Everyday Law on the Street
City Governance in an Age of Diversity
272 pages
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1 table
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6 x 9
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© 2012
Toronto prides itself on being “the world’s most diverse city,” and its officials seek to support this diversity through programs and policies designed to promote social inclusion. Yet this progressive vision of law often falls short in practice, limited by problems inherent in the political culture itself. In Everyday Law on the Street, Mariana Valverde brings to light the often unexpected ways that the development and implementation of policies shape everyday urban life.
Drawing on four years spent participating in council hearings and civic association meetings and shadowing housing inspectors and law enforcement officials as they went about their day-to-day work, Valverde reveals a telling transformation between law on the books and law on the streets. She finds, for example, that some of the democratic governing mechanisms generally applauded—public meetings, for instance—actually create disadvantages for marginalized groups, whose members are less likely to attend or articulate their concerns. As a result, both officials and citizens fail to see problems outside the point of view of their own needs and neighborhood.
Taking issue with Jane Jacobs and many others, Valverde ultimately argues that Toronto and other diverse cities must reevaluate their allegiance to strictly local solutions. If urban diversity is to be truly inclusive—of tenants as well as homeowners, and recent immigrants as well as longtime residents—cities must move beyond micro-local planning and embrace a more expansive, citywide approach to planning and regulation.
Law and Society Association: Herbert Jacob Book Prize
Won
Kitty Calavita, University of California, Irvine
A beautifully written and ingenious exploration of the day-to-day, on-the-ground enforcement of municipal regulations—and, hence, urban governance—in Toronto. The topics are wide-ranging and include affordable housing and land use issues, the regulation of street-food vendors, and the taxi permit system, among others. It is an excellent empirical study of what law and society scholars call ‘law in action’ and the various and often unpredictable ways such law veers from the ostensible intentions of those who write the law in the books.
Sally Engle Merry, New York University
Studies of urban communities rarely recognize the role of law, but here eminent sociolegal theorist Mariana Valverde turns her attention to the way laws from the local to the international shape urban life. This book challenges Jane Jacobs’s idea that cities should be organized as small, self-governing villages, arguing instead that law is critical in dealing with the inequalities and exclusions of highly diverse cities. Ethnographically rich, readable, and engaging, this book is essential for understanding the contemporary city.
Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser University
Mariana Valverde has a remarkable gift for revealing the unexpected amidst the taken-for-granted. Here, she takes us deep into the little-understood—yet crucially important—world of Toronto’s everyday urban law, governing taxi licenses, hot dog stands, garden weeds, and rooming houses. In so doing, she reveals the systematic ways in which urban law works against the social and cultural diversity that cities profess to embrace. A wonderfully and clearly written book, with a refreshing humor and wit, Everyday Law on the Street invites us to reimagine the city.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Law of the Street Corner
Chapter 3. The Legal Regulation of Taste: Annoying Noises, Unkempt Yards, and the “Quality and Tranquility of Life”
Chapter 4. City Bureaucrats and Village Elders: The Dysfunctional Dance of Local Governance
Chapter 5. Law without Rights: Zoning, Poverty, and the Normative Family Home
Chapter 6. “Putting Diversity on the Menu”: The Municipal Corporation and the Micromanagement of Street Life
Chapter 7. Driving a Taxi: City Fathers’ Myth of Immigrant Self-Employment
Chapter 8. From Local to Global and Back Again: Mosques and the Politics of Local Planning
Chapter 9. The Death of Planning and the Challenges of Diversity: Concluding Reflections
Notes
Index
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. The Law of the Street Corner
Chapter 3. The Legal Regulation of Taste: Annoying Noises, Unkempt Yards, and the “Quality and Tranquility of Life”
Chapter 4. City Bureaucrats and Village Elders: The Dysfunctional Dance of Local Governance
Chapter 5. Law without Rights: Zoning, Poverty, and the Normative Family Home
Chapter 6. “Putting Diversity on the Menu”: The Municipal Corporation and the Micromanagement of Street Life
Chapter 7. Driving a Taxi: City Fathers’ Myth of Immigrant Self-Employment
Chapter 8. From Local to Global and Back Again: Mosques and the Politics of Local Planning
Chapter 9. The Death of Planning and the Challenges of Diversity: Concluding Reflections
Notes
Index
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Law and Legal Studies: Law and Society
Political Science: Urban Politics
Sociology: Urban and Rural Sociology
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