See Leslie Kern's most recent Society & Space contributions: From Toxic Wreck to Crunchy Chic: Environmental Gentrification through the Body

Gentrification is a global phenomenon that transforms cities, neighbourhoods, and everyday lives. Cities like Toronto, Canada have seen a variety of neighbourhoods – working class, commercial, ethnic – remade by an influx of wealthier residents and new retail enterprises. But what if your neighbourhood is better known for abattoirs, toxic chemicals, and diesel trains than Victorian housing stock, ethnic restaurants, or historical significance? For over ten years, (2000-2010) I lived in a formerly industrial Toronto area that was considered by some to be "too shitty to even wreck.”

Gentrification seemed a distant threat, even as neighbourhood after nearby neighbourhood sprouted Starbucks, sushi bars, and salons. But the Junction maintained its infamy as a zone with both high poverty and high pollution rates. Named for the railroad that cuts through it, the Junction had hosted Toronto’s stockyards as well as numerous manufacturing and processing plants, until deindustrialization and relocation cemented a long period of decline. It has also long been home to a concentration of social services and spaces that serve low-income people, including a women’s shelter and rooming houses. With a reputation as a polluted and derelict zone with a socially-marginal population, the Junction was largely ignored by real estate agents, property developers, and new commercial enterprises.

“What do you care what other people think?” Until recently, the Junction didn’t seem to.

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And yet, during that ten-year period the neighbourhood pursued—and gradually solidified—a brand that is part yogi, part skateboarder, and part granola (i.e. ‘crunchy’) chic. The area is now described as an “eco-happy” neighbourhood! Structurally and narratively, it has come a long way. Was this a case of environmental gentrification?

Environmental gentrification is a process in which “environmental improvements result in the displacement of working-class residents as clean up and reuse of undesirable land uses make a neighbourhood more attractive and drive up real estate prices” (Curran and Hamilton 2012).

Or had the toxic past been glossed over through place marketing strategies that promised a clean, green, sustainable future? There are elements of both of these pathways in the Junction’s story, but here I suggest that environmental gentrification also works through the conflation of both pollution and ‘health’ with different kinds of urban bodies and embodied (body-centred) practices. This happens not only via the removal of symbolically ‘dirty’ bodies and their replacement with symbolically ‘clean’ bodies, but also via the ways in which those ‘dirty’ bodies become seen as such by the symbolic displacement of environmental and industrial pollution onto them. This redirection allows the neighbourhood to redefine itself as clean (whether it is actually environmentally clean or not) once those bodies are removed, contained, or made invisible.

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This case study illustrates the mutual constitution of forms of embodiment and processes of urban change. Much gentrification scholarship describes an attack on particular subjects marked by embodied characteristics and practices. The homeless, the poor, racialized minorities, those with disabilities or mental illnesses, sexual minorities, and sex workers have all been targeted for removal by revitalization campaigns, as their bodies become “symbolically afflicted” with various kinds of illnesses (moral, racial, sexual), and thus seen as polluting (Wilson and Grammenos 2005). I primarily examine representations of gentrification that connect bodies, health, and the environment, but I want to remind us that representation matters – it materializes in real bodies and real places with actual socio-economic consequences. Furthermore, bodies and practices are not just symbols of pollution or health. Bodies are material, organic entities that are transformed in very real ways through a range of intertwined processes: biological, environmental, social, cultural, economic, technological, and so on. These transformations might be visible on the surface of the body or in its physical form; they might also be internal transformations. Thus, the industrial legacy here has altered the natural environment, the built environment, and the bodies that reside or work here.

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Bodies are also active – both in terms of the practices they engage in, and in terms of the ways they signal and reproduce social difference. More-than-human actors are also active agents in transforming place and society; they are not passive recipients of meaning or change (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006). While my focus here is on human bodies, I acknowledge that the more-than-human – including such varied entities as livestock, air pollution, organic seeds, and dead bodies – has a role to play in constituting urban change. Overall I want to maintain the view that human and more-than-human actors, organic and built environments, cultural and political forces, are not discrete and distinct. Instead, they can be viewed as intertwined, mutually constitutive, intra-active phenomena that constantly produce one another (Barad 2003).

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From derelict to hip

Located at the intersection of traditional First Nations trails, the Village of West Toronto Junction, founded in 1884, and its railroad-based industry was based on the original dislocation and dispossession of First Nations peoples (Nagam 2009). The railroad enabled the growth of Toronto’s stockyards (begetting the city’s nickname – Hogtown) and served major factories such as the Heintzman Piano Company and the Canadian Cycle and Motor Company. The meat industry attracted first- and second-generation immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Malta, and Poland. The town eventually amalgamated with Toronto in 1909. Interestingly, in 1904 the Junction banned alcohol sales in order to contain the unruly behaviour of the local workers, staying ‘dry’ until 1998.

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The process of deindustrialization in the late 1960s and 70s, the relocation of the Canadian Pacific Railways shops in 1964, and finally, the relocation of the stockyards in 1993, meant hard times for the area. Many of the Junction’s industries of course contributed to cumulative environmental effects, including water and ground pollution; VOCs from paint factories and a rubber factory; and air pollution from light manufacturing. Some industrial uses remain nearby, and their environmental effects linger. These contribute to fears of contamination, and air pollution is expected to get worse before it gets better, as the new rail link between downtown and the airport means heavy diesel train traffic through the area.

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Artists were attracted to the area in the 1980s and 90s for the cheap rent and gritty feel. They may have been the leading of edge of a transition that saw the arrival of galleries, salvage and reclamation-based home design stores and local artisan craft shops. The more recent explosion of boutique shops, bars, and restaurants signals the Junction’s change into a desirable consumption landscape, as does the hot real estate market. House prices, rent, and household income all rose by about 20% between 2005-2012. Condominium developers have finally taken an interest as well. It seems reasonable to conclude that gentrification in the Junction can be considered environmental gentrification in progress, as the decline of industry, some attempts at clean up, and a clever re-branding have finally made this area attractive to new residents and investors.

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The changes over that period seemed tailor-made for me: an academic and parent looking for cozy cafés to write in and places to meet other parents. My partner at the time was closely acquainted with the other side of the tracks: a butcher by trade, he worked at several of the remaining meat factories. The Junction became a research site for me with the arrival in 2010 of a Starbucks, an event that raised public consciousness about gentrification and generated heated debate. Although I no longer live there, over the past five years I have continuously collected a wide variety of textual and visual materials relating to the Junction. I also conducted interviews and participant observation in the summers of 2010 and 2013. My work is informed by my multiple subject positions in relation to the neighbourhood – white settler, consumer of ‘eco-products’, renter, activist, friend, neighbour, researcher – none of which place me as an objective observer, but rather as a situated participant with ongoing connections to and care for this place.

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Turning the toxic past into an asset

One of the first things to recognize about the new brand is how the industrial past is selectively recuperated and romanticized, primarily through railroad imagery. The colonial past and the stockyards upon which the railroad flourished are largely forgotten or hidden from view, but steam engines adorn street signs, banners, light standards, and murals, and a mock historical train platform sits at the centre of the main commercial street. Accounts of local history always start with the railroad: “The story of West Toronto Junction is a colourful turn-of-the-century saga of railroads, political speculation and suburbanization, tightly bound into the boom and bust economic cycles of the fast growing Toronto region.” This powerful symbol of the past has been imbued with new uses and meanings.

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For example, the popular Farmer’s Market, drawing 800-1000 visitors every Saturday, is set up on the mock train platform. Visitors can purchase produce grown in neighbourhood backyards taken over by local organic farmers. The West Toronto Railpath represents another kind of remaking: a paved path for cyclists, joggers, and pedestrians running alongside the tracks to downtown Toronto, the Railpath is designed to encourage environmentally- and physically-healthy activities. And although it may seem paradoxical, the expanded diesel rail service is a new environmental threat around which a good deal of neighbourhood activism and solidarity has been generated. The railroad, once associated with ‘dirty labour’ (e.g. slaughterhouses, meatpacking) and unruly subjects, is now a site of action and progress towards health and well being for bodies and the environment. Through new embodied practices, the industrial past is detoxified.

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The Junction’s re-branding is also made visible in the form of new businesses hawking eco-friendly products and speciality foods. These include numerous organic food cafés, organic grocers, gluten-free bakeries, natural pet product stores, artisan meat and cheese shops, fitness centres, and yoga and Pilates studios. The owners of a successful raw food restaurant were interviewed for a New York Times travel blog feature on the Junction, in which they claim that the Junction is becoming “crunchy-chic, drawing yogis and skateboarders alike” (Kaminer 2009). A magazine article entitled “Eco-happy Junction” highlights some of the new businesses that are at the centre of this brand. Terms like “eco-conscious,” “fair trade,” “biodegradable,” “sustainable,” and “good-for-you” occur throughout (Davey 2012).

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Some of these have directly displaced other businesses, including greasy spoon diners, porn shops, and dollar stores. This critical mass of new businesses sells products and experiences that are meant to act simultaneously on the environment (recycling, sustainability etc.) and upon bodies. Notions of detoxifying, cleansing, balancing, aligning, beautifying, and purifying are applied to bodies that seek to be transformed, inside and out. Simultaneously, these bodies are actively consuming environmental gentrification in the new neighbourhood spaces. Where environmental decontamination is at best incomplete, environmental gentrification proceeds as bodies are mobilized to make remediation visible and seem successful.

While some bodies become the carriers of health and environmental cleanliness, other bodies and embodied practices become conflated with pollution and toxicity through a slippage among environmental, social, and moral conceptions of pollution. The New York Times travel blog exemplifies this:

The Junction section of Toronto was once a booming manufacturing hub […] but industry declined and in recent decades, the neighbourhood withered as prostitutes and drug dealers staked their turf along Dundas Street West […] The young and artsy are […] transforming this stretch from a grimy skid row into a bright enclave filled with quirky bookstores, vegan restaurants and organic cafes. […] Instead of porn shops, Dundas Street West is now lined with wholesome and organic food purveyors (Kaminer 2009).

In this narrative, sex workers, drug dealers, and pornographers take over from deindustrialization as the cause of the neighbourhood’s ‘withering’ and wholesome consumption practices become its saviour. Gentrification is cast not as a turf war between working-class residents and middle-class newcomers, but as a war between sex workers and vegan restaurants.

In 2010, the imminent arrival of a Starbucks franchise provoked debate about the pros and cons of gentrification, and provided a critical moment for some to push for the direct displacement of sex work occurring in massage parlours:

If you truly care about the Junction, devote your time to protecting it from something that truly matters and really does denigrate the area – The Sunshine “Health Spa” (aka Happy Endings) […] Far worse things than Starbucks are clearly still going on in our fine neighbourhood.

While sex work and the drug trade have not disappeared from the neighbourhood, their decreased visibility makes it easy to declare that the vegans have won (although Sunshine Health still stands). Sex work is a kind of present absence, an invisible yet hypervisible threat that lingers on the edges. For example, people like to wax nostalgic about the “crack-whores” that once provided local colour and grit, but sex workers have been largely driven to more marginal locations. In this case, the Junction’s dirty past – industrial and sexual – is displaced onto and contained within bodies that have been driven off the streets by raw food and gluten-free treats.

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The working class, and its past forms of labour, also functions as a present absence against which the Junction can define its new identity. The history and continuing presence of meat packing plants and abattoirs are only ever noted in terms of ‘unpleasant odours,’ which are characterized as an external nuisance and occasionally lead residents to push for the closure of such facilities. There is little room to make visible or attribute a cause to the long-term embodied and economic effects on those who performed this labour, such as disability, injury, illness, and unemployment. Nor can we account for the vast numbers of animal bodies that passed through this place, their existence and deaths making those jobs possible and shaping the neighbourhood and city in invisible yet myriad material ways. The harms of this industry, such as food contamination, as well as pollution from other industries, are borne by individuals and largely hidden, absorbed, and materialized (as disease or genetic modifications) as they intra-act with human and non-human bodies. These embodied inequalities are matched by socio-spatial inequalities, wherein disabled bodies are institutionalized and physically marginalized by lack of accessibility in the neighbourhood and city at large, and workers are seen as part of the contaminated past.<

The visibility of what are construed as unhealthy bodies and practices is also sometimes perceived as a threat to wholesome family values, and results in pleas for direct displacement:

I’m sick and tired of the bums, vagrants, prostitutes, mentally ill freakshow people who maraud the Junction Streets and expose themselves indecently in front of children […]. They can’t afford Starbucks. So please Starbucks come to the Junction. Corner of Keele & Dundas.

These groups (real or imagined others) are seen as polluting the neighbourhood. This intersection is also the location of the Salvation Army Evangeline women’s shelter. Spaces such as this have been significant to the Junction’s reputation over time, even though they receive less attention than the sex shops or meat plants. I spent time with a weekly art group in the shelter over the summer of 2013. As we sat to knit, paint, bead, sew, quilt, or crochet, I became aware of the ways in which the women here experienced the effects of social and economic disinvestment, including poverty, inadequate housing, poor nutrition, violence, and a lack of physical and mental health care.

One woman suffers from swollen ankles because she doesn’t have shoes or socks that work with her orthotics. One woman saves her meagre funds to afford the quality vitamins and minerals that keep her stress and anxiety under control. During art group, the women snack on food provided by the shelter: processed cheese snacks and salty junk food. Although Toronto swelters under record high temperatures, they have no fans or air conditioning in their rooms. When told that a neighbourhood group has donated funds for more art supplies, they ask: can we buy sneakers?

At the same time as the neighbourhood is awash in wholesome organic food, the women here subsist on nutritionally deficient processed items. Their unmet basic needs speak to the incomplete, uneven, and unequal health makeover of the Junction. Through the paradoxical interplay of hypervisibility and invisibility, the bodies of the women who reside in the shelter are highlighted in ways that position them as ready ‘others’ (Lauzon 2008). The shelter serves as a reminder to the neighbourhood of the lingering history of poverty and ill health, providing a continuing rationale for the expansion of the new brand. At the same time, it becomes an actionable target for those who seek continuing ways to improve the neighbourhood. Recently, the art group received a donation from a neighbourhood fundraiser, suggesting that charity is a growing element of the ‘feel-good neighbourhood.’

Conclusions

I began this project by asking how a toxic past can be mobilized as a neighbourhood asset. Bodies seem to be a critical medium through which environmental gentrification has proceeded in my case study neighbourhood. Pollution, toxicity, and the industrial past are hidden within, displaced onto, and conflated with working class bodies, physical and mental illness, dirty labour, unhealthy habits, and dangerous people. This recalls hygienist discourses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wherein bodies marked as other by race and class, and those seen as diseased, morally weak, or engaged in dirty work were heavily policed by urban authorities (Valverde 1991). A key difference is that it is no longer primarily the state that is responsible for monitoring or improving the health of the city. Increasingly, individuals, through their bodies and embodied practices, are mobilized to produce a healthy neighbourhood, at the expense of those who can never be considered healthy. And as different kinds of bodies are constituted as threats to the health of the neighbourhood, the solution is to displace them through the removal of unhealthy consumption sites, which are replaced with ‘healthy’ (and more expensive) ones. Simultaneously, those who can participate in the consumption of the eco-neighbourhood embody the movement of the neighbourhood from toxic to chic. This slippage between bodies, places, processes, and the environment highlights the ways in which gentrification is not just about changes in the built landscape, tenure structure, or class make-up of a neighbourhood, but is also about changing both embodied practices and the materiality of bodies themselves.

In creating neighbourhood spaces designed to subtly and not-so-subtly transform bodies and embodied practices in line with a powerful narrative about progress towards cleanliness, health, and sustainability, gentrification and displacement are largely depoliticized and in fact naturalized. Once the process is materialized in and through bodies, it does not seem to be socially and economically produced, or shaped by political-economic forces such as neoliberalism. It is very difficult to contest ‘health,’ when the limits of this discourse posit illness, toxicity, and pollution as the alternatives.

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How might bodies and embodied practices resist being defined by a health-illness binary? I watched the women in the art group engage in creative practices of ‘making’ that stand largely outside of the capitalist, consumption-oriented eco-neighbourhood. The things that they make out of both new and re-used materials are fashioned as gifts, donations, and personal treasures that adorn their bodies or provide physical or emotional comfort in the shelter. Sometimes the group collectively engages in public art interventions in the neighbourhood, such as yarn-bombing a telephone booth or displaying banners on the shelter. These projects serve as affirmations of the women’s existence and their right to the neighbourhood that resonate with, yet cleverly politicize, the handmade, eco-friendly consumption aesthetic of the new Junction. And even though the Junction’s eco-friendly transformation has clearly been market-based, it is important to note that non-capitalist spaces and different kinds of embodied social and consumption practices can be promoted under the eco-friendly rubric. For example, gifting, trading and bartering are popular forms of exchange; people are growing their own foods and transforming the socio-natural ecology of the neighbourhood; and practices such as yoga – despite all of its rampant commercialization – offer new ways of thinking about and materializing the relationship between the body, the city, nature and other human and non-human beings. Thus, as David Harvey (1998) asserts, the body may very well serve as a site for capital accumulation strategies, but it is also a powerful locale to look to for resistance. 

References

Barad K 2003 Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28(3): 801–31.

Curran W and T Hamilton 2012 Just green enough: contesting environmental gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Local Environment 17(9): 1027–42.

Harvey D 1998 The body as an accumulation strategy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16(4) 401 – 421.

Heynen N, M Kaika, and E Swyngedouw 2006 In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Routledge: London.

Lauzon C 2008 What the body remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s memorial to missing women. In: O Asselin, J Lamoureux, and C Ross (eds) Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp 155 – 179.

Nagam J 2009 Digging up Indigenous history in Toronto’s cityscape. Canadian Dimension 43(1): 54-55.

Valverde M 1991 The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Wilson D and D Grammenos 2005 Gentrification, discourse, and the body: Chicago’s Humboldt Park. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23(2): 295–312.

Acknowledgments

Research assistance provided by Karissa Laroque. All photos by Leslie Kern.