Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 5

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5. Urban Sustainability, Neoliberalism and Public Ecology

Competing Visions of the Future

The proliferation of discourses of sustainable development and urban sustainability had

a significant affect upon the industrial imaginary that predominated in Hamilton politics

throughout the twentieth century. The prevailing assumption that urban development

can only occur at the expense of nature was challenged by growing awareness of the

inability to continue spatially segregating or otherwise externalizing the socio-

ecological impacts of development, and particularly development dependent upon

industrial manufacturing and transportation infrastructure. Faith in the vitality and

stability of industrial production as the backbone of the regional economy had been

undermined by the plant closures and layoffs of the 1980s and ecological

modernization, as outlined in the Vision 2020 plan, offered both a means of economic

revitalization and a new vision of a cleaner, greener city no longer defined by

smokestacks and industrial pollution. Realizing this vision, however, was another

matter. Despite the declining prominence of manufacturing, Hamilton remained

dependent upon patterns of urban development and strategies of economic growth

rooted in this earlier Fordist era.

Hamiltons urban form and infrastructural networks of roads, railways and

waterways has been shaped to a large degree by the prominence of industrial

manufacturing and its concentration along the Lake Ontario waterfront. The Red Hill

Expressway is a prime example of this path dependency and infrastructural inertia

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(Atkinson and Oleson 1996), having been proposed in the 1950s and promoted over the

following two decades as a crucial transportation corridor for sustaining and expanding

the local manufacturing sector by connecting the industrial waterfront to suburban

housing and neighbouring centres of growth. With the decline of manufacturing in the

1980s and 1990s, the project remained in place largely through the substantial financial

and political commitments that had already been made by politicians, planners, land

speculators and businesses. The shape of future growth had been predicated on the

expected completion of the road and its anticipated benefits for development at the

southern and eastern limits of the city. The cancellation of these plans presented serious

challenges for the various interests who had long staked their financial and/or political

future on the projects realization.

With the economic recession of the early 1990s and the growing pressures for

interurban competition, the development of greenfields on the escarpment continued

to unite the interests of developers, politicians and planners around the completion of

the road. The municipality, dependent more than ever upon the local tax base, continued

to concentrate on attracting manufacturing as well as service-based industries, but now

focused on the various industrial parks that had been established on the escarpment.

Further, the election of the Mike Harris provincial government in 1995 brought a

dramatic reduction in political and financial support for policies of ecological

modernization as environmental programs were quickly targeted by the cost-cutting

fervour and austerity measures of the so-called Common Sense Revolution (Krajnc

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2000).1 Thus, while pursuing ecological modernization through innovative planning

policies and guidelines and through support for restoration efforts such as the Remedial

Action Plan for Hamilton Harbour, the Region remained committed to neo-Fordist

development, with the expressway being the most prominent and pivotal example.

Proponents faced the difficult task of presenting the roadway and associated urban

expansion as compatible with the increasingly well-established, if vaguely understood,

principles of sustainable development.

The apparent contradictions between the goals of the expressway and the Vision

2020 plan increasingly became a target for criticism from a variety of environmental

organizations, including the well-respected Bay Area Restoration Council (BARC), the

multi-stakeholder group created to oversee implementation of the Hamilton Harbour

Remedial Action Plan. (RAP). In late 1995, BARC joined the Friends of Red Hill Valley

and other opposition groups2in calling for a full environmental assessment of the

modified highway route due to significant changes in design and concern over the

negative impacts for the Harbour, which had not been considered in the 1985 joint-

1 The Common Sense Revolution was presented as a response to the economic recession thatwould stimulate development by introducing strong medicine: opening up service provision tothe private sector, removing regulatory red tape and drastically reducing governmentspending. The provincial NDP had already cut environmental spending but the HarrisConservatives would cut further and deeper, eliminating one third of the Ministry of theEnvironments 2000 staff positions and introducing a series of bills that limited or removed

provincial responsibility for a wide range of environmental regulations (Krajnc 2000).

2 These groups included the Bay Area Restoration Council, Bruce Trail Association, BurlingtonConserver Society, Citizens for a Sustainable Community, the Conserver Society of Hamilton,Community Action for Parkdale East, the East Hamilton / Stoney Creek Health Association,Friends of Red Hill Valley, Greenpeace Hamilton, Hamilton Naturalists Club, Kings ForestOrienteering Club, Save the Valley and Watershed Action Towards EnvironmentalResponsibility (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, December 1995).

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board assessment. In late 1995, concern over future contaminant flows from the

highway and adjacent landfill sites was exacerbated by unprecedented flooding in the

valley following a severe thunderstorm (Hamilton Spectator, March 28, 1996).

Representatives of BARC argued that, the severe damage to the citys largest park and

natural area (and the last of the 14 streams that once flowed into the south shore of the

bay) flies in the face of the ecosystem rehabilitation and protection philosophy of the

Remedial Action Plan (quoted in the Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, December

1995). Further concern surrounded the revelation that the expressways connection to

the provincial Queen Elizabeth Way via an interchange in the sensitive wetland areas

near the waterfront had also not been considered in the original environmental

assessment (Hamilton Spectator, October 3, 1995).

Bolstered by the cancellation of provincial funding for the road under the NDP,

critics of the project were particularly vocal throughout the mid 1990s, with the Friends

of Red Hill Valley leading the charge. Numerous letters appeared inthe Hamilton

Spectator, often presenting the expressway debate as a battle between two competing

visions of the future: one based on the indefinite extension of the post-war pattern of

economic activity and land development, utterly dependent upon automobiles and

trucks and the other concerned with the livability of cities when the dreams of ever-

increasing prosperity have died (Hamilton Spectator, July 29, 1994). In response, some

expressway proponents insisted that measures such as public transit and intensification

would only be possible when and if supported by market demand and continued to

present environmental damage as an unfortunate but unavoidable cost of progress and

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economic growth (Mike Bryan inHamilton Spectator, March 9, 1998). This familiar

argument drew upon the industrial environmental imaginary and its representation of

nature as raw material for production or empty space for development. It also relied

upon popular conceptions of local pride in Hamiltons Steel City resilience and the

ability to survive tough social and environmental conditions a macho celebration of

the local capacity to weather the environmental costs of economic production and

growth, an ability that allegedly separated Hamilton from the more pristine and affluent

communities in the GTA.

Others struggled to present the expressway as itself an example of sustainable

development, highlighting the restoration of the valley and arguing that a more

environmentally sensitive four-lane expressway could improve air quality by

lessening congestion in the city core (Regional chairman Terry Cooke inHamilton

Spectator, July 25, 1997) and providing more efficient traffic flows than crowded city

streets (Jim Harvie inHamilton Spectator, October 9, 1997). Many expressway

supporters continued to suggest that environmentalists were taking a narrow view of

environmental problems by focusing on the protection of greenspace and wildlife

while neglecting to provide realistic solutions to inner city congestion and the safety

concerns surrounding truck traffic in the east end (Robert Williamson inHamilton

Spectator, September 24, 1997). In this way, critics of the expressway were represented

as promoting an environmentalism that protected greenspace at the expense of the

public desire for the security, health benefits, and convenience offered by less congested

city streets.

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It is clear, however, that the strategies utilized by opposition groups had advanced

considerably by this time. While critics still highlighted the impacts of the road on

human health, recreation and local ecosystems, the conservation ecology narrative

evident in the opposition of the 1970s and 1980s had broadened to include consideration

of the larger political economic dimensions of the expressway project, its uneven spatial

and socio-economic impacts, and the decision-making processes involved. A more

inclusive narrative ofpublic ecology was emerging, laying the foundations for a more

comprehensive critique of urban development that would gradually change popular

conceptions of urban nature, linking conservationist concerns with the broader issues of

democratization and environmental justice. This shift is most evident in the activities

and publications of the Friends of Red Hill Valley, who quickly established themselves

as the most prominent critics of the expressway during the 1990s. Following the partial

restoration of funding for the project by the Harris Conservatives, Friends and allied

groups focused public attention on the financial costs of the highway and the diversion

of spending away from other priorities such as the repair of aging infrastructure or the

protection of social services endangered by the cost-cutting measures of the provincial

government.

The term public ecology refers to efforts to support both broad participation and

meaningful deliberation in environmental decision making (Hull and Robertson 2000:

113), based on the recognition that all environmental issues are inherently normative

and based upon differing experiences and valuations. Public ecology maintains that our

understanding of nature and environment are unavoidably shaped by the language

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and culture through which they are articulated. As a consequence, environmental

conflicts cannot simply be resolved by appealing to scientific authority or economic

necessity but requires democratic debate and deliberation that clarifies the values,

interests and assumptions that inform the words and actions of the different actors

involved. This chapter explores the emergence of this revitalized narrative of public

ecology in opposition to the efforts to recast the expressway project and associated

urban expansion as examples of sustainable development and to define urban

sustainability in ways that marginalized or obscured issues of democratization and

environmental justice.

Neoliberalizing the Steel City

The Common Sense Revolution launched by the provincial Conservative government

of Mike Harris represented a significant rightward shift in urban policy and discourse

within Ontario, introducing an austere program of neoliberal funding cutbacks,

deregulation and privatization, and contributing to a political climate in which economic

development and the creation of a good business environment was reasserted as the

first priority of urban governance (Keil 2002). The Harris Conservatives blamed the

economic recession of the early 1990s on Ontarios bloated public sector and the

impediments to economic growth presented by wasteful spending. excessive

taxation of the private sector and middle-class, and the bureaucratic red tape of

governmental regulation. This resurgence of faith in market forces and

entrepreneurial innovation was reinforced by the popularity of such ideas on an

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international and global scale during the mid 1990s (Harvey 2007). Echoing the militant

shock therapy honed by earlier advocates of neoliberal reform such as Milton

Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (Klein 2008), the Conservatives

proposed to reduce the size and cost of government with dramatic reforms that

included spending reductions in education, health-care, welfare and other social

programs; tax reductions and rebates; reductions in the number of provincial politicians

and staff; and the deregulation and/or privatization of many public services. These

rollbacks included a 42% funding reduction and the loss of 900 of 2400 front-line

positions in the Ministry of the Environment (Krajnc 2000). The Conservatives strongly

advocated the idea of voluntary self-regulation, allowing industries to regulate

themselves with respect to environmental pollution. These cutbacks and deregulatory

measures played a major role in the water contamination crisis in Walkerton, Ontario,

which claimed the lives of seven people and resulted in the poisoning of hundreds more

in 2000 (Prudham 2004).

Following the election of the Harris Conservatives, municipal governments faced

increased pressure to run cities like a business, cutting spending and increasing

efficiencies by introducing market competition, focusing on value for money for

taxpayers, and investing greater energy and funds in place promotion to attract new

private investment. As John Rennie Short writes, In the new representations, more is

said about the city as a place for business, for work, attractive to the senior executives

and the governing class of the business community, and much less is said about the city

as a place of democratic participation, the city as a place of social justice, the city as a

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place where all citizens can lead dignified and creative lives (1999: 53). The

introduction of roll back neoliberalization, which aimed to undue Keynesian welfare

state policies through funding reductions, deregulation and privatization of

governmental services (Brenner and Theodore 2002), brought a renewed emphasis on

middle-class security and the persecution of those social groups most directly affected

by spending cutbacks, such as the unemployed, street youth and homeless people (Keil

2002).

Divisions between citizens within the inner cities of Toronto and its satellites, and

those in the suburban and exurban periphery (on the whole, more affluent and less

culturally diverse) were exaggerated by this discourse of inner city threat and the

Conservatives emphasis on the transference of tax funds to outlying suburbs. This was

done through the reduction of public services and programs, the introduction of urban

amalgamations that in many cases increased the numbers and political influence of

suburban politicians on municipal councils, and the encouragement of accelerated

suburban and exurban expansion through the removal of regulatory constraints on

commercial, residential and infrastructural development.3 This socio-spatial division

between the inner cities and their suburban and exurban peripheries concentrates wealth

within the outlying areas and evokes the frontier imaginary outlined in Chapter 2,

representing inner city neighbourhoods as a moral and socio-economic wilderness in

need of redemption through gentrification (Smith 1996).

3 The gradual development of political divisions between the inner cities and suburbs of theGreater Toronto Area has been well documented by R. Alan Walks (2004) through his study ofprovincial and federal voting patterns.

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Many in Hamiltons business community and municipal government embraced this

rightward shift, as it provided further ideological support for representations of the

expressway and associated suburban development as the key to Hamiltons economic

recovery and pursuit of global competitiveness.4 However, the Conservative program

of funding cuts also meant that little money was made available for municipal spending,

even for road infrastructure. The Tories endorsed the road and restored funding but

rejected the original cost-sharing formula in favour of a lump sum of $100 million over

five years. This deal left the Region scrambling to make up the difference, estimated at

$100 to $140 million, for the completion of the Mountain expressway and the

construction of the Red Hill route (Hamilton Spectator, December 19, 1995). The

Friends of Red Hill Valley quickly began raising concern about the financial burden this

would place on the Region and predicting significant tax increases and spiralling

municipal debt (ibid, December 13, 1995). They emphasized the costs of road for

individual taxpayers and called for greater democratic accountability and

transparency on the part of the municipal government. Over the following years, the

group produced a number of humorous posters and press releases to illustrate these

concerns (Figure 5.1). In this way, the group both responded to and adopted neoliberal

rhetoric, shaping their discursive strategies in the attempt to appeal to a wider cross-

section of people.

4 In 1995, the Region became the first municipality in Canada to privatize its water andwastewater system, opening up a revolving door of ownership, technical accidents and politicalcontroversies before reverting back to public ownership in 2004 (Buckley 2003). The Regionsoon began adopting public-private partnerships for waste management as well.

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Figure 5.1: 1000 Expressway Dollars depicting Regional Chairman Terry

Cooke (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, February, 1996)

The province soon began downloading responsibility for various services to

municipalities, including public transit, health services, affordable housing and the

administration of social assistance. This restructuring only increased the financial

pressures on the Region of Hamilton-Wentworth and the expressway itself was soon

subjected to neoliberal logic in the search for possible ways of continuing to fund its

completion. The Region began considering tolls but this was rejected by then provincial

Transportation Minister Al Palladini, who suggested that the Region consider more

innovative means of soliciting private funding sources, such as selling billboard

advertising space along the roadway. The Region also considered private-public

partnerships in which funding for the road would be gradually repaid to private

construction firms through a kind of lease payment (Hamilton Spectator, September

5, 1996). This reflected the Conservatives move away from the well-established

modernist conception of highway infrastructure as a government-funded public good

and toward what Graham and Marvin (2001) describe as splintering urbanism a

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privatized vision of infrastructural networks that are determined solely by the demands

of the market and thereby link together the residential and recreational enclaves of more

affluent citizens with the premium network spaces that facilitate economic growth.5

In Hamilton, during the late 1990s, financial pressures increased due to the

provincial cutbacks, earlier expenditures on the servicing of new and proposed housing

developments on the escarpment (estimated to $53.4 million between 1989 and 1994),

and long-neglected maintenance costs for the citys existing infrastructure of aging

water pipes, sewers and roadways. Regional staff recommended tax increases to address

these escalating costs, along with alterations in funding allocations to avoid the

channelling of maintenance funds towards special projects such as the expressway

(Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, February 1997). The private funding plans for

the highway were soon abandoned in favour of cutting a number of expenditures from

the project, including the scaling back of flood protection plans and the elimination of a

bridge designed to elevate the expressway over a portion of the creek. This leaner and

meaner expressway (language that clearly echoed the neoliberal rhetoric of the times)

was met with grave concern from many environmentalists because a portion would now

run along the valley bed and require re-routing of over seven kilometres of the creek

(Hamilton Spectator, March 14, 1997).

With $41 million trimmed from the project, the provincial government agreed to

provide additional funding for the interchange connecting to the QEW (Hamilton

5 This vision is illustrated by provincial Highway 407, which became a toll route after theConservatives sold the road to a private consortium in 1999.

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Spectator, July 11, 1997). As anticipated, the province also approved the Regions

request for exemption from further environmental assessment, despite the changes in

design since the joint-board approval in 1985. However, expressway critics had already

begun focusing their attention on the federal government and soon began lobbying the

Federal Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans and Environment Canada to launch an

environmental assessment on the basis of anticipated impacts for the creek, wetlands

and harbour. The completion of a biological inventory by the Hamilton Regional

Conservation Authority (HRCA) in 1995 provided further support for their arguments in

favour of the areas ecological significance. The study confirmed the valleys

importance as an important migratory corridor for birds and documented a wide variety

of flora and fauna, including 600 plant species, 24 species of mammal, 24 species of

fish, and 177 bird species. Five rare species of plants and birds were noted. In almost all

cases, the diversity of plant and animal life was significantly higher than previous

assessments in 1991 and 1985 (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, September 1996).

Public use of the valley was also increasing at this time, encouraged by the opening

on an end to end recreational trail and guided walks organized by the Friends of Red

Hill Valley and the HRCA. While the provincial government had withdrawn funding for

the rehabilitation plan introduced by the NDP, the HRCA organized a volunteer group to

continue these restoration efforts. Members of Friends were also becoming heavily

involved in participatory ecological monitoring programs that provided local citizens

with opportunities to learn about the flora, fauna and ecological conditions of the valley

while actively gathering data that was potentially useful for its protection. These efforts

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were also an explicit response to the provincial rollback of environmental regulations,

which sparked similar programs throughout Ontario in the late 1990s (Sharpe et al.

2000). One of the most successful and long running programs in the Hamilton area is

Watershed Action Toward Environmental Responsibility (WATER). Initiated by Dr.

George Sorger, a biologist from McMaster University, WATER has trained local high

school students to monitor pollutant levels in local waterways, including various points

along the Red Hill Creek (Sorger, June 27, 2005). Other academics from McMaster

began conducting assessments of the ecological impacts of the expressway, including

Dr. Joe Minors widely reported calculation that up to 47,000 trees would likely be

removed by highway construction (Hamilton Spectator, April 25, 1997).

Through numerous articles and press releases published by chairperson and veteran

environmental activist Don McLean, the Friends of Red Hill Valley continued to

question the ecological and financial costs of the road, insisting that the Region had

failed to provide any up-to-date empirical evidence of the traffic demands that

necessitated the expressway or the economic benefits that would allegedly follow

construction. McLean noted that the levels of traffic moving across the escarpment

predicted in the Regions last estimation, from 1982, had failed to materialize and

argued that this earlier assessment had falsely assumed continual employment growth

along the industrial waterfront. Earlier estimations of the economic benefits of the

highway were also put into question. McLean argued that, unlike the 1970s, Hamilton

now had a surplus of vacant business parks and that the primary reason for the absence

of investment was not lack of highway access but Hamiltons outdated image as a

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polluted industrial city (Hamilton Spectator, October 15, 1997). Friends and their

supporters argued that Hamilton should concentrate on the transformation of that image

and the regional economy itself by prioritizing urban intensification, downtown

revitalization, environmental protection and quality of life, in many ways anticipating

a discourse of urban renewal and an alternative environmental imaginary that would

become increasing prominent by the turn of the century.6

Issues of global trade also became more prominent in the debate at this time, with

critics of the project arguing that the growth and acceleration of cross-border trade

under the North American Free Trade Agreement would ensure that the expressway

would become a shortcut for truck traffic heading to and from the United States border

at Niagara. While trucking companies paid fuel taxes for the maintenance of provincial

roads, maintenance of the expressway would remain the sole responsibility of the

Region a situation that one letter writer described as another form of downloading.

Critics maintained that the road would simply serve as a means for traffic to bypass the

city, while burdening the surrounding area with increased pollution, congestion and

noise (Hamilton Spectator, January 20, 1998). However, for many proponents of the

expressway, particularly within the business community, linking the city to these cross-

border and global flows of goods and services was viewed as the key to future profits

and sustained economic growth. From this perspective, Hamiltons survival depended

6 This call for an alternative urban future was reinforced by local environmental disasters suchas the Plastimet fire of July 1997, a blaze at a plastics and vinyl recycling site in downtownHamilton that burned for four days and cast a massive cloud of smoke and soot over the city.The materials burning at the site included highly toxic polyvinyl chlorides or PVC. The fire wasimplicated in the subsequent illness and death of a number of local firefighters by cancer.

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upon taking advantage of its geographical location between the economic nodal points

of Toronto and the US border crossings, expanding its ground transportation network in

the effort to attract commercial and industrial business.

The Red Hill Expressway was increasingly regarded as part of this larger

revitalization vision one piece of a larger road network whose purpose was no longer

to support steel manufacturing on the waterfront but rather to encourage new industrial

and commercial development on the escarpment and further south towards the John C.

Munro International Airport, building a larger multi-modal transportation network in the

process. This vision of the future re-imagined Hamilton as a transportation hub and

goods distribution centre for just-in-time delivery goods and services, building upon

its historical strengths in manufacturing and expanding the existing multi-modal

infrastructure (the port, airport, roadways and railways) to attract companies

specializing in value-added products for export.7In the words of Hamilton Chamber of

7 One of the key promoters of this vision was TradePort International, a developmentconsortium that took over operation of the Hamilton International Airport under a controversialprivatization agreement with the Region in 1996. The TradePort consortium was composed ofYVR Airport Services, a subsidiary of the Vancouver Airport Authority, Local 837 of theLabourers International Union of North America (LIUNA), and WestparkDevelopments, alocal real-estate and land development company. Both LIUNA and Westpark were involved innumerous commercial and residential developments in the Hamilton area. TradePort founderand president Tony Battaglia was also president of Westpark Developments and a formerpresident of the Hamilton-Halton Homebuilders Association. TradePorts Board of Directorsalso included Ron Foxcroft, founder of Fox 40 International and CEO of the Fluke

Transportation Group a major proponent of the expressway. Prior to leaving his position asRegional Chairman, Terry Cooke began working for Fluke Transportation and later served asCEO. In 2007, YVR Airport Services took over complete ownership of the airport in a $13million deal. Controversy continues to surround Hamiltons private lease agreement withTradePort, under which financial, shareholder and management information remains private.Particular concern has been generated by the large sums of money that Hamilton has spent onairport-related developments ($12 million between 1996 and 2006) in contrast to the smallamounts of money that the city has received through its revenue sharing agreement (HamiltonSpectator, April 8, 2006).

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Commerce CEO John Dolbec (November 18, 2005), one of the most vocal proponents

of the expressway, Hamilton is a natural hub as a goods distribution centre and so

Hamilton almost cant help but succeed in spite of itself. But to play in that game you

have to have some pieces of infrastructure that are just absolutely essential. The

opening of the east-west expressway, dubbed the Lincoln Alexander Parkway, in

October 1997 was widely celebrated as the first step in completing the larger

transportation network and increased the pressure to complete the Red Hill link.

Increasingly, the expressway was seen as crucial to this vision of economic renewal

through transportation infrastructure and new commercial and industrial investment on

the periphery of the city a vision that remained very attractive to real-estate

developers, residential homebuilders, construction, trucking and transportation

companies.

While expressway supporters continued to emphasize the anticipated benefits of the

highway for economic development, they were also forced to respond more

substantially to the sustained criticism of the projects ecological impacts and charges of

its inconsistency with the conception of sustainable urban development presented in

Vision 2020. To this end, proponents pointed to the promises of environmental

mitigation and restoration made by the Region and the alleged health and security

benefits of shifting commuter and truck traffic from arterial roads to the valley route.

The expressway was increasingly represented as a green highway that could reconcile

the need for the preservation of greenspace with the need for more efficient flows of car

and truck traffic. Furthermore, many proponents struggled to describe the road as an

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example of precisely the kind of sustainable development advocated by Vision 2020.

Using the plans familiar representation of sustainability as a three-legged stool,

connecting economic, social and environmental goals, pro-business groups such as the

Chamber of Commerce argued that expressway opponents were focusing narrowly upon

the environmental leg while downplaying or ignoring Hamiltons need for economic

sustainability. In the words of Chamber CEO John Dolbec (interview, November 18,

2005), the whole system has gotten out of balance in terms of the economic

development aspect of sustainability.8 Because its not sustainable for this city to keep

growing in population and not have employment growth keeping pace.

The relative decline of commercial and industrial contributions to the municipal tax

base and the corresponding increase in residential contributions was frequently cited as

evidence of Hamiltons need to attract more investment and avoid becoming a

bedroom community for the GTA (Ed Fothergill inHamilton Spectator, October 26,

2003). From this perspective, the expressway was a key contributor to that growth and a

means of achieving a balance between economic, social and environmental

sustainability. In contrast, opponents of the project were frequently represented as

advocating an unbalanced view of sustainability, calling for environmental protection

while advocating little or no economic development (Dolbec, November 18, 2005). In

the effort to reconcile the continuation of Fordist-style development, heavily dependant

8

This comment is very curious, as it implies that there was a balance between economic, socialand environmental sustainability in the first place! In fact, it is precisely the lack of balance andthe privileging of narrow economic concerns over social and ecological well-being thatprecipitated the discourse of sustainable development and sustainability more broadly.

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upon road infrastructure, suburban expansion and a historical specialization in

manufacturing, with growing public support for intensification, public transit and

environmental protection, the notion of balance became an important rhetorical tool.

Advocates of the expressway and the larger transportation hub plan argued that these

goals were not mutually exclusive and that Hamilton could and should pursue all of

them simultaneously. As discussed below, these ideas would be further developed as

public environmental concern began to increase again, spurred by the acceleration of

urban growth in Southern Ontario and the global concern with the impacts of climate

change.

Multiplying Paths of Resistance: Justice, Development and Democracy

Networks of resistance to the project were also expanding and diversifying during the

late 1990s, with local social justice, peace and animal rights groups joining the more

prominent environmentalist organizations in opposition. Many of these groups were

loosely connected to the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) at McMaster

University, which began publishing information about the Red Hill debate in its

newsletter and established a working group on the issue in 1998. Through these

channels, those involved in resistance to the highway connected with other OPIRG

groups around the province, as well as local groups such as Hamilton Action for Social

Change, which approached environmental issues from a perspective grounded in

concern for social justice, poverty and militarism. These groups injected more radical

notions of environmental justice and democratization into the debate, drawing on

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anarchist, socialist and feminist critiques of capitalism that were becoming increasingly

influential within the emergent global justice movement (popularly but often

erroneously referred to as anti-globalization).

A strong narrative of environmental justice was now being articulated through

resistance to the expressway, countering the representation of the city as a unified whole

by pointing to the socially and spatially uneven distribution of the projects impacts.

Critics argued that the highway would chiefly benefit suburban and exurban land

speculators, real-estate developers and cross-border truck transportation, helping to

subsidize growth on the upper east mountain while forcing low-income neighbourhoods

in the lower east end of the city to absorb the environmental costs of increased air, water

and noise pollution. As many noted, this section of the city, with its close proximity to

the industrial waterfront, already faced a concentration of polluting manufacturing sites,

brownfields, landfills, and waste processing sites such as the sewage treatment plant and

the SWARU incinerator (Hamilton Spectator, March 23, 1998). In many ways, this

could be seen as a continuation of Hamiltons historical practice of displacing the

negative environmental impacts of development, encouraging development in one

region while allowing the socio-ecological costs to be absorbed in another.

The Friends of Red Hill Valley remained the dominant voice of opposition and while

environmental justice was a prominent theme within their publications it tended to be

framed in terms of the financial costs of the road for taxpayers and the lack of funds

available for the maintenance of existing infrastructure. Further emphasis was placed on

the question of democracy and the exclusion of public participation in decision-making

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for major development projects such as the expressway. Friends and their supporters

continually advocated public dialogue on the project through their letters, articles and

press releases, and were continually searching for new avenues of influence over the

decision-making processes of planners and politicians. Again, this dialogue was framed

primarily in terms of democratic reform and public accountability rather than the

more radical notions of decentralized decision-making and community empowerment

advocated by student groups and others affiliated with the McMaster OPIRG. Stronger

connections began to take shape between environmentalists, labour organizations and

social justice groups, with the later becoming particularly active in their opposition to

the Mike Harris agenda of social spending cuts, deregulation and downloading. Some

expressed their opposition to the expressway as a drain on other areas for municipal

spending and all shared a common interest in the fate of the inner city with

environmental groups.

Many expressway proponents, including Regional chairman Terry Cooke, publicly

responded to the surge of criticism by claiming that the need for the project had already

been well established and its impacts thoroughly studied, and by asserting that the

decisions made reflected the will of a silent majority that had expressed their support

for the project by electing political representatives in favour (Hamilton Spectator, July

25, 1997). From this perspective, public participation was welcome but only within the

context of consultation over the design of the highway, not debate over alternatives.

This kind of consultation was the stated aim of the Community Stakeholder Committee

(CSC) established by the Region in 1997, as agreed to in the provincial environmental

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impact assessment exemption order. The CSC was a short-lived and volatile exercise as

these differing views of the democratic process came into confrontation.

Representatives of Friends participated in the process only to withdraw nine months

later, claiming that the committee had been stacked with representatives of pro-

expressway groups and that the CSC should have been willing to address the question

of the need for expressway after this request was repeatedly made by members of the

public at a series of committee meetings (Friends of Red Hill newsletter, March 1998).

For those in favour of the project, expressway critics appeared unwilling to negotiate,

compromise or listen to reason. Further, they were regarded as anti-democratic in

their unwillingness to accept a decision that many expressway supporters viewed as the

product of a democratic process that had included regular elections, an environmental

assessment hearing, and a number of consultation opportunities for citizens to express

their opinions and concerns (Centennial Parkway Ratepayers Association, April 10,

2006). Expressway proponents largely refused to enter into debate over the merits of the

highway or the broader issues of urban form raised by critics, insisting that the

decision has been made (president of the Hamilton Construction Association in

Hamilton Spectator, April 11, 1998) and that the will of the majority should prevail

over fanatical opposition (former mayor Jack MacDonald inHamilton Spectator, June

2, 1998). The efforts of expressway critics to involve other levels of government were

decried as unjustified attempts at interference with a project whose need had already

been determined and which was already underway, with the Lincoln Alexander Parkway

complete and further construction ready to begin in the valley. Thus, the announcement

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in May 1998 of a screening process for a federal environmental assessment was met

with predictable expressions of outrage and disappointment (Hamilton Spectator, June

9, 1998).

At the beginning of that year, a request for a federal environmental assessment had

been submitted to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) by the Friends of Red

Hill Valley and the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA), highlighting the

impact of the expressway on the creek, wetlands and harbour, and expressing concern

that the Region would proceed with construction before obtaining authorization under

the Fisheries Act (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, January 1998). The Region had

been in contact with the DFO in the effort to develop a mitigation plan that addressed

federal concerns with the disturbance of fish habitat, expecting that these concerns

would be met with no need for a federal assessment. However, federal interests in the

project also included relocation of a trans-provincial pipeline; the impacts on a

Canadian National Railways line and possible application of the Migratory Birds

Convention Act. This later issue attracted the interest of Environment Minister Christine

Stewart in the Red Hill case, along with the request from CELA and approximately 80

letters from local citizens (Hamilton Spectator, May 3, 2000). Over the course of 1998,

around 800 people submitted letters calling for a federal environmental assessment and

this prompted the government to create a formal process for public input into the

assessments terms of reference.

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While this process began, activists were increasing the pressure at the local level. A

large rally at Hamilton City Hall on May 5, 1998, attracted 600 to 1500 people,9

following the release of a capital budget in April that contained warnings about the level

of debt generated by capital expansion projects such as the expressway. The

connections that had been established between environmentalists, social justice

activists, labour groups and other community organizations around the issue of

municipal financing were particularly evident at this event, linking together various

criticisms of the expressway project (Figure 5.2).10The budget had highlighted the lack

of funds available for maintenance of existing infrastructure and advised Regional

council, consideration of delaying or eliminating some of the projects may be in order

(quoted in Regional Municipality of Hamilton Wentworth 1998b: 3). The Friends of

Red Hill Valley and allied groups used this political opportunity to try to invigorate and

expand public opposition to the expressway. Under their influence, the popular debate

that played out in the pages of theHamilton Spectatorand other local media surrounded

municipal spending priorities and air quality.

Figure 5.2: Illustrating the Pro-Expressway Vision (Friends of Red Hill Valley

2004)

9 TheHamilton Spectator(May 6, 1998) estimated 600 people while the Friends of Red HillValley estimated 1500, a significant discrepancy.

10 In addition to the Friends of Red Hill Valley, the groups represented at this rally included theCentral and North End Neighbourhood Committee, Concerned Citizens of Ward 5, theConserver Society (formerly Clear Hamilton of Pollution), Hamilton Action for Social Change,Hamilton Against Poverty, the Hamilton Coalition for Social Justice, the Hamilton NaturalistsClub, the Social Planning and Research Council, and the United Steelworkers Local 1005.

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The debate surrounding the later issue was intensified by the release of a Draft

Summary Report in June, which outlined the Regions plans for relocation of the creek

and associated restoration work. A section on air quality claimed that, with the

completion of the expressway, overall vehicle emissions in the Region are expected to

decline 3 16% during the next 20 years. This conclusion was allegedly based on a

study conducted by researchers at McMaster University for the Hamilton Air Quality

Initiative11 but these researchers soon announced that the Region had misinterpreted the

results of their study, which had predicted an overall increase in vehicle emissions and

concluded that vehicle emissions could be most successfully controlled or reduced by

increasing the use of public transit and by technological improvements to vehicles

(quoted in Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, June, 1998). Despite this criticism, this

11 The Hamilton Air Quality Initiative is a long-running collaborative project, arising from theVision 2020 plan, involving researchers and various levels of government in efforts to quantifyair pollution problems and promote effective ways of addressing those problems.

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assertion was often used by expressway proponents throughout the remaining years of

the debate in the effort to cast the road in a green light. Critics made much of this public

disavowal of the Regions statements on air quality, accusing proponents of deliberately

misleading the public.12

Other air quality studies suggested more troublesome impacts. A federal ranking of

air quality in 25 of Canadas largest cities placed Hamilton third from the bottom and a

subsequent prediction of PM10 (harmful airborne particulate matter created by

automobile traffic) levels generated by the expressway concluded that the young and

elderly should be encouraged to limit their exposures, and not frequent the Red Hill

Valley once the expressway has been completed (quoted in Friends of Red Hill Valley

newsletter, September 1998).13 The Friends of Red Hill Valley also directed attention

towards a newly released study of the highways anticipated ecological impacts, which

raised concerns about the substantial permanent loss of habitat and species within the

valley and cautioned that the proposed ecological restoration efforts would be unlikely

to sustain the biodiversity, structure and integrity of existing habitat (quoted in Friends

of Red Hill Valley newsletter, November 1998). In contrast to these reports of

12 Similar accusations were made after Regional Chairman Terry Cooke announced the results ofa new poll demonstrating 80% public support for the highway, only to have the conductors ofthe poll, Decima Research, state that this interpretation was premature and misleading(Hamilton Spectator, June 13, 1998). The wording of the questions in this poll had presented the

Lincoln Alexander Expressway and the Red Hill Creek Expressway as a single project, makingit impossible to distinguish between support for the two roadways. An earlier poll, conductedbefore 1997 municipal election, found approximately 40% of respondents in favour of thevalley route and another 40% of favour of an alternative north-south route.

13 Expressway proponents countered by noting that this study was based on predictivemathematical modelling that, according to the authors of the study, could over or under-estimatepollution levels by up to 400% (Get Hamilton Moving Task Force 2000).

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ecological concern, many expressway supporters continued to represent the valley as a

degraded wasteland (Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3: Valley of Vermin (Hamilton Spectator, May 9, 1999)

A bus strike in late 1998 also provided an opportunity to link together concerns over

the highways drain on municipal funding with issues of social justice, framed within a

wider critique of the citys future development and urban form. The Friends of Red Hill

Valley noted that transit use had been declining across southern Ontario but particularly

rapidly in Hamilton, falling from 29.3 million passengers in 1985 to 19.7 million in

1997. During this period, funding also declined and Friends declared their opposition to

further cuts on the basis of the detrimental impacts for low-income citizens as well as

the need for strengthening transit connections in order to support more compact urban

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development. Contrary to expressway proponents, the Friends of Red Hill Valley argued

that further expansion of highways and development to the south of the city could not

be pursued in tandem with public transit, as investment in roadway expansion

encouraged further use of the private automobile and supported an urban form based

around highway linkages, diverting both limited funds and public preferences away

from transit (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, January 1999).

While development expanded on the mountain, based upon further roadway

expansion, public transit remained concentrated within the lower city, an area with a

declining population and higher concentrations of unemployment and low-income

communities. From the 1980s onwards, public transit came to be regarded by many as a

transportation mode of last resort and associated with middle-class fears and

stigmatization of the poor within a decaying inner city. These negative associations

towards public transit and persistent positive associations of the private automobile with

affluence and freedom of mobility presented significant challenges as activists struggled

to present viable alternatives to the larger urban development model represented by the

expressway.

Expanding Networks: The Federal Environmental Assessment

The1999 federal environmental assessment provided new opportunities for raising more

comprehensive questions over the form, quality and long-term consequences of urban

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development in Hamilton. Friends of Red Hill Valley and other expressway opponents

urged the federal assessment to allow space for studying the need for the expressway

and possible alternatives, while proponents lobbied for a much narrower and speedier

assessment that would concentrate on the mitigation of social and ecological impacts

(Hamilton Spectator, January 30, 1999). The Spectatorwas flooded with letters and

articles for and against the project. Business interests in support of the highway became

more vocal through the formation of a new coalition, the Get Hamilton Moving Task

Force, created in April 1999 to counter local anti-expressway efforts and drum up

resistance to the intrusion of the federal environmental assessment (Figure 5.4). The

Task Force was created by members of the Chamber of Commerce but soon expanded

to include representatives from various real-estate, transportation and construction

companies, as well as former mayor Jack MacDonald and members of neighbourhood

groups such as the Centennial Parkway Ratepayers. With a core group of 12 to 15

members, the group launched a coordinated campaign of letter-writing for local print

media and its own website, and also began networking with sympathetic politicians and

planners at all three levels of government, including Regional employees and federal

Liberal politicians such as Stoney Creek MP Toni Valeri (John Best, December 20,

2005).

Figure 5.4: Get Hamilton Moving Task Force logo (2007)

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Despite this surge of pro-expressway activism, the federal government announced in

May 1999, that a full panel hearing environmental assessment would be conducted by

the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. The Region had hoped that the

assessment would take the form of a screening that would consider and possibly

expand upon their mitigation efforts but a panel hearing was much more wide ranging

in scope, requring a board of appointed environmental experts and extensive public

involvement. In the letter requesting this panel review, the Fisheries Minister stated

"that the Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth has been less than forthcoming

with information necessary, at least from a fish habitat standpoint, to complete the

screening" and earlier federal documents complained about the Regions failure or

refusal to provide details concerning their proposal to re-align the Creek (quoted in

Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, September 2000).

The Region, Get Hamilton Moving, the editorial board of theHamilton Spectator,

and other expressway proponents insisted that the environmental assessment was a

bureaucratic redundancy that would address issues already covered by the provincial

assessment of 1985, unnecessarily intruding into the jurisdiction of the province and the

municipality and needlessly postponing the restoration of the valley, which was still

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popularly represented as a space of neglect and degradation (insert editorial cartoon -

Hamilton Spectator, May 7, 1999). Receiving no favourable responses from

Environment Canada and the DFO, the Region soon announced that it would be

launching a legal challenge against the entire process (ibid, July 7, 1999). While this

challenge was being prepared, the assessment hearing moved ahead, beginning with

public presentations to assist the panel in determining the scope and terms of reference

for the process.

United in their opposition to this process, expressway proponents accused the federal

government of backroom politics and pointed to apparent conflicts of interest on the

part of panel members. It was revealed that the panel chair was still registered as a

public lobbyist to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA), despite the

fact that they now employed him (Hamilton Spectator, November 5, 1999). Another

panel member was accused of being biased against the project due to her association

with various environmental organizations and the fact that she had served on the

supervisory committee for a Masters thesis completed by Don McLean, the outspoken

environmental activist and former chairperson of the Friends of Red Hill Valley (ibid,

August 6, 1999). Through access to information laws, Get Hamilton Moving acquired

email correspondence between members of Environment Canada (EC) and the DFO that

demonstrated local employees of EC had been pushing hard for a full panel hearing. Get

Hamilton Moving argued that these employees, based out of the Canadian Centre for

Inland Waters in Hamilton, had very close ties to local environmental groups, including

Friends of the Red Hill Valley, and that these connections unduly biased them against

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the project from the very beginning (Get Hamilton Moving Task Force 2000).14 Many

expressway proponents, particularly local politicians, also accused Hamilton East MP

Sheila Copps, Minister of Heritage and former Minister of the Environment, of having

worked behind the scenes to trigger a full hearing. Indeed, Copps put her support in

writing to the Environment Minister in April 1999 but there is little doubt that the letters

from local citizens had a much more substantial influence.

Casting the objectivity and impartiality of the panel hearing into doubt, Get

Hamilton Moving and other expressway proponents defended the Regions legalistic

response and presented the entire process as an abuse of power, orchestrated by a small

minority of local environmentalists (Get Hamilton Moving Task Force 2000). They

noted that a new provincial highway, the privatized and much-maligned Highway 407,

had not been subjected to federal scrutiny, despite the fact that construction was built

across large tracts of rural land and numerous streams. Get Hamilton Moving had also

delivered a petition of 5000 signatures to the federal government in support of the

highway but argued that these voices were being ignored. In the effort to demonstrate

that the majority of Hamiltonians wanted the valley route, Get Hamilton Moving

commissioned a telephone poll that found 60.3% in favour of the construction of the

north-south extension of the Red Hill Creek Expressway (Hamilton Spectator, May 21,

1999).

14 This evidence is quite compelling, demonstrating that local Environment Canada employeesdid indeed work diligently in advocating a full panel hearing, based on their assessment of thehighways ecological impacts and particularly the impacts on habitat for migratory birds. It iscertainly likely that some of these individuals were in communication with localenvironmentalist organizations opposed to the expressway.

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The Region continued to abstain from participation in the panel hearing, ignoring

CEAAs requests for detailed information on the project required for the environmental

assessment to proceed (Hamilton Spectator, January 12, 2000). A number of further

studies on the ecological impacts of the highway were also withheld from the public,

including a July 1999 study of southern flying squirrels, a nationally endangered species

discovered in the valley (ibid, January 18, 2000). In their press release and submissions

to the panel hearing, the Friends of Red Hill Valley publicly denounced the Regions

secrecy and also directed criticism at the history of municipal neglect of the valley,

noting that the ecological restoration efforts and stormwater sewer repairs now

incorporated into the expressway proposal could have been undertaken at any point

rather than postponed until road construction began. Instead, pollution and erosion from

excessive sewer flows into the creek had been allowed to continue unabated.

These accusations were given further weight in November 1999, when charges were

laid against the City of Hamilton under the provincial Environmental Protection Act for

allowing toxic leachate to flow into the creek from the adjacent Rennie Street landfill

(Hamilton Spectator, November 10, 1999). This problem had been noted in at least two

studies conducted by consultants for the Region, but no action had been taken. Lynda

Lukasik, a prominent member of Friends of the Red Hill Valley, had conducted tests

with Dr. George Sorger15 and consulted reports from the Region to demonstrate that

15 Working with the Bay Area Restoration Council and, later, Environment Hamilton, Dr. Sorgerhad been training local high school students to conduct tests of local waterways since the late1980s. In the Red Hill Creek they found that just about every pipe that flows into Red Hill wascontaminated, some of them very heavily contaminated, with e-coli, phosphate, ammonium,low-dissolve oxygen and all the typical things. And we also looked into leachate coming out ofthe Upper Ottawa dump that was pouring into the creek and was very toxic. It was oozing out of

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PCBs were flowing from the landfill into the creek at levels 40,000 times above the

provincial water quality objective (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, December

1999).16 The City was forced to install a leachate collection system but the Region faced

the further challenge of dealing with the clean-up of this highly toxic site, which lay in

the path of the future expressway yet had not been considered in the 1985 provincial

environmental assessment. Councillor Chad Collins responded that this was one of the

many remediation efforts that would be undertaken when expressway construction

resumed (Friends of Red Hill Valley newsletter, October 2000). The Region soon

revealed the existence of another landfill site, the third such site adjacent to the creek

and the second lying in the path of the road (Hamilton Spectator, October 11, 2000).

Political pressure also continued to mount from the Regions rising debt and the lack of

funds available for infrastructure maintenance and repair (Friends of Red Hill Valley

newsletter, September 2000).

Further controversy surrounded Regional Councils decision in June 2000 to expand

the urban boundary, against the advice of Regional staff and in violation of the fixed

the barrier and into the creek. Dr. Sorger claims that the City of Hamilton initially responded tohis findings at the Upper Ottawa, Rennie Street and Taro dumps by attempting to discredit hisability as a scientist, apparently going so far as to challenge his methodology for toxicity tests(June 27, 2005).

16 Lukasik received a $150,000 award as a result of this case and used this money to create anenvironmental justice fund for further advocacy work. This was the starting point forEnvironment Hamilton (EH), a non-profit environmental advocacy group created the followingyear by Lukasik and fellow environmental activists Don McLean and Brian McHattie. Asdiscussed in the following chapters, EH soon established itself as a more formally structuredadvocacy group specializing in providing local citizens with scientific and legal tools to identifyand challenge environmental problems in their local communities (Lynda Lukasik, June 30,2005).

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urban boundary advocated by the Vision 2020 plan. The extension added 450 acres in

the Glanbrook area, just south of the Red Hill Valley and adjacent to the Heritage Green

development in Stoney Creek. The Conserver Society, Citizens for a Sustainable

Community, and Action 2020 all field appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board but were

ultimately unsuccessful in overturning this decision.17 OMB challenges were also

launched by land and real-estate developers who wished to have the boundary extended

still further, but developers within the expanded area greeted this decision

enthusiastically and enjoyed rapid increases in their parcels of land. For example, Aldo

DeSantis of real-estate and housing company Multi-Area Developments owned 180

acres in this area and still more just outside the new boundary. DeSantis had purchased

this land for $5,600 per acre from the Ontario Realty Corporation just two years earlier

and its value now skyrocketed to approximately $40,000 per acre. Other prominent

developers, such as Al Frisina of 100 Main Street East Limited, realized less dramatic

but still substantial increases in large parcels of land within the area. Real estate and

housing experts estimated that the value of this land would rise to around $100,000 per

acre once approval was given for new residential development and water and sewer

servicing supplied by the municipality (Hamilton Spectator, August 9, 2000). DeSantis,

Frisina and other developers owning land in this area were active members of the

17 Citizens for a Sustainable Community was created by members of the original Task Force onSustainable Development to encourage community adoption and implementation of the goals ofVision 2020. Action 2020 was created in 1999 with a similar mandate but was also intended as ameans of preserving Vision 2020 during the difficult transition promised by amalgamation,described below. The decision of Action 2020 members to launch an OMB challenge against theexpansion of the urban boundary was not well received by Regional staff and politicians, whosoon cancelled the funding for Action 2020 (Harvey, February 12, 2003).

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Hamilton-Halton Homebuilders Association, one of the key proponents of the

expressway, and provided financial support for pro-expressway councillors (see Chapter

7).

Expressway critics argued that these developers would be the primary beneficiaries

of the highway. Further, they noted that many of the developers holding land in this area

were residential developers interested in building new subdivisions near the valley,

rather than filling Hamiltons empty business parks with new commercial and industrial

activity. Many activists maintained that Hamilton politics was constrained by the

demand for continuous economic growth and guided to a large extent by the needs and

wants of an urban elite that had united behind the expressway as a stimulus for new

growth opportunities (Ken Stone, July 7, 2005; Buddy Martin, December 27, 2005; Don

McLean, February 18, 2007). This urban elite frame drew attention to the close

relationships between politicians and business interests (particularly those related to

property development, construction and transportation) as an urban regime united by a

shared interest in growing the municipal tax base, stimulating new investment and

facilitating more fluid movements of goods, people and services via the regional road

network. The analysis of political economic relationships and municipal spending

priorities became vital tools in the effort to demonstrate these shared interests.

Friends, along with allied groups more closely connected to peace and social justice

movements such as Hamilton Action for Social Change (HASC), situated this political

economic approach in the larger context of the socio-economic disparities exacerbated

by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization, the downsizing of public

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services, and/or the downloading of responsibility for those services to lower levels of

government (Friends of Red Hill Valley 1998). Members of HASC explicitly linked the

expressway to trade liberalization and neoliberal models of economic development,

describing the road as the NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] highway.

According to HASC member, Andrew Loucks,

this is the kind of development that this model of economic development encourages.You know, just-in-time delivery and the fact that Red Hill will be a short cut fortransport trucks moving to and from the border. So we can have more of our factoryinventories moving on fossil-fuel burning trucks. Its funny, as soon as this ideabecomes popular its already looking like a pipe dream because warehouses aregoing to look pretty cheap when the price of oil goes through the roof. And theresalso the big-box stores and sprawl development that it will encourage. These are thekinds of things that tend to happen when you foster ultra-competitive, profit-driveneconomic environments. People have to put certain values at the forefront of theirchoices and I think we can see how that relates to Vision 2020 and how the Cityargues that its hands are tied. We have half of the things that we use in this citycoming from thousands of miles away and that has something to do with the modelof trade liberalization thats developed (interview, July 20, 2005).

Indeed, as I discuss in more detail in the following chapters, it is clear that the

expressway came to be regarded as a vital means of situating Hamilton as a distribution

and processing node within regional and cross-border transportation networks,

including both a proposed mid-peninsula corridor and a larger NAFTA superhighway

network running from Quebec City to Monterrey, Mexico (The Globe and Mail2004).

Public Ecology and the Urban Ecological Imaginary

Resistance to the expressway during the 1990s marked a significant shift in the political

narrative uniting this opposition, moving from an emphasis on the conservation of

urban nature to the democratization of public control over urban nature. This shift has

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been described elsewhere as a shift towards a public ecology (Luke 2003), an urban

political ecology (Desfor and Keil 2004), or as a politics of the urban metabolism

(Heynen et al. 2006). As Huber and Currie (2007: 725) state, a politics of the urban

metabolism would not only privilege the maintenance and protection of green

naturalized spaces threatened by urbanization but also seek to contest and reform the

socioecological constitution of the urban itself in order to address the root causes of

urban environmental injustice. As discussed in Chapter 1, nature and environment

are understood here as hybrids or cyborgs of social relations and biophysical

phenomena that are always invested with cultural meanings and shaped by language and

relationships of power (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). From this perspective, urban

spaces and environments are not simply physical spaces but are produced by interwoven

social and ecological relationships flows of matter, energy, money, information and

symbols (Swyngedouw 1996, 2006; Gandy 2004, 2005). This approach implies a

public ecology in so far as it recognizes that our experiences and understandings of

nature are always meditated through culture, language and relations of power and that

all environmental knowledge is normative or value laden (Hull and Robertson

2000: 110).

Accordingly, this suggests the need for an environmental politics that does not leave

socio-ecological relationships to be governed primarily by technocratic control or the

vagaries of the market private ecologies that can all too easily curtail or eliminate

control over land, air, water, food and other basic necessities of life for the majority of

the worlds people, concentrating access to wealth and healthy environments in the

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hands of the few (Luke 2003, 2005). Rather, this is a politics that struggles to produce

more and better spaces for democratic deliberation over access to and utilization of

urban nature. Public ecology promotes the multiscalar integration of a vast array of

environmental knowledge across disciplines and a diverse public (Hull and Robertson

2000: 112) clarifying the values, norms and methodological assumptions that inform

knowledge and action, and working to establishing dialogue between different language

communities particularly between the physical and life sciences, social science and

public policy (Forsyth 2003; Latour 2004). These efforts are guided by concern with

understanding how social and biophysical phenomena are co-produced (Haraway

1991; Forsyth 2003), supporting health and sustainability for some while undermining

the life chances of other regions and communities (Harvey 1996; Swyngedouw 2004;

White 2006).

While still relying upon appeals to the ecological and aesthetic significance of the

valley, prominent characteristics of the early conservationist narrative, the new wave of

resistance exemplified by the Friends of Red Hill Valley and their supporters displayed

a greater sensitivity to the diverse ways in which nature is experienced, understood,

valued and represented. This is reflected in the array of discursive strategies utilized,

which framed the protection of the valley not simply in terms of the conservation of

nature but also in terms of local history, social and environmental justice, municipal

spending and taxation, democratic transparency and accountability, animal welfare, and

resistance to neoliberal globalization. This mixture of approaches was a response to

changing political opportunities and political economic conditions, greater

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communication between disparate activist groups, and a deliberate attempt to engage

more people in the expressway debate.18

We can conceptualize this shift from a narrative of urban conservation to one of

public ecology in terms of the gradual development of core political frames. Firstly, the

narrative gradually moved from an urban conservation frame a vision of urban

renewal based on limiting the negative ecological impacts of development, particularly

within natural spaces to an urban ecology frame that suggested the need to consider

all aspects of urbanization in terms of the interconnections between ecological health,

socio-spatial justice and economic development, and to design forms of development

that address these problems simultaneously rather than sacrificing one for the other.

Placing the valley in the context of the city as a whole, environmental activists had

challenged the prevailing tendency towards the conceptual, legal and literal

compartmentalization of urban space, which had separated the city into exclusive zones

and entertained the fiction that ecological processes and pollutants could be similarly

contained. Through various sustainability efforts and education, the city of the grid, first

18 According to activist Lynda Lukasik (June 30, 2005), the Friends of Red Hill Valley made adeliberate attempt to extend the boundaries of the discussion beyond narrowly conceived issuesof environmentalism and to attract other groups and interests to their cause. According toLukasik, the core members of the group asked themselves, What do we need to do to engagethe public in this discussion? Our perspective changed because over time we realized that notonly was it important for us to understand the implications of this project from every angle but

also to get that information out there, because we realized that this is how you engage thecommunity in the discussion and the debate. Because if you think about it from your own pointof view, you get involved with something because theres some element there thats of interestand concern to you. I guess its a matter of establishing some level of comfort with appealing towhat I call peoples enlightened self-interest. I think there are a lot of environmentalists outthere who are more purist than that and are very uncomfortable with that approach. But myattitude is why would you be uncomfortable with that? Is it because you have a false sensethat humans arent capable of learning and evolving?

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promoted by colonial surveyors, was gradually being challenged by the vision of a city

of ecological flows in which attention was directed to the movement of pollutants across

space, their concentration in particular areas and the need for forms of development that

integrated with natural processes rather than simply extracting energy and profit from

them (Oddie 2008).

Drawing upon visions of the green city promoted by earlier environmental groups

and more recent sustainability initiatives, such as Vision 2020 and the Hamilton

Harbour Remedial Action Plan, activists struggled to challenge the established binary

between development and the environment that was so central to Hamiltons

industrial imaginary. In this established vision of urban nature, the environment was

understood as a realm of non-human life separate from human beings that presented

both opportunities and obstacles to development (equated with economic growth,

population and employment growth) and a progress defined primarily in terms of

technological innovation, the convenience and acceleration of mobility, and the

accumulation of wealth. In contrast, environmentalists insisted that nature should not be

understood as an unlimited input and waste sink for economic production but rather as

the very foundation of development and economic growth. While the earlier

conservationist narrative highlighted the need for environmental protection and the

limits to growth and waste presented by dwindling resources and mounting ecological

degradation, many activists during the 1990s emphasized the regenerative abilities of

nature for urban life and insisted that Hamilton could renew its image, economy and

overall quality of life by pursuing forms of development designed to enhance and

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protect urban nature, and supporting businesses that attempted to limit their

environmental impacts and/or specialized in green products and services. Articulating

this alternative approach to urban development would prove to be one of the most

difficult challenges for expressway opponents.

Activists challenged the vision of a unitary and united city suggested by the

industrial imaginary and the Ambitious City narrative of growth and progress with an

alternative vision of urban space as differentiated and unequal, with some areas (the

mountain and west-end) receiving the direct benefits of development and others (the

north and east-end of the lower city) forced to absorb its negative environmental and

socio-economic impacts. In this way, the earlier framing of the valley as vital to human

and non-human health was developed into a more nuanced vision ofenvironmental

injustice, highlighting the concentration of pollution within the lower city and the

subsidization of more affluent suburban communities on the escarpment.

Thirdly, the Friends of Red Hill Valley and supporters placed great emphasis on

ecological citizenship and the democratization of urban nature. Friends employed

familiar and well-established techniques such as sustained letter-writing campaigns,

lobbying of political representatives, press conferences, public protests, and the

publishing of press releases, articles and newsletters, but also placed great emphasis on

engaging the public directly in different activities related to the valley, such as clean-up

walks, guided hikes, outdoor festivals and ecological monitoring. While earlier

environmentalist groups such as Clear Hamilton of Pollution and Save the Valley

advocated stewardship or care for nature as a vital component of citizenship and called

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for greater public participation in municipal decision-making, the Friends of Red Hill

Valley actively encouraged this ecological citizenship by offering a variety of

opportunities for people to learn about and care for the flora and fauna of the valley

(Lukasik, June 30, 2005). Further, these activists worked with allied groups to expose

and challenge the influence of particular business interests over urban development and

municipal politics, advocating both the democratization of municipal planning

alongside ongoing community engagement and mobilization.

Environment Hamilton extended this same approach to numerous projects that

monitor ecological conditions across the city, such as Stackwatch, which teaches

citizens to identify troublesome emissions from manufacturing sites, and Trees Count, a

program that trains volunteers to monitor the quantity and health of urban forests in

their local community. This same emphasis on ecological civic engagement was evident

in the efforts that the Friends of Red Hill Valley made to closely monitor and report on

the activities of both municipal planners and politicians. Newsletters from the group

would routinely include detailed critical analysis of reports from Regional staff and

their consultants, as well as updates on the latest decisions made by council and issues

indirectly related to the expressway, such as harbour rehabilitation efforts, public transit

and cuts to local social programs. In this way, Friends encouraged citizens to participate

in local environments and communities rather than focusing exclusively on lobbying the

local state, while placing the expressway struggle in the larger context of a struggle over

the future of the city. However, as discussed in the following chapter, this framing of

citizenship and democracy was limited in significant ways by an uncritical acceptance

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of liberal political principles that would soon be challenged by changing political

circumstances and alliances.

Whereas the growth and progress narrative had presented the use of land and natural

processes as largely a technical matter to be administered by the expertise of planners

and business people, environmentalists contributed to a view of urban nature as deeply

politicized, placing issues of land-use and environmental health squarely in the realm of

democratic debate. The representation of the local state as unduly influenced by the

interests of business suggested the need for democratic reform and the opening up of

new avenues for public participation in municipal decision-making. This vision of the

city situated democratic citizenship both within and outside of the walls of government,

suggesting the need for governmental reform andactive public education and

community mobilization. Self-organization, coalition-building, and public engagement

in knowledge production were valorized as key democratic activities for empowering

communities, decentring the state as the primary locus of political activity. This view

was based upon the belief that government should be guided by citizens through

participatory decision-making structures, and the hope that an informed public with the

ability to participate will make choices in the public good, supporting environmental

protection and more equitable distribution of wealth.19

19 This notion of participatory democracy drew upon earlier critiques of liberal democracy andthe expert management of the welfare state, as well as a resurgent interest in more radicalsocialist and anarchist organizing principles amongst student organizations, peace groups andothers coalescing around resistance to neoliberal globalization (Wainwright 1994; Conway2004).

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Engagement with a wide variety of regulatory, legal and consultation processes, and

the ultimate failure of those processes to stop the expressway, contributed to this more

critical view of democracy and motivated activists to place greater emphasis on both

community organizing and the democratization of municipal politics. The Vision 2020

plan was particularly important in this respect, as it presented a new model of

participatory environmental governance and suggested a new economic strategy of

ecological modernization that many activists saw as the starting point for a new urban

future that remained unrealized. Debate over the meaning and implementation of the

plan created deeper divisions between supporters and critics of the expressway,

reducing opportunities for the kind of collaborative and reform civic

environmentalism exemplified by cities like Toronto (Keil and Boudreau 2006) and

further radicalizing groups that had traditionally been grounded in a social democratic

approach to environmental politics. With a sense of growing opposition between

community activists and the municipality, these groups invested more time and energy

in networking with like-minded organizations, sharing knowledge an

Documents

Red Hill Dissertation: Chapter 5