From delay to dispossession
Eviction as slow violence in Toronto’s bureaucratic housing system
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8136556 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kevin Mark Bonnell (0000-0003-4281-6086, University of Waterloo, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-20 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Race Ethnicity and the City (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2688-4674 • E-ISSN: 2688-4682 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/26884674.2025.2608844 |
| OpenAlex | W7125476814 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 23 |
This article examines eviction in Toronto, Canada, as a racialized and bureaucratically coordinated form of slow violence. Eviction is often framed as a legal or policy issue, yet this study shows how displacement unfolds through institutional delays, misrecognition, and procedural ambiguity that intensify harm experienced by systemically marginalized tenants. Drawing on 24 tenant interviews, detailed tribunal observations, Critical Race Theory, and Institutional Ethnography, the analysis identifies four interconnected harms: anticipatory surveillance, epistemic erasure, legal ambiguity, and relational dispossession. These harms demonstrate eviction as an extended condition of vulnerability structured by race, time, and administrative practice. Building on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, the article argues that planning timelines, tribunal delays, and legal scripts operate as mechanisms of racialized harm. The analysis introduces administrative drift as a way to understand how bureaucratic inaction, silence, and repetition organize dispossession. Eviction is shown to be a spatial and temporal process of racialized governance that requires sustained scholarly and policy attention to bureaucratic time, credibility, and institutional responsibility.
Bureaucracy · Eviction · Government (linguistics · Work (physics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Urban Planning and Governance · Urbanization and City Planning
The Common Place of Law
Everyday Law on the Street
Evictions
“When We Do Evict Them, It’s a Last Resort”
Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City
Institutional Ethnography
Race matters (even more than you already think)
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Racial and Gender Disparities among Evicted Americans
Feeling out of it
Institutional ethnography and data analysis
From eviction to evicting
Evictions as infrastructural events
Slow emergencies
Chronic urban trauma
It's exhausting to create an event out of nothing
What can be known and how? Narrated subjects and the Listening Guide
The Circle of Dispossession
Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |