Ted Rutland, PhD

I am a human geographer focused on urban politics in Canada, especially the politics of public security and policing. I approach this work with an interest in social and racial justice, and often draw on work in Black studies to analyze the ways ideas about "race" shape violent configurations of policing and city-making, as well as the ways social and racial justice movements imagine and seek to create more liberatory urban worlds.

As co-director of the After Policing Research Group, I work with university-based and community researchers to develop strategic research projects to challenge the power of the police, support grassroots struggles against the police, and enable the transition to a world after policing.

The Research Group provides a supportive milieu for researchers with various levels of experience, and I am always looking for new master's and PhD students who would like to conduct research that fits within the broad mission of the Research Group. If that sounds like you, please get in touch!

GEOG 315 - Social and cultural geographies

URBS 440 - Urban security and policing

URBS 420 / GEOG 430 - Social geographies of Montreal

Aurélien, M, and Rutland, T. 2023. Out to Defend Ourselves: A History of Montreal's First Haitian Street Gang. Halifax, Fernwood Press.

Aurélien, M, and Rutland, T. 2023. Il fallait se défendre: l'histoire du premier gang de rue haïtien à Montréal. Montreal, Mémoire d'encrier. 

Rutland, T. 2018. Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Rutland, T. 2026. Ferguson effects: libidinal geographies of "police disengagement" and late fascist urbanism. Urban Geography, 47(8): 1849-1871.

Rutland, T., and Arab-Smith, A. 2026. Secure and monitor: racial regimes of property and policing in gentrifying Halifax. Antipode, forthcoming.

Rutland, T., et al. 2026. Public relations, repression, and counter-insurgency: the overlapping functions of police "co-response" teams in Montreal. City, forthcoming.

Benhadjoudja, L., and Rutland, T. 2023. Futurité blanche en crise: les temps et espaces de la gestion de la race à Montréal. Espaces et sociétés, 190: 99-113.

Rutland, T. 2021. Nowhere land: the evicted space of Black tenants' rights in Montreal. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 40(2): 208-226.

Rutland, T. 2021. From compromise to counter-insurgency: variations in the racial politics of community policing in Montreal. Geoforum, 118: 180-189.

Rutland, T. 2020. Profiling the future: the long struggle against police racial profiling in Montreal. American Review of Canadian Studies, 50(3): 270-292..

Roche, E., and Rutland, T. 2019. La diversité sans diversité: différences "raciales" et accès au logement dans deux villes plurielles francophones (Montréal et Saint-Denis). Information géographique, 3: 19-38.

Rutland, T. 2017. Canadian urban planning at 150. Historical Geography, 45: 107-110.

Rutland, T. 2015. Enjoyable life: planning, amenity, and the contested terrain of urban biopolitics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(5): 850-868.

Rutland, T. 2015. "The city is an apartment house": property, improvement, and dispossession in early twentieth-century Halifax, Nova Scotia. Urban Geography, 36(3): 359-384.

Rutland, T. 2013. "Where the little life unfolds": women's citizenship, moral regulation, and the production of scale in early twentieth-century Halifax, Nova Scotia. Journal of Historical Geography, 42: 167–179.

Rutland, T. 2013. Activists in the making: urban movements, political processes, and the creation of political subjects. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(3): 989-1011.

Rutland, T. 2010. The financialization of urban redevelopment. Geography Compass, 4(8): 1167-1178.

Khalil, S, and Rutland, T. 2019. La ville anti-Noir: La sécurité urbaine et les "après-vies" de l'esclavage à Montréal. In H. Bélanger and D. Lapointe (Eds.) Perspectives critiques et analyse territoriale. Montreal: Presses de l'Université du Québec.

Rutland, T. 2013. Energizing environmental concern in Portland, Oregon. In B. Miller, W. Nicholls, and J. Beaumont (Eds.) Spaces of Contention. Brookfield, MA: Ashgate.

Rutland, T. 2023. Innovation ou extension de la répression? Les perspectives des intervenant.e.s sur les escouades mixtes à Montréal. 

Rutland, T. 2020. Anti-gun or anti-Black? The racial targets of the SPVM's "anti-gun" squad.

Montréal sans profilage. 2018. Le profilage racial dans les pratiques policières : Points de vues et expériences de jeunes racisés à Montréal.

Comité logement de la Petite Patrie et Laboratoire Urbain de l'Université Concordia. 2014. La conversion en condos et la copropriété indivise dans le quartier de la Petite Patrie.

For a full and up-to-date list of my opinion pieces, magazine articles, and recorded lectures and interviews, see www.tedrutland.com