The proposed big box retail emporium on Eastern Avenue in Leslieville spells urban crisis. But why, you might ask, does this investment into what looks like a derelict stretch of urban land, which has long been beyond the best-before-date, not led to widespread approval but instead is strongly opposed by the workers and residents in the area, and by urbanists at large? The answer is that in this topsy-turvy world, what looks like investment is disinvestment, what looks like jobs is deskilling and what looks like sustainability is its toxic opposite.

“SmartCentres”: A misnomer of a mall

SmartCentres, a developer of mostly suburban commercial real estate, wants to build 70,000 square metres of shops around 1900 parking spots. Wal-Mart has been secured as the anchor tenant of the project. The City of Toronto opposes the project because its commercial character violates the employment lands designation of the area in question. Now the case is before the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), an appointed provincial review board for municipal planning disputes. The OMB has to decide, in hearings that started on May 21 and will continue for three months, whether and what SmartCentres can build.

The developer’s plans promise 2100 retail jobs in a neighbourhood that has suffered economically since the NAFTA meltdown of Canadian manufacturing. From the point of view of urban design, this “smart centre” attempts to hide its big box pedigree behind a fake brick exterior. Imagine a drive-in Carrot Commons. While the competing Canadian Tire store across the street, south of Lakeshore, takes its architectural cues straight out of Learning from Las Vegas, the architects of the Leslieville megaplex pretend, in their glossy brochures, to bring Tuscany to the Toronto portlands.

Some have already pointed to the “class war” aspect of the project’s premise: it allegedly pits job-deprived neighbourhood folk hungry for any type of employment, against the middle class shoppers who drive anywhere to plunk down their golden credit cards for stuff they will carry back to their privileged lairs in neighbourhoods such as the Beach. Just as long as that kind of shopping does not come to a streetcorner near them. There is, indeed, a class component to this kind of politics, as there is to all politics in Toronto. But the real class war is between corporations such as Wal-Mart and SmartCentres on one side and poor neighbourhoods, on which they prey for cheap labour and captive customers, on the other.

Privatizing urban space

So, what is wrong with this development? Unfortunately, almost everything.

This planned commercial temple seals the fate of current employment and of sustainable alternatives in a blue collar neighbourhood that has fallen on hard times.

As a shrine of privatized consumption, the Leslieville monster store flouts the idea that a city could be more than an assemblage of private residential and commercial spaces. Through the ages, cities have managed a more or less benign balance of public spaces and private retreats, private wealth and public responsibility. Modern society could thrive in cities because the sanctity of the residence and the anonymous openness of the street allowed human interaction in a broad spectrum of possibilities. Privacy at home and anonymity on the street also kept both state and market at bay. They couldn’t touch you there.

During the 20th Century, most western cities âe” and those in many other parts of the world âe” established large government-controlled public sectors of collective consumption. In housing, transit and social services, municipalities established ways of meeting the needs of citizens without the market.

Public services were, well, public. They also created employment. Collective consumption was just that: collective and not subjected to the market. Those who provided these services were typically public employees with safe and unionized jobs, benefits, vacation pay, etc. included. Urban neighbourhoods in cities of collective consumption were bastions âe” to a certain extent âe” against the ravages of the market economy. They offered a respite from the corporate world of the Fordist assembly lines where the world market ruled workers’ lives.

Throughout the West, but especially in North America, this model has been under attack for some time. Collective consumption has made way for a potpourri of privatized services, and the provision of housing, transit and even welfare and prisons have been left to the markets. The corporate world is now where we go to satisfy our needs. The Wal-Martization of the state has taken hold.

A private but small-scale economy which provided the big and small necessities of urban life through a chain of stores, workshops and service establishments stood alongside the public or social economy of the municipal collective and the welfare state. Even the majority of the local malls that bundled these activities had a homemade feel to them despite the prominence of the likes of Eaton’s or the Bay in their architecture. The Wal-Martization of commercial space has changed this, too.

Turning citizens into consumers

On the consumption side, this has turned citizens into consumers, who now have to buy everything âe” from the cradle to the grave âe” from a more and more limited group of corporate giants that pride themselves of offering the same normalized set of plastic products all around the world. The poverty of choice, a suburbanization of taste, is packaged in dazzling arrays of fast-recycled consumer products that take the entertainment away from the public sphere into the private home theatre.

On the production side, the Wal-Martization of municipal economies has meant a dead-end re-proletarianization of large parts of the workforce. Previously, blue collar manufacturing work offered stable, and often life-long employment for the working class at worst and the opportunity for social advancement at best. The quality of jobs in the retail economy symbolized by the Leslieville megamall is low, there is no job security and this kind of employment rarely leads anywhere beyond the cash register.

Recent census data and academic studies have shown that thousands of manufacturing jobs are being lost in the region, the city is falling apart into three socio-economic solitudes, and real incomes continue to drop. In this climate, it is a dangerous illusion to build a city on the promise of the kind of corporate economy that SmartCentres represents.

With this kind of urban planning the city’s public and collective economy will continue its disastrous trajectory, which is why we don’t need a mega mall on Eastern Avenue.