Constructing a Just City: A Feminist Theo-Ethical Contribution

As it has been materialized in urban environments, the ideology of neoliberalism has produced the conditions for increasing economic inequality in Toronto and in many other North American cities. Both poverty and extreme wealth are on the rise, and in Toronto, these disparities are spatialized, which is to say, they are mapped into and onto the urban landscape. Urbanized neoliberal political economic relations can be recognized by the prioritization for the concerns and interests of wealthy private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations and financial capital, through the commodification of human lives and particular ethno-cultural ‘others,’ and through the disregard for the needs of the most vulnerable city dwellers. Neoliberal urbanization, as a spatial strategy, has consequences on the sense of self of urban inhabitants. When cities are built and maintained with the priorities of wealthy urban inhabitants in mind and premised on a neglect for the needs of the most economically disenfranchised, all urban inhabitants are scripted to think of themselves as responsible for their own (economic) well-being, not for the (economic and social) well-being of others. In this thesis, I address the moral problems of urban economic injustice and neoliberal subjectivity spawned by neoliberal urbanization. Using liberative, feminist and materialist methods, I propose a theo-ethical moral vision for middle-class urban Christian inhabitants to become moral agents who are able to resist with the hope to transform spatialized structural injustice, and the commodification of human life. To do so, I suggest the moral norms of responsible relationality, public neighbour love understood as stranger love, and justice-love. I develop the metaphor of God’s body as made up of connective tissues of love in order to understand what it is that love is and asks of disciples of Jesus in the context of urban neoliberalization. I examine the transformative city building practices of participatory planning and the right to the city movement as seeds of hope for the future. I argue for participatory art as a moral and spiritual resource for moral agents in the pursuit of economically just cities.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD