It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.

This chapter defines heritage languages and motivates their study to understand linguistic diversity, language acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics. It outlines the goals of Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto (HLVC), the first project investigating variation in many heritage languages, unifying methods to describe the languages and push variationist sociolinguistic research beyond its monolingually oriented core and majority-language focus. It shows how this promotes heritage language vitality through research, training, and dissemination. It lays out overarching research questions that motivate the project:

• Do variation and change operate the same way in heritage and majority languages?

• How do we distinguish contact-induced variation, identity-related variation, and internal change?

• Do heritage varieties continue to evolve? Do they evolve in parallel with their homeland variety?

• When does a heritage variety acquire its own name?

• What features and structures are malleable?

• How consistent are patterns across languages?

• Are some speakers more innovative?

• Can attitudes affect ethnolinguistic vitality?

• How can we compare language usage rates among communities and among speakers?

This chapter draws cross-linguistic comparisons among the patterns reported in Chapter 5 for three linguistic variables that occur in at least three languages in the project: (VOT), (CASE), and (PRODROP). Conditioning factors, both linguistic and social, are discussed. Collapsing across rate and constraint hierarchy for each variable, we note any indication of change in either. Half the context we examine exhibit stability. Of the eight that indicate difference, half of these can be attributed to English (including both convergence and divergence). With few differences between homeland and heritage speakers to work with, we find few generalizations about what parts of the language, or which languages, change. We do see more change in one morphosyntactic variable, (CASE), than in the phonetic variable (VOT), but less in the other morphosyntactic variable (PRODROP).

Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

A Welshman striving to make it in the English world, Jones’ path toward leadership in the international psychoanalytical movement was long and strenuous. Although not as innovative compared to others included in this volume, he made unique contributions in bringing psychoanalysis to the English-speaking world. On the brink of WWII, he risked his life to go to Vienna, already occupied by the Nazis, where he managed to convince the dying Freud to leave Austria for London. Personally responsible for bringing both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud to England, he was caught in the middle of vicious fights between these two powerful women and their followers, and barely survived a near-fatal heart attack. From age seventy to his death at seventy-nine, Jones labored at completing the 1500-page, three-volume Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, which remains the only officially authorized biography of Freud.

In Canada, lack of permanent immigration status affects migrant students’ ability to seek rights in different settings, producing unsafe conditions and increasing the possibility of deportation. One example of these settings is schooling, as youth who hold precarious immigration status are regularly excluded from higher education. This access issue is widespread and invisibilised across the country. In this chapter, we draw from interviews with migrant students who participated in an Access Project at York University in Toronto to discuss the interlocking barriers precarious status migrants experience due to their immigration status. We specifically focus on one aspect of the Access Project, a bridging course that facilitated students’ entry to higher education by discussing immigration-related content and acquainting them with university procedures. We propose that the bridging course can be understood as a counterspace, where students redefine their narratives by creating counterstories within the university that challenge anti-migrant discourse and political context in their lives.

While the C40 has come to claim a position of global leadership based on a demonstrated ability to generate coordinated action and collective effort, the description of the network presented in Chapter 1 signals that this has not always been the case. This chapter explores the early phase of the C40 (2005-2009) in which the network was characterized by uneven participation and an inability to engender network-wide engagement and coordination. Applying the theory of global urban governance fields brings to light the dynamics of competition and political contestation and links the observed lack of coordination to an inability to achieve convergence around a common identity. The Clinton Climate Initiative and the C40 Chair (occupied by the cities of London and Toronto) and Secretariat each sought to project divergent ideas with respect to how cities of the C40 should “do” global climate governance, yet neither was able to leverage the mechanism of recognition to effectively claim authority and give shape and substance to the governance field. As a result, the governance field remained fragmented and uncoordinated; split, as with so many other city-networks, into a small group of leading cities and a large group of laggards.

Chapter 10 zooms in on resistance in public-housing estates, a most unlikely setting because residents are transient and vulnerable. The chapter presents two pairs of cases, in Toronto and Melbourne, each city displaying a success and a failure in both mobilization and impact. The Toronto cases show how cultural producers engaged in boosterish programming that distracted public opinion from ongoing displacement in one site, while, in the other, experiential tools and preexisting networks combined to foster a strong residents’ voice in revitalization plans and prevented displacement. The analysis of Melbourne’s estates confirms the powerful role of union support and shows how a councillor’s ideology gains salience in the context of multimember districts.

In Chapter 6, the analysis of mobilization moves to examine the complex role of legacy in squats. It starts with a case in which prior protest experience was counterproductive (illustrated with Seoul’s Yongsan) and continues with a comparison of three squats with enduring anarchist legacies (Hamburg’s Gängeviertel and its antecedent protests of Park Fiction and Skam, as well as Toronto’s Pope Squat, and Madrid’s Tabacalera). In these latter three cases, experiential tools and cultural producers were critical to the outcomes. The analysis also illustrates that prior protest is helpful in gaining the squat but an enduring outcome depends heavily on organizational features and varieties of capitalism.

Chapter 9 focuses on protest impact. It begins by illustrating the role of partisan dealignment, with a discussion of Buenos Aires and Santiago. Cases in these cities followed different paths to mobilization, yet in both sites protest had high impact because organizers found allies at the national level. The chapter then illustrates the pivotal role of the councillor in single-member districts with two divergent cases in Toronto, in Mimico and Parkdale. These cases also illustrate the co-optation of the creative class by real-estate developers – an important lesson because signs indicate that co-optation will become more common. The chapter then examines impact under right-wing partisan alignment, an adverse setting for protesters. In Seoul, the same set of protest strategies led tosuccess in a leftist district (in the Duriban case), yet they failed in a conservative ward (in the Myeong-dong case). The final part of the chapter continues in Seoul, illustrating the change in protest following a shift from development regime to a progressive regime: In Mullae, cultural producers resisted displacement by infiltrating institutions and obtaining support through insider lobbying.