Constructing a Foundation for Change: The Ecosystem Approach and the Global Imperative on Toronto’s Central Waterfront

This paper explores the micro-level politics involved in the processes of planning Toronto’s Central Waterfront in the period between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s. Using a conceptual framework that reviews and integrates ideas from growth machine literature as well as urban regime, regulation and globalization theories, the paper sets current waterfront development efforts in a theoretical context through which they can be understood as a 21st-century strategy for capital accumulation. In order to understand the ways in which Toronto’s waterfront has come to be mobilized to accommodate the imperatives of global economic and spatial restructuring, this paper takes an historical approach, reviewing waterfront planning activities undertaken in Toronto in the past twenty years. A new and novel “ecosystem approach” to waterfront planning was adopted in this period which, through its ability to both encompass and conceal a range of meanings, allowed its proponents to accommodate a variety of historical problems that had impeded waterfront development. This paper demonstrates that, in so doing, this approach set the stage for the elite pursuit of world city status through the development of Toronto’s Central Waterfront.