Reshaping Toronto's Waterfront by Gene Desfor & Jennefer Laidley

Author:Gene Desfor & Jennefer Laidley [Desfor, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Published: 2011-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1 It bears noting that our terminology and conceptualization of the conjoined production of space and nature here draws not only from Harvey (1989b, 1982) and Lefebvre (1991) but also centrally from Neil Smith (2008, 1996) and his insistence on understanding the inter-twined production of space and the production of nature as received material and ideological geographies of capitalism. For an extraordinarily lucid discussion of modernization as an active fusion of nature and society in historical-geographical materialism, see Swyngedouw 1999.

2 Indeed, Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) reference passages describing the Harris filtration plant in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, a novel which also traces some of the social and cultural ambiguity of such modernist projects by exploring the role of immigrant labour and racialized class conflict in their construction.

3 Harvey’s (1989b, 1982) notion of the spatial fix and the spatio-temporal fix is a broad, multifaceted one (see Jessop 2006 for a critical review). We invoke specifically his attempt to capture how social capital is sunk into relatively long-lived investments in an urban context. Schoenberger describes this facet of the idea as ‘the creation of an expanded and improved built environment – investment in the whole suite of physical installations that sustain and enhance the system’s ability to create wealth. This includes, for example, transportation networks, water supply, waste disposal systems, communications systems and the like. The beauty of this form of the spatial fix is that it is so intensely grounded’ (2004, 429).

4 We agree with Holdren and others in emphasizing that while absolute physical quantities of fossil energy sources may not be exhausted anytime soon, the increasing social, environmental, and technical costs of exploiting these resources into the future has effectively brought to an end the era when sufficient, high-quality energy from fossils can be assumed.

5 We do not posit that a singular energy problem has confronted and does confront all cities across historical time and geographical space. In fact, quite the opposite. Different cities with different socio-technical characteristics induce their own distinct energy problems, albeit often embedded within broader institutional and technological contexts or chains of causation. In fact, the most pressing dimension of energy problems does not always pertain to mobilizing sufficient fuels per se; instead, as is the case in many contemporary cities, more pressing issues may arise around the environmental and human health consequences of particular energy-using and energy-converting technologies (e.g., urban smog from internal combustion engines).

6 Coal gas was extracted by baking coal in a retort or oven without oxygen at temperatures of about one thousand degrees Celsius. The extracted gas was collected in gas holders or ‘gasometers’ and then distributed throughout the city by an underground network of pipes. In the coal-gas energy cycle, coal served a dual purpose. First, it contained the primary energy source extracted in the form of volatile gases, but also, second, coal provided the process heat to drive the gases out. In 1841 a Montreal-based company was franchised by city council to provide Toronto with gas street lights.

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