Re-territorializing democracy: Social service regionalism and ‘recalibrated’ governance in Ontario’s Peel Region

In 2023-2024, the Ontario government proposed dissolving Peel Region, a two-tier governance structure serving one of Canada’s most diverse and rapidly urbanizing suburban areas. While framed as technocratic restructuring, the initiative was underpinned by political calculation and populist appeals to local autonomy, revealing deeper tensions in how territory, governance and social service delivery are imagined and politicized. Approaching territory as a relational and contested construct—an active force in decision-making and a site of social relations imbued with meaning—the article critically examines the political stage surrounding the proposed dissolution and foregrounds how a network of non-profit social service providers, the Metamorphosis Network of Peel, became a key territorial actor resisting top-down reforms. Although the dissolution plan was ultimately abandoned, it exposed the fragility of state-led governance and opened space for alternative imaginaries and re-territorialization grounded in networks of care infrastructure and embedded forms of expertise. Tracing how Metamorphosis mobilized place-based advocacy and service-oriented networks, we argue that this coordinated response, while not municipalist in a classical or insurgent sense, reflects an incipient form of regionalist praxis that we call here “social service regionalism.” The Peel case contributes to international debates on re-territorialization by advancing a processual, post-sovereigntist account of spatial politics. It illustrates how regional governance is recalibrated in practice not through bureaucratic engineering but through polycentric spatial politics and embedded networks more attuned to local realities.