Sébastien Lambelet will present preliminary results of the field reserach he is conducting in Toronto for about a year. Since his arrival in this large and fascinating city, Sébastien is puzzled by the way city politics constantly get influenced by higher level of governments and market changes, thereby making city authorities unable to properly plan and steer urban development. In this context, Sébastien will argue that Toronto is currently governed by a “regime of throwntogetherness” (see Massey 2005, 2007).

His talk will retrace the evolution of Toronto’s growth regime since the 1998 amalgamation, underlying that a coherent land use policy regime was established in the 2000s, as a progressive backlash to amalgamation. However, since the early 2010s, this policy regime has been progressively und successfully dismantled by a succession of legislative reforms undertaken by conservative leaders in the name of market and governmental efficiencies. Sébastien will critically discuss this evolution and argue that, instead of solving Toronto’s housing “crisis”, market solutionism turns city politics into apolitical debates, thereby a) overlooking policy alternatives and b) reinforcing the preemptive power of developers and financialized landlords (see Stone, 1988).