A Case Study on the Uses and Users of Contemporary Urban Public Space

This paper draws on the problematisation of squeegeeing and aggressive panhandling during the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s in Toronto, to explore the way concerns about public disorder are framed within political discourse. In so doing, it highlights and remedies an important void in the literature which connects vagrancy legislation to concerns about consumption. While this literature does well to expose how vagrancy law is enacted and deployed for consumption, it does little to explicate the production of the rhetoric of consumption itself. What requires attention is the way consumption is linked to and conflated with the rhetorics of civility and community: the former serving to optimise consumption; the latter to resolve the paradoxes of consumption. The enactment and deployment of vagrancy law, therefore, ought to be situated within what may be called the community–civility–consumption triad. [considered] a crime. [I]t’s frightening to think that at the end of this century a vagrancy law that had never been prosecuted in... over a half century, would now be revived... I hope that’s not the intention [here today]. It would be frightening that this is in fact the revival of vagrancy laws (Michael Bryant, Oppositio