Neoliberalizing Social Justice in Infrastructure Revitalization Planning: Analyzing Toronto's More Moss Park Project in Its Early Stages

A public consultation process is currently underway to gather ideas on the revitalization of a park and community center in one of Toronto's most economically diverse neighborhoods. This project is a partnership between a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)-focused community center, a private philanthropist, and the City of Toronto. In this article, we argue that More Moss Park is illustrative of the neoliberalization of social justice, in which social justice is touted as central to both the end goal of the project and the planning process that will shape it. We focus on three political moves that underwrite the neoliberalization of social justice in the project. The first is the technicalization of social justice as “know-how,” a form of expertise that one of the main partners claims to have gained via its history of working for sexual minority communities and that it claims to be able to offer in other sociospatial contexts. The second is the normalization of an anonymous private donor as a necessary “silent” partner in urban development whose foremost concern is social justice in the form of neighborhood improvements for marginalized communities. The third is the use of crises of neighborhood insecurity and of budget shortfalls as planning problems whose solutions rest on the suspension of normal planning approaches, thus justifying the use of a public–private partnership. These moves illustrate the ways in which social justice has become neoliberalized not only through narrowing its scope but also through using it as ideological armature to mask marginalizations emerging from urban neoliberalism itself.