Legislating Tolerance: Article 976 of the Civil Code of Quebec and its Application to Mixed-Income and Mixed-Use City Redevelopment Projects

I first examine the increasing need for tolerance required for the cultural sustainability of city redevelopment projects that seek to establish communities of a mixed-use or mixed-income variety. Next, some difficulties that arise in terms of inequality, clashing differences, and a lack of inclusion felt by those within these redeveloped spaces in the urban cores of our cities are discussed with reference to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s notion of cosmopolitan legal struggles and the subaltern cosmopolitan contact zones generated within the small social spaces of mixed-use and mixed-income developments in the urban core. I then undertake a discussion of article 976 of the CCQ, where a form of legislated tolerance can be observed, before I examine the differences in the treatment of neighborhood nuisance under article 976 in comparison to its treatment elsewhere. Finally, the discussion culminates by drawing the lessons learned from article 976 back into the discussion of Santos’s cosmopolitan legality, the drumbeat of city redevelopment projects in the urban cores of our cities, and the potential of harnessing hegemonic legal tools in a non-hegemonic or counter-hegemonic manner, in order to work towards more tolerant and culturally sustainable cities.