This blog post aims to understand how air pollution impacts upon Toronto, who is involved in the assessment of air quality and use this as a lens for understanding air pollution more generally. Graham (2015) has previously stated that understanding air pollutants has been understudied and underdeveloped. This is surprising despite constant lobbying in academia to understand air, given that air is implicit for everyday human and geological life (Sloterdijk, 2009). In understanding the air quality of Toronto, there is a variety of actors and processes, which brings in reference to metabolism, one of Urban Political Ecology’s key debates and theory. Understanding air means we can understand how the city operates as a complex and evolving network.
Toronto previously had a fairly negative record on air pollution in comparison to its Western world compatriots, when compared to cities of similar sizes and populations. In 2004, Toronto Public Health reported that air pollution contributed to around 1700 premature deaths and 6000 hospitalisations as a direct result of pollutants in the Torontonian air. While the numbers have fallen to 1300 and 3550 respectively in a decade since the report, ‘air pollution still has a serious impact on the health of Toronto’s residents’, as of 2014.
From the monitoring that takes place in Toronto, there is evidence to suggest that unequal power relations occur between those who reside near to the main road networks, and those who reside further away. As figure 1 demonstrates, ‘those who live less than 100m from a major road or 500m from a highway… which can result in increased health risks’ (PublicHealthOntario). An area which has a high density of roads, Scarborough, is a highly diverse area, with 67.4% of its population as visible minorities. Typically, minorities reside in poorer areas of Toronto and have stronger associations to SO2 and NO2. This is similar to another global city, Hong Kong, where the poorer are disproportionately located due to prices of property and historical enclaving of immigrants (Wong et al., 2008).
Monitoring has seen a more participatory turn in Toronto. Toronto Environmental Alliance created the INHALE project, aiming at monitoring streets closed off from cars. Participation is one way that the city and its people can join forces to create positive change. It allows those impacted to create their own ways of monitoring and possible solutions (Sahely et al., 2003).
However, the aforementioned changes that Toronto is making to improve its air quality face the threat of its neighbours’ backtracking on progress. Toronto Public Health has estimated that US created pollution causes around 30% of the air-quality related deaths and 1/4 of hospitalisations linked to the quality of air in the City. Similarly to Toronto, there has been a de-scaling of coal-fired energy plants in the US since the turn of the millennium, which has been of benefit to the Canadian city, but proposals by the Trump administration suggest a revival of the American coal industry and minimalist the influence the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has on domestic matters. This is in keeping with his withdrawal from the Paris Summit Agreements. This could pose a new and serious threat to the progress that Toronto has made until now.
This blog has demonstrated that air pollution in Toronto has seen some progress being made, but ultimately is still a serious issue for the City, relatively speaking. In terms of Urban Political Ecology framing, the points made in regards to the policy-making processes of diminished coal power usage, the proximity of residents and businesses to major road networks, the increase in voluntary monitoring and the threat of US-created pollution highlight the intertwined nature of land and the air. These highlight how networks of actors from campaigners to policy-makers are critical for identifying, reducing and monitoring air pollution. Toronto as a ‘global city’ can be assessed through a multi-scalar approach, from the continental threat of the United States’ coal industry revival to the neighbourhood impacts that sewage burning and road networks bring.
Reference List:
Graham, S. (2015) ‘Life support: The political ecology of urban air’, City, 19, 2-3, 192-215.
Sahely, H., S. Dudding and C. Kennedy (2003) ‘Estimating the urban metabolism of Canadian cities: Greater Toronto Area case study’, Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering, 30, 468–83.
Sloterdijk, P. (2009) Terror from the Air (Translated by A. Patton and S. Corcoran), Semiotext(e):Los Angeles.
Wong, C.-M., Ou, C.-Q., Chan, K.-P., Chau, Y.-K., Thach, T.-Q., Yang, L., … Lam, T.-H. (2008) ‘The Effects of Air Pollution on Mortality in Socially Deprived Urban Areas in Hong Kong, China’, Environmental Health Perspectives, 116, 9, 1189–1194.
Further Information:
https://www.torontoenvironment.org/air_quality
https://aqicn.org/city/toronto/
https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/health-wellness-care/health-programs-advice/air-quality/
Word Count: 669
Urban Political Ecology 
A shockingly high number of deaths related to air pollution seen in Toronto – this is significantly higher than I found in Vegas, perhaps that could be due to the higher population of permanent residents in the city? The same pattern of exposure is seen in Vegas, that those living near to roads are more impacted – with this also linking to socio-economic status and minority groups. Vegas is also encouraging more participatory methods to monitor air pollution. I like the relation to politics and the Trump administration and how decisions in other parts of the North American continent are having a knock on effect on Canada’s air quality.
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Thank you for your reply!
I assume that the high proportion of tourists, especially in the areas around the strip where the hotels, casinos etc are, means that exposure to pollutants are only for a very short period of time.
It is quite striking to see that the monitoring of air pollution are being done by groups of scientists or environmental lobbying groups, and interesting to see whether this is the case for other systems like water, waste etc.
America’s impact on Canada’s and Toronto’s air pollution makes things tricky, does Canada formally blame the US and Trump? In doing so, this would cause tensions between the two. This exemplifies the idea that cities can be studied simply by their boundaries, and instead considering outside factors is necessary.
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