Jane’s Walk | Noticing possibility in Mississauga City Centre

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Noticing possibility in Mississauga City Centre, with Jes F and Rahul M

Saturday, 2 May 2026 | 12:00 p.m. | Contemplating Child sculpture, Community Common Park, 34 Princess Royal Drive at Living Arts Drive

Mississauga City Centre is a “vertical suburb around a mall”, a “triumph of bad policy over logic”. Its own mayor calls it “boring”. These may all ring true, especially from behind a windshield or an infinite scroll.

But what truths might exist alongside these portrayals—truths that might help realize a more livable, more neighbourly community? 

This walk is about the art of paying attention to possibility in Mississauga City Centre: possibility as it actually exists, as it waits for a slight nudge, and as it speaks to challenges faced by North American suburbs seeking to transition away from car dependency. It will feature conviviality in lesser-known parks and side streets, buried creeks waiting to be daylighted, and public facilities with the potential for civic activation.

A section of the walk will be devoted to Community Commons Park and the Living Arts Centre: two unique public spaces that are decried as “underutilized” by the present mayor and targeted for a $4 billion redevelopment. Another section of the walk will feature civic spaces around Celebration Square: as they have been variously transformed for the better, closed off or hidden from the public, or wait for people and government to take pride in these places.

Duration: 2 hours.

Walk start: Contemplating Child sculpture, Community Common Park, 34 Princess Royal Drive at Living Arts Drive, Mississauga.

Walk end: Same as walk start location.

Themes: Advocacy and politics, Architecture and Urban Planning, Arts and Culture, People and Communities

Accessibility: Stairs or other barriers, Breaks encouraged, Indoor stops, Washroom, There will be convenience stores and cafes along the route.

Attendees Identify You: We will have an orange Jane’s Walk sign.

Jane’s Walk | Water and time

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Cooksville Creek, from microseasons to this millennium

Sunday, 3 May 2026 | 2:00 p.m. | John C. Price Playground to oldest(??) tree in Mississauga City Centre

Let’s take a walk along Mississauga’s Cooksville Creek, as an exercise in traveling deep, and not far across both time and space. Let’s have conversations about what brings us—people, peoples, and place; humans and nonhumans; ancestors and future kin—together; about portals to an alternate, actually-existing Mississauga; about inhabiting a place; and about water.

Duration:

2:00:00

Walk start:

John C. Price Playground, Little John Lane, off Dundas Street East.
Closest major intersection: Dundas and Hurontario.
Five-minute walk to 1 Dundas and 2 Hurontario MiWay bus routes.

Walk end:

Oldest(??) tree in Mississauga City Centre.
Closest major intersection: Burnhamthorpe and Hurontario.
Five-minute walk to 2 Hurontario, 26 Burnhamthorpe, 10 Bristol, and 20 Rathburn MiWay bus routes.

Route info:

Most of our route will be within a ten-minute walk (or less) from the 2 Hurontario and 3 Bloor MiWay bus routes.

Washrooms and vending machines will be available at a little past the midway point, at Mississauga Valleys Park.

Themes:

Environment and Sustainability, History and Places, Lived experiences and personal perspectives, People and Communities

Accesibility:

Uneven terrain, Stairs or other barriers, Breaks encouraged.

This walk is not a loop, though the start point can be reached from the end point using transit.

Attendees Identify You:

I will have an orange backpack.

Empire as insular, unsophisticated, incoherent

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Commentary on Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire

At the 2025 AAG Meeting in Detroit, I was part of an author meets readers panel for Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire.

The panel was organized by Christian C. Lentz, Michael Hawkins, and Joseph Palis, and included commentary from Kristian Saguin, Mona Domosh, Don Mitchell, and myself.

A version of our comments was published in September 2025 for the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. What follows is my original unabridged commentary.

Let me begin by making a distinction between the violence and injustice of American imperialism on one hand, and its sophistication, coherence, and success on the other. Though at perpetual risk of erasure, the evidence for the former in the Philippines is plentiful. But this is not necessarily evidence of a total, nor monolithic, nor coherent project.

To resist the erasure of American imperialism, and to understand its ongoing legacies, it is important not to ascribe to it more power than it could actually muster. We could instead name its weaknesses and contradictions, through finer-grained close studies, and show just how vain, incomplete, and unsuccessful its schemes are. And what better way to do this than to study Great Men and their Grand Designs, at the height of their hubris?

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The definition and control of land and populations in the crisis century

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Counterinsurgency, disaster risk reduction, and territorialisation in the Philippines

This article attempts to make historical and institutional sense of the Philippine state’s violent responses to unfolding ecological crises. It reframes the relationship between a ‘weak’ state and a ‘high-risk’ territory as part of an ongoing process of territorialisation, that is, ways of knowing and controlling territories and populations. By tracing organisational forms and lineages, personnel and practices, it finds that the Philippine state had come to rely on its security forces to organising and staff its new disaster risk management bureaucracies. This is partly an outcome of the military developing the central state’s most credible capability in disaster response, through civil-military operations; a reoccurrence of patterns that span previous rounds of state formation, as impelled by managing risks over a tenuously consolidated territory; and an entrenchment of a pathway of elite formation of rewarding retired officers with experience in combat command with posts in the civilian bureaucracy, itself a way of managing the risk of unrest among security forces. Routines, subjectivities and ideologies of counterinsurgency came to be transposed to reducing and managing disaster risk, alongside the deprecation of other possible forms of expertise.

This article appears in a special issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint on the theme More-than-complex: Governance and place in Philippine disaster management.

It is the final form of work I had previously presented at the Governing Complex Disasters in Southeast Asia workshop in 2023.

Read the full article here.