‘Cleaning up’ the neighbourhood: Affective dynamics of environmental gentrification

This article examines how affect shapes trajectories of environmental gentrification through a study of greening in several downtown neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada. Following the 1990s, two decades of greening practices in the West End neighbourhoods of Wallace-Emerson, Bloorcourt, Bloordale, and Sterling Junction have produced geographies of exclusion wherein unruly ‘toxic’ beings have been vilified, policed, and targeted for removal. An affective account of gentrification reveals how certain bodies become marked for intentional displacement. The author explores fear as a powerful affective force, used to justify various environmental and affective practices directed towards ‘cleaning up’ the neighbourhood. These practices serve to disrupt existing more-than-human relations, displacing and marginalizing inhabitants who are understood as ‘invasive’ outsiders and as part of an assemblage of waste that must be removed. Drawing upon queer scholarship and theory, this article delves into the place-specific intertwining of environmental remediation or ‘cleanup’ with social cleansing, arguing that invasiveness, toxicity, and non-belonging are affectively produced.