“Public” Space for Whom? Encampment Evictions, Spatio-Legal Exclusion, and Differentiated Urban Citizenships in Toronto

In the summer of 2021, Toronto police executed violent raids, brutalizing vulnerated encampment residents and their supporters in three downtown public parks. During these evictions, state violence manifested in displacement and police brutality, including the use of force and intimidation tactics such as kettling. In response to the public relations fallout that ensued, the City changed course in October 2021, issuing Suspension Notices to encampment leaders that barred them from public space and public services. These tactics constitute a form of legally-imposed spatial exclusion (Beckett and Herbet, 2010), subjugating a vulnerated group to additional precarity, uncertainty, displacement, and violence. Forbidding unhoused people from accessing and using public space produces an acutely unequal and exclusionary city. In light of this, questions of differentiated urban citizenship, the meaning of “public” in public space, the processes by which individuals are made illegal, and the narratives and discourses embedded in the aforementioned become acutely pertinent. This portfolio of work is an exploration of the encampment eviction tactics pursued by the City of Toronto in the summer and fall of 2021 in the context of spatio-legal displacement and exclusion, carceral urban governance, and differentiated and propertied urban citizenship. The first section of the portfolio is an article that identifies the implications that the City’s eviction tactics have on questions of urban citizenship and the reconfiguration of spatial governance in Toronto. Utilizing a socio-legal approach and a mixed-methods qualitative research design, the article investigates how and why legal processes of spatial exclusion are mobilized against unhoused people, and how those processes produce differentiated access to urban citizenship and rights. The second section employs arts-based methods to complicate the City’s narratives surrounding the encampment evictions. Using erasure poetry and abecedarian poetry, two municipal press briefings are intentionally reworked to transform their meaning or effect, elucidating the constructedness and instability of narrative. The experimental and site-specific poetic explorations raise questions of erasure, public memory, and the right to narrate (Bhabha, 2014). The final section is a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 2003, 2010), identifying the dominant narratives about encampment evictions constructed in mainstream media articles and municipal press briefings. The analysis elucidates how discourses of governance, order, and citizenship are mobilized to justify displacement and minimize state violence, while constructing unhoused people as undeserving non-citizens. In an antiparallel corollary, counter-narratives identified from advocate public statements and internal municipal documents relating to the planning of encampment evictions reveal what is erased by hegemonic narratives. This work contributes to socio-legal literatures on propertied urban citizenship and permanent displaceability, offering new insights on the arbitrary and informal processes of illegalization that exclude unhoused dwellers from public space in cities of the Global North and the narratives used to justify them.