Ce travail s’inscrit dans un contexte de mondialisation croissante accompagné d’une importante métropolisation qui tout en concourant au développement de certaines villes qui forment désormais un réseau mondial pilotant l’économie, se trouvent face à un certain nombre de défis de nature diverse (sociale, économique ou environnementale) auxquels elles doivent apporter des réponses. C’est la question de la gouvernance métropolitaine, qui constitue la réponse principale à ces challenges que la thèse se propose d’étudier. Au travers d’une analyse de Toronto, capitale économique du Canada et capitale politique de l’Ontario, dans ses dynamiques économiques et sociales actuelles (notamment les effets du multiculturalisme sur l’attractivité de la métropole) ainsi que dans leurs conséquences politiques et au travers d’une série d’entretiens avec les acteurs locaux et provinciaux, publics et privés, ce travail propose de confronter les théories existantes pour mieux cerner leurs limites. Au terme de cette étude, un regard croisé avec l’agglomération parisienne est proposé pour permettre d’élargir le propos et de justifier la nécessité non d’une gouvernance mais d’une politique métropolitaine, menée à l’échelle nationale pour définir périmètres, acteurs, compétences et enjeux. C’est par le biais de cette politique, mettant en place une institution métropolitaine chargée de gérer les problèmes actuels de métropoles que l’on doit parvenir à conjuguer la nécessaire attractivité économique avec le bien-être des populations. / This study examines the social, economic and environmental challenges facing cities that have emerged as global economic hubs as a result of increased globalization and significant metropolitanization. Of particular interest is the issue of metropolitan governance, which is key to overcoming those challenges and is the focus of this thesis. Through an analysis of the city of Toronto, economic capital of Canada and of Ontario politics, its current economic and social dynamics (including the impact of multiculturalism on the attractiveness of the metropolis) and their political consequences; and through a series of interviews with key players from the local and provincial, as well as public and private sectors, this study will examine the existing theories in order to better define their limits. At the end of this study, the juxtaposition of the Parisian agglomeration is explored in order to further the issue and to justify the need, not of metropolitan governance, but of metropolitan policy, exercised at the national level which will define the scope, the players, the competencies and the stakes. It is through this metropolitan policy, which would implement a metropolitan institution in charge of managing the current problems of metropolises, that we need to coalesce economic attractiveness and population well being.

There has been a history of a strained relationship between the public and the police institution for decades; most recently as a result of documented high levels of arrest rates among marginalized communities. Stop and frisk practices have been active in the United States since the 1950s and have been studied academically in the United States since the 1990s. However, research concerning Canadian data is limited. This project, using Bourdieusian concepts (field, habitus, capital, and doxa) with other resistance to change/police culture research, addresses the gaps in literature surrounding the practice of ‘carding’ in Canada by determining the forms of strategies and capital used by parties to defend and contest the police practice in the city of Toronto. Using a form of Document Analysis, this project created inductive categories from reports and recommendations submitted by the Toronto Police, several activist groups, and the province of Ontario between the years of 2012-2015. Findings from this paper were similar to previous literature; however, we saw an emotional argument surrounding the use of risk emerge through those justifying the police practice of ‘carding’. This emotional argument relied on a platform of fear and risk discourse, arguing that having limited faith in police not only goes against previously accepted practices, but places our communities in greater potential danger. Furthermore, our findings showed that narratives presented by those contesting the practice of ‘carding’ saw legal and factual arguments emerge which were not seen in previous literature. These legal and factual arguments focused on Constitutionality and statistics to contest the practice of ‘carding’, rather than rely on emotional arguments as seen in previous literature. This project allowed for a snapshot of the case in Toronto to help understand the issue in a Canadian context. Many themes developed were similar to previous literature; however, we saw a new emotional argument surrounding a risk discourse and those contesting ’carding’ have accessed the legal ‘field’ to express concerns. Directions for future research are presented at the end of this study.

A descent into the ravine is a step through a tear in urbanity. The terrain vague is a foil to the capitalist city; against a demand for order, specificity, and integration, it is disorienting, banal, erratic. Operating outside the constraints of dominant social structures, it harbours the unconscious of the city, not only an inevitable, but also a necessary rupture in the urban fabric. In this subterranean realm, the striated and measured plots of land are sporadically smoothed over by persistent nature, reclaiming its territory. These perceived voids invite projections of desire, both at a civic scale and on an individual level, that consequently shape the space. These are grounds of negotiation, a political realm often driven more by visceral impulses than economics. They aggravate tensions typically suppressed in the city, including those wrought by violence and melancholy. This is a portrait of the Don Valley in Toronto. Fragments of representation reveal the role of this space in the collective memory of the public. Beyond the infrastructure that binds them, the city and the valley are integrated through their opposition: one fuels the experience of the other.

The Canadian firm of Jacques & Hay was in business for fifty years, during which the company, if The Globe (Toronto) is to be believed, furnished the Province of Canada. This was a stunning and largely undocumented success. Jacques & Hay was one of the largest employers in the province and dominated the cabinet-making trade from 1835 to 1885. In 1871, Jacques & Hay employed 430 men and 50 women in a vertically-integrated operation that included a sawmill, two factories and a showroom. Jacques & Hay produced abundant furniture at reasonable prices. The availability of such household furnishings greatly enhanced domestic life in nineteenth-century Canada, providing scope for a more elaborate social life and allowing more people to achieve a greater sense of comfort and decency in their living arrangements.

This case study explores public order policing at the Vancouver Olympics and G20 Summit in Toronto. The source material is drawn from media coverage of these events. These cases are analyzed using prior theoretical works in order policing in order to achieve two research goals: to discover which theory best explains police actions and the extent of and reasons explaining the involvement of other government agencies in securing protest events in Canada. Using pattern matching methodology, it was found that no one particular theory is best at explaining events at the two cases, rather components of various theories provided the most useful insight. The components of these theories that need to be amalgamated through analytic induction are: the use of intelligence functions; police flexibility; as well as paramilitarization tactics. Finally, it was found that there was a noticeable presence and integration of other government agencies involved in securing both events.

This study analyzes the trends in temperature, and their extremes, in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in the context of urban heat island. The trends in annual and seasonal temperature changes were investigated in the GTA over the past century and a half with special focus on 1970-2000. The Mann-Kendall test is used to assess the significance of the trends and the Theil-Sen slope estimator is used to identify their magnitude. Statistically significant increasing trends for mean and minimum temperatures are observed mainly at the urban and suburban stations. The sequential Mann-Kendall test is used to identify any abrupt change in the time series of temperature (31 -161 years), and the results indicate that increasing trend for annual mean temperature has started after 1920 at Toronto downtown, after the 1960s at the suburban stations, and has increased significantly during the 1980s at all stations, which is consistent with the pace of urbanization during these periods in the GTA. The observed urban heat island (UHI) in Toronto is quantified and characterized by considering three different rural stations. The UHI intensity (∆Tu-r) in Toronto is categorized as winter dominating or summer dominating depending on the choice of a rural station. The results from the trend analysis of annual and seasonal ∆Tu-r suggest that the choice of the rural station is crucial in the estimation of ∆Tu-r, and thus can overestimate or underestimate its prediction depending on the location and topographical characteristics of a rural station relative to the urban station. The trends in extreme temperature indices are also investigated and the results indicate that indices based on daily maximum temperature are more pronounced at the urban and suburban stations compared to that at the rural stations. The changes in the trends for extreme indices based on daily minimum temperature are consistent at all stations for the period of 1971-2000. With the decrease in the percentage of cold nights and the increase in the percentage of warm nights, the diurnal temperature range has decreased throughout the GTA region. The analysis of heating degree days and cooling degree days revealed that the former is associated with decreasing trends and the latter exhibited increasing trends at almost all stations in the GTA. Finally, it is evident from the results that urban heat island phenomenon exerts warmer influence on the climate in cities, and with the current pace of urbanization in the GTA, it is imperative to understand the potential impact of the emerging UHI on humans and society.

This dissertation explores human interactions with Toronto’s Don River Valley from the late eighteenth century to the present, focusing on the period of intense urbanization and industrialization between 1880 and 1940. Its concentration on the urban fringe generates new perspectives on the social and environmental consequences of urban development. From its position on the margins, the Don performed vital functions for the urban economy as a provider of raw materials and a sink for wastes. Insights derived from the intersections between social and environmental history are at the heart of this project. The dissertation begins by documenting the industrial history of the river and its transformation from a central provider in the lives of early Toronto residents to a polluted periphery in the latter half of the nineteenth century. An analysis of the valley’s related function as a repository for human “undesirables” reveals connections between the processes that identified certain individuals as deficient “others” and similar imperatives at work in classifying difficult or unpredictable environments as “waste spaces.” Efforts to “reclaim” and improve the river are the subject of the remaining chapters. A series of initiatives between 1870 and 1930 aimed at reconfiguring the lower Don as an efficient corridor for transportation and industrial development reveal in their shortcomings and unintended consequences a failure to accommodate dynamic and often unpredictable ecological processes. Reclamations of a different kind are explored in the conservation movement of the twentieth century, through which the valley emerges as a valuable public amenity. The dissertation concludes by investigating how the valley’s history informs current plans to “renaturalize” the river mouth. Throughout, the Don functions as an autonomous and causal force in the city’s history. On this small river on the urban fringe, nature and society worked in mutually constitutive ways to shape and reshape the metropolis.

The diasporic resources and transnational flows of the Black diaspora have increasingly been of concern to scholars. However, the making of the Black diaspora in Canada has often been overlooked, and the use of sport to connect migrants to the homeland has been virtually ignored. This study uses African, Black and Caribbean diaspora lenses to examine the ways that first generation Caribbean-Canadians use cricket to maintain their association with people, places, spaces, and memories of home. In this multi-sited ethnography I examine a group I call the Mavericks Cricket and Social Club (MCSC), an assembly of first generation migrants from the Anglo-Caribbean. My objective to “follow the people” took me to parties, fundraising dances, banquets, and cricket games throughout the Greater Toronto Area on weekends from early May to late September in 2008 and 2009. I also traveled with approximately 30 MCSC members to observe and participate in tours and tournaments in Barbados, England, and St. Lucia and conducted 29 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with male players and male and female supporters. I found that the Caribbean diaspora is maintained through liming (hanging out) at cricket matches and social events. Speaking in their native Patois language, eating traditional Caribbean foods, and consuming alcohol are significant means of creating spaces in which Caribbean-Canadians can network with other members of the diaspora. Furthermore, diasporas are preserved through return visits, not only to their nations of origin, but to a more broadly defined homeland, found in other Caribbean countries, England, the United States and elsewhere in Canada. This study shows that while diasporas may form a unified communitas they also reinforce class, gender, nation and ethnicity hierarchies and exclusions in diasporic spaces. For example, women and Indo-Caribbeans are mainly absent from or marginalized at the cricket grounds, which celebrates a masculine, Afro-Caribbean culture. Corporeal practices such as sports, and their related social activities, can be deployed as diasporic resources that create a sense of deterritorialized community for first generation Caribbean migrants.

This research examines the relationship between masculinity and recruitment at the University of Toronto during the Great War. Through a gendered framework established by historians such as Judith Butler, masculinity is approached as a constructed process that encompasses a variety of complex relationships between the individual subject and social processes. The following questions are explored: What motivated the administration the University to instate policies that first encouraged, and then forced, male students to enter active service? How did dominant discourses of masculinity influence recruitment efforts and the subsequent movement towards mandatory military training? The research reveals that gendered understandings of war and recruitment on campus presented active service as the defining moment of manhood. Enlisting, then, was understood as more than a willingness to take up arms; it publicly signified that a man was committed to the defense of democracy and to securing the freedom of generations to come.

This thesis draws from ten semi-structured interviews with multiracial men in Toronto, Canada. It is an exploratory study that examines how participants experience race, masculinities and identities. Multiracial identities challenge popular notions of racial categories and expose social processes of racialization and the shifting nature of social identities. I explore how gender impacts participants’ experiences of multiple, fluid or shifting racial identities, and the importance of context in determining how they identify themselves. Participants also discussed the impact of multiculturalism and their understandings of racism in Canada. There were differences in the experiences of Black multiracial men and non-Black multiracial men in terms of how gender and race impact their lives. These differences imply that the colour line in Canada is shifting and that categories like ‘whiteness’ are being redefined. Analyses of these topics are taken up from an anti-racist and critical mixed race studies perspective.