Striking from Below: Tenant Organizing as Insurgent Planning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Major Paper examines tenant organizing in Toronto in the context of two overlapping crises: an affordable housing crisis and a crisis in landlord-tenant governance. This research introduces the concept of ‘tenant insurgency', which describes the process by which working class tenants challenge landlords outside of entrenched institutions and laws that govern the landlord-tenant relationship. This research applies theories of insurgent planning, insurgent citizenship, and feminist care ethics to discuss how tenant organizing represents a strategic, bottom-up response to the systemic failures of governmental and legal institutions in safeguarding tenants' rights. Using a mixed-methods qualitative research design consisting of semi-structured interviews and document and media analysis, this research investigates the history, motivations, limitations, and opportunities of tenant organizing in Toronto. Key findings suggest that the insurgent planning practices and strategies undertaken by tenants stem from a distrust in the legal system, prioritize collective action, and create new tenant infrastructures of care beyond the traditional legal system. Findings also reveal the fragmented landscape of tenant organizing, shaped by variegated goals, political motivations, and strategies of tenant organizing groups. This research argues that tenant insurgency not only addresses immediate rental housing struggles but also calls for a re-imagining of landlord-tenant governance and political participation, shifting the scales in power to the end of working class tenants. This research contributes to counter-hegemonic scholarship on insurgent planning and citizenship, landlordtenant governance, and housing justice, offering practical insights to scholars, planning and urban policy practitioners, and social movement organizers in cities of the Global North.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".