finally, we must note the uneven and shifting patterns ofshrinking and growing cities and the challenges such patternspresent for infrastructure provision and operations. The ShrinkingCities Project, based in Germany, has studied dramatic examplesof urban shrinkage in Germany, Russia, the US and the UK citingcases of population losses of hundreds of thousands in individualcities. (http://www.shrinkingcities.com) Closer to home, weencounter actual population loss at the metropolitan scale in onlya few cities scattered across the Canadian Shield, and rapid metro-politan growth in the very largest Canadian metropolitan areas –growth driven either by immigration or by the oil extraction indus-try. Within individual metropolitan regions is a highly nuancedpattern of growth, decline, and stasis in terms of the built environ-ment and demographics. For example, the outer ring of municipal-ities in the Toronto urban region experience continued explosivephysical expansion and population growth. At the centre of the re-gion, the City of Toronto has also experienced intensive and large-scale redevelopment that has added many thousands of newdwellings to the housing stock of the City yet with virtually nooverall population growth.

Infrastructures in-between

One of the most important areas of concern in the in-betweencity is the provision of infrastructure, its use and accessibility toit. The place-making effects of centralized rail-based transporta-tion infrastructure in the industrial city are well-known: the topol-ogy of radial rail networks created the centred urban structurestypical of many European and North American cities. During the20th century, most urban regions experienced metropolitanizationof industrial, commercial and residential uses, a process often asso-ciated with widespread automobilization and suburbanization.

3 Places to Grow is the name of a land use and transportation plan developed by theProvince of Ontario for a large region centred on Toronto.

4 Among other things, the report recommended looking into road tolls on theregion’s major 400 series highways, a proposal which is highly contentious. It wouldchange the transportation geography of the Toronto region dramatically as it wouldeffectively upgrade those highways into peripherals that define the perimeter of thecity.

D. Young, R. Keil / Cities 27 (2010) 87–95 91

This process can be understood as a long term stretching of the‘‘topologics” of the industrial city towards a metropolitan or regio-nal scale. This significant up-scaling created the landscape of pro-duction and consumption for Fordist capitalism (Brenner, 2004).Ultimately, it also provided the basis for the post-Fordist regional-ized globalization of the world. Its highly flexibilized regionaltransportation systems are the grid from which the leopard skinof urban regions is connected through a complex network ofdecentred topologies (Amin, 2004).

Cities build infrastructure

A recent globally sourced report states: ‘‘All cities need high-quality infrastructure to facilitate the movement of people andgoods, and the delivery of basic services to their populations”(GlobeScan, 2007, p. 25). In complex city regions this poses a hostof challenges of ‘‘funding, management, maintenance and efficientrunning of services, as well as the need to find infrastructure solu-tions that are environmentally sustainable” (Ibid.). A more popularpublication, The Atlantic, published a stern warning that cities arelosing the battle for eminence in infrastructure funding: ‘‘Trans-portation spending is spread around the United States like peanutbutter, and while it is spread pretty thick – nearly $50 billion lastyear in federal dollars for surface transportation alone – the placesthat are most critical to the country’s economic competitivenessdon’t get what they need” (Katz and Puentes, 2008, p. 38). Theseplaces are, of course, cities, and the Canadian situation is perhapsworse. A nationwide study by the Federation of Canadian Munici-palities found in 2007 that the country’s urban infrastructureswere ‘‘near collapse” and spoke of a municipal infrastructure defi-cit of $123 billion (Mirza, 2007).

Infrastructure builds cities but it also dissolves cities as it createscentrifugal possibilities. The post-war suburbs are the most perva-sive example of the explosion of settlement and the implosion ofurban centres. A global ‘‘suburban solution” (Walker, 1981) drainsthe urban centres and leads to new forms of concentration wherethere are no traditional accumulations of infrastructure services.Historically concentrated forms of built and social environment –service hubs in ports, markets, civic centres, central business dis-tricts, etc. – give way to a more pervasively sprawled metropolitanlandscape entirely dedicated to providing the most efficient con-duit for global capital. Even in overall ‘‘healthy” metropolitan re-gions, the centrifugal dynamics continue. In Toronto, forexample, the recent census figures suggest an unbroken, if notaccelerated, trend towards suburbanization of housing and jobs.This has social and spatial implications: the traditional focus oncollective consumption is partially replaced with a purely ex-change value oriented set of criteria for infrastructure develop-ment which makes global economic competitiveness, rather thanlocal social cohesion the marker of success (Erie, 2004; Keil andYoung, 2008). The spatial consequences of such a fundamental so-cial reorientation are visible in the just-in-time landscapes oftransportation and information infrastructures that have lacedmetropolitan regions since the 1980s. This is the walmartized,strip-malled landscape of automobile convenience, which valuestemporal availability (for producers and consumers) over quality;space (for warehousing, transportation and mass distribution onone hand and single family monster homes in the far reaches ofthe commutershed on the other) over other considerations (den-sity, proximity, sustainability, etc.). The aforementioned study on‘‘megacity challenges” concludes that while ‘‘transport overtakesall other infrastructure concerns . . . the environment matters butmay be sacrificed for growth” (GlobeScan, 2007, p. 7). In this con-text, we also need to mention that urban regions are but part of lar-ger urbanization clusters such as the regional Megalopolis of theAtlantic seaboard in the United States. A recent study of the area

concludes: ‘‘Overall, the forces of urban decentralization havechanged Megalopolis from a region of big city population to a morefully suburbanized agglomeration” (Vicino, Hanlon and Short,2007, p. 348). In the Quebec-Windsor corridor in Canada, as wellas in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor and the lower mainland ofBritish Columbia, we see similar tendencies towards large scalesuburbanized agglomeration. The governments of Ontario, Quebec,and Canada have addressed the specific transportation and infra-structure issues of the Quebec City-Windsor corridor with aplanned Ontario-Quebec Continental Gateway and Trade Corridor(http://www.tc.gc.ca/mediaroom/speeches/2007/2007-11-27.htm).As is the case with the transportation networks in the regionalPlaces to Grow planning efforts3, these transregional plans cut moretransversals through the in-between city, treating these areas as ter-rain to be overcome rather than as places to stay, inhabit or produce.Perhaps the most visible outgrowth of this tendency is the globallyfinanced, privatized Highway 407, which represents a giant concreteswath that crosses the entire Southern Ontario in-between beltnorth of Toronto (Torrance, 2008).

Metropolitan infrastructures: the political challenge

The renewal and expansion as well as the reform of governanceof infrastructures are now top agenda items for most governmentsand elite groups. One of the responses to the world financial crisisof autumn, 2008 put forward at meetings of the G20 countries isthat national governments should spend heavily on infrastructure(Jackson, 2008). The new American Obama Administration haspledged billions of dollars in infrastructure funding, while the firstorder of business of a fledgling, yet unsuccessful Canadian politicalcoalition to the left of the governing Conservatives was the expan-sion of public works. While they have so far been hesitant to putsignificant amounts of real dollars on the table, the current Cana-dian federal government has espoused infrastructure as one oftheir priorities; the provincial government of Ontario has a Minis-try of Infrastructure Renewal and has shown great interest inexpansion of growth-centre based infrastructures that support On-tario’s industrial economy; a new Metrolinx regional transporta-tion agency has been created to coordinate regional mobilityneeds and planning in the Greater Toronto Area; and a recent re-port commissioned by the Mayor of Toronto, David Miller, has laidgreat emphasis on changes to the financing, governance and provi-sion of infrastructures in the global city region (Mayor’s Fiscal Re-view Panel, 2008).4 Reflective, perhaps, of an apparent newfoundinterest in infrastructure in relation to economic activity, the Schu-lich School of Business at York University is changing the Real Prop-erty stream in the MBA program to Real Estate and Infrastructure(Habib, 2008).

Most infrastructure decisions are made for the connection ofprime network spaces (Graham and Marvin, 2001) in the down-towns to major transportation and communication hubs in the re-gion. The major metropolitan airports, the ports, the commoditydistribution centres, etc. are the major examples here. There is lit-tle attention paid to the spaces that are traversed in the process ofconnecting the splintered premium locales of the metropolitan re-gion. If anything, exurban voters conspire with downtown inter-ests in creating better bypasses of the in-between city in order tomove goods and people more efficiently between the prime net-

5 These problems of the Canadian suburban built landscape are vividly portrayed inthe film The Radiant City Burns and Brown (2006).

92 D. Young, R. Keil / Cities 27 (2010) 87–95

work spaces. Evidence of this politics at work can be found in theFebruary, 2009 announcement by the Canadian federal govern-ment of a $175 million investment in the expansion of parking lotsat remote suburban commuter rail stations in the Toronto region.(Barber, 2009) A previous announcement had indicated forthcom-ing federal money towards the renovation of Union Station, thehub of the commuter rail network located in downtown Toronto.

What, then, are the infrastructural necessities specific to the in-between city? Tom Sieverts gives us some clues what to look forhere. In the first place, the challenges of the in-between infrastruc-ture are those of connectivity. From the point of view of the econ-omy of urban regions, lack of connectivity is translated into lack ofcompetitiveness. This is what most of the discourse on urban infra-structure is about. The in-between cities of the urban fringe partic-ipate in this policy discourse as silent partners, to be bypassedquickly, gotten by fast. The scale of connectivity for which infra-structures in the globalized metropolitan region is built makeslinks between airports, offices and ‘hip’ entertainment as well asbetween producers, suppliers, and mega-consumption spaces.The in-between is lost, although it is clear that those mega-infra-structures or super-structures are neglecting the capillaries of theurban region – those links that create spaces of the everyday wherepeople live and work – at the peril of losing competitiveness alongwith livability (Keil and Young, 2008).

Various spaces in the in-between city are theoretically con-nected mostly through car use but truncated public transportationfilters into the automobilized landscape. As a hegemonic image, in-betweenness suggests freedom and mobility, ‘‘a life a la carte, pro-vided [inhabitants] can afford it. By means of a rapid transport sys-tem, inhabitants can reach and connect with a large number ofdiversely specialized uses and places in a short time” (Sieverts,2003, p. 71). But Sieverts is aware of the illusion that underlies thisidealized view: ‘‘Read and used as a system, the Zwischenstadt is . . .

problematic from several perspectives. It exerts stress on the envi-ronment, it does not serve those sectors of the population which donot have access to a car, and it fragments living space and livingtime” (Sieverts, 2003, p. 71).

Some of the issue of invisibility of the in-between city in infra-structure questions has to do with the Zwischenstadt’s inherentcharacter. Sieverts points out that memory has a hard time takinghold in this mesh of (sub)urban uses. ‘‘In the Zwischenstadt, wecannot speak any longer of one single form of aesthetic. At firstsight, we have to separate at least three different aesthetics: theclassical aesthetic of conventional beauty, e.g. of the old city, theaesthetics of the ‘prints of life’ e.g. in the form of ‘spontaneousappropriation’, and the aesthetic of flows, e.g. in the form of trans-portation networks” (Sieverts, 2007a, p. 204). While the in-be-tween city is the playground of all kinds of state-sponsoredstrategies of planning and politics, it is no destination of such activ-ities, but merely a container and recipient of higher order restruc-turings. The in-between city, in fact, is an ‘‘anaesthetic”environment, which has no memory and does not lend itself tobe remembered as distinct. It is produced to be transgressed athigh speed to reach other points in the urban region.

Infrastructures in the in-between city share some of the commonproblems of suburbs: they are not built for expansion. ChristopherLeinberger has recently commented that ‘‘the infrastructure sup-porting large-lot suburban residential areas – roads, sewer andwater lines – cannot support the dense development that urbani-zation would require, and is not as easy to upgrade. Oncelarge-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hardto unbuild” (Leinberger, 2008, p. 75). This creates cascading prob-lems of inelasticity as can be exemplified in the problem of agingpopulations that use those monofunctional spaces. The usual sub-urban disconnectivities (like lack of public transit) are added to bya sparse social service infrastructure, and auto-city ‘‘hurdles:

ramps that were too steep, longish treks across mall parking lots,and of course awful suburban arterials” (Lorinc, 2008, p. 34).5

Accordingly, shopping malls, like Vaughan Mills in the city of Vaugh-an in our research area, are beginning to expand their commercialmandate to the concept of the service hub in order to make errandsmore accessible to a changing and aging population. Lack of connec-tivity in the suburbs has shown to create issues of heightened riskand vulnerability as non-car owning populations, for example, arestranded in neighbourhoods that were built despite their needs.The premise of the decades-old model of the residential neighbour-hood unit was that as a quiet refuge from the urban to-and-fro ofwork and social encounters with strangers, it would find physicalexpression as an extensive area of low density family sized detacheddwellings difficult to traverse due to its twisting pattern of minorstreets. In decades past when levels of car ownership were muchlower and when far fewer women worked outside of the home, suchneighbourhoods were perhaps less refuge than proto-prison. Todayin many of those neighbourhoods, as residents age and/or incomesdecline, the mismatch of people place and infrastructure once againbecomes problematic.

Implementing new patterns of development, supported by –and supportive of – new kinds of infrastructure connectivities isa tremendous challenge given the present-day market-led processand culture of city-building. An example of this is the acknowl-edgement by municipal planners in the City of Vaughan that sim-ply designating an arterial crossroads as a mixed use district centrein the Official Plan and bestowing upon its greenfields high densitydevelopment permissions will not trigger the immediate creationof a new kind of suburban built environment. (Interview Birchalland Robinson, 2008) Cautious and conservative property capital-ists must convince themselves of the readiness of the market fornew kinds of spaces and ways of living in an area that is character-ized by the single family detached house. Municipal plannersacknowledge that such a readiness on the part of the developmentindustry could take several years to develop.

But the in-between city does not just carry the baggage of theclassical suburb, it also shares some of the problems of not-yet-developed areas (where all new development creates unplanneddemand) and magnetically draws upon itself the ‘‘urban” problemsof congestion, poverty, racism, etc. For his part, Tom Sieverts ex-presses the core of the problems facing the landscape of the Zwis-chenstadt as having to reconcile the ‘‘agora” into the ‘‘system:”

Thus, the system of the global economy must be opposed by theagora of local economic cycles, the system of abstract communica-tion must be set against the agora of lively debate, and the systemof the bureaucratic power over society as a whole must be con-fronted with the agora of local community and neighbourhoodresponsibility (2003:73).

He outlines seven planning strategies for the reclamation of thein-between city: awareness, learning, involvement, innovation,experience, relation and movement (2007a). He begins with intel-lectual and emotional awareness of the in-between city as ‘‘a basiccondition for treating the environment with care and responsibil-ity!” (2007a, p. 209) and ends with movement ‘‘[f]rom the pathvia the threshold to the place” (Ibid.). These strategies are simulta-neous arenas for planning action and social conflict. Some of theseare immediately important to the questions posed by infrastruc-ture deficits. Regional planning must avoid sidelining the in-be-tween city and create more security and well-being through theprovision of a web of social infrastructures. Flexibility and resil-ience are key to this effort.

D. Young, R. Keil / Cities 27 (2010) 87–95 93

In fashioning strategies for regional planning and design follow-ing his seven principles, Sieverts observes that there are two waysof looking ahead. He favours the ‘‘interpretation of the urban re-gion as a field in steady transition. . . for it leads directly to the‘material’ forces, as the ‘raw material’ of design”. And he continues:‘‘In this interpretation as an urban fabric in steady transition, onecan emphasise the continuation of the old urban traditions, oryou can, in contrast, look at the ‘Zwischenstadt’ as a field of newdevelopments, as a new frontier of experiments and innovations.Both interpretations are legitimized, as the ‘Zwischenstadt’ is a fieldof ‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’ (The simultaneity of dif-ferent eras)” (Sieverts, 2007a, p. 207). The transitional characterof the Zwischenstadt is not just one of urban development periodsbut also needs to be read in the context of the ‘‘epochal and globalecological crisis” during which these ‘‘young urban landscapes willhave to change profoundly” (Sieverts, 2007b, p. 9). Sieverts seesadvantages in the aging nature of some of the in-between cities’infrastructures. Their generational turnover is about to happen as‘‘in the coming years their built structures enter their first ‘natural’renovation cycle, which can be used for a far-reaching reconstruc-tion. The big infrastructure must also be renewed and must partlybe retooled for ecological reasons by switching it to new systemssuch as, for example, certain systems of sewage treatment, energyand transportation” (Sieverts, 2007b, p. 9). A good example of thissort of thinking is Mayor Miller’s Tower Renewal campaign in Tor-onto, the goal of which is the renovation of about 1,000 high riserental apartment buildings which were built throughout Toronto’ssuburbs in the 1960s and 1970s (ERA Architects and the Universityof Toronto, 2008).

6 ‘‘Jane-Finch on the Move is a grassroots group that promotes communitysolidarity and harmony, and strives towards removing systemic barriers that manymembers in our community face through the participation of all members of ourcommunity. We value positive change with a demand for peace, social justice andeconomic security for all”. (Retrieved on September 21, 2008 from http://www.face-book.com/topic.php?uid = 2218681422&topic = 4711).

Politics of change or war of attrition?

In our study area, the most powerful collective political actor isthe provincial government. It has used its constitutional authorityto radically upscale regional thinking to include a large portion ofcentral Ontario now referred to as the Greater Golden Horseshoe, aregion of some 8 million people. This upscaling has been supportedby two key pieces of provincial legislation – a Greenbelt Act and agrowth management plan called Places to Grow. As noted above,the province of Ontario is, simultaneously, planning transportinfrastructure at an even larger scale as a partner with the Provinceof Quebec and the federal government in what is called the Conti-nental Gateway project. The Gateway project is geared explicitly tofacilitating goods movement between the US and southern Ontarioand Quebec.

The provincial government is also potentially the key funder ofmajor infrastructure projects – both hard and soft. (Given the nat-ure of Canadian federalism, the federal government is likely to playonly a relatively minor role.) Finally, due to its constitutionalauthority over municipalities, the province is the holder of regionalplanning authority, an authority it enacted as it upscaled the re-gion to the Greater Golden Horseshoe. What is unclear, as the prov-ince moves to implement new infrastructure spending, is whetheror not there is political space for civil society participants – partic-ularly from the in-between city – in rethinking regionalinfrastructure.

At the city-regional level, which is the space of most specula-tions on the future of infrastructure due to the newly createdtransportation agency Metrolinx, a philosophical and pragmaticwar of attrition has begun to take shape. The City and the TorontoTransit Commission (TTC) have embraced the concept of a $10 bil-lion Transit City light-rail plan, which would serve both inner cityareas of high congestion and ‘priority neighbourhoods’ in the in-between city: suburban neighbourhoods identified by the City asconcentrations of social exclusion. The Transit City plan foresees

major spending on seven new light-rail lines, such as the 31 kmEglinton Avenue line between the airport and the post-War suburbof Scarborough. By contrast, the $50 billion, 25 year Metrolinx plan– which follows the province’s earlier $17.5 billion scheme Mov-eOntario – is geared more strongly towards a modal mix of regio-nal transportation including more roads, subway-style railtransportation, a commuter rail line from downtown to the airport,increased regional rail and bus service (GO Transit) and a new‘‘Downtown Core” subway line in the central city. Only aboutone percent of the spending ($500 million) is earmarked for alter-native ‘‘active” forms of transportation like bicycling and walking(Gray, 2008a, b; Kalinowski, 2008). Metrolinx released its draft re-gional transportation plan called ‘‘The Big Move: TransformingTransportation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area” in Sep-tember, 2008, and in November of that year, the Metrolinx board ofdirectors approved the final version of the Plan. While the planspeaks boldly of transforming modes of travel in the region, howits projects are to be funded remains unclear. The first 7 years ofthe capital plan are based on the assumption that a previous pro-vincial commitment of $11.5 billion will be honoured and that a re-quest for $6 billion from the federal government will be approved.How the remaining $32.5 billion worth of projects proposed foryears 8–25 in the Plan will be funded is not known. (NRU, 2008).

At the inter-municipal level, city governments of Toronto andVaughan (or any other suburban municipality ringing the centralcity of 2.5 million) are barely involved in bi-lateral conversationsthat affect interconnectivity in meaningful ways. In an era wheneconomic borders are collapsing under the pressure of neo-liberalmarkets and globalized investment, political boundaries seem toharden and jurisdictional decision-making cannot escape its terri-torial trap.

At the community level, finally, we see new forms of self-asser-tion in the face of ongoing depletion of resources and growing so-cial hardship. One organization, Jane and Finch on the Move6, hasbegun to become a focus of a community based politics which takesthe immobilization of populations due to poverty and under-servic-ing as the starting point for new demands.

In sum, the politics surrounding and constituting in-betweeninfrastructure is in flux and not yet geared towards the relationalreality of the in-between city. At this point, the majority of currentpolitics of regionalism is territorial and much of the thinking aboutit remains territorial also. There has been talk about various ‘‘fixes”,including a ‘‘sustainability fix” (While et al., 2004), which attemptsto envision the modern region as a place that can be governed in abounded way. This has its roots, of course, in quite pragmatic con-siderations as the container logic of the official political processtends to re-capture the political in territorially re-scaled but stillbounded forms. The recent attempt by the Province of Ontario,for example, to establish a regional transportation authority –Metrolinx – can be seen in this context (Keil and Young, 2008;http://www.metrolinx.com/default.aspx).

Territorial, institutional, class and ethnocultural barriers de-fined through processes largely outside of the control of the actors,residents and workers in the in-between city – such as the compli-cations of multi-level and horizontally competitive government,racialization, and neoliberalization of state functions – continueto deepen the lack of connectivity in the in-between city. In thesketch above, we have pleaded for a different perspective towardsthe new in-between cities in our metropolitan regions, and we

94 D. Young, R. Keil / Cities 27 (2010) 87–95

have ultimately begun to make the case for a new politics of in-be-tween infrastructure.

Conclusion

How can renewal come to the politics of infrastructure in the in-between city? The ideology of neo-liberal governance seemed sodeeply ingrained that, in spite of ever-increasing tallies of infra-structure maintenance shortfalls and the reality of bridges and lightstandards collapsing onto freeways, the likelihood of governmentsin Canada (or Ontario or Greater Toronto) generating and freeing upthe billions of dollars necessary for basic infrastructure mainte-nance appeared remote. The possibility of a radically altered wayof conceiving the region from the perspective of infrastructure con-nectivity in which the in-between cities are not bypassed may havebeen even more so. The question that now opens up is: will the newemphasis on deficit spending in response to global economic reces-sion reinforce the ways in which the in-between infrastructuresand their dependent populations have been marginalized or willthey participate in the renewal?

The new topologies in urban regions do indeed call for a newrelational politics. Suburban areas in Canada no longer functionas stable refuges somewhere outside of ‘the city’ and the rhythmsof suburban daily life cannot be assumed to be either harmoniousor uncomplicated. This will be exacerbated by the current eco-nomic and financial crisis as mortgages become less fictitiousand more of a real burden to suburban families as happened beforein the 1990s (Dale, 1999). At the same time, the suburbs of Can-ada’s largest urban regions are the most culturally diverse commu-nities in the country, their traffic congestion is among the country’sworst, and their workplaces are growing the fastest. Looking atnew suburban areas and forgotten in-between cities, we see evi-dence of heightened forms of global connectivity (embodied inthe millions who have immigrated to Canada’s suburbs) interfacingwith local processes and politics of planning and development onthe terrain of largely pre-structured suburban environments. Butwill these new relational dynamics generate a new relational pol-itics particularly related to infrastructure?

As we have taken up the call in this paper for a ‘‘politicization ofinfrastructure” in the in-between city, we have recognized that theterrain on which hardware and user patterns are laid in the mixedperiphery of the Toronto area has begun to shift economically,demographically and eco-socially. Revisiting the question of‘‘how power’s different modalities are variously exercised, how itputs people into place”, we can now conclude that while the invis-ibility of these spaces used to make for a rather ineffective politicsand for a relegation of connectivity concerns there to the back-burner of the urban agenda, their hybrid and hermaphroditic char-acter may be a starting point for the reinvention not just of urbanconnectivity in spaces that have often been overlooked, but also forthe recognition of those spaces themselves.

Transit justice, i.e. overcoming the class–gender–ethnicity–agebiases of the system, will certainly have to play a part in the polit-icization of infrastructure. Yet, one of the inherent dangers of a pol-itics of metropolitan infrastructure is exactly the racialized subtextof the transformations we are experiencing. Often taking cues fromthe way segregated American cities have been portrayed, popularand scientific discourse has noted the increasing significance ofethno-cultural and class divisions. A Toronto daily newspaperheadlined an article on the topic last year with ‘‘Everything’s whitewhen you’re downtown” and commented: ‘‘White picket fencesand manicured lawns cared for by mostly white, upper-middleclass families come to mind when the word ‘suburban’ is men-tioned. But in recent years, the Cunninghams and the Cleaversare moving into the downtown core, while multicultural and

poorer populations take up residence behind those picket fences”(Liu, 2008:5; A more scholarly discussion of the relationship ofclass and ‘race’ in the Canadian metropolis can be found in Walksand Bourne, 2006). In order to understand the complexity of the in-between city’s infrastructure politics better, we need to overcomesuch rigid throwbacks to the dichotomies of the old city-suburbanscheme. In fact, the ‘‘politicization of infrastructure” will need toexplode such hierarchical notions of urban space as well as themore linear models of social inclusion that rest on these notions.It cannot be sufficient anymore to link the periphery to the centreby better supply of hard and soft infrastructures. While important,such conventional politics of infrastructure is ultimately flawed be-cause it overlooks the complex networked mobility needs and real-ities present in those communities that are traditionallymarginalized by the dichotomous centre-periphery model. Consid-ering ‘‘the relation between social exclusion, mobility and access tobe a dynamic one, and one that plays out at the level of society as awhole” (Cass, 2005, p. 553), we believe that bringing better con-nectivity to the in-between city is not a matter of closing the mod-ernization gap. While we firmly believe that building light-rail andflexibilizing the bus routes for example are minimum require-ments of a new politics of infrastructure ‘‘out there”, we also con-cur that ‘‘initiatives in transport, planning and communicationsshould promote networking and meetingness (and minimize miss-ingness) amongst those living, working and visiting particularplaces” (Cass, 2005, p. 553). This includes at a minimum toacknowledge these communities’ existence beyond neo-colonialgestures from the political high ground of the central city. Thepoliticization of infrastructures therefore includes the politiciza-tion of the people in the in-between city around issues of transpor-tation, infrastructure, and connectivity on the basis of their ownexperienced needs of mobility and access.

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper has been funded by a grant under thedirection of Roger Keil, Patricia Wood and Douglas Young. The pro-ject is called ‘‘In-between Infrastructure: Urban Connectivity in anAge of Vulnerability”. It was sponsored under the Peer ReviewedResearch Studies (PRRS) program of Infrastructure Canada. Somefinancial support was also provided by Toronto Community Hous-ing Company, one of the community partners to the project.

We thank Rob Fiedler for producing the maps for this article.

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