Moving through Toronto’s PATH: Assembling private urban governance

Abstract

This paper explores Toronto’s urban PATH, a 30 km network of underground pedestrian tunnels and elevated walkways that connect shopping areas, residential towers, mass transit and downtown destinations. Both as a case and heuristic, this paper situates Toronto’s PATH as an assemblage of private urban governance forms, exploring emergent and evolving constellations of power and responsibility for governing city space that defy easy distinctions of ‘public’ or ‘private’. As an urban assemblage, the PATH comprises potential and actual entities and associations, and is an accumulation of encounters. Never a stable or static entity, the PATH and its governance, we argue, is provisional, revealing constantly evolving connections, alignments and political-economic potentialities. We contend the PATH serves as a palimpsest of mutating governing relations; a multiplicity of meanings, visions and encounters etched into the built environment. By focusing on public and private vestiges, wayfinding, and visibility, and private verticalising ventures, we highlight how practices, logics, processes, urban actors and their histories collide to form fragile, provisional urban alignments and visions.