In this interesting book, Mariana Valverde grapples with the ways that municipalities regulate space and the related largely unseen and unexamined issues that affect nearly everyone who lives in a city. She explores how cities use law and property and local regulations to settle myriad disputes that arise between stakeholders (landholding and otherwise) and others clamoring for rights. Empirically, much of the focus of Everyday Law on the Street is on Toronto where Valverde conducted significant ethnographic work. She pays significant homage to urban-planning scholar/activist Jane Jacobs, who also lived in Toronto. Although her conclusions are clearly applicable to many more cities, Toronto marks this book. This city is quite racially and ethnically diverse, and how municipalities struggle with diversity emerges as an important theme in the organization of space.

In the first chapter, showcasing the vast legal landscape that her book engages, Valverde provides a catalog of all the laws that overlap and intersect on a particular street corner. This creative approach captures both the complexity and the invisibility of municipal property regulation. The invisibility of local property regulations masks their power. That being said, if one could point to the most powerful agent in the author’s story, it is not the law but rather the municipal corporation. This is surprising, given its lowly status. As Valverde notes, although the municipal corporation cannot send us to war, it has significant power over citizens’ daily lives, including the power to get us to have quieter parties and clean up our yards, and over businesspersons’ conduct of their livelihoods.

In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, Valverde shows us how the municipal corporation flexes its muscle as it enforces municipal regulations about aesthetics, taste, and the uses allowed by residential zoning. Her ethnographic works takes center stage in these chapters as she shadows those charged with enforcing regulations, goes to hearings, and reports on high-profile disputes between neighbors. In sorting out who comes out ahead, she provides a story that showcases the power of the corporation to manage complaints by listening to them. She does not characterize this power as organized. If fact, she suggests that it is quite the opposite: “Everyday conflicts and disputes in a large cosmopolitan city turn out to be governed by dysfunctional, often spiraling interactions” (p. 105). The results are somewhat unsurprising; democracy and diversity lose out to privilege. In the end, officials in the corporation are forced to use outdated and overly complicated bureaucratic rules to respond to the “haves,”—in this case, “those who are already privileged, who already feel entitled” (p. 105).

In the first chapter, we were primed to think of this as a book that foregrounds a city’s dealings with challenges posed by substantial racial and ethnic diversity. The subtitle mentions diversity; Toronto’s reputation as a diverse city is touted. Toronto, Valverde maintains, is more diverse than American cities like New York City, which has a reputation for ethnic diversity. That being said, unfortunately, the challenges that ethnic diversity create for land-use regulation receive little mention in the first several chapters. Instead, with a few notable exceptions, the author discusses diversity quite broadly—in terms of class, age, or socioeconomic status (i.e., village elders and newcomers). These discussions are interesting and important to the overall concept of the regulation of space in municipalities, but they were slightly confusing given the extensive discussion of racial and ethnic diversity early on in the book.

One important exception is a fascinating discussion of the use of a private nuisance law to regulate Chinese cooking smells in Chapter 3. Valverde’s thick description of this conflict between white lawyers and their Chinese neighbors is excellent, and showcases well an important recurring issue in the book. The challenges posed by diverse groups sharing the same space will be played out in fields (like nuisance law) ill-equipped to do them justice.

In Chapter 5, “Law Without Rights,” Valverde begins an extensive discussion of the governance issues involved in regulating housing-related conflicts. It is here that she mentions the challenges to urban planning that are created by racial and ethnic diversity. This chapter covers several different housing contexts in which racial and ethnic diversity complicate municipal regulations. In treatments of diversity and city planning elsewhere, she discusses the impact of zoning regulations that exclude multifamily or public housing. Significantly, she adds to this conversation by highlighting regulations restricting room size and those restricting occupancy, which can have significant impact on immigrant populations. The most compelling discussion in this chapter, from the perspective of diversity, is her treatment of a partnership between a local Chinese agency serving people with mental health issues and a Catholic agency designed to provide apartments for 25 individuals with a history of homelessness and drug or alcohol dependence located in East Chinatown. Valverde’s ethnographic research allows her to deftly describe the controversy as it emerges among those in favor of the housing, the coalition between white middle-class residents and Chinese business owners in opposition, and the local councilor caught in the middle.

The challenges posed by ethnic and racial diversity become front and center in the final three chapters. The first of these deals with an attempt to allow the sale of more culturally diverse street food and the second details the city’s regulation of the taxi system. In the case of food carts, diversity was part of the campaign. In the case of the taxi regulation, diversity came from the many non-white immigrants who drove taxis. In neither case did the city’s effort lead to greater inclusion. Regarding the food carts, the diversity menu failed because city bureaucrats did not make the appropriate interventions. With respect to taxi licensing, instead of turning immigrant drivers into owners, the city’s changes solidified a second-tier system of self-employment that applied largely to immigrants.

Why do diversity inclusion efforts fail? In Toronto, Valverde suggests that failure may be somewhat accidental. As she explains, “social inclusion is often left out of the agenda due to the inertia, and/or lack of vision” (p. 210). Outdated legal rules, regulations, and bureaucratic traditions also stand in the way of inclusion. Missing from her analysis is any significant role for racism, or power relations with respect to racial groups. Do mechanisms of inclusion ever fail because whites would rather not give up power to non-whites? For issues of applicability to cities outside Toronto, it would have been helpful if she had spent a bit more time engaging this question.

Valverde closes the final chapter of this well-written book with a prescription for cities in their efforts on inclusion. Her thoughts in this area may be one of the book’s most significant contributions. Distancing herself from Jane Jacobs, Valverde compellingly argues that bringing back city planning is the best path to achieving more diverse and inclusive outcomes.