Searching for a Public Transit 'Fix': A Multi-Scalar Study of Public Transit Policy in Ottawa and Waterloo Region

In recent years, Canadian governments have embraced transit-led planning strategies as a solution to problems of unsustainable urbanism.With this shift, investments in public transit systems have increased dramatically.This thesis explores the development of public transit policy agendas in two urban contexts, the City of Ottawa and Waterloo Region.It evaluates the priorities underlying particular visions of transit-oriented reform and points to the challenge of equitable transit planning under conditions of growth-first governance.The emergence of transit-oriented reform agendas has taken place as part of a broader project of sustainable city-building.Despite post-political appeals to holistic or triple-bottom-line policymaking, sustainable urbanism is a contested process that seeks to renegotiate ongoing tensions between the perceived exigencies of growth-first neoliberalism and the conditions of collective reproduction in the city.This negotiation has been characterized as a search for a 'sustainability fix' (While et al. 2004).In this thesis, I examine how public transit policymaking helps to constitute this search for a stable political and institutional 'fix'.In this thesis, urban policymaking is analyzed as a multi-scalar process.Transit policy is constituted across federal, provincial, regional, and municipal scales of governance.The thesis explores this multi-scalar process using an ideational-institutional approach.It analyzes the ways in which actors interpret and represent institutional contexts, as well as the ways in which institutional contexts filter and structure political demands.Transit policy agendas are negotiated across scales, but are also shaped by Canada's distinctive institutional form of urban governance.to provide a corrective to Regime's narrow empirical focus on local politics.The first draws from the 'new institutionalism' in political science and analyses cross-national variation in forms of urban governance.What this literature shows is that the practice of local politics is conditioned in important ways by state-specific institutional forms, including the institutions of federalism, cultural traditions and norms, national and regional urban policies, and electoral systems.The second literature is rooted in a political economy of scale and situates changing modes of urban governance in relation to processes of state-spatial restructuring.For scale theorists, the concerns of the New Urban Politics can only be understood as part of a larger process of institutional transformation associated with the collapse of national regimes of Keynesian-Fordism.These two forms of state theory are clearly distinct.I argue, however, that they are ultimately complementary.In contrast to the new urban institutionalism, the political economy of scale embraces a much more radical socio-spatial conception of the state.It conceives of the state not only as spatially malleable, prone to occasional periods of geographical restructuring, but it connects such transformations to the state's role in regulating the contradictions of a crisis-prone capitalist political economy.Importantly, though, authors like Neil Brenner have emphasized the path-dependent nature of state-spatial restructuring.New institutional geographies are layered on top of existing architectures and thus reflect historical conditions in all manner of ways.On my reading, then, the political economy of scale entails a radicalization of the new urban institutionalism, explaining competitive city politics as place-specific manifestations of after-Fordist state restructuring strategies.This state theoretic account provides an important corrective to the localism of the Regime Approach by situating local politics within their proper multi-scalar institutional context.

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