“Pass me the hookah”: an assessment of Toronto’s ‘shisha ban’ as related to Muslim placemaking, forced displacement, and racializing surveillance By Mitra Fakhrashrafi A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto Copyright 2020 “Pass me the hookah”: an assessment of Toronto’s ‘shisha ban’ as related to Muslim placemaking, forced displacement, and racializing surveillance Mitra Fakhrashrafi Master of Arts Department of Geogrpahy & Planning University of Toronto Copyright 2020 ABSTRACT Toronto’s ‘shisha ban’ came into effect on April 1st, 2016 and has since forced nearly 70 predominantly Black and brown Muslim migrant-owned businesses to close or restructure their livelihoods. Following the passing of the ban, Ali, the owner of Scarborough-based Habibiz Shisha Café, spoke to the cultural and religious significance of shisha and asked, “where else is there for us in this city?” (Hassan, 2016). Through semi-structured interviews and an analysis of the legislation enacted, I look to Ali’s question as a starting point to engage in a study of the relatively new bylaw and its impacts on Muslim placemaking in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Through this thesis, I put forward a non-exhaustive archive of Toronto’s shisha culture and look to traditions of Black, Indigenous, and racialized urban placemaking to consider collective futures beyond racializing surveillance and the unbelonging and displacement which often follows. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Bé naam-e khoda. This thesis would not have been possible without the support, kindness, and generosity of many people. This work began in 2015 following rumors about a city-wide shisha ban. The ensuing passing of the bylaw led to conversations with friends online and in-person about how to protect Toronto’s shisha lounges and the people who frequent them. I am grateful to be in community with people in Toronto who are invested in the futures of Muslim placemaking including the Muslim- identified research participants, without whom this work would not have been possible. I am appreciative for the opportunity to have undertaken this research with the guidance of my supervisor, Dr. Emily Gilbert, whose endless patience, unwavering support and thoughtful insight kept me motivated towards completing this work. Likewise, Emily’s feedback, edits, and questions pushed me to further think through this study, especially with regard to the possibilities for agency and resistance. Lastly, I would like to thank my family and chosen family for keeping me grounded and encouraged and focused (and distracted) throughout the otherwise very isolating writing process. Mersi! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES vi INTRODUCTION 1 Purpose of the study and research questions 1 Significance of the study 1 Summary 4 CHAPTER 1. Theoretical framework and literature review 4 Introduction 4 Placemaking, a ‘sense of place’, and enacting spatial justice 6 Gentrification and forced displacement 12 Racializing surveillance 17 The rise of the shisha lounge: a case study of the Ottoman coffeehouse 20 Literature review summary 29 CHAPTER 2. Methodologies 30 Introduction to research methods 30 Vulnerability and mitigating research risks 31 Data collection 33 Positionality 37 CHAPTER 3. Assessing and analyzing the shisha ban 38 Introduction and terminology 38 A timeline of Toronto’s shisha ban 39 iv Countering the “strict health needs assessment” 51 The financial burden of shisha lounge owners 53 Analyzing the legal challenge 57 Bylaw analysis summary 61 CHAPTER 4. Narrating former shisha lounge patron responses 62 Introducing former shisha lounge patrons 62 BIPOC transformations of the city 67 Affordable places of belonging 69 Citizenship and clashes over space 77 Resisting the white gaze 78 Resisting the auntie gaze 81 No ‘safe’ spaces 84 After the ban 85 “Where now?” 88 CHAPTER 5. Summary and conclusions 93 Study objectives, restated 93 Limitations and recommendations for future research 94 Conclusions 95 BIBLIOGRAPHY 97 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 4.1: DoNothingClub ‘Cold Cutz’ digital mix illustrated cover art Figure 4.2: Hundreds of Muslim community members demonstrate discriminatory bylaw at Toronto City Figure 4.3: Still from The Feeling of Being Watched (2018) Figure 4.4: Screenshot from the music video for “Shisha” (2012) by Massari featuring French Montana Figure 4.5: Jessica Kirk’s playlist listening station and Jean Deaux lyrics as seen at Habibiz (2019) multidisciplinary art exhibit vi INTRODUCTION I: Purpose of the study and research questions This thesis examines Muslim peoples’ fraught, contested and ever-shifting relationships to placemaking in the City of Toronto, as revealed through the government’s ban of hookah waterpipes, or shisha. The ‘shisha ban’ came into effect on April 1st, 2016 and has since forced nearly 70 predominantly Black and brown Muslim migrant-owned businesses to close and/or restructure their livelihoods. Through a series of semi-structured interviews and multidisciplinary artistic interventions, as well as an analysis of the legislation enacted, I illustrate what the City’s banning of shisha lounges means for Muslim peoples’ ‘sense of place’. I first look to traditions of radical placemaking in Toronto and in ‘the West’ more generally to underline the ways that Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ placemaking practices are systematically (albeit differentially) marked by unbelonging, displacement, and racializing surveillance. With a focus on Muslim people navigating the Greater Toronto Area I ask questions such as: What are existing barriers that Muslim people face in creating ‘a sense of place’?; How do shisha lounges serve as important places of communal gathering that oftentimes model alternative ways of sharing and inhabiting space?; What does it mean to further police places predominantly frequented by already hypersurveilled communities?; and How do we collectively imagine futures beyond unbelonging, displacement, and the surveillant mechanisms that seek to maintain white, capitalist, colonial spatial architectures? I explore these questions with the overarching goal of better understanding how the relatively new City of Toronto bylaw prohibiting the smoking of hookah in licensed establishments, aka ‘the shisha ban,’ has impacted Muslim placemaking in the city. An accompanying objective of this work is to narrate Muslim peoples’ experiences with belonging/unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance in shisha lounges and to put forward a non-exhaustive archive of Toronto’s shisha culture. II: Significance of the Study Existing literature and organizing related to the targeted surveillance of Muslim people in Toronto and in Canada has predominantly focused on state funded surveillance programs at the airport, at the border, in workplaces, and in places of worship. For example, situated against the 1 structural backdrop of “whiteness as a cultural signifier for innocence in [the] airport and other border spaces”, Melissa Finn, Jenna Hennebry, and Bessma Momani (2018) look to the “immobilization of racialized and securitized” Muslim people through identity scrutiny, ‘risk’ profiling, and biometric assessment to demonstrate how it leads “many Canadian Arab youth to see themselves as second-class citizens” (Finn et al., 2018, 607). This surveillance and the overarching ‘feeling of being watched’ often results in unconscious self-policing by Canadian Arab youth as well as conscious efforts such as the altering of travel plans (Finn et al., 2018, 669). Finn et al. highlight that, through borders, ‘racializing surveillance’ (Browne, 2015) not only manages who is ‘in or out of place’ but also functions as a “social sorting” related to who moves, further demarcating the “parameters” (Finn et al. 2018, 670) of belonging and unbelonging in public spaces. In tracing the barriers that migrants, refugees, and/or many Black, Indigenous, and racialized people face in accessing essential Toronto city services including public spaces like libraries, Jean McDonald (2012) uses “governmentalized internal borders” (p. 129) to stress that borders are more complex than black lines on maps and are not limited to airports. For example, state-funded surveillance programs such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) mandate to increase its presence in mosques and religious associations such as post-secondary campus-based Muslim Students’ Associations (MSAs) from Halifax to Toronto to Alberta have led to what a University of Toronto MSA member described as the invasive feeling of an “additional microscope” (Nasser, 2019). This “additional microscope” highlights the way that, for many young Muslim Canadians already navigating the terrain of gendered and classed racism, surveillant encounters continue to act as everyday borders and barriers. Likewise, recent debates have also addressed federal, provincial, and municipal legislations that police Muslim people’s, and particularly Muslim women’s, encounters in public spaces such as workplaces and beaches (Ali, 2018; Ahmad, 2019). Despite “dominant and liberal discourses that position Canada as a tolerant and multicultural nation” (Ali, 2018), the recent passage of Bill 21 in Quebec further highlights governmentalized internal bordering as teachers and other provincial employees are effectively banned from wearing the hijab and, for this reason, increasingly uprooted across provinces (Ahmad, 2019). Racializing surveillance