[URBAN NOTE] "What the Hebdo killings, and their aftermath, say about global cities"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc reflects on what the Paris shootings say about urban cosmopolitanism. His arguments that dealing with urban alienation is critical are sound, but his other arguments? I have serious doubts as to the extent to which basic freedoms should be compromised.

I’d argue that Torontonians can and perhaps should adopt a more critical stance towards the drama playing out in Paris. In an extraordinarily diverse city, where almost half of the residents were born outside Canada, freedom of expression must share the urban stage with that grittier, and more workaday, principle known as civic pluralism.

Sure, Section 2 of the Charter enshrines the right. But for cities like Toronto to function and thrive, its residents must constantly seek out ways to co-exist, and therefore deploy language that aims to surmount, or at least mitigate, seemingly irreconcilable differences.

I’m not suggesting that the satirists and columnists start pulling their rhetorical punches in order to cow-tow to murderous thugs. But in an urban centre where so many people from so many backgrounds live cheek by jowl, often in crowded apartment buildings, it’s neither censorious nor heavy-handed to expect that those who speak publicly be mindful of the potential impact of their words or pictures on the people with whom we share buses, emergency rooms and check-out lines.

Why? ISIS and Al-Qaeda both depend heavily on actively recruiting young men and women from Western cities, and it seems obvious to me that urban alienation — along with poverty, youth unemployment and geographic isolation — is a critical pre-condition to the sort of radicalization that leads to disasters such as this one.

Of course, lots of other factors come into play — access to citizenship, services, and education, to name but three obvious ones. Still, at such an anxious juncture, when the federal Tories are pledging to enact heavy-handed security laws to combat what Prime Minister Stephen Harper last week described as a “war,” Torontonians and their civic leaders should do everything possible to the ensure that the members of the city’s newcomer communities feel as if they truly belong here.