Under the paving stones at the Bloordale Beach: Sub-terra urbs nullius and volumetric colonialism in Toronto

Fergie Maxwell

Urban Studies, 2025, vol. 62, issue 12, 2547-2566

Abstract: This article explores a public art project in Toronto, Canada which imagines an in-land beach in an empty lot slated for development to investigate how capitalist urban redevelopment reproduces settler-colonial futurity. News and social media discourse on the project locates a sense of possibility in the site by characterising its sandy infill as inert, empty volume ripe for reinvention. I use this discourse as a lever into the volumetric dimensions of settler-colonial capitalist urban redevelopment: the project, the development in which it attempts to intervene and the discourse of dense, mixed-use planning within which it is caught up collectively imagine the production of space as contingent on the existence of empty subterranean matter. I task geographies of dispossession with moving beyond planar conceptions of spatial difference to attend to how settler-colonial capitalism necessitates the reproduction of empty space conceived in terms of height and depth.

Keywords: capitalism; settler-colonialism; Toronto; urban neoliberalism; volume; 资本主义; 定居殖民主义; 多伦多; 城市新自由主义; 体积 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:62:y:2025:i:12:p:2547-2566

DOI: 10.1177/00420980251318602

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