Condo Conquest

When condominiums first emerged in North American cities in the 1960s, they were a new kind of housing governed by boards of resident owners volunteering in a community. Condo Conquest shows how the condo and its inner governance have since become something else entirely, taken over – or conquered – by an assemblage of commercial interests specializing in condo law, real estate, security, and property management, as well as growing numbers of non-resident investors. Drawing on the accounts of residents and board directors in Toronto and New York and myriad other sources, Randy Lippert reveals how a growing reliance on commodified technologies, emergent forms of knowledge, and the exploitation of renters are threatening the condo’s future and undermining the integrity of urban communities.

This book examines condominium, property, governance, and law in international and conceptual perspective and reveals this urban realm as complex and mutating. Condominiums are proliferating the world over and transforming the socio-spatial organization of cities and residential life. The collection assembles arguably the most prominent scholars in the world currently working in this broad area and situated in multiple disciplines, including legal and socio-legal studies, political science, public administration, and sociology. Their analyses span condominium governance and law on five continents and in nine countries: the United States (US), China, Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, South Africa, Israel, Denmark, and Spain. Neglected issues and emerging trends related to condominium governance and law in cities from Tel Aviv to Chicago to Melbourne are discerned and analysed. The book pursues fresh empirical inquiries and cogent conceptual engagements regarding how condominiums are governed through law and other means. It includes accounts of a wide range of governance difficulties including chronic anti-social owner behaviour, short-term rentals, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they are being dealt with. By uncovering crucial cross-national commonalities, the book reveals the global urban context of condominium governance and law as empirically rich and conceptually fruitful. The book will appeal to researchers and students in socio-legal studies, law, sociology, political science, urban studies, and public administration as well as journalists, social activists, policymakers, and condo owners/board members.

Condoland casts CityPlace – a massive residential development of more than thirty condominium towers just outside Toronto’s downtown core – as a microcosm of twenty-first-century urban intensification. Built almost entirely by a single private developer, this immense neighbourhood took decades to plan, design, and develop, but the end result lacks a sense of place and is not widely accessible to those who need homes: only a small number of its 13,000 units constitute affordable housing, and public amenities are limited. In this richly illustrated volume, James T. White and John Punter reveal the stories behind the design, architecture, and planning of CityPlace. They also consider the tools used to shape Toronto’s built environment and critically assess the underlying political economy of planning and real estate development in the city. Condoland raises key questions about the long-term sustainability and resilience of Canadian cities that acquiesce to the rapacious development industry.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Condominium and comparable legal architectures make vertical urban growth possible, but do we really understand the social implications of restructuring city land ownership in this way? Geographer and architect Megan Nethercote enters the condo tower to explore the hidden social and territorial dynamics of private vertical communities. Informed by residents’ accounts of Australian high-rise living, this book shows how legal and physical architectures fuse in ways that jeopardize residents’ experience of home and stigmatize renters. As cities sprawl skywards and private renting expands, this compelling geographic analysis of property identifies high-rise development’s overlooked hand in social segregation and urban fragmentation, and raises bold questions about the condominium’s prospects.

The purpose of the book is to assess the process of urban verticalization in different contexts through time, to provide insight into the relationships between highrise design and the way inhabitants negotiate them in their everyday lives, to assess how planners, politicians, and designers negotiate residential highrises in the strategies they develop for building the city and to introduce urban narratives and cartographies. Verticalization, although not new, currently takes place in a very different context than post-1945. Today, highrise residential buildings are more than architectural solutions: they are commodities in a global market where capital flows are fixed by developers and municipalities. Our exploration of residential verticalization is anchored in case studies, revealing different types of local-global negotiations in the design of the city, and has been framed by three interrelated dynamics: first, the complex relationships within the financialization of real estate markets, revealing differences in the types of local-global negotiations in the construction of the neo-liberal city; secondly, the most developed, anchors residential verticalization in the processes of socio-spatial differentiation within cities (mostly identified as gentrification associated to processes of urban renewal and densification; the third, related to readings and interpretations of the urban landscape and social, spatial practices and its iconographic and cartographic representations. This book is of interest to academics, students, planners, architects, and urban studies professionals. It shows that the chosen research object is an increasingly relevant angle of analysis of the contemporary city. It also provides a better knowledge of the processes of residential verticalization, their impact on the privatization of the urban space, and on urban segregation or fragmentation.

From the author of the best-selling Feminist City, this urbanite’s guide to gentrification knocks down the myths and exposes the forces behind the most urgent housing crisis of our time. Gentrification is no longer a phenomenon to be debated by geographers or downplayed by urban planners—it’s an experience lived and felt by working-class people everywhere. Leslie Kern travels to Toronto, Vancouver, New York, London, and Paris to look beyond the familiar and false stories we tell ourselves about class, money, and taste. What she brings back is an accessible, radical guide on the often-invisible forces that shape urban neighbourhoods: settler-colonialism, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and more. Gentrification is not inevitable if city lovers work together to turn the tide. Kern examines resistance strategies from around the world and calls for everyday actions that empower everyone, from displaced peoples to long-time settlers. We can mobilize, demand reparations, and rewrite the story from the ground up.

Policing and security provision are subjects central to criminology. Yet there are newer and neglected forms that are currently unscrutinised. By examining the work of community safety officers, ambassador patrols, conservation officers, and private police foundations, who operate on and are animated by a frontier, this book reveals why criminological inquiry must reach beyond traditional conceptual and methodological boundaries in the 21st century. Including novel case studies, this multi-disciplinary and international book assembles a rich collection of policing and security frontiers both geographical (e.g. the margins of cities) and conceptual (dispersion and credentialism) not seen or acknowledged previously.

Any court watcher knows that the Supreme Court of Canada delivers some of its major constitutional judgments in a “By the Court” format. This transformative approach abandons the common law tradition of attributing decisions to individual judges. By the Court is the first major study of these unanimous and anonymous decisions and features a complete inventory, chronology, and typology of these cases. Peter McCormick and Marc Zanoni explore the origins, purposes, and potential future of “By the Court,” framing this practice as uniquely Canadian, and the most dramatic form of a modern style that highlights the institution and downplays individual contributions.