Making a Music City: The Commodification of Culture in Toronto’s Urban Redevelopment, Tensions between Use-Value and Exchange-Value, and the Counterproductive Treatment of Alternative Cultures within Municipal Legal Frameworks

Abstract

Meaningful diversity and inclusion within today’s cities requires attention on many fronts, including that of city redevelopment strategies and policies. To that end, this article focuses on culture-led regeneration strategies—specifically, those of Toronto’s “Music City” initiative and “Creative City” strategy—and unpacks the mechanics of using culture and heritage as tools for redevelopment where their commodification can reveal the clash between divergent value interests that exist within spaces of culture in the city. Sustainable urban development must carefully account for these divergences to avoid the displacement and lack of equitable accounting of relationally vulnerable individuals, groups, (sub)cultures, and space. Counterproductive effects of culture-led redevelopment initiatives which have, despite themselves, wound up either dismantling or failing to curb the disappearance of the “culture” that served as their initial impetus, are an example of where urban governance and planning have not effectively engaged precarious groups and spaces in the city that are affected by redevelopment strategies and where exchange-value interests have overwhelmed use-value interests to their detriment.

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