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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Canadian metropolitan dwellers have diverged in the way they vote in federal and provincial elections and in their political values, depending on whether they live in the inner city or the suburbs (Walks 2004a, 2004b). This mirrors trends that have been developing in the U.S. for some time (Gainsborough 2001), which led early commentators to claim that suburbanization portended the 'Republicanization of America' (Harris 1954; Phillips 1969). Suburban 'discontent' in the U.S. is borne out by low levels of trust in upper levels of government, and animosity towards the welfare state, particularly towards targeted programs helping the poor, blacks and central cities (Thomas 1998; Oliver 2001; Gainsborough 2001). There has been continued debate on whether divergence is due to self-selection (particularly, of those with more 'conservative' values into the suburbs) or conversion effects (related to the effects of place, or 'neighbourhood effects') (Campbell et al. 1960; Cox 1969; Gainsborough 2001). Regardless, because population growth is concentrated in newer suburban areas, presidential and congressional candidates for political office are said to be increasingly dependent on following a 'suburban strategy' at election time, based on luring suburban voters with low taxes, the 'streamlining' of government services, and attacks on 'big' government (Schneider 1992; Greenberg 1995; Thomas 1998).
A similar situation would appear evident in the Canadian context, where polarization in support for the main parties dates back to 1979 (Walks 2005). By the time of the 2000 election, residents of the outer suburbs of the three largest metropolitan regions were significantly more likely to hold attitudes to the 'right' of the rest of Canada concerning tax cuts, the relative power of business and labour, responsibility for the poor, and the benefits of the welfare state, whereas inner-city residents were to the 'left' in their attitudes towards federal spending, healthcare privatization and the power of business (Walks 2004b). While the federal Liberals have been able to hold onto many suburban seats, the coupling of rapid suburbanization and the suburban shift to the right has worked to elect of a number of right-wing provincial governments. In Ontario during the 'Mike Harris' years the Progressive Conservative (PC) party relied heavily on support from the '905' suburbs for its victories while the inner cities were hardly represented in government (Walks 2004a). Indeed, a number of authors have associated suburbanization with the neo-liberal turn in Canadian federal and provincial government policy (Dale 1999; Donald 2002a; Keil 2000; Walks 2004a). The mechanisms producing city-suburban political divergence are not completely clear. However, case-study survey research in one district of Toronto suggests that it is foremost explained by self-selection (particularly of left-leaning voters into the inner cities), followed by the effects of local experience and mode of consumption (Walks 2006).
But it might be asked what does a 'suburb' or an 'inner city' mean, and whether the categorical definitions employed are the most efficacious at capturing intra-urban spatial discrepancies in political responses. Two main types of zonal definitions are prominent in the literature. Jurisdictional definitions based on municipal boundaries are the most common in the U.S. context, while functional definitions built around conceived differences in urban form and lifestyle are more often used to delineate suburbs and cities in Canada (and in the U.K.). It is yet unclear which one of these definitions is most applicable to understanding political differentiation within Canadian metropolitan regions. The determination of the most appropriate boundary has theoretical as well as practical implications, as the form the boundary takes tells us something about the types of geographic processes that may be producing intra-urban differentiation, and in turn, informs a theory of how urban space may be related to the production of political practices and ideology.
This article first examines competing definitions of inner cities and suburbs in U.S. and Canadian urban analysis, and then discusses the importance of each type of definition for understanding and adjudicating the mechanisms that potentially produce city-suburban political differentiation in North American metropolitan areas. The article then empirically compares degrees of zonal differentiation in federal party support within Canadian urban regions when each type of zonal definition is employed, using aggregate election data for all federal elections between 1945 and 2000 and data from the 2000 Canada election survey. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of the findings for understanding zonal political disparities in Canada.
The Boundaries of Urban Definitions
It is unclear whether traditional distinctions between city and suburb are applicable in the contemporary period. Writing in the U.S. context (but broadly applicable across North America), Jackson (1985, 6) pinned the difference on population density (high in cities, low in suburbs), commuting status (suburbanites commute elsewhere to work, city residents work nearby), home ownership (tenants in cities, owners in suburbs) and land-use practice (suburbs are residential in character while cities are mixed use). Yet, the fact of gently sloping population densities across Canadian metropolitan regions and low population densities in a number of inner-city neighbourhoods (Filion et al. 2004), increasing cross-commutes (Miller and Shalaby 2003), growing rental affordability problems at the fringes (Bunting et al. 2004) and a long history of industrial suburbs (Harris and Lewis 1998; Walker and Lewis 2004) suggest that Jackson's criteria do not help us much in deciding where to draw the boundary. Neither does Fishman's (1987) definition of 'true' suburbs as rooted in British ideals of aristocratic country lifestyles and bourgeois notions of the family. While cities and suburbs might have been distinguished in the nineteenth century by differences in familial lifestyle or rural evocation, it is much less clear that such criteria are relevant in the post-war era.
Of course, as Harris (2004, 49) notes, suburbs and suburban life share few of the qualities of rural life, and so cannot seriously be seen as any 'marriage' between, nor the 'offspring' of, city and country. Instead, suburbanization must be understood as a subset of the urbanization process. Many neighbourhoods, which began as fringe residential or industrial suburbs, have ultimately ended up being subsumed by urban development of various kinds. Many of the neighbourhoods that Canadians currently associate with the inner city began as remote residential suburbs that were eventually annexed by the largest and/or oldest municipalities (Smith 2006). It might be questioned that if such is the historical trajectory of fringe residential communities, does it even make sense to compare inner cities and suburbs as if they were separate types of communities, with different effects on residents' political positions?
While there are some difficulties in distinguishing between the suburbs and cities of the pre-war period, a time in which the economic, technological and political 'forces of centred urbanism' arguably helped organize a tight, symbiotic, and fluid relationship between them (Rae 2004), there are both empirical and theoretical grounds for differentiating between the postwar versions of these zonal forms. Empirically, with the exception of some prairie/western cities, there is the historical fact that the annexation of fringe communities to central city municipalities slowed drastically after the 1920s, and particularly after 1950, both in Canada (Sancton 2000, 2006; Harris 2004) and the U.S. (Teaford 1987; Oliver 2001). Initially, this was due to the fiscal crises of the inter-war years that fuelled the reluctance of the central cities to take on new debts. However, in the post-war period the lack of annexation activity is to a greater degree related to an antagonistic political relationship between city and suburb, framed not only by the significant decline, obsolescence, and perceived poor social environment of central-city housing, neighbourhoods and infrastructure, but also the emerging politics of regional coordination, municipal consolidation and fiscal tax sharing which threatened both suburban and central-city interests (Teaford 1997; Frisken 2001). Metropolitanization worked to define newer suburban communities in terms of their political relationships with central-city municipalities to a much greater degree than in the pre-war era. In Canada, the establishment of regional governments often helped struggling suburbs leverage more power and resources from their reluctant central cities (Frisken 2001; Sancton 2006). The widespread application of low-density zoning and other planning controls in the post-war period has worked to prevent the subsequent re-development of residential areas on the same scale as occurred before the First World War. Some even see zoning as the main culprit maintaining low-density 'sprawl' and preventing the suburban densification that would have otherwise occurred under the more laissez-faire market conditions prevailing before the war (Fischel 1999; Levine 2006).
More conceptually, a number of scholars suggest that the dominant forms of urban development produced in the post-war era are theoretically distinct from both the inner cities and the traditional residential suburbs of the past. Indeed, what often goes by the name 'suburb', it is argued, is really a brand new form of city with its own internal logic. In such a new form the importance of proximity in residential location decisions is reduced while the value of amenity is exaggerated (Bunting and Filion 1999; Filion et al. 1999). Partly, this can be attributed to the very different forms of planning, layout and infrastructure necessitated by the fact that such places have been built to accommodate the automobile (Sheller and Urry 2000). Because such new post-war forms of cities developed without the constraints placed upon them by such 'forces of centred urbanism' they often developed literally 'inward, as it were, from their outer edges' (Evenden 2000, 38). The result is that it is not their cores but their boundaries that give these new suburban forms their identity (Evenden 2000). As urban populations have grown, it is argued these suburbs have become the 'centre' of society, potentially reducing old inner city areas to a 'specialized neighbourhood' type (Evenden and Walker 1993, 251). This new form of city is increasingly the destination of the majority of work-related trips originating within it, is mixed-use, socially diverse, and covers the ma jority of the metropolis (not only at the urban fringe). Thus, although clearly distinct in form from the inner cities, it contradicts traditional conceptions of 'suburbia' (Harris 2004, 19). In its place, new monikers have been proposed, including Technoburbs (Fishman 1987), Postsuburbia (Kling et al. 1991), Exopolis (Soja 1992) and the Dispersed City (Bunting and Filion 1999).
It is this post-war suburban form that has been tied to a new politics of 'discontent' and 'selfishness' in Canada (Dale 1999). Yet, the boundaries and processes that best articulate political differentiation within metropolitan regions remain to be interrogated. There are two basic models. In either model, political divergence could result from conversion or self-selection/transplantation mechanisms. However, the factors behind such mechanisms differ.
In the first model, what is here termed the jurisdictional hypothesis, city-suburban political differentiation is a result of municipal differences in governance structures, social composition, service capacities and fiscal policies. The assumption is that residents choose (self-select into) municipalities based on utility maximization criteria, and that a sufficient number of choices are present which allow them to do so (Tiebout 1956), and/or that municipal communities evolve separate political cultures which reflexively evolve in relation to the place-based demands of their taxpayers, and which then act to convert newcomers (Fischel 2001). As municipalities segregate populations based on ability to pay, service needs and social composition, their boundaries are then expected to articulate political and ideological divisions.
The second model relates to the morphological hypothesis. In this model, it is mainly lifestyle differences between the denser, more mixed-use and transit-friendly urban forms of the old prewar cities and the low-density, auto-dependent nature and separated land uses of the newer post-war cities/suburbs, which encourage a different politics of space. Morphological differences may lie behind the varied neighbourhood preferences of certain social groups. The work of Ley (1996, 2003) and Caulfield (1994) suggests that the pre-war city acts as an expressive and performative setting for a segment of the new middle class whose left-liberal politics and preferences for 'authentic' neighbourhoods are defined partly in relation to the conformism assumed to be inherent in post-war suburban lifestyles. Such a perspective is supported by the work of Walks (2006) who found that self-selection on behalf of supporters of the New Democratic Party (NDP) into older housing in pre-war neighbourhoods was the mechanism that best explained city-suburban discrepancies in party preferences in one district in Toronto. In the U.S. context, Schneider (1992) posits that the predominant lifestyle and form of low-density suburbs typical of the post-war era allow those who crave order, security and a hyper-controlled environment to retreat into a private space. Meanwhile, the conversion perspective is reflected in the cultural arguments of Sewell (1991) who suggests that the low densities of the 'new' post-war city stress self-reliance and protect residents from having to relate to others, while private transportation, the lack of public spaces, and the daily auto commute reinforce the sense that one is alone and in constant competition with others. Sewell contrasts this with the 'old' pre-war city, in which higher densities, public spaces, and public transportation are seen to force people of different class and ethnic backgrounds to mix, respect each other's differences, and remind participants that they are part of a larger community. In the U.S. context, Hogen-Esch (2001) suggests that a new form of politics has arisen built around what he terms a 'suburban land-use vision', based primarily on the maintenance of a high-amenity and high-consumption lifestyle in the face of growing fiscal and social...
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