1 TRANSPORTATION GOVERNANCE AT THE CROSSROADS THE CASE OF TORONTO

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s first review of the regional economy, Toronto’s model of economic development is under pressure (OECD, 2010). While the Greater Toronto Area (GTA, figure 1) generates 17% of Canada’s GDP and 45% of Ontario GDP, the OECD cautions that from 1995 to 2005, the region experienced economic and labor productivity growth significantly lower than the average for OECD metro-regions. The GTA maintains a diverse economy – Toronto is an international business centre and finance capital as well as a significant manufacturing hub – but the region’s traditional manufacturing industries, notably the automotive sector, have experienced dramatic decline since 2002: a trend exacerbated through the current global financial crisis. The OECD identifies: (1) a lack of capital investment; (2) an inadequate utilization of Toronto’s prized cultural diversity; and (3) a poorly integrated transportation network as curtailing productivity and economic competitiveness (congestion on the region’s roads alone is reportedly responsible for an estimated $3.3 billion annually in lost productivity), while (4) limited intergovernmental collaboration stymies the prospect for future growth. Ontario’s neoliberal revolution – implemented in 1995 through the provincial Progressive Conservative Party’s Common-Sense Revolution (CSR) – attempted to restore growth to the GTA after Toronto’s Fordist accumulation regime stagnated (terminally in the 1989-1993 recession) and the region’s metropolitan governance dynamic broke down (Donald, 2002; Keil, 2002). The CSR placed Toronto at the forefront of urban neoliberalization – facilitating, in part, the emergence of the GTA as a successful, dynamic and global(izing) urban region – yet the internal contradictions and re-territorializations of this contingent political-economic project have proved unable to resolve the region’s crisis tendencies underlined by the OECD. This paper presents a preliminary examination of the evolving relationship between governance and territory in the GTA in the wake of the CSR’s penetrating and multi-scalar processes of neoliberal restructuring. I posit the underlying tensions between pre-existing metropolitan political dynamics and an emergent, neoliberal regional urbanization both structure and limit the potential of the GTA. Exploring these issues is particularly relevant at the contemporary juncture as the 2007-2010 “financial crisis” illuminates and engenders new multifaceted and multiscalar articulations of urban restructuring; reverberating from macroscale reconfigurations to the rhythms of everyday life of urban inhabitants. In the American context, the present crisis perhaps found its most vivid expression in the housing market. The situation in Canada has been relatively mild by comparison. In Toronto, new home construction continues, particularly in the downtown condo-boom, and in select areas bidding wars are resurfacing. Fears of a property market meltdown such as experienced in the United States, have thus far failed to materialize. Rather, the “crisis” in the Toronto context has found its most pertinent articulation as a crisis of regional governance and rescaling, concretely articulated within the developing politics of regional transportation.