Stefan Kipfer
York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies, Faculty Member
- Politics, Urban Studies, Critical Social Theory, Geography, Marxism, Anticolonial Theory, and 23 moreHenri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, The Global Political Economy, Everyday Life, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Urban Ecology, Toronto, Hegemony, Canada, Human Geography, Neoliberalism, Urban Space, Paris, Gentrification, Urbanization, Racialization, Environmental Humanities, Radical Geography, France, Neocolonialism, and Imperialismedit
This paper establishes a theoretical linkage between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. Gramsci’s critical-historicist method and its relationship to humanism, his integral understanding of Marxism, and emphasis on the moment of political... more
This paper establishes a theoretical linkage between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. Gramsci’s critical-historicist method and its relationship to humanism, his integral understanding of Marxism, and emphasis on the moment of political practice resonate with Fanon’s articulation of the subjective and political-economic aspects of the colonial question, his activistic materialism, and his dialectically humanist universalism forged through anti-colonial struggle. Establishing this linkage presupposes engaging distinct currents of postcolonial Gramscianism in relation to each other and to the philological turn in Gramsci scholarship. In turn, a Gramsci–Fanon convergence helps elucidate the specificities of (post-)colonial contexts without elevating these into a civilisational-ontological difference. Emphasising their geographical sensitivity as a meeting point, pushing Gramsci towards Fanon helps us treat the global South and imperial heartlands relationally, in historico-geographica...
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In early October 2008, activists held the second Social Forum of Popular Neighbourhoods (Forum social des quartiers populaires (FSQP)) in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. Organized by movement groups from Paris (Mouvement de l’Immigration et... more
In early October 2008, activists held the second Social Forum of Popular Neighbourhoods (Forum social des quartiers populaires (FSQP)) in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. Organized by movement groups from Paris (Mouvement de l’Immigration et des Banlieues (MIB)), Toulouse (Motivé-e-s), and Lyon (Divercité), the Forum was sponsored by a wide variety of movement organizations active on issues of unemployment, poverty, housing, racism, police violence, women’s equality, imperialism, education, arts and culture. Among them were also more recent organizations like Popular Ecological Zone (Zone Écologie Populaire (ZEP)), an environmental justice group that tries to redefine green politics by taking into account how residents in popular neighbourhoods carry a disproportionate burden of environmental degradation.
A few short years after the ‘Revolution against Capital’, various currents of the left were forced to grapple with fascism as a new political problem. It is an understatement to say that, during the interwar period, the strategic puzzles... more
A few short years after the ‘Revolution against Capital’, various currents of the left were forced to grapple with fascism as a new political problem. It is an understatement to say that, during the interwar period, the strategic puzzles posed to revolutionaries by fascism were never resolved satisfactorily. Today, the problematic of fascism is back with a vengeance. It threatens to outgrow what Stuart Hall called authoritarian populism, either because explicit fascist elements have risen from margin to centre within the populist right, or because forces with direct links to fascist or neo-fascist histories have outflanked their radicalized counterparts in the bourgeois right. The latter case applies to France. There, the resurgence of the Front National (which appeared moribund for a second time a mere ten years ago) has put the problem of ‘antifascism’ back on the agenda with a vengeance. During the 2017 Presidential election, which saw the FN garner a record number of votes in th...
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Debates about comparative method have been at the forefront of English-language urban studies during the last two decades. In one sense, these debates simply derive from and help sustain the crucial labour process of urban research. In... more
Debates about comparative method have been at the forefront of English-language urban studies during the last two decades. In one sense, these debates simply derive from and help sustain the crucial labour process of urban research. In other respects, the rise of comparative method to foremost prominence has demonstrated theoretical differences in the field. The heat that some of these debates have occasionally generated (e.g. on scale, global cities, assemblage and planetary urbanisation) alerts us to the political stakes involved in comparison. These range from the micro-political dynamics of knowledge creation to various macrological considerations. In this paper, I deal not only with the political implications of comparative projects, I also raise the question: how do political strategies produce comparative perspectives? After a few observations about comparative debates in urban research and beyond, I zero in on Frantz Fanon’s tricontinental internationalism as a generator of ...
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This article confronts debates about extended and concentrated urbanization with Indigenous claims to time and space. It does so in part by discussing the degree to which notions of extended and concentrated urbanization allow us to... more
This article confronts debates about extended and concentrated urbanization with Indigenous claims to time and space. It does so in part by discussing the degree to which notions of extended and concentrated urbanization allow us to understand the dynamics of pipeline politics in Canada, notably Indigenous claims leveled at infrastructure projects. It argues that Lefebvre-inspired research is both promising and insufficient in this regard. Their promises can only be realized provided one considers urban research as mediation (between everyday life and the social order), contextualize urbanization as a product of non-linear histories through which ‘city’ and ‘non-city’ are transformed or reinstituted as socio-spatial forms, and take seriously imaginaries that may not only contest but also refuse the expansion of the urban field. Meeting these conditions is not possible without resorting to other, non-Lefebvrean approaches that help us understand the settler-colonial aspects of Canadi...
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Abstract This paper analyses the rise of authoritarian populism in the City of Toronto. We interpret the first term of Rob Ford’s mayoralty (2010–2014) as a racialized attempt to re-organize bourgeois rule within the contradictions of... more
Abstract This paper analyses the rise of authoritarian populism in the City of Toronto. We interpret the first term of Rob Ford’s mayoralty (2010–2014) as a racialized attempt to re-organize bourgeois rule within the contradictions of Canadian and Toronto politics. The Ford mayoralty has not congealed in a populist regime. As an unfinished project, Ford-ism does, however, represent a radicalizing moment in the uneven development of the new Right “revolution” that has remade Canada since the 1980s. In Toronto, the unevenness of authoritarian populism is expressed in Ford’s attempt to reinvent and cement a pre-existing political divide between “downtown” and the “suburbs.”
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Abstract In their study of the redevelopment of public housing in Toronto's Regent Park, Stefan Kipfer and Jason Petrunia challenge the Third Way urbanism that largely dominates academic and political debate about housing... more
Abstract In their study of the redevelopment of public housing in Toronto's Regent Park, Stefan Kipfer and Jason Petrunia challenge the Third Way urbanism that largely dominates academic and political debate about housing today. Tracing the limits of place-based ...
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Research Interests: Sociology, Human Geography, Politics, Colonialism, Urbanism, and 3 moreHegemony, Redevelopment, and Antipode
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The post-colonial has often functioned as a code word for a form of French post-theory. In more recent efforts to reconstruct linkages between metropolitan Marxism and counter-colonialism, the post-colonial refers to an open-ended... more
The post-colonial has often functioned as a code word for a form of French post-theory. In more recent efforts to reconstruct linkages between metropolitan Marxism and counter-colonialism, the post-colonial refers to an open-ended research field for investigating the present weight of colonial histories. But even in these reformulations, post-colonial research presents formidable challenges to Euro-American urban Marxism. In this context, this paper redirects Henri Lefebvre’s work to analyse post-colonial situations. It traces in particular the notion of ‘colonisation’ as it develops from his critique of everyday life (which signalled an extension of his critique of alienation) to his work on the state (where the notion reappears in discussions of theories of imperialism). We argue that Lefebvre’s notion of ‘colonisation’ (which refers to multi-scalar strategies for organising territorial relations of domination) presents a promising opening to understanding the ‘colonial’ aspects o...
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Toronto is the largest and most populous city in Canada. The metropolis on Lake Ontario has a land area of 622 square ki-lometres and a population of 2.4 million. After the city was consolidated from previ-ously seven municipalities in... more
Toronto is the largest and most populous city in Canada. The metropolis on Lake Ontario has a land area of 622 square ki-lometres and a population of 2.4 million. After the city was consolidated from previ-ously seven municipalities in 1998, City Council has endorsed the preparation ...
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In den sechziger Jahren kommentierte Hans Blumenfeld die auffallende Ahnlichkeit von Bevolkerung und Ausdehnung seiner neuen Heimatstadt Toronto und seiner Geburtsstadt Hamburg. Naturlich war Blumenfeld von der enormen Unterschiedlichkeit... more
In den sechziger Jahren kommentierte Hans Blumenfeld die auffallende Ahnlichkeit von Bevolkerung und Ausdehnung seiner neuen Heimatstadt Toronto und seiner Geburtsstadt Hamburg. Naturlich war Blumenfeld von der enormen Unterschiedlichkeit der urbanen Formen und Dichte der beiden Stadte irritiert. Trotzdem fand er, dass Hamburg und Toronto, im Hinblick auf stadtisches Wachstum, eine ahnliche Problematik hatten. Es ist erstaunlich, dass es, wahrend Toronto und Hamburg in den sechziger Jahren etwa die gleiche Dichte in ihren Stadtkernen und im gesamten Stadtgebieten hatten, in Hamburg „eine erheblich grosere Bevolkerungsgruppe auserhalb der Gemeindegren-zen“ als in Toronto gab — dies obwohl die Hamburger Bebauung zu drei Vierteln aus Geschosswohnungsbau bestand, und es in Toronto weniger als ein Viertel Geschosswohnungsbau gab. Auserdem gab es in Hamburg seit uber einem halben Jahrhundert den Schnellbahnverkehr, den motorisierten Individualverkehr verstarkt erst seit 1954, wahrend in Toronto das Auto seit den zwanziger Jahren verbreitet war und die erste U-Bahn erst 1954 eroffnet wurde (Blumenfeld, 1979: 290).
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This paper analyses recent developments in urban planning in the City of Toronto. A municipality of 2.4 million inhabitants that makes up the inner half of the Greater Toronto Area, the City of Toronto was consolidated from seven... more
This paper analyses recent developments in urban planning in the City of Toronto. A municipality of 2.4 million inhabitants that makes up the inner half of the Greater Toronto Area, the City of Toronto was consolidated from seven municipalities in 1998. Planning practice, ...
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Research Interests: Gramsci and Frantz Fanon
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This article may be individually cited under its original titles: Boucher, N., (2008). Dream to Ride Out the World . . . and Beyond: Movement, Travel and Dream in Occidental and Indigenous Ontologies. Across urban studies there is an... more
This article may be individually cited under its original titles: Boucher, N., (2008). Dream to Ride Out the World . . . and Beyond: Movement, Travel and Dream in Occidental and Indigenous Ontologies.
Across urban studies there is an increasing preoccupation with the forms of articulation that link a multiplicity of cities across a region often known as the ‘Global South’. How do cities such as Jakarta, São Paolo, Dakar, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, Beirut, Dubai, Karachi, for example, take note of each other and engage in various transactions with each other in ways that are only weakly mediated by the currently predominant notions of urbanism? What might be the lines of connection and how do different cities recognize and experience the textures of their different histories and characters? Six urbanists are assembled here to write in conversation with each other as a way to embody possible collaborative lines of inquiring about these issues.
Across urban studies there is an increasing preoccupation with the forms of articulation that link a multiplicity of cities across a region often known as the ‘Global South’. How do cities such as Jakarta, São Paolo, Dakar, Lagos, Mumbai, Hanoi, Beirut, Dubai, Karachi, for example, take note of each other and engage in various transactions with each other in ways that are only weakly mediated by the currently predominant notions of urbanism? What might be the lines of connection and how do different cities recognize and experience the textures of their different histories and characters? Six urbanists are assembled here to write in conversation with each other as a way to embody possible collaborative lines of inquiring about these issues.
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This special review symposium is devoted to a critical investigation of arguments for a socially and economically progressive American ''new regionalism''. The distinction between ''old'' and... more
This special review symposium is devoted to a critical investigation of arguments for a socially and economically progressive American ''new regionalism''. The distinction between ''old'' and ''new'' regionalisms refers to the difference between inter-and post-war institutional ...
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Over the last three decades, the urban world has been shaped by twin processes of socio-spatial restructuring and state reorganization. Projects of ''state rescaling'' (Brenner 2002a, 2002b), for example, have been... more
Over the last three decades, the urban world has been shaped by twin processes of socio-spatial restructuring and state reorganization. Projects of ''state rescaling'' (Brenner 2002a, 2002b), for example, have been promoted in dominant institutions of the Washington Consensus (the ...