Daniel Ross

In March Toronto’s Kensington neighbourhood was abuzz with worries about a huge Loblaw’s supermarket planned for a site near College St. and Spadina Ave. Residents organized to oppose the development, arguing that it would push the area’s small food shops out of business and change the market forever. I wrote about the anti-Loblaw’s campaign on this blog and on activehistory.ca, exploring how it fits into the area’s nearly fifty-year history of citizen engagement in planning.

Flash forward to the present. As market residents try to stay on top of the Loblaw’s issue, a new, and potentially larger threat has emerged. At a public meeting last night developers Rio-Can faced tough question from hundreds of citizens who turned out to discuss their plans to build a mini-mall–in which the main tenant would be a 12,000 square foot Walmart–on Bathurst between College and Dundas Sts. Over 70,000 have signed a petition against the development on Change.org.

June 6 town hall meeting. Photo by Friends of Kensington Market

Walmart has often faced opposition when moving into communities in Canada and elsewhere in the world. The company’s labour practices, opposition to unions and reputation as a killer of independent businesses have made it an unpopular neighbour. But has it ever faced a community as organized and sure of itself as Kensington Market? We’ll find out over the next few months as this issue develops. Stay tuned.

Since Sunday I’ve been in Victoria for the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA). Yesterday I took part in a panel presentation that brought together scholars from western, eastern, and central Canada to discuss the different ways that citizens have engaged in planning their local communities since the 1950s. Often their engagement took the form of pushing back against plans to dramatically redevelop urban space to accommodate car traffic. I presented research on 1970s Montreal cycling advocacy group le Monde à bicyclette. It was fun and really interesting to connect with other scholars interested in cities, politics, and the management of urban space. A summary of the panel is below.

Our City, Our Voices: Citizen Activism and Urban Planning in Canada, 1950-80

Sponsored by the Political History Group

Facilitator: Nicolas Kenny (SFU)

Liam Haggarty (Mount Royal) and Jesse Salus (Independent Scholar): “Calgary’s Ring Road Controversy: A History of Community and Environmental Activism in Alberta”

Andrew Nurse (Mount Allison): “Pyrrhic Victory: Opposition to Freeway Development and the Crisis of Civic Activism, Halifax 1971-73”

Valérie Poirier (UQAM): «L’autoroute est-ouest, c’est pas le progrès!»: environnement et mobilisation citoyenne en opposition au projet d’autoroute est-ouest à Montréal en 1971

Daniel Ross (York): “’Vive la Vélorution!’: Le Monde à Bicyclette Imagines a Bikeable City, 1975-80

In the post-WWII era, Canadian cities followed the example of their American neighbours in embracing modernist planning as a solution to the infrastructure needs created by postwar prosperity and population growth. The new planning paradigm relied on experts to formulate large-scale plans for improving the functionality and efficiency of cities. One of the principal concerns of planners was accommodating the private automobile through the construction of wider and better-maintained roads, new expressways, and parking.

This expert-led, auto-centric trend in planning aroused its share of opposition. Citizens in affected communities expressed anger at being ignored by their elected officials and excluded from the planning process. They mobilized to oppose the perceived social and environmental costs of this kind of development: the destruction of housing, neighbourhoods, and communities; a decrease in the quality of urban life; and increased traffic, accidents, and pollution. Instead, these citizens proposed a different vision of the city, one that promoted community over efficiency and favoured alternative modes of transport, including public transit, cycling, and walking. In many cases, they saw their own political mobilization as a reaffirmation of the importance of participatory democracy: of people having a say in the planning and governance of their own communities. The four papers that compose this panel focus on citizen mobilization both against auto-centric urban development, and for a more organic, bikeable, or walkable city. They document a fascinating moment in Canadian history, and one that is very relevant to current debates.

(Co-written with Colin Coates and originally posted at Activehistory.ca)

“The rise and fall of America’s largest socialist utopian experiment”
-Program blurb from the 2013 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival

This post, inspired by the documentary film American Commune (2013) by Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo, takes two different looks at the history of a 1970s countercultural commune located in the southern US. The first is a broad reflection on how we frame the stories of utopian experiments, while the second explores how communes were the subject of special scrutiny by the North American state. 

“DOOMED TO FAIL?”: HOW WE REMEMBER UTOPIAN EXPERIMENTS

It is a standard to describe the history of utopian communities as involving a “rise and fall.” In fact, what often makes utopian experiments so appealing to writers is their fall, the result of disastrous, wooly-headed dreams that could not adjust to the realities within which the communities were located. The very idealism that underpinned their foundation, and led to their “rise,” also ensured their inability to survive.  It is a tidy narrative, where the utopians’ hubris guarantees their downfall. But is it too tidy?  Maybe utopians fail for the same mundane reasons that the rest of us do.

This compelling documentary film tells the story of two sisters who come to terms with their childhood. Born on “The Farm,” the archetypical hippy commune of the 1970s, Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo left the community as their parents’ marriage disintegrated, an event which seems tied chronologically and causally to the end of the utopian phase of “The Farm.” They weave home movies shot on The Farm, contemporary news reports of the famous (and infamous) commune, and family photos with recent footage of a reunion and interviews with their family and many former adult and children members of the community.

(For access to a gallery of historical photographs from the farm, click here)

Founder Stephen Gaskin looms large in American Commune, a religious inspiration, solver of community discord, and occasional authoritarian. The film states that he forbade birth control on The Farm, and hence the eldest daughter was conceived and the family was formed. On this remote acreage in Tennessee, firmly in the Bible Belt – though Gaskin is a compelling spiritual leader in his own right – the sisters, and their brother (who appears only briefly), spent their early years in the isolated, safe, treed environment, surrounded by children their own age and a large community of adults who shared a counterculture dream.

Family structures could be fluid, though the filmmakers’ parents apparently remained together until their acrimonious divorce. Members of the community contributed their labour to the collective good, and cash was almost entirely absent. The Farm attempted to reach the goal of self-sufficiency that many 1960s and 1970s back-to-the-land readers of Thoreau’s Walden believed they could attain. Members swore an oath of poverty and turned over their wealth to the whole. The Farm epitomizes many of the standard features of a utopian settlement: separation from whatever is deemed the “mainstream,” a charismatic leader, communal property, an overarching goal of bettering the world.  In one key way it was different. Gaskin did not exclude anyone who wished to join The Farm, regardless of whatever wealth they could contribute. There were no metaphorical gates on the farm.

As a result, The Farm could not last, the film states. Early in the film we see the ramshackle huts in which the early families had lived being torn down; the buses on which the founding members had travelled from California to Tennessee in 1971 were rusting. The Farm of the women’s childhood was no more. However, an interview partway through shows that it shifted from a commune to a decollectivized intentional community after its crisis in the early 1980s. The film ends by commenting that the The Farm was the longest utopian experiment in American history. This detail is not true – a number of other communes have lasted longer.  The Oneida Community lasted from 1848 to 1881, New Llano in Louisiana from 1917 to 1939, and various Hutterite colonies in the United States and Canada dating back over 80 years are still going strong. But the film also accepts that The Farm experiment continues into the present. After all, there was a place in which to hold the reunion, and Stephen and Ina May Gaskin still live on the land.  And poignantly, the former members rally around one of filmmakers at a time of personal need. The spirit of the community transcends the decades.

A few events led to the end of Gaskin’s leadership in the early 1980s: an FBI raid in search of a marijuana plantation (they found milkweed patches instead), the limitations of self-sufficiency, and bank decisions to call in loans, which were supposedly linked to the police raids. I think that here the filmmakers may have touched on a key moment for a variety of utopian settlements in both Canada and the United States. Undercapitalized in general, communes depended on cheap land.  Land was often cheapest when it was rather unproductive. And it was easiest to live on cheap, marginal land when the financial costs of remaining there were lower. By 1981 and 1982, interest rates neared 20% in the United States and Canada. Few utopians, or non-utopians for that matter, were prepared for such an increase in borrowing costs, and particularly for those who believed in self-sufficiency and cashlessness, the costs were too burdensome. I would suggest that the historical context of utopias must be acknowledged as well. Utopias are not ipso facto fated to fail, any more than any attempt at agrarian settlement or business creation is fated to succeed.

But to tell the story of the fall of the utopian experiment is to reassure ourselves that, as wonderful as the dreams may be, they really are not practical. We don’t really have to bother with such reveries. But sometimes the historical contingency of a mundane issue like high interest rates can actually influence the rise and fall of utopia.

HARMLESS HIPPIES OR DANGEROUS SUBVERSIVES? NATIONAL SECURITY AND COUNTERCULTURAL COMMUNES

In retrospective, utopian experiments may appear as beautiful but necessarily ephemeral experiments.  From the point of view of the state, this was not always the case. Before nostalgia for countercultural living, there was anxiety, particularly on the part of the Cold War-era state. Considerable government resources were devoted to the surveillance of the seemingly harmless Farm residents in the United States, and, it turns out, in Canada as well.

Credit: openstreetmaps.org and maps.stamen.com.

Over the past twenty years, scholars have documented amply how agencies like the FBI in the United States, and CSIS and the RCMP in Canada devoted considerable resources to policing political dissent in the 1960s and 1970s. Surveillance and undercover operations produced information on, and directly influenced the fate of groups ranging from the Black Panthers (see my previous post here) to Canadian hippies. As persistent use of access to information legislation on both sides of the border has demonstrated, it was a rare non-conformist who did not have a file with the RCMP or FBI – or both. Recently, for example, it has come out that both singer Rita McNeil and father of Medicare and former premier of Saskatchewan Tommy Douglas had extensive RCMP files.

Stephen Gaskin and The Farm were no exception. From 1970 until well into the 1980s, the FBI generated reams of reports on the commune and its residents, investigating whether their socialist lifestyle, drug use, cultish behaviour, and links to the peace movement made them criminals or threats to national security. Farm resident Albert Bates has documented how agents followed Gaskin and his fellow communards on their trek east looking for land, and surveilled their activities once they were established in Tennessee. At least one agent seems to have infiltrated the community, and Gaskin was interviewed on several occasions by the agency (who referred to him as a “very reliable source”).  Yet these investigations seem to have turned up little that could harm The Farm, although Bates and other long-time residents maintain that the FBI had a hand in the unfavourable loan renegotiations that eventually bankrupted the community in the 1980s.

The story does not end there, however. An access to information request made earlier this year reveals a Canadian dimension to state concern with The Farm and its projects. In the late 1970s—if not before—the Intelligence Division of Canadian Immigration had its own file on the commune. Heavily redacted and in part destroyed, the file remains interesting reading for its insight into state methods and concerns.

Credit: Library and Archives Canada.

In 1977 two groups of communards from The Farm crossed the border north into Canada, settling in rural Hampton, Nova Scotia and Lanark, Ontario, where they established branch offices of the commune’s international aid NGO, called PLENTY, and began fundraising. Since 1974, PLENTY had been involved in providing aid to disaster victims around the world, mostly in the form of food and reconstruction projects. In 1976 and 1977 PLENTY volunteers from The Farm were working hand in hand with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) providing earthquake relief in Guatemala.

The Farm residents who moved to Canada in 1977 were quickly flagged by Immigration Intelligence officers for further investigation. It was the communards’ international aid activities—as detailed in an article in the local Perth Courier—that originally brought them to the attention of immigration, but it is not clear why they merited investigation. Immigration status may have been an issue for the group that settled in Hampton, but it was not for the couple who moved to Lanark, Canadian Allan Brown and his American wife Susan, who was a landed immigrant. Instead, it is likely that the PLENTY activists were targeted in the context of a larger investigation of American immigration to eastern Ontario communes: authorities seem to have seen the Browns as part of a potentially dangerous chain migration of radicals and long-haired do-gooders from south of the border. One label applied to associated records was “Non-Immigrants – Vagrant Control,” suggesting their potential to be a burden on the state or to attract other unproductive (and illegal) immigrants.

Credit: Perth Courier

Officials in both Nova Scotia and Ontario created files on the PLENTY organizers. Investigators reported to Ottawa that “PLENTY claims to be a non-profit charitable organization with headquarters in Nova Scotia. They claim they are engaged in raising money for Guatemala relief.” However, they raised doubts as to where the money being raised was actually going, arguing that controls on CIDA programs were “very lax and a group such as PLENTY could use funds for their own purpose”. In the 1960s and 1970s a number of government efforts to build infrastructure and civil society—including the Company of Young Canadians and the Local Initiatives and Opportunities for Youth programs—raised similar doubts from security services and conservative politicians, who felt that taxpayers’ dollars were being used to fund dissent. The press often echoed this concern, or at least played upon the incongruity of state funding of so-called “shit-disturbers”. In the case of PLENTY, a 1977 Toronto Star article mused that Canada was “giving U.S. hippies $70,000 to rebuild Guatemala town”.

Background checks revealed that none of those concerned had criminal records in Canada, but the investigation did not end there. Officers communicated with authorities in the United States to learn more about The Farm and Stephen Gaskin, receiving in response newspaper clippings about the commune as well as a copy of a detailed file on Gaskin, produced by the Tennessee Department of Corrections following his 1974-5 imprisonment on marijuana charges (received for growing plants at The Farm). The report describes Gaskin as intelligent, energetic, and responsive to counselling: an ideal prisoner, apart from the fact that the main entry under his “Interests and Activities” was the growing and use of marijuana.

For the moment it is impossible to say what, if anything, was done with this information. The file does not seem to have been widely read: it was checked out seven times over the course of 1977, and then just once more in 1979. What is clear, however, is that the Canadian security services, like their American counterparts, were invested in keeping an eye on those citizens who had decided that the best solution to a society they did not accept was to build a better one. If the goal of many countercultural utopias of the 1960s and 1970s was to escape from an oppressive and unjust system, the suspicions generated by that ideal ensured that back-to-the-landers never strayed too far from the watchful eye of the state.

American Commune reminds us of the optimism and idealism that underlay this attempt to create a different way of living, just as the state-produced records underscore the obstacles that faced those who wished to imagine alternative futures.

Further reading:

www.americancommunemovie.com

http://www.thefarmcommunity.com

www.thefarm.org

Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Reg Whitaker, Gregory S. Kealey, and Andrew Parnaby, Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2012).

Ivan Greenberg, Surveillance in America: Critical Analysis of the FBI, 1920 to the Present (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012).

This Thursday, March 21st I’m taking part in WIDEN (Workshops for interdiscipline exchange and novelty) at the University of Toronto. I’ll be talking about my research on the history of cycling advocacy in Montreal, alongside an engineer and a psychologist who will also be presenting their research. The idea, which I find really useful, is to find connections between our disciplines (and hopefully amuse the audience in the process).

More about the talk here:

http://www.widen.ca/2013/03/10/on-networks-march-21-2013/

(originally posted at activehistory.ca)

A few dozen locals braved the cold on February 16th in Toronto’s iconic Kensington Market. They were protesting plans to open a big-box supermarket in the neighbourhood. Developer Tribute Communities plans to break ground soon on a condo development on College Street—just east of the market’s northern entrance—that will include a 20,000-square foot Loblaws store.

Photo by Dominique Russell

Demonstrators from the group Friends of Kensington Market fear that Loblaws will damage the community by driving the small shops that give the market its character out of business. As they marched down Augusta Ave., the Friends held signs reading “No Loblaws No” and “Save Small Kensington Businesses”. In an interview with the CBC, market shop owner Anna Cecilia Espinoza worried that the arrival of big retail could spell the end of small businesses like hers. A “Save Kensington” has since been started on Activism.com. News of the development comes at a time of acute insecurity about how rising property values are changing the area (by bringing in more chain stores, higher rents, etc.). The recent closure of local café Casa Acoreana has led some to speculate that the area has reached a “tipping point” for gentrification.

Flyer by Damien Boyer

Recently, my own research has led me to read about community responses to urban planning and development in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s. I’ve been struck by the degree of success of certain downtown neighbourhoods during that period at organizing and having their voices heard on projects that threatened their homes and neighbourhoods. One was Kensington Market.

In this post I discuss how the Loblaws protest fits into a larger history of people in Kensington Market speaking up about their community’s future. In the 1960s shop owners and residents organized to have their say in neighbourhood planning. While they weren’t able to follow through on many of their own plans to improve the area, they did set up an innovative community-based planning model, and blocked or altered several projects that would have dramatically changed the neighbourhood. Today’s Kensington owes a lot to those efforts—and more recent ones—to keep the area’s character intact. And that may be one of the best arguments for taking opposition to big-box retail in Kensington Market seriously.

The market today and the sites discussed in this post. Tiles by openstreetmap.org

The area that is now Kensington Market acquired its eclectic, bohemian vibe through more than a century of change. The influential Denison family owned most of the land that is now Kensington before it was subdivided in the 1850s. Since then, several waves of immigrants—first British, but soon followed by Jewish, Portuguese, Caribbean, Chinese and others—have occupied the area. Small family shops dotted several blocks in the area’s south-east, giving the market an Old World feel and encouraging a sense of community among its diverse, but mostly poor or working-class, residents. By the 1970s the area was famous throughout Canada as the inner-city “ethnic” neighbourhood par excellence, in part because of the popular CBC sitcom The King of Kensington.

The market full of life in the early 1970s. Ellis Wiley/City of Toronto Archives

From the sixties onwards it also became known as a destination for the counterculture, attracting students, artists and other hip residents. As property values rose, those populations mixed with recent immigrants. Family groceries now sit side-by-side with coffee shops, used-clothing stores, art galleries, and, more recently, a few higher-end boutiques, restaurants and bars. The area tends to be a hit with tourists visiting the GTA, and monthly summer Pedestrian Sundays have become a big draw.

Like all of downtown Toronto, the market has changed drastically since it first became a neighbourhood. But one constant over the past fifty years has been area’s ability to mobilize against unwanted change. It began inthe early 1960s, at the apogee of Toronto’s wave of postwar urban renewal. Politicians, bureaucrats and developers planned a series of large-scale, capital-intensive projects to cope with population growth, reduce the city’s housing shortage and help reshape Toronto into a world-class city. Such plans included subway and expressway expansion as well as the removal of dozens of blocks of housing to make way for apartment towers and townhouses. Kensington Market was one area singled out for transformation. Planners cited its poor housing stock, unclean streets, and traffic congestion problems as reasons for redevelopment. As early as 1962, the city produced an abortive plan for rerouting and pedestrianizing several of its streets, receiving cautious support from local businesspeople.

The city’s 1962 plan for Kensington. City of Toronto Archives

That utopian plan for cleaning up Kensington never got off the ground. Instead, over the next decade a number of less-desired projects threatened to eat piece-meal into Kensington’s housing stock and community. The Spadina Expressway, proposed to link Highway 401 to downtown, was the most infamous. If built, it would have radically transformed Spadina Ave. into a thoroughfare rather than a destination.

But there were other threats. South of Kensington, several blocks of houses in the Alexandra Park neighbourhood (now home to the Atkinson housing Co-op) were slated for demolition by the mid-1960s. Planners discussed including parts of Kensington in that project. Meanwhile, several public institutions had plans for enlarging their footprints in the market. The Provincial Institute of Trades on Nassau St. (later George Brown College, now Kensington Lofts) was eager to acquire more room for students from 1968 on, and Toronto Western Hospital was preparing for a $37-million expansion that included a large parking facility. A third threat to the neighbourhood’s character came from the development of a vacant, 52,000-square foot site on College St. between Bellevue and Lippincott. From 1967 until 1970, a series of plans for that lot—including two towers housing 950 apartment units—threatened to dramatically reshape the neighbourhood.

In response to these individual projects and a general sense that city planners wanted to destroy Kensington by improving it, local residents and shop owners organized. In fall 1967 the Kensington Market Businessmen’s Association (KMBA) was joined by the new Kensington Area Residents’ Association (KARA) as advocates for the area.

September 1967 call for the first public meeting of the KARA. Douglas Rigby/City of Toronto Archives

Over the next few years, the KARA and KMBA overcame internal conflicts and worked together to represent the market’s interests and present a new vision for its future. They adamantly opposed single-use development of any part of the area, and dug in their heels on the issue of institutional encroachments on housing stock. Instead of tower apartments, they proposed that the College St. site be developed with recreation space, a nursery school, and mixed housing, and that provisions be made for residents forced from their homes. The idea of a pedestrian mall was revived, along similar lines to the 1962 plan. To solve the problem of getting stock to market businesses, they proposed building a multi-story distribution centre in the market which would centralize area deliveries and ease traffic congestion.

In addition to these counter-proposals, organized Kensington residents championed a process for neighbourhood planning based on extensive community consultation. Suspicious of city planners’ raze-and-build attitudes, they wanted their voices to be heard on every decision related to the area. They found allies among some members of Toronto’s city council at a moment when citizens across the city were pushing back against modernist planning. The result was something new. A group called the Kensington Urban Renewal Committee (KURC) was formed, and given control over the planning process for the area. The KURC brought together two city councillors with representatives of the KBMA, the anti-expressway Spadina Businessmen’s Association (SBA), and the KARA, which had the largest representation on the committee.

The KURC functioned until 1970. The results of this dynamic period of neighbourhood mobilization were largely positive. The hospital’s expansion occurred in consultation with its neighbours, and George Brown’s campus did not grow at the expense of local shops and houses. Meanwhile, the plan for single-use apartment towers on College St. was defeated. Instead, the lot was acquired by the Toronto Board of Education (TBE). Following the lead of the KURC, the TBE conducted an exhaustive consultation process with locals—the first of its kind—resulting in a project (the Kensington Community School) that had widespread neighbourhood support.

Pamphlet on the Kensington Community School consultations. City of Toronto Archives

On the other hand, pedestrianization and other solutions to overcrowded streets remained elusive, and the KARA and KMBA were not able to maintain neighbourhood unity beyond the early 1970s. Nonetheless, the consultations surrounding the KURC and the TBE’s work in Kensington broke new ground in terms of community involvement in city planning.

Flash forward to the present. What the Kensingtonians I’ve spoken to want above all to stop Loblaws from muscling in on the market, and in this respect their mobilization echoes protests in 2008 against a proposed Starbucks on Augusta Ave. But as I was told by Dominique Russell, a long-time area resident, they also hope to contribute to a bigger, citywide conversation about how to implement mixed-use development. Retail at grade (street level) is the name of the game in condo development in downtown Toronto, since zoning requires most new developments to be mixed use. This is based on the assumption that a healthy streetscape has to be diverse both in its functions and the people it attracts to develop a sense of community. However, recently condo developers seem to be teaming up with big retailers—Shoppers Drug Mart, Loblaws, Starbucks—to produce a very cookie-cutter kind of development. A great piece by Jake Schabas on Spacing.ca goes into more detail about why that is happening and what’s wrong with it. The result is that while new condo developments provide mixed-use, many don’t allow for any sense of individuality or community space.

The Friends of Kensington Market don’t oppose condo development—in fact they think densification is inevitable. But like their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s, they want it to contribute to, not harm, Kensington’s unique sense of community. In Dominique Russell’s words,

the problem of the corporatizing of our main streets isn’t going away, and it’s playing out in neighbourhoods across the city. My hope is that the defense of Kensington market starts a conversation about what “retail at grade” actually means,—and right now it’s big corporations—and possibly a rethink of the city plan that is in fact suburbanizing the downtown, so that Toronto will no longer be a “city of neighbourhoods.”

As this post has shown, there is a long history of Kensington Market residents thinking in just this way about development, community, and the place of their neighbourhood in the city. Both Tribute Communities and Loblaws should take the time to listen to their concerns.

Further Reading:

Jean Cochrane, Kensington (Erin, ON: Boston Mills Press, 2000).

Douglas Rigby, Citizen Participation in Urban Renewal Planning; A Case Study of an Inner City Residents’ Association (PhD Thesis, University of Waterloo, 1975).

John Sewell, The Shape of the City: Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning, 2^nd ed (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Jennifer Lyn Shaw, Resistance amid Disorganization: Understanding the Nature of Community Organizing in Toronto’s Kensington Market (MA Thesis, University of Toronto, 2005).

As Rob Ford’s lawyer begins to argue his appeal today, I was pleased to get a mention in the Toronto Star for my post about the history of municipal conflicts of interest. The author, Marco Oved, takes a similar approach, although with a much broader lens. Worth a look!