Fearing the Immigrant: Racialization and Urban Policy in Toronto

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A fascinating deep dive into one citys urban policyand the anxiety over immigrants that informs it

The city of Toronto is often held up as a leader in diversity and inclusion. In Fearing the Immigrant, however, Parastou Saberi argues that Torontos urban policies are influenced by a territorialized and racialized security agendaone that parallels the War on Terror. Focusing on the figure of the immigrant and so-called immigrant neighborhoods as the targets of urban policy, Saberi offers an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the politics of racialization and the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities.

A comprehensive study of urban policymaking in Canadas largest city from the 1990s to the late 2010s, Fearing the Immigrant uses Toronto as a jumping-off point to understand how the nexus of development, racialization, and security works at the urban and international levels. Saberi situates urban policymaking in Toronto in relation to the dominant policies of international development and public health, counterinsurgency, and humanitarian intervention. Engaging with the genealogies and contemporary developments of major policy techniques involving mapping and policy concepts such as poverty, security, policing, development, empowerment, as well as social determinants of health, equity, and prevention, she scrutinizes the parallel ways these techniques and concepts operate in urban policy and international relations.

Fearing the Immigrant ultimately asserts that the geopolitical fear of the immigrant is central to the formation of urban policy in Toronto. Rather than addressing the root causes of poverty, urban policy as it has been practiced aims to pacify the specter of urban unrest and to secure the production of a neocolonial urban order. As such, this book is an urgent call to reimagine urban policy in the name of equality and social justice.

Reviews

"Fearing the Immigrant is a searing analysis of the colonial management of contemporary global suburban spaces. This dazzling work eschews disciplinary and geopolitical borders to offer a cutting critique of the securitization of the city as domestic warfare and leaves us with bold new ways to think race, struggle, and the future of urban life."Deborah Cowen, author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade

"Innovative and detailed, Fearing the Immigrant opens up Torontos urban policy, both conceptually and geographically. Connecting urban policy to debates around space, state, racialization, and geopolitics, Parastou Saberi makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities."Mustafa Dike, author of Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded

Author Bio

Parastou Saberi is a visiting research fellow at the University of Warwick Department of Politics and International Studies. She is coeditor of Destroy, Build, Secure: Readings on Pacification, and her work has been published in Political Geography and Race & Class, among other journals.