The exclusionary politics of creative communities: the case of Kensington Market Pedestrian Sundays.

McLean, Heather ; Rahder, Barbara

Abstract

Increasingly, urban boosters are promoting the ways artist and activist networks transform public streets into spaces of conviviality, play, and community building through creative interventions. However, such actions frequently undermine the very communities they say they are trying to support. Using the case of Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market, Toronto, we explore the role played by local artists and activists in contributing to local gentrification dynamics, and how their actions reflect broader socio-economic inequities in the city and beyond. Despite community activists' wish to challenge homogenized and corporatized urban redevelopment, and to build vibrant and engaged communities, the activists often unintentionally reinforce values that promote and benefit some members of the community at the expense and exclusion of working-class, immigrant, and racialized others.

Keywords: creative communities, artists, activists, gentrification, diversity

Resume

De plus en plus, les promoteurs urbains celebrent les transformations des rues publiques en espaces de convivialite, de plaisir et de developpement communautaire a travers les interventions creatives de reseaux d'artistes et de militants. Toutefois, de telles actions destabilisent souvent les communautes qui sont objets memes de transformation. Prenant le cas des dimanches pietonniers du Kensington Market, a Toronto, nous examinons les contributions des artistes et militants locaux a la dynamique de gentrification, ainsi que la portee de leurs actions sur les inegalites socio-economiques de la ville en general. Malgre les souhaits des militants communautaires d'agir en contestation contre le developpement urbain homogeneise et corporatise, et de batir des communautes animees et engagees, sans le vouloir, ils accentuent souvent les valeurs qui promouvoient et beneficient certains membres de la communaute au detriment et en exclusion de la classe ouvriere, des immigrants et autres racialises.

Mots cles: communautes creatives, artistes, militants, gentrification, diversite

Introduction

Once a month every summer since 2004, couples dancing the tango animate normally mundane parking spaces and samba squads replace the beeping of delivery trucks backing up to stores in Toronto's Kensington Market as the downtown neighbourhood is transformed into a massive Sunday afternoon street party. These events are organized by Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market (P.S. Kensington), a network of activists and artists who have worked together to replace car traffic on their neighbourhood streets--however temporarily--with capoeira, yoga, and cooking demonstrations, in a creative celebration of their local community.

P.S. Kensington emerged as an organization in 2002 in response to concerns over the influx of condominium development throughout downtown Toronto in the 1990s. The group--made up of bicycle activists, artists, and merchants, and led by a local bistro owner--sought to challenge this encroaching redevelopment and to critique car culture, in general, for its erosion of street-level community interaction. Their strategy was to use urban public space interventions in the form of street parties as a tool of resistance.

The group's success at attracting thousands to their Sunday events in the Market neighbourhood led to P.S. Kensington becoming an advisor to other downtown Toronto Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) wanting to organize their own pedestrian festivals. The artistic interactions staged in Kensington clearly resonated with city booster networks interested in promoting culture-led regeneration strategies, providing distinctive amenities, and holding interactive arts events throughout the city. City councillors, architects, planners, developers, and local lifestyle magazines tout the Kensington events for staging quirky and eclectic celebrations of community.

Regardless of the fun, tensions have emerged within the neighbourhood over these events. While grassroots activists and artists are attempting to resist gentrification and celebrate their local community, their efforts have inadvertently ended up alienating many of their working-class neighbours. By attracting the interest of developers and reinforcing the regeneration strategies that appeal to middle-class residents, shoppers, and tourists, these pedestrian-only events have reduced the viability of the seemingly more mundane stores that rely on truck deliveries and on car-driving customers. Expressing some of this tension, Glouberman (2004) writes:

 It doesn't feel good opposing Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington
 Market, a big street festival, thrown every week, born of a desire
 to decrease reliance on cars. I mean, the first day I visited,
 there were musicians and performers and there were children
 literally laughing and dancing in the streets. What kind of asshole
 is opposed to that? What the hell is wrong with me?

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Despite a burgeoning literature examining the proliferation of creative-city and arts-led urban regeneration strategies, little research has explored the neighbourhood tensions and contradictions inherent in staging these community celebrations in any detail. Whose vision of community is enacted in these types of creative pedestrian-only events? Whose values, lifestyles, consumption patterns, and spatial practices are celebrated? How are different groups of residents, business owners, shoppers, and visitors affected? Who ultimately benefits and who loses in the process? What is the impact, if any, of the anti-corporate sentiments among the artist and activist organizers of these events? How does this vision of community building and celebration fit with or challenge the interests of civic boosters, BIA groups, and developers?

In this paper, we unpack the contradictions and power dynamics that exist in the activist and artistic interventions of a group explicitly attempting to celebrate and protect its unique inner-city community in Toronto. The group, through its interventions, provides an especially attractive supplement of urban amenities that benefits specific interests but increases hardships and exclusion for others. The P.S. Kensington group's initial once-a-week, now once-a-month, car-free street parties and community celebrations attempt to enact a vision of community that does not fit with the heterogeneous reality of the neighbourhood. Instead, they reinforce and exacerbate broad socio-economic and spatial inequalities. This case examines what happens on the ground when some feel excluded from the party.

The specific events and opinions documented in this case study are based on an analysis of (1) popular media reports between 2004 and 2010; (2) minutes of two Kensington community forums held in 2003 and 2004; (3) twelve formal and informal interviews conducted in 2009 with Kensington Market business owners and residents, ES. Kensington activists, and Pedestrian Sunday participants; and (4) participant observation at the Pedestrian Sunday events. Our approach is best described as a partial and situated positionality (a la Haraway, 1990), informed by our sometimes shared and sometimes varied backgrounds in participatory action research, feminist methodology, and urban activism. For example, one of the authors assisted in organizing Planning Actions 2004 community forum on pedestrian-only initiatives, discussed later in this paper. Our motivation, then, exemplified by long-standing commitments to social equity, spatial justice, and participatory research and planning, can be characterized as working to get academic knowledge back 'onto the streets' (Fuller and Kitchin, 2004). We do not claim to be objective observers of social phenomena so much as embodied and embedded scholars, interested in uncovering the dynamics of complex social and spatial relationships in order to open up the possibilities for creating more equitable and just cities.

Gentrification and the Role of Creative Communities

Over the past 30 years, urban theorists' understandings of gentrification have evolved from a focus on neighbourhood-scale change (Glass, 1964) to a sophisticated understanding of global urban strategies shaped by broader market-based institutional shifts and policy realignments (Smith, 1996; Brenner and Theodore, 2005). A number of urban researchers have focused on the specific interconnections between gentrification and artistic or cultural practices and have deepened our understanding of the role these play in the global as well as local marketing of cities.

Residential, commercial, and industrial neighbourhoods are being transformed by revitalization and regeneration strategies that real-estate developers, city boosters, and BIA groups promote to create new spaces of consumption for middle-class elites and investment capital (Lees, 2000; MacLeod, 2002; Kern, 2010; Kern and Wekerle, 2008; Smith, 1996; Zukin, 2009; Ward, 2011). These strategies dovetail with creative-city goals to encourage the growth of places and spaces that include live/work studios for artists and cultural festivals attractive to creative-class workers and residents (Bell and Jayne, 2003; Evans 2010; Florida 2002; Gertler et al. 2002; Markusen 2006; Peck 2005; Rantisi, Leslie, and Christopherson 2006). Some of these initiatives promise to reinvigorate the prospects for neighbourhood-based businesses and improve the quality of lire of local community members by attracting more middle-class residents and shoppers to the area (McCann, 2007). BIAs are increasingly establishing collaborative partnerships with artists and cultural organizations to develop creative events that help animate neighbourhoods and raise the areas' cachet, quality of life, and property values (McLean, 2010; Slater, 2004). Frequently these events are designed to promote face-to-face interaction and an imagined ideal of the liveable, inclusive urban village (McCann, 2007; Barnes et al., 2006; Zukin, 2009).

Artists have become--perhaps unwittingly--complicit in a process that, in many cases ultimately alienates and displaces low-income communities, including artist communities, through gentrification. As artists more into inexpensive and unconventional neighbourhoods, they often transform their everyday spaces into creative and interactive moments that play into the broader politics of displacement and inequality (Deutche, 1996; Ley, 2003; Lloyd, 2005; Pinder, 2005). As urban boosters attempt to market visions of the creative city (Peck, 2005), they increasingly look to artists to help cultivate and transform spaces of production into spaces of consumption, a dynamic in which capital and culture are mutually constituted.

Artists are not alone in favouring seemingly authentic, socially diverse, improvisational places over more tightly planned and controlled space (Bain, 2003; Ley 2003). As unique cultural amenities become increasingly valued and marketable (Markusen, 2006; Peck, 2005; Ward, 2011), artists act as a "colonizing arm" (Ley, 2003: 2534) or as "avatars of urban consumption" (Lloyd, 2005:346) through the images and identities attached to their lifestyle and cultural productions. Once these edgy, urban spaces that promise "encounter and jouissance" (Ley, 1996: 321) are discovered and transformed into places providing the sought-after buzz, urban cosmopolitans and middle-class professionals seek them out for their bohemian and offbeat fare (Florida, 2002; Smith, 1996; Ley, 1996; Ley, 2003; Lloyd, 2005: 346). Creating a festival atmosphere becomes an increasingly popular and lucrative way of converting oppositional symbols into marketable commodities (Ley, 1996).

Some perceive these interventions as overcoming homogenized, corporatized landscapes and consumer-oriented monoculturalism (Zukin, 2009). Indeed, Caulfield sees potentially emancipatory contradictions in gentrification--as a middle-class rejection of "faceless suburbia" (Caulfield, 1994: 627) and as offering critical social practices that challenge the interests and agendas of corporate property capital. Many artists and activists, in particular, see themselves as reclaiming urban space in order to encourage a more engaged, more interactive, and more radical conception of public space (Pinder, 2005; Zukin, 2009). Events like street-reclaiming parties provide opportunities to break up the routine and repetition of everyday neighbourhood interactions. Proponents argue that these spaces of conviviality not only playfully connect people in irreverent community gatherings but also provide moments in which people can share common interests (Ferrell, 2002). Others see this as creating radical democratic spaces where residents from all walks of life can demand uncommercialized spaces in the city, thereby challenging what is perceived as the homogeneity reproduced by corporatized planning (Klein, 2000: 313). Supporters argue that by taking over streets, parking lots, and parking spaces, these interventions promote spontaneous encounters between neighbours, create play spaces for children, and provide places where the elderly can sit and share their "street wisdom" (Engwicht, 1999: 4) with passersby. Some argue that these activities also strengthen community relations by fostering collective stewardship and management of both public and private spaces (Zukin, 2009).

While efforts to celebrate creative communities may well foster more face-to-face interactions at the local scale, critics note that these activities rarely challenge the underlying system of political and socio-economic relations that currently lead almost unwaveringly towards increasing privatization, corporatization, and gentrification (Harvey, 1997). In fact, uncritical and unquestioned ideals of public involvement, community, and creativity may reproduce the very exclusions, both symbolic and material, that they claim to challenge (Young, 1990; Harvey, 1997). Parker (2008) argues persuasively, for example, that it is not just class differences that are exacerbated in this process. The gendered work of social reproduction is devalued if not entirely erased in the creative city discourse, such that what appears as inclusive and progressive actually valorizes individual-centred discourses of creativity, excluding others and downplaying inequality (Parker, 2008). Because some groups have greater access to resources and more social connections to both local and global movers and shakers, they are more likely to define what is considered creative, to influence the shape of their neighbourhoods, to define the boundaries of their communities, and to provide the creative supplements that result in increasing gentrification (Parker, 2008; Ley, 2003; Zukin, 2009; Joseph, 2002: 22).

This examination of the Kensington Market Pedestrian Sundays provides a detailed example of how these processes play out in urban space through the shared and contradictory interests of local community activists.

Transforming Kensington Market with Car-Free Street Parties

Artists and activists have been attracted to Toronto's Kensington Market for decades. Close to the city's downtown core, the Market was a historic immigrant reception area dating from the mid-19th century, when it was originally lined with small houses built for Irish and Scottish labourers. By the early 1900s, the neighbourhood housed a majority of the city's Jewish community, many of whom converted the ground floors of their homes into shops. Ever since, Kensington Market has provided affordable housing and small shops for a changing array of working-class and immigrant families selling fresh produce, meat, fish, cheese, spices, dried fruit, and baked goods, as well as second-hand clothing. Pubs and cafes, record stores, and restaurants were added in the 1960s, when the area began attracting hippies (Daly, 2006), and in the 1980s, when the area drew in punks.

Kensington Market is now a bustling neighbourhood where pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and delivery trucks weave through the tight-knit urban fabric. The area is well known for its unique style and celebrated by the local media for its "jostling, sweaty rhythm ... on a busy summer's day, the hectic variety of its sounds (from blues to hip-hop) and even its smells (cheese, fish, fresh vegetables, the odd whiff of marijuana)" (Bentley Mays, 2007). These are the qualities that, over the past 10 to 15 years, have attracted music shops, artists' studios, and unique restaurants to nestle in among the more traditional Market shops and homes.

While surrounding neighbourhoods are undergoing rapid commercial and residential gentrification (Hackworth and Rekkers, 2005), developers have also become increasingly drawn to Kensington Market's eclectic character. Some former manufacturing buildings on the edges of the Market have been converted into lofts (Bunce, 2004). Corporate chain stores have attempted to get a foothold as well, while increasingly expensive restaurants and bars have incrementally crept in to "sell $3.50 chocolate croissants, instead of cheap empanadas" (interview with Kensington Market resident, 2009).

For the P.S. Kensington activists, cars and condos are seen as a threat to the diversity and vitality of Toronto's unique downtown neighbourhoods, potentially making them "more like malls" (public meeting transcripts, 2004). Responding to these trends, the group began organizing neighbourhood residents and shop owners to lobby the City of Toronto for formal car-free Sunday events in the Market. P.S. Kensington's primary goal is to "re-claim our streets from the mess of traffic and parking" and to provide opportunities for the neighbourhood to express its unique character (P.S. Kensington, 2009).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The group's presence was most strongly felt in the summer of 2004 when, from noon to six in the evening each Sunday, the streets of Kensington Market were filled with people and closed to cars, thanks to active support from the City of Toronto. The City Works Department was already doing feasibility studies for four proposed pedestrian zones in Toronto's downtown core and was pleased to collaborate with the Kensington group. With the City's support, ten thousand visitors came each week to the Kensington Sunday events to enjoy interactive community celebrations. Food-and-drink booths were set up in empty parking spaces; an "Iron Chef" competition was held in front of a restaurant; and streets became stages for live bands, dance lessons, and spoken-word poetry (ES. Kensington, 2009). Mayor David Miller and urban guru Jane Jacobs, who cut the ribbon, attended the high-profile opening-day event. Brochures on the environmental and social benefits of car-free communities and the importance of public-space activism in Toronto were ubiquitous (P.S. Kensington, 2009). Extensive news and editorial coverage of the events illustrated many local activists' strong interest in these colourful street festivals. Participants expressed excitement about being part of such a vibrant community, while pedestrian activists celebrated their commitment to making Kensington Market into a space for creative, communal, interactive interventions.

P.S. Kensington members talked about their activities as an attempt to defy gentrification by creatively activating the neighbourhood's streets. They believed that by transforming parking spots into croquet and Scrabble games, turning intersections into public squares, and placing a piano in traffic to make music and block cars, they were, as one resident put it, creating

 a cultural playground--an expression of our community's diverse
 ethnicity, age and interests. People complain about gentrification
 but the Market is changing. It may be dangerous to sit around and
 do nothing. It makes sense for people to collectively foster the
 right change in direction. Everyone should ask themselves what they
 have done for Kensington Market lately. (public meeting
 transcripts, 2004)

However, not all of the local activists and storeowners agreed, either before or after the Sunday events of the summer of 2004, that pedestrianization was a good idea. In one community meeting, facilitated by the urban planning activist group Planning Action, some community members expressed concern that the types of initiatives organized by P.S. Kensington might actually accelerate gentrification (Planning Action, 2009). Similarly, while some Market businesses liked the ideal of a car-free Kensington, some were ambivalent, and others vehemently opposed. According to one poll, 40 percent of storeowners were opposed to the car-free plans. As one storeowner noted, this opposing group was made up of "the old timers in the Market, fish stores, work-wear clothing stores and meat shops ... they were worried the car-flee events would lead to the permanent pedestrianization, and blocking truck deliveries would kill their businesses" (interview with Kensington Market storeowner, 2009). Among the opponents was the owner of a local meat and sausage store--the largest employer in Kensington--who worried that blocking vehicle traffic would affect his business, which requires eight truckloads of meat delivered to his store every day (Polo, 2003: 15). In interviews and newspaper articles, opponents of the car-flee Sundays argued that successful car-flee areas in European cities tend to work well when the neighbourhoods are more homogenous and made up primarily of restaurants and bistros.

P.S. Kensington and the City of Toronto respected the storeowners' concerns and insisted that they would proceed with car-free plans only if 50 percent of Kensington merchants supported the initiative (Polo, 2003: 15). As a result, P.S. Kensington undertook a community poll involving considerable dialogue between the working group and area merchants. Some critics agreed to allow the car-free Sundays to go ahead, but others argued that the community poll was flawed because the group was actively promoting the events and attempting to convince residents and shop owners of the benefits of car-flee Sundays as they went door to door (interview with Kensington Market resident, 2009).

P.S. Kensington attempted to address storeowners' concerns by organizing a bicycle porter system to transport goods within the car-flee zone and by encouraging storeowners to participate in various ways. For example, one week had a fish theme in which artists painted the streets blue and helped children make cardboard fish to hang in front of the shops. However, these attempts were seen as foolish or half-hearted by some of the storeowners. An editorial in a Toronto newspaper, for example, commented on the lack of practicality of the fish theme:

Some products are impulse buys and some simply are not ... do they really think I would take in the blue streets and fish on the sidewalk and then think to myself "hmm. It's a hot day, and I am not going home for several hours, but this fish theme is so compelling I'll go and buy a bag of fresh halibut"? (McIntosh, 2004)

According to Glouberman (2005), as well as interviews with RS. Kensington proponents and critics, when the events were over, local merchants and residents harboured mixed feelings. While the events attracted revellers from throughout the Greater Toronto Area, some local residents and storeowners felt that the artists, activists, and bistro and cafe owners imposed the event on them without their consent (public meeting transcripts, 2004; interview with Kensington Market storeowner February, 2009). Other storeowners--those who sell bulk foods and things like fish or spices--said that they lost money, and that the events benefited shops that sold "arts and crafts, knick knack-type things, ice cream or coffee" (interview with Kensington Market storeowner, 2009). While a few found ways to make a bit of money--for example, by setting up barbecues to sell oysters and sardines to the crowds--the throngs of visitors that came to Kensington Market on Sunday came for a street party, not to shop for groceries.

Ironically, although the P.S. Kensington activists sought to resist corporatization and gentrification, the Sunday events added cachet to this neighbourhood, which was increasingly valued by Toronto's middle-class as a cool place to shop in boutiques, eat in bistros, and just hang out. According to some storeowners, shoppers in the Market have changed in recent years, with more young, white professionals--looking for organic fish and vegetables or wanting to drink coffee and eat in restaurants--and fewer Portuguese and Caribbean families (interviews with Kensington Market storeowners, 2009). They think that the ES. Kensington events have helped transform the Market into a space where "10,000 to 20,000 people show up ... turning the neighbourhood [from] that place you buy meat and fish [into] that really cool place with those big parties that also sells fish" (interview with Kensington Market storeowner, 2009).

P.S. Kensington has not received City of Toronto funding since 2004, but because its interactive celebrations of community fit well with City development goals, the group continues to informally collaborate with municipal planners, City councillors, and BIA groups (interview with P.S. Kensington representative, 2009). The City of Toronto's Culture Plan for the Creative City (2003) highlights the need for more community-based participatory art initiatives in which local arts organizations partner with businesses to promote broader economic development and urban revitalization goals. Similarly, the City encourages local businesses to engage with arts organizations to develop unique strategies for neighbourhood regeneration. In Toronto newspapers and magazines, local city boosters identify Kensington Market as a neighbourhood in serious need of regeneration, with City councillors and architects looking to P.S. Kensington for inspiration. Local municipal councillor Adam Vaughan, for example, congratulated the P.S. Kensington activists for their efforts and explained how their events are an inspiration for architects, planners, and the local Kensington Market BIA. He hoped that working collaboratively with these stakeholders would transform the Market neighbourhood into a permanent car-free mews of live/work spaces, shops, and housing (Lorinc, 2007).

In 2005, the Kensington Market neighbourhood was also designated a national historic site in an effort to protect its "heritage value and character-defining elements." Unfortunately, this honorary designation and its recommended standards and guidelines do not impose any legal restrictions on owners, land uses, or the City of Toronto (Choo Fon, 2011). Consequently, though there is considerable interest in preserving the unique character of the Market, there is no agreement on what this means or how it could be accomplished.

In 2008 and 2009, critiques of the Pedestrian Sundays emerged on Toronto-based activist websites as people debated the contradictions inherent in celebrating a pedestrian-only Kensington Market (Planning Action, 2009), much to the chagrin of the P.S. Kensington activists. In response to the concerns about their apparent complicity in the Market's increasing gentrification, some prominent P.S. Kensington members gave interviews and posted comments on their website, outlining their efforts to raise issues of housing affordability and gentrification at the now once-a-month car-free summer events (interview with P.S. Kensington representative, 2009). They have also made considerable efforts to raise issues of social sustainability and housing affordability as part of the Pedestrian Sunday events (interview with a P.S. Kensington activist, 2009). For example, St. Stephen's Community House, a multi-purpose community outreach centre, was brought in to provide information on local services ranging from job search and youth programs to homeless shelters (P.S. Kensington, 2009).

At the same time, the group actively extended its work to include other BIAs in downtown Toronto. In Mirvish Village and Baldwin Village, for example, P.S. Kensington worked to promote creative, grassroots urban regeneration events that promised a celebration of "community, culture, and ecology" and featured such things as massage tables and dance parties, as well as opportunities for small businesses to sell their wares. In 2010, members of P.S. Kensington also lead workshops about community building and public space at the Creative Places & Spaces conference featuring creative-city proponents Richard Florida and Charles Landry (Artscape, 2009).

The Creative Reproduction of Inequality

Despite P.S. Kensington's best intentions, the Sunday events reinforced broader dynamics of gentrification and class exclusion taking place in downtown Toronto, as in many cities throughout the world. Hulchanski (2006) describes Toronto as increasingly separated into a gentrified and racially exclusive downtown core surrounded by car-oriented inner suburbs that are home to racialized and working-poor residents. His study tracked demographic shifts between 1971 and 2005, revealing how Toronto has become polarized into three distinct cities: (1) an increasingly high-income and predominately white city clustered mostly in downtown south; (2) a relatively middle income and ethnically mixed city wedged between the other two; and (3) a city comprised of low-income, predominately immigrant and racialized families located primarily in the aging inner suburbs, far from the core. As downtown Toronto neighbourhoods become transformed into more pedestrian- and transit-friendly urban villages, the car-dependent working poor on the outskirts become further socially and spatially marginalized.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Kensington Market, while still relatively affordable, lies in the heart of this increasingly exclusive downtown and is consequently pressured by the surrounding neighbourhoods' gentrification. To the west, Little Italy has a long history as a working-class immigrant neighbourhood, as its name suggests, but it is rapidly gentrifying (Hackworth and Rekers, 2005). To the south, Alexandra Park is slated for massive redevelopment with the existing public, non-profit, and cooperative housing to be replaced by a mixed-use neighbourhood including new condominiums and market-rent townhouses.

While Kensington Market's residences and businesses still contain a mix of social classes and ethnicities, with social and economic networks that extend far beyond the geographical boundaries of the neighbourhood, the car-free Sunday events were never imagined nor designed to appeal to the low-income, car-dependent suburban shop owners who regularly visit the Market. Instead, a new generation of self-selected "healthy young people with the kinds of lives that don't require cars" (Glouberman, 2005: 128) got "excited with their idea and ran with it," simply assuming the rest would join in (interview with Kensington Market storeowner, June 2009). Caught up in their excitement about building community, the Kensington network lost sight of the heterogeneous, contradictory mix of people who actually live, work, and visit the Market. Cultivating their own view of what the neighbourhood should be, the organizers re-inscribed existing power imbalances by privileging certain types of people and certain types of consumption in the process.

Thus, while the Kensington activists made great efforts to banish corporate symbols from their events--"there's no branding; there's no bank handing out key chains; there's no local real estate agency trying to bring in their hot air balloon; there's none of that crap" (interview with a P.S. Kensington activist, 2009)--in what Caulfield and others might characterize as "critical social practice" (Caulfield, 1994:32), they nonetheless introduced other hierarchies and exclusions. According to one storeowner, shops run by "Market old-timers" selling generic canned goods, toilet paper, and meats were not given much consideration by the core event organizations. He believed this was because the old-timers are considered "sell-outs, or too corporate ... not selling as-sexy brand-name products" (interview with Kensington Market storeowner, 2009). He also observed that the majority of the Pedestrian Sunday activities--tango performances, yoga classes, giant chess games--were strategically located in the north end of the Market, in front of the core organizers' bistros, coffee shops, and boutiques. Clearly, some thought that the staging of these community events was designed to benefit a few specific stores and restaurants, and, in the process, define who and what counts as anti-corporate.

These exclusionary dynamics also played out in the types of entertainment selected for the P.S. Kensington events. One community resident complained that the celebrations only showcased "cool" musicians and artists who possessed the currency the organizers identified with, but missed other groups of people living in the neighbourhood. Another noted that although performers were multicultural, they were all young artists who regularly perform in hip downtown neighbourhoods and bars.

If they really were about celebrating community, they could have included the seniors who live in the neighbourhood's Toronto Community Housing seniors' home. I used to live near there and there were always Chinese and Vietnamese seniors making music and dancing in the park, doing Tai Chi. (interview with Kensington Market resident, 2009)

While the P.S. Kensington organizers tried to address the storeowners' concerns through the creative use of a porter system and artistic advertising, the fact remained that the concerns of the "old-timers" were not shared by the organization, and therefore not fully appreciated or addressed by the activists' agenda. The idealized vision of community sought after by the activists involved music, art, and meandering crowds enjoying spontaneous creativity, not shoppers loading their cars with bulk goods or trucks making deliveries. The storeowners who did not fit P.S. Kensington's community vision found themselves unable or unwilling to participate in the celebrations.

According to a local critic, people in ES. Kensington

identify as pedestrian activists or the "saviours" of Kensington Market. They really think it is their job to change the Market. The ES. Kensington supporters who advocate for the Market are made of a mix of hippy kids, people from middle class backgrounds who want to hang out in the Market's coffee shops, and second-hand boutique owners and bistros, the newer stores and restaurants that sell organic food. (interview with Kensington Market resident and activist, 2009)

The exclusionary dynamic at play during the Sunday events illustrates the way subtle power relations are reproduced through class privilege, political connections, and the invocation of shared values--however real or imagined. Local artists and activists are essential to this enterprise because these types of events and amenities cannot be provided by top-down policy strategies alone. Indeed, activists and artists have become valued cultural intermediaries, seen as the people who provide a sense of community and who cultivate the fine-grained moments that supplement booster-led regeneration planning (Joseph, 2002; Ley, 2003). In Kensington Market, these were the networks of people who went door to door to convince residents and shop owners of the importance of car-free Sundays--an activity that one ES. Kensington member referred to as "consciousness-raising" (interview with Kensington Market resident, 2006). Ley (2003), in contrast, describes this type of activity as a display of "class-privileged temperament" because of the time, energy, and political connections involved.

Ley (2003) argues that these types of community celebrations reinforce the organizers' values and understanding of what it is to be a cool, edgy community, while sidelining the people and activities associated with more mundane day-to-day neighbourhood life. As Parker (2008) notes, these types of creative celebrations virtually erase neighbourhood spaces of care, work, social reproduction, and the people who rely on them. Wilson and Keil (2008) add that these events fetishize the creativity of people with the time and networks to claim neighbourhood space, while ignoring the creativity required by many other people who are struggling just to get by.

Because the organizers' vision seemed to celebrate only that which is young, hip, and cool, the Market's old-timers, community services, and their customers fell "completely off their radar" (interview with Kensington Market resident and activist, 2009). Young (1990) describes these types of conflicts as involving a bounded understanding of community. She suggests that concepts of community that rely on an overall sense of "social wholeness" often result in the exclusion of people who do not fit into the group's vision (314). Bounded notions of community rely on a "common logic of underlying polarity" in which categories of community versus the individual tend to define each other negatively (315). Enacting such a singular vision of community serves only to silence the excluded and further inscribe class inequalities. These uneven class dynamics reveal the need for diverse communities to engage in much more critical and reflexive dialogue across their differences (Joseph, 2002).

The Kensington Market case raises critical questions about the role of cultural practice in marketing cities for the creative class versus making space for diversity. Any urban neighbourhood housing and serving people of diverse backgrounds and lifestyles cannot be adequately defined or equitably celebrated as a community if only one of its social groups is involved and valorized (Young, 1990). By bringing in organizations that are critical of gentrification, local regeneration strategies can spark critical debates about who is included and excluded in the process of creating trendy downtown neighbourhoods. It is important that these groups raise issues of access to affordable housing and bring in non-profit community service organizations. But community organizers, activists, artists, planners, developers, and municipal representatives will have to do much more than talk if they are to be truly inclusive of the diversity of city inhabitants.

Conclusion

Street-reclaiming community celebrations are contradictory antidotes to corporatized urban space. On the one hand, grassroots activists and artists conceive of such events as a means of re-engaging local residents and storeowners in a playful and participatory recovery of community and public space. They see themselves as challenging the dehumanizing nature of car culture and all the corporatized planning that goes with it--from high-rise condominiums to big-box retail and look-alike shopping malls. These activists and artists are transforming everyday neighbourhoods into unique, sensual, and convivial spaces filled, however briefly, with collective games, dances, food, and creativity.

On the other hand, these same events, wittingly or unwittingly, reproduce and often exacerbate powerful class divisions within communities. Rather than challenging the pressures that give rise to gentrification, the rush to transform Kensington Market into a space for play made the artists and activists complicit in alienating and displacing low-income residents, even when this was not their intent. Indeed, their celebration of this sometimes gritty marketplace glossed over the very real power differentials within the neighbourhood, thereby paradoxically depoliticizing the urban inequities inscribed within it.

What Joseph (2002) refers to as the "romance of community" is ultimately insufficient to ameliorate the deep structural and spatial inequalities pressuring urban neighbourhoods. P.S. Kensington's interventions helped bistros, cafes, and bakeries prosper, while less "hip" stores lost money; hipster musicians and artists were promoted, while the talents and tastes of local seniors and working class residents were largely ignored. By putting the Market on the map as a place to hang out, buy lattes and party, but not as a place to shop for groceries or dry goods, the activists' attempts to enliven their community actually added to the very gentrification pressures they sought to resist.

Grassroots arts and culture events may seem small and insignificant within the grander scheme of making cities safe and attractive for global corporate investment. Yet, these events have a way of shaping the social imaginaries celebrated and performed in urban spaces. ]hey valorize, exclude, and change communities and the relationships within, around, and beyond them in ways both anticipated and unanticipated.

Because urban neighbourhoods are complex and heterogeneous mixes of people and networks, attempts to celebrate community must take into account the varied, overlapping, and contradictory interests that contribute to the identity of the place. These contradictions also offer possibilities to enliven spaces in more inclusive ways, to imagine alliances across difference, and to value and explore myriad forms of creativity. RS. Kensington has responded to criticisms by attempting to develop stronger connections with local community organizations, to encourage local homeless shelters and youth programs to participate, and to engage a broader network of people who live in and move through the Market. This suggests a messier conception of community--one in which diversity is valued as part of the strategy to re-imagine more inclusive and creative urban spaces for everyone.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Claire Major, Emily Gilbert, and Jamie Peck for comments on an earlier draft. Thanks to graduate student assistants in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, Vivien Leong and Matt MacLean, and to our anonymous reviewers. Research for this article was made possible, in part, by a SSHRC Doctoral Research Fellowship for Heather McLean and a SSHRC Standard Research Grant for Barbara Rahder.

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Heather McLean and Barbara Rahder

Faculty of Environmental Studies

York University