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After dispossession: An urban rights praxis of remaining in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
Abstract
Drawing from a multi-year research presence in Vancouver, Canada’s Downtown Eastside, we generate insights into the praxis of the historically dispossessed within contemporary processes of subaltern urbanisms. Interviews with past and present Downtown Eastside residents reveal parallel narratives of dispossession and remaining between Japanese Canadians who were expelled during the Second World War and communities in the present-day neighborhood. A common frame of reference, a form of dispossessive collectivism, takes shape in a tenuous Right to Remain premised on material, cultural, existential, and political struggles that have inflected life in the Downtown Eastside for over a century of colonial urbanization. The Right to Remain can provide a situated and integrative vocabulary for consolidating grassroots praxis across diverse social groupings and settings to address urban spatial claims (symbolically and materially) and to confront forces of gentrification driving dispossession processes in Vancouver and beyond.
... While residents of SROs are now increasingly Indigenous, in the 1970s most were white, an affront to dominant tropes of whiteness, masculinity, propriety and property (Harris, 1993). But these framings of the neighbourhood obscure a dialectic of expulsion and remaining, racialized violence and resistance, that has shaped a form of dispossessive collectivism characterized as the defence of the 'right to remain' that has inflected urban life for over a century of colonial urbanization (Masuda et al., 2020). ...
... not the renter. Testament to the sustained pressure from DES tenants in their struggle for the right to remain (Masuda et al., 2020), this sea-change also reflects the continued resonance of legal relegation in this outlaw zone. ...
Drawing from community‐based research in the Downtown Eastside, the poorest part of Vancouver, Canada, a neighbourhood long demonized as an ‘outlaw zone’, we suggest that what may appear to be illegal property practices in the area's infamous Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels are, in fact, harder to detach from formal legality than supposed. We characterize the state's withdrawal of tenancy law from SRO in the 1970s as productive of property outlaws. A form of legal relegation, outlawry places SRO residents in a space of lesser protection, stripping them of rights. A space of decades of systematic legal relegation, the outlaw zone is a product of law, not its antithesis, predicated on organized forms of devaluation and discrimination.
... By giving conceptual weight to these countercurrents, this framework also encourages an 'urban praxis of remaining' (Masuda et al., 2020;Roy and Rolnik, 2020). It recognises that racialized subjects' perspectives are necessary resources in transformative politics, to derail the rights-based playbook of prevailing property regimes that brackets the dispossessed beyond the political (Bhandar, 2018). ...
This article interrogates the racial logics of home and homemaking. It opens up the conceptual terrain of home to property – a technology of racial dispossession and handmaid of racial capitalism. I reconceptualize home as dominion and as belonging. Unhoming names the synergies between these modalities that authorizes the unmaking of racialized subjects’ homes. I argue unhoming is a structural feature of racial capitalism and position resistance to unhoming as homemaking that might rescript propertied landscapes. Repositioning home as practised in propertied landscapes centres homemaking’s life-giving and death-dealing contradictions and excavates the work home does for – and (might do) to disrupt – liberal property regimes.
... In 2014, we established a research relationship with the SRO collaborative (SRO-C) located in Vancouver's DTES. Since then, we have mounted a series of participatory projects (Franks et al. , 2017Masuda et al. 2015Masuda et al. , 2020. Our investigations into the SRO living conditions include surveys and interviews undertaken with local organizations and participant researchers, archival research into the historical formation of SROs, as well as making a connection to the historic Japanese-Canadian community that was uprooted from the district in the 1940s but that left behind many viable buildings that remain as today's SROs. ...
In this chapter, we address what is currently thought to be the environmental origins (and consequences) of COVID-19, from the “wet markets” of Wuhan, China, to the clearing skies over major cities around the world, from the vastly unequal realities of urban (and rural) spread and containment to the reconfiguration of urban space, climate justice, and energy futures amid efforts to “save” or “reconfigure” the economy. In addition to telling the “front story” of the pandemic’s emergence and impact as it pertains to what is commonly referred to as “the environment,” we draw on several key lenses for understanding the “backstory.” We close with reflections on what many are calling a “fork in the road”—contested decisions being taken about how far to “bounce back” to “normal” versus “bouncing forward” to a more socially and ecologically sustainable future.
... As a self-reinforcing process, heritageisation, which began in the 19th century, continues to reconstruct and protect the singular narrative of the nation state otherwise operating within the dominating frameworks of the AHD. Its assimilative nature speaks to Naidoo's [18] analysis of the fear of difference and sameness in the UK, and the politics of dispossession in a broader sense [43,45]. Naidoo observed that difference, which is defined based on ethnic and cultural backgrounds, often develops following a 'fear of sameness' within an ethnonational context. ...
This article explores the role that heritage might play in the representation of ‘difference’, within the context of neoliberal cities. The case is a large-scale urban change in the former working-class neighborhood of Gamlestaden, Sweden. Interviews and on-site observations revealed how authorized heritage practices can enable the celebration of particular social and cultural values, while naturalizing the erasure of others. People’s cultural diversity, and diverging interpretations of the past, have been guided by the power of heritage into a process of subjectification, according to which only ‘unthreatening’ forms of cultural diversity were celebrated and revealed legitimate. The ‘fetishized’ difference and particular historical records have served to conceal the political interest at stake in its’ production and maintenance, and led to a politicised representation of cultural diversity through what Annie Coombes’ terms ‘scopic feast’. All this was made possible through BID, the first neoliberal business improvement district model in Sweden, and its investment in a deeply rooted process of heritageisation. Uncritical engagement with difference in the context of heritage management and neoliberal urban development, make it appear almost natural to erase the cultural values that fall outside the authorized narrative of value.
... In 2014, we established a research relationship with the SRO collaborative (SRO-C) located in Vancouver's DTES. Since then, we have mounted a series of participatory projects (Franks et al. , 2017Masuda et al. 2015Masuda et al. , 2020. Our investigations into the SRO living conditions include surveys and interviews undertaken with local organizations and participant researchers, archival research into the historical formation of SROs, as well as making a connection to the historic Japanese-Canadian community that was uprooted from the district in the 1940s but that left behind many viable buildings that remain as today's SROs. ...
Covid-19 has fundamentally changed the way individuals and groups interact in their everyday lives and, thus, key constructs within social capital research. These social changes, to be explored in this chapter, are (1) trust, (2) group membership (for good or bad), and (3) social isolation. The chapter highlights novel research opportunities including well-being benefits of non-human communities, an unprecedented “natural experiment,” and the longer-term impacts of social change on both health and social capital itself. Through its re-shaping of social capital, COVID-19 offers changes which may have meaningful influence on health and well-being, beyond its direct deleterious effects. It is vital that we reflect on previous social structures and new possibilities afforded by the disruption of systems and hegemonic structures which are only now possible and could make for a healthier, equitable future.
... In 2014, we established a research relationship with the SRO collaborative (SRO-C) located in Vancouver's DTES. Since then, we have mounted a series of participatory projects (Franks et al. , 2017Masuda et al. 2015Masuda et al. , 2020. Our investigations into the SRO living conditions include surveys and interviews undertaken with local organizations and participant researchers, archival research into the historical formation of SROs, as well as making a connection to the historic Japanese-Canadian community that was uprooted from the district in the 1940s but that left behind many viable buildings that remain as today's SROs. ...
The economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 global pandemic are both immediate and pervasive, and potentially profound. In this chapter, I take a social geographical perspective on both acute and chronic consequences, centering around the idea of the social, the hard edge of inequality, and social justice. These three components help to frame two key relationships that arguably emerge as socioeconomic consequences of the global pandemic: (1) the contradictory relationship between social distancing and social infrastructure and (2) the compounding relationship between economic hardship and so-called deaths of despair. In effect, social distancing undermines the density of social bonds and closeness so essential to social infrastructure such as libraries, markets, and care homes. Conversely, the sudden rise in mass unemployment may have long-term socioeconomic consequences for already increasing rates of suicide and drug/alcohol overdose in nations such as the US and the UK.
There is a general consensus now in Australia that we are in the grip of a severe housing crisis. The characteristics of spiralling housing costs and deepening precarity are unfolding in a context of the systematic managed decline of public housing as a critical social infrastructure, such that the capacity to make and find ‘home’ is thinning every day. Yet in a settler-colony, such as Australia, the struggle against housing injustice is set inside an already violent relationship of un-homing that creates the very conditions for others to make home. Reckoning with this monstrous dilemma, of the politics of dwelling justice on stolen land, is the focus of this essay, which springs from our own experience and failure to fully comprehend the ways that our housing research and activism works to reinforce settler colonial logics of dwelling on stolen land.
The contributors to Grammars of the Urban Ground develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for capturing the complex, ever-shifting, and interactive processes that shape contemporary cities. Building on Marxist, feminist, queer, and critical race theory as well as the ontological turn in urban studies, they propose a mode of analysis that resists the staple of siloed categories such as urban “economy,” “society,” and “politics.” In addition to addressing key concepts of urban studies such as dispossession and scale, the contributors examine the infrastructures of plutocratic life in London, reconfigure notions of gentrification as a process of racial banishment, and seek out alternative archives for knowledge about urban density. They also present case studies of city life in the margins and peripheries of São Paulo, Kinshasa, Nairobi, and Jakarta. In so doing, they offer a foundation for better understanding the connective and aggregative forces of city-making and the entanglements and relations that constitute cities and their everyday politics.
Contributors. Ash Amin, Teresa Caldeira, Filip De Boeck, Suzanne Hall, Caroline Knowles, Michele Lancione, Colin McFarlane, Natalie Oswin, Edgar Pieterse, Ananya Roy, AbdouMaliq Simone, Tatiana Thieme, Nigel Thrift, Mariana Valverde
In light of the rapidly unfolding consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic among the precariously housed community of the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, we offer some reflections drawn from an ongoing activist research project the Right to Remain that has supported the life-saving frontline organizing response for tenants living under adverse housing circumstances in single room occupancy (SRO) buildings. With the public health system predictably overwhelmed at the onset of the pandemic, the gap was quickly filled by grassroots tenant organizers, whose capacity and credibility grew quickly as a result of their intimate knowledge of SROs and level of trust with tenants. From our experiences in chronicling their efforts between March and December, we describe how activist participatory research has important roles to play ‘beyond’ the project. With a vaccine just arriving, we are only half way through the crisis, and the ability to sustain basic supports, let alone continue on a pathway of transformative critical research, is in peril as burnout grows and tenants’ lives, including among our own collective, continue to be placed in jeopardy.
This article highlights the stakes of commemorating and representing loss in the settler colonial city. Focusing on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians living in Vancouver’s Powell Street neighbourhood before 1942, it contributes to existing scholarship on the internment and dispossession periods by critically examining Japanese Canadian reflections on the loss of place in the midst of as well as after their forced removal. Drawing primarily on the New Canadian newspaper in the 1940s and 1950s, this article demonstrates how Japanese Canadian writers mourned Powell Street’s “death” by describing the neighbourhood as ghostly and in ruins after their departure. Using discourses of urban settler colonialism from the mid-twentieth century, writers conveyed the injustice of the Nikkei community’s erasure within the newspaper and asserted a Japanese Canadian claim to the neighbourhood despite state efforts to deny such a claim. At the same time, this article argues that the New Canadian’s representations of Powell Street reflected participation in what Ann Stoler calls “ruination”, whereby Japanese Canadian commemorations became imbricated in the settler colonial logics and processes that pathologize the Downtown Eastside and its residents. Taking seriously the political work of commemoration, the article concludes that urban dispossessions and their representations must be viewed as overlapping, intersecting, and at times, compounding processes.
“Taking back” has long been a rallying call of urban social movements asserting land rights. This call often involves seeking to ward off dispossession by taking possession. Scholars rethinking property beyond the normative “ownership model” have explored the seeming paradoxicality of resisting dispossession through legal forms of possession that reproduce deprivation. In this paper, I consider the possibilities for taking back the concept of possession itself by examining claims to “vacant” property in Philadelphia. I put taking back through a citywide “land bank” in conversation with the taking over of a poor people’s movement that occupies government-owned properties as a means of survival and political mobilization. I argue that outside or on the edge of legal recognition, the effort to take back property functions not as an end in itself, but rather as an explicitly political taking on of the notion of possessive ownership.
Fragmentation is a keyword in the history of critical urban thought. Yet the products of fragmentation – the fragments themselves – tend to receive less attention. In this paper, I develop a politics of urban fragments as a contribution to debates both in urban theory and in urban poverty and inequality. I examine inadequate and broken material fragments on the economic margins of the urban global South, and ask how they become differently politicized in cities. I develop a three-fold framework for understanding the politics of fragments: attending to, generative translation and surveying wholes. I build these arguments through a focus on a fundamental provision – urban sanitation – drawing on research in Mumbai in particular, as well as Cape Town, and connecting those instances to research on urban poverty, politics and fragmentation.
There is a growing consideration globally of a right to the city in urban policies, strategies and legislation. The mention of this concept in the UN’s New Urban Agenda vision statement, in relation to human rights, both acknowledges and encourages this trend. It is also a result of lobbying and contestation. In the Anglo-American scholarly literature, there has been caution as to whether Henri Lefebvre intended a legal and institutionalized meaning for his ‘right to the city’. This paper reviews these debates and from that perspective examines Lefebvre’s positions on law, rights and the right to the city. It locates this within his wider political strategy and in particular the three-pronged strategy he put forward in The Urban Revolution to address the urban question—political foregrounding of the urban, promotion of self-management, and introduction of the right to the city into a transformed contractual system. By contextualizing and reviewing Everyday Life in the Modern World (published immediately before Right to the City), the paper examines Lefebvre’s thinking on rights formation, within ‘opening’, or the process of inducing change. The paper engages with meanings Lefebvre provides for rights in his concept of the right to the city, including his later conception of a contract of citizenship. The paper suggests that engagement with a fluid role of law and rights, in combination with Lefebvre’s other strategies, is important in opening the pathway he charts for the realization of this right, whether through local or global initiatives.
This article draws on original empirical research in Accra, Ghana to explore the particular dynamics that contemporary processes of class-based dispossession assume at the urban scale, posing the concept of ‘accumulation by urban dispossession’. It responds to recent calls to shift the focus of urban theory from North to South and demonstrates how widely used concepts must be interrogated and reworked as they travel from place to place. Accra is home to a large informal proletariat that is excluded from formal wage labour and housing markets and therefore has to create urban commons in order to reproduce itself. Since these commons place limits to capital's ability to valorise the urban fabric, state-led accumulation by urban dispossession is a strategic response that employs a range of physical-legal and discursive mechanisms to overcome these limits through the enclosure of the urban commons and the expulsion of the informal poor. This argument problematises Harvey's capital-centric theory of accumulation by dispossession, which treats enclosure as a fix for capital's inherent crisis tendencies. Furthermore, it demonstrates that primitive accumulation in this context differs from the classic form described by Marx on the grounds that it is based on the expulsion of the dispossessed rather than their incorporation into the capital relation as labour power.
The demographic transition of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has shifted the locus of urbanizing populations from the global North to the global South. As the theoretical epicenter of urban scholars and policymakers adjusts to accommodate this transition, some realignment in how ideas are weighted and applied is inevitable. This recalibration, while not necessarily comfortable for those in established positions of intellectual power, is desirable and maybe even overdue. The overarching argument presented here is that recent work on neoliberalism, despite its quality and relevance for many places, will need to be "provincialized" in order to create intellectual space for alternative ideas that may be more relevant to cities where the majority of the world's urban population now resides. To this end, we explore the limits to the critique of neoliberalism-a perspective that has assumed hegemonic dimensions in the progressive geographical literature. In seeking post-neoliberal insights, we highlight two bodies of work that also address issues of urban injustice. The first is the largely practice-generated literature on poverty and its amalgamation into a resurgent literature focused on the right to the city. The second theoretical framework we explore as a counterpoint to the neoliberal crtitique is the nascent debate about the size and shape of the subnational state, arguing that it is time to bring to the fore the difficult question concerning the most appropriate form of urban government. Finally, we suggest that if the state is to be an important component in the urban developmental landscape, all sorts of initiatives in research and capacity-building will be needed, giving substantially greater attention to documenting urban change on hitherto under-researched cities, and learning from practice how to transform the theoretical canon to ensure 21st-century relevance.
This article brings Lefebvre's Right to the City thesis into conversation with Bauman's notion of the flawed consumer to account for the neoliberal colonisation of public tenant organising in urban redevelopment. Drawing on a case study of public housing redevelopment from Sydney, Australia, we show that neoliberal community building and the emergence of professional community builders obviate the self-organising efforts of tenants. In this case tenants’ rights were attenuated when the housing authority invited private capital to not only rebuild the physical fabric but also remake the social relations around public tenancy within the trope of consumerism. We argue for a revival of tenant self-organising as a collective political project that might counteract the individualisation of tenants’ rights under neoliberal community building regimes. Such a political project needs to be extended beyond the boundaries of the local neighbourhood or ‘housing estate’ to expose the strategies at work in public housing redevelopment projects. Drawing on Right to the City we argue that inhabitance should confer the right to participate in place-making. We conclude that tenant self-organising is one way that tenants imagine, collectively construct and inhabit lived space; it is a process of meaning- and place-making amongst a community with a shared experience of contemporary urban transformation.
From the housing project's inception, New York's Stuyvesant Town has been an unlikely site for struggles over inhabitance and social justice. Robert Moses used a public–private partnership to displace residents of the Gashouse district for the initially whites-only affordable housing project. Assisted by local rent-stabilisation legislation, Stuyvesant Town persisted as an affordable housing option until the early 2000s, when the new owners began converting the properties to market-rate rentals. An unlikely coalition of residents mobilised to block the sale, and by the late 2000s rent controls were re-established. This case links significant themes regarding social justice and housing including rent stabilisation, community activism, and neoliberal marketisation. We evaluate the utility of the right to the city perspective for understanding middle-class struggles in the context of housing financialisation. We argue that Lefebvre's right to the city applies to the Stuyvesant Town context, although the movement to protect affordable housing was led by middle-income residents who are not the traditional working-class agents associated with his concept. While remaining sympathetic to recent critiques over the vulgarisation of Lefebvre's principles, we argue that a focus on spatially contingent rights can transcend both a limited ‘politics of turf’ and empty ‘rights talk’ to create space for broadly empowered and inclusive communities.
Vancouver's successful bid for the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games took place at a transformational moment for the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In the first decade of this century, the IOC began to require host cities to address a much wider range of local impacts of the global Games', and to undertake planning initiatives to ensure maximum local social inclusion. In this article, we present a case study of the policies and principles of social inclusion used by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) in preparing for the 2010 Games. We use key informant interviews, document analysis and participant observation to study a specific programme Building Opportunities with Business (BOB) that was showcased as one of VANOC's prominent demonstrations of social inclusion. Our evidence suggests that Games planning processes have become even more powerful instruments for the promotion of liberal philosophies through neoliberal local governance regimes; social inclusion is promised through the proliferation of ever more institutionally diffused public-private partnerships. With the neoliberal shift from public service provision to private sector entrepreneurialism, individual employability becomes the primary goal of, and normative justification for, social inclusion policies. Heavily circumscribed VANOC efforts at specific types of social inclusion have met with limited success, but it appears clear that the fusion of transnationally mobile mega-events and prevailing doctrines of neoliberal entrepreneurialism has become a significant new framework for local urban social policy.
The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, remains one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada, yet is also a site of rapid gentrification. Both new and revitalized restaurants have created new spaces of consumption, transforming the neighborhood into a dining destination. Site visits and an analysis of the discourses used in newspaper articles and magazine features, as well as on blogs and in other online spaces, indicate that the presence of poor and marginalized residents of the Downtown Eastside is one of the reasons for some consumers’ decisions to visit new upscale establishments in the area. Analysis of advertisements and other primary documents indicates that the presence of poor and marginalized residents has become a competitive niche for the promotion of distinctive and authentic culinary adventures. This trend toward poverty tourism signals a shift from the simple displacement of low-income residents to a more complex form of gentrification in which residents face spatial management and control while their poverty is commodified.
This paper revisits the ‘geography of gentrification’ thinking through the literature on comparative urbanism. I argue that given the ‘mega-gentrification’ affecting many cities in the Global South gentrification researchers need to adopt a postcolonial approach taking on board critiques around developmentalism, categorization and universalism. In addition they need to draw on recent work on the mobilities and assemblages of urban policies/policy-making in order to explore if, and how, gentrification has travelled from the Global North to the Global South.
Public Culture 14.3 (2002) 557-582
Besides the conventional financial and technical requirements, the typical property leasing agreement often includes the provision that a tenant be assured of the "quiet enjoyment of the land." The term quiet, apparently, refers not to protection from excess noise but an assurance that the tenant can enjoy his or her possession without interference and interruption, free from disturbance and dissension. But quiet also has a more active sense in the language of law, as settlements of ambiguous or disputed property relations speak of "quieting title." It's a rather archaic phrase but an evocative and suggestive one for my purposes.
What it tells us is that property doesn't just happen. Just as quiet can be a verb, so property is an enactment (Rose 1994; Seed 1995). In this sense, a property regime is never complete and self-evident but requires a continual doing. The doing of real property happens not only in courtrooms and the law schools. Property must also be put to work on material spaces and real people, including owners and those who are to be excluded from that which is owned. In this grounding of property, ideological enactments are also required, including those that relate to certain notions of land. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, land in its legal sense is a "ground or territory . . . owned by a person or viewed as public or private property." Property is enacted on law's land—and, indeed, helps to produce the land—in diverse ways. Maps must be drawn, surveys prepared, developments realized, fences built. And in these enactments a very particular and contingent vision of property is produced, one that Joseph Singer (2000a: 3) terms the ownership model: a notion of property premised on a consolidated bundle of rights (use, exclusion, alienation) and vested in a single, determinate owner who exercises absolute control. And thus it is that law's lands appear to be quiet lands. They are not only lands that are securely possessed, for which title is determinate. The land itself appears inert and quiescent. The doing of property disappears.
But the law does not exhaust the various meanings and possibilities communicated by the term land. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the word can also be used to refer to a site of occupation and cultural use (such as the land of a nation or people), unoccupied nature (such as a heath or steppe), or a natural "resource" that can be harnessed for human ends. Similarly, property is not contained by the ownership model, despite the endless policing of its boundaries (MacPherson 1987). Property can additionally accommodate notions of common or public property (Singer 2000b). Moreover, the "right to exclude" has as its necessary concomitant the "right not to be excluded" (MacPherson 1987: 77). These ambivalences of property, what Julie Katherine Gibson-Graham (1996: ix) might term its "loose ends," are evident in its enactments. Property is not a fact but an aspiration. To frame a prevailing property regime as an enactment is to recognize the massive, continuing mobilizations of social networks of power, aided by discourses and technologies, that sustain it. Property must be quieted, the land settled. But networks unravel. Technologies fail. Discourses misspeak. And networks can nevertheless be rerouted, technologies rewired, and discourses reframed. And the land can become loud and unsettled.
When a parcel of land is to be rezoned or a major development is planned, the applicant is usually required to set up a notice on the site that informs the public of the proposal. In Vancouver, the city where I live, these notices are conventionally headed with the phrase development application. We are told of the name of the developer (who may not be the owner of the land, whose name is often excluded) and their proposal for a named location. A map bounds the site (see fig. 1).
Joe Hermer and Alan Hunt (1996) characterize such signs as a form of "official graffiti." Pervasive and apparently trivial, official graffiti are deeply implicated in the government of everyday life. Along with traffic signals, "no smoking" signs, advisory notices on consumer goods...
The gentrification literature since the mid-1990s is reappraised in light of the emergence of processes of post-recession gentrification and in the face of recent British and American urban policy statements that tout gentrification as the cure-all for inner-city ills. Some tentative suggestions are offered on how we might re-energize the gentrification debate. Although real analytical progress has been made there are still 'wrinkles' which research into the 'geography' of gentrification could address: 1) financifiers - super-gentrification; 2) third-world immigration - the global city; 3) black/ethnic minority gentrification - race and gentrification; and 4) liveability/urban policy - discourse on gentrification. In addition, context, temporality and methodology are argued to be important issues in an updated and rigorous deconstruction of not only the process of gentrification itself but also discourses on gentrification.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, residents of the neighbourhood of Strathcona in the city of Vancouver, Canada, successfully fought the grand designs of planners, engineers, politicians and developers to displace residents, demolish homes, clear lands, and rebuild the area. Against all odds, a relatively politically powerless group of residents and their supporters from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds formed a neighbourhood organization, the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) to mount a last-ditch struggle to defend their homes, ways of life, and right to place. This article re-examines existing explanations of these historic events. It identifies the unique activism of ethnic minority women, and introduces the concept of culturally hybrid forms of oppositional practice—the interaction of cultural practices of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural residents of Strathcona with mainstream Canadian political discourse and structures. The article stresses the critical importance of broadening and complicating existing analyses of multi-ethnic women's community-based urban activism as a way of rethinking feminist conceptualizations of movement activism around place and identity.
After decades of fighting for clean air and green space in the face of environmental racism and urban disinvestment, Chicago's Latinx Little Village neighbourhood has begun to see environmental improvements take place. Activists are wary of the potential for gentrification in the wake of clean up, and are advocating for the right to stay put in the community they have worked so hard to improve. These ongoing contestations have recently intersected with accelerating racialized state violence as renewed anti-immigrant and white supremacist rhetoric, policies, and actions have targeted Latinx communities. In this paper we ask, how do struggles against environmental racism, gentrification, and xenophobia interlock, and how does the framework of environmental justice serve to enable activism across all three sites? For racialized minority communities, repeated experiences of forced migration and displacement often mean that an anti-displacement ethos is particularly well-articulated and grounded in collective historical memory. Drawing on an extensive analysis of media materials complemented by archival research, fieldwork, and interviews with community organisers, this paper argues that tight linkages between environmental justice and anti-displacement principles inform community responses to multiple forms of structural racialized violence.
This paper suggests that planetary urbanisation offers an antidote to the narrow-mindedness of our toxic times. It conceives planetary urbanisation as “an affair of perception,” as a vision that begins vast, at the horizon, and sees particular parts (including your own particular part) comprising an interdependent totality. To envision the world through the lens of planetary urbanisation has certain distinct advantages. After all, it’s a viewpoint expressive of commonality rather than difference, of a mutually shared planet in which people who look different, who talk different from one another, who don’t know one another, who may even hate one another, have more in common than they might think.
This paper is a slightly revised version of the 2017 Geografiska Annaler B Lecture, which I gave at the Nordic Geography Meeting in Stockholm. It seeks to show why Guy Debord’s ([(1967) 1994]. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by David Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.) is just as important now as it was when it was published 50 years ago – not just politically, but also analytically. To do so, I develop an argument Debord only made in passing: that we live in a world governed by a falling rate of use value. Through this development, I suggest some ways to think about the right to the city – and revolution – in our current moment.
The marginalized and impoverished Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, Canada has long been subjected to planning programs that have aimed to solve area problems through strategic government intervention. The 2011–2014 Local Area Planning Process, led by the City of Vancouver in consultation with local actors, represents the most recent of such programs. Despite the Local Area Planning Process’s stated goal of inclusive participation, the resultant Downtown Eastside plan transformed the political landscape of the neighbourhood and met with derision from stakeholders for its potential to generate dramatic capital-led transformations. In this paper, we critique participatory planning through a case study of the Local Area Planning Process. We utilize a lens of critical toponymy (the investigation of the historical and political implications of place naming) as a methodological tool to examine planning technologies of power and their mobilization through governmental processes. We deploy a novel approach to toponymy, drawing on assemblage theory, that presents toponymy as a radically open and dynamic process mobilized relationally through a multiplicity of discourses and materialities. Our case study demonstrates that processes of toponymic assemblage within the Downtown Eastside Local Area Planning Process worked to (1) generate new territorial conflicts, (2) depoliticize community activism, and (3) co-opt racialized and class-based histories of displacement and dispossession to stimulate “revitalization” (“Japantown”). On the other hand, we found that in unanticipated ways, these processes worked to stimulate anti-gentrification activism, alliances, and resistance. Our analysis of planning highlights how toponymic agency can service oppressive and marginalizing place-framings, but it can also have liberating effects – by inspiring unlikely alliances and counter-framings.
The cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying urban rebellion rather than proving its practical content on the ground. I explore the limits of the thesis via its fraught entanglement with private property rights and the state-form; and through Lefebvre's radical critique of the state, political economy and rights elsewhere. Rights claims, I contend, unintentionally reify the uneven power relations they aim to overcome, while routinely cauterising the hard-fought collective social force that forces social gains. As a counter to the RttC thesis, I explore the autonomous Take over the City (TotC) movements of 1970s Italy, arguing that these largely neglected eminently immanent forms of territorial community activism, brought here into dialogue with Lefebvre's conception of territorial autogestion, surpassed the RttC thesis in praxis. The experience of “Laboratory Italy” thus provides highly suggestive lessons for a contemporary politics of urban space.
Geographic scholarship in critical toponymy has highlighted the importance of place naming as a form of discursive power within processes of urbanization. This paper builds on such literature and advances a novel theory of toponymic assemblage to interpret findings from a participatory research project in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada. We foreground neighborhood history in the form of a Japanese Canadian enclave and its wartime uprooting and dispossession, and trace the historical antecedents of a resurrected toponymy of “Japantown” that has appropriated and renarrated Japanese Canadian history to facilitate further rounds of dispossession. Using a genealogical method, we highlight three “moments” of Japanese Canadian uprooting, return, presence, and activism, demonstrating how toponymies are assembled in place in heterogeneous and historically contiguous ways. This approach expands on current research in critical toponymy, offering a novel methodology for exploring the enrolment of toponymy, discourse, and materiality in the formation of place.
This article uses the case of anti-eviction politics to examine the urban land question. Following the ideas and practices of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and its global interconnections, it traces the potentialities and limits of poor people’s movements as they battle displacement and enact a politics of emplacement. In doing so, it seeks to expand existing understandings of dispossession. Drawing on critical race studies and postcolonial theory, the article pays attention to the relationship between property and personhood in the context of long histories of racial exclusion and colonial domination. It asks: what politics of home and land is possible outside the grid of secure possession and sovereign self? The work of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign points to how various modes of collectivism can be asserted through practices of occupation as well as through global frameworks of human rights. Challenging the secure categories of property and personhood through which liberalism is constituted, such politics is attuned to the present history of racial banishment but is also subject to aspirations of resolution and possession.
Between 2000 and 2012, the Santa Isabel area of the Santiago-Centro comuna (municipal district) saw increasing capital concentration in middle-income-oriented, new-build real estate. Whilst large developers devised several ways to pay low land prices to original owner-residents, the average sale price of new apartments rose, reducing the amount of housing options in the area by at least 50% for original low-income residents—a form of exclusionary displacement. In parallel, state regulations intensified the Floor Area Ratio in order to anchor real-estate investment to their territories, substantively leading to development projects with much higher density rates, higher rents, and smaller living spaces. In this article, I draw upon an analysis of 262 land plots that were redeveloped into 65 new high-rise projects and a survey of 195 original households who lived in the still non-redeveloped properties inside the case study area, in order to analyze how Santiago’s high-rise urban renewal (usually) means new-build gentrification led by the state and monopolized by large-scale developers.
A new regime of gentrification is dramatically restructuring Manila’s metropolitan landscape. Grounded upon an on-going neoliberal warfare of accumulation by dispossession, this gentrification serves as the fulfillment of postcolonial visions of a world class and modern metropolis through public–private arrangements and market-oriented developments but necessitates the systematic demolition of informal settlements, the home of the Manila’s urban poor and working class population. Through a mixed-methods approach, this paper examines gentrification’s spatial forms and trajectories and exposes context specific dynamics facilitating accumulation by dispossession. Using barangay (village)-level data on changes in population of informal households and median zonal values, I calculate for local measures of spatial autocorrelation and locate significant clusters of spatial shifts. Using the quantitative results plus field narratives and community histories, I triangulate local dynamics of accumulation by dispossession. What emerges is a sprawling gentrification process that, in producing a market-oriented metropolis, displaces and asphyxiates informal spaces. These accounts illustrate the contingencies of violence, neoliberal urbanism, colonial legacies of land regimes, and elite power in the production of a globally-competitive Manila. With other Global South megacities similarly competing in the global market, gentrification in Manila, with its expanding landscape of property accumulation and ’legitimized’ dispossession, is instructive of the emerging form of gentrification in the 21st century.
In the center of Mumbai, next to the city’s newest and most expensive commercial developments, lies one of Asia’s largest slums, where as many as one million squatters live in makeshift housing on one square mile of government land. This is the notorious Dharavi district, best known from the movie Slumdog Millionaire. In recent years, cities from Delhi to Rio de Janeiro have demolished similar slums, at times violently evicting their residents, to make way for development. But Dharavi and its residents have endured for a century, holding on to what is now some of Mumbai’s most valuable land. In The Durable Slum, Liza Weinstein draws on a decade of work, including more than a year of firsthand research in Dharavi, to explain how, despite innumerable threats, the slum has persisted for so long, achieving a precarious stability. She describes how economic globalization and rapid urban development are pressuring Indian authorities to eradicate and redevelop Dharavi—and how political conflict, bureaucratic fragmentation, and community resistance have kept the bulldozers at bay. Today the latest ambitious plan for Dharavi’s transformation has been stalled, yet the threat of eviction remains, and most residents and observers are simply waiting for the project to be revived or replaced by an even grander scheme. Dharavi’s remarkable story presents important lessons for a world in which most population growth happens in urban slums even as brutal removals increase. From Nairobi’s Kibera to Manila’s Tondo, megaslums may be more durable than they appear, their residents retaining a fragile but hard won right to stay put. © 2014 Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
Short and accessible, this book interweaves a discussion of the geography of property in one global city, Vancouver, with a more general analysis of property, politics, and the city.
If we want to explore the social dimensions of property, we need to think of it not only historically but also geographically, entailing both practices in and representations of social space. The concept of landscape is a useful bridging device here, given its double meaning as both a material space and as a particular way of seeing space. Landscapes, in both senses, can serve to reify and naturalize dominant property relations but can also serve as spaces of contestation. Such landscapes, however, cannot be disentangled from the places in which they are positioned. I use this framework to make sense of resistance to gentrification in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada, a poor neighborhood with a rich history of activism. A collective property claim by the poor has been staked out through the material use, production, and representation of an urban landscape. Such local meanings and practices, however, are threatened by "outsiders," who are seen to map and use this landscape in very different ways.
The author seeks to make sense of the political and ethical cleavages associated with inner city gentrification in Vancouver, by an examination of the differing perspectives on real property deployed by the opposing constituencies. He identifies a marked division between dominant and community-based readings of property as an economic, political and legal category, associated with opposed visions of space, place and history. Conclusions are drawn relating to the significance of a geographically informed theorisation of decentred legalities, and the complex politics of power, resistance and domination.
This paper argues that food should be a more central focus of critical geographical research into urban poverty and that the concept of “foodscape” can contribute to this literature. We utilize the concept in a study of the daily practices of accessing food among low-income residents of the Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, BC. We highlight how food access for the urban poor involves a complex and contradictory negotiation of both sites of encounter and care and also exclusion and regulation. Focusing on foodscapes emphasizes the social, relational, and political construction of food and thus highlights not simply food provision but also questions of existing power structures and potentialities for future change. Therefore, we discuss efforts to question the existing food system in Vancouver, to resist the gentrification processes that threaten the Downtown Eastside's food resources, and to build alternative strategies for urban food justice.
This article examines ways in which images and ideas about masculinity have been implicated in the social construction of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. In the 1950s and 1960s, this was the city's skid-road district, a location where damaged masculinity, represented by the figure of the derelict, was linked causally to the deterioration of the central-city landscape. The derelict was constituted as a figure of abjection that marked the outside boundary of respectable masculinity, and his presence provided a rationale for urban renewal. During the 1970s and the 1980s, community groups contested the representation of skid road. They attempted to reconstruct the area as the Downtown Eastside, a working-class neighborhood and community that was symbolized by another male figure: the aging, retired resource industry worker. This image was derived from the memory and experience of the people who lived there. But because it rested on the appropriation and reworking of the same association between masculinity and space on which skid road was based, it excluded significant groups of people from the community it defined.
This paper examines conditions that impede inner-city gentrification. Several factors emerge from review of a scattered literature, including the role of public policy, neighbourhood political mobilisation and various combinations of population and land use characteristics that are normally unattractive to gentrifiers. In a first phase of analysis, some of these expectations are tested with census tract attributes against the map of gentrification in the City of Vancouver from 1971 to 2001. More detailed qualitative field work in the Downtown Eastside and Grandview-Woodland, two inner-city neighbourhoods with unexpectedly low indicators of gentrification, provides a fuller interpretation and reveals the intersection of local poverty cultures, industrial land use, neighbourhood political mobilisation and public policy, especially the policy of social housing provision, in blocking or stalling gentrification.
Displacement has been at the centre of heated analytical and political debates over gentrification and urban change for almost 40 years. A new generation of quantitative research has provided new evidence of the limited (and sometimes counter-intuitive) extent of displacement, supporting broader theoretical and political arguments favouring mixed-income redevelopment and other forms of gentrification. This paper offers a critical challenge to this interpretation, drawing on evidence from a mixed-methods study of gentrification and displacement in New York City. Quantitative analysis of the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey indicates that displacement is a limited yet crucial indicator of the deepening class polarisation of urban housing markets; moreover, the main buffers against gentrification-induced displacement of the poor (public housing and rent regulation) are precisely those kinds of market interventions that are being challenged by advocates of gentrification and dismantled by policy-makers. Qualitative analysis based on interviews with community organisers and residents documents the continued political salience of displacement and reveals an increasingly sophisticated and creative array of methods used to resist displacement in a policy climate emphasising selective deregulation and market-oriented social policy.
The American Indian Quarterly 27.3 (2003) 593-606
Anyone passing through inner-city Vancouver on foot, on a bus, or in a car cannot help but SEE, in a literal sense, the concentration of Aboriginal people here. For most urban Canadians, and visitors from elsewhere, this is an unusual and often surprising visual experience on which they feel compelled to remark. Even so, many representations of this and other inner-city neighborhoods in Western Canada are characterized by a marked invisibility of Aboriginal people, and women in particular. This essay describes both the construction of this invisibility in public culture, and an event that symbolizes Aboriginal women's active resistance to these acts of erasure.
Academic, professional, public, and popular discourses deploy a plethora of identifying labels and categorizations that obscure and depoliticize the embodied nature of colonialism that evidences itself in inner-city Vancouver, Canada. The annual Valentine's Day Women's Memorial March gives political expression to a complex process through which Aboriginal women here are struggling to change the language, metaphors, and images through which they come to be (re)known as they emerge into public visibility. The demand for recognition and respect articulated in the flyer quoted from above encompasses a critique and redefinition of dominant representations of Aboriginal women that are deeply embedded in Canadian colonial history and culture, as well as a claim for inclusion in the larger Aboriginal struggle for rights in place and to health, dignity, and justice.
The intersection of Main and Hastings streets—known locally as "Pain and Wastings"—marks the heart of Vancouver's inner-city neighborhood: the Downtown Eastside. Since 1997, when the City of Vancouver Health Department declared a public health emergency in response to reports that hiv infection rates among residents exceeded those anywhere else in the "developed" world, Downtown Eastside Vancouver has become a focal point in emerging local, national, and international debates about the causes of, and solutions to, widespread practices of intravenous injection of illicit drugs and the spread of HIV/AIDS. Public health and law enforcement authorities, in an effort to respond to these "twin epidemics" have treated the Downtown Eastside as a containment zone, rather than as an enforcement zone: few if any arrests are made for simple possession or trafficking of small quantities of illegal drugs, or for soliciting for the purposes of prostitution. An open, publicly visible street market in illicit drugs and commercial sex has mushroomed.
Predictably, national and international media as well as a surfeit of both well-intentioned and/or brashly self-promoting artists, writers, and researchers have been drawn as moths to flames to document, analyze, represent, treat, and market the dramatic and photogenic spectacle of social suffering in this neighborhood. A favorite focus of the cameras and interviewers is the southwest corner of Main and Hastings streets: the entranceway to the Carnegie Community Centre. Television and video crews offer the virtual voyeur disturbing—or titillating—images of emaciated heroin, crack cocaine, and prescription drug users buying, selling, injecting, and smoking. Young women hurry back and forth between this corner and others, in and out of alleyways, cars, and parking lots. The money women make selling sexual services passes quickly through their fingers from "Johns" to drug dealers.
On one day of the year, though, for at least a few hours, the scene at Main and Hastings is dramatically altered. In 1991, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women's organizations in inner-city Vancouver declared February 14 a day of remembrance to honor neighborhood women who have been murdered or who have disappeared. In the Downtown Eastside, Valentine's Day has been transformed into an occasion to protest against racism, poverty, and violence against women, and to celebrate resistance, solidarity, and...
I consider two cases of legal abandonment in Vancouver—of murdered sex workers and live-in caregivers on temporary work visas—in light of Agamben’s claim that the generalized suspension of the law has become a dominant paradigm of government. I bring to Agamben’s theory a concern to specify both the gendering and racialisation of these processes, and the many geographies that are integral to legal abandonment and the reduction of categories of people to ‘bare life’. The case studies also allow me to explore two limit-concepts that Agamben offers as a means to re-envision political community: the refugee who refuses assimilation in the nation-state, and the human so degraded as to exist beyond conventional humanist ethics of respect, dignity and responsibility.
This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas - "subaltern urbanism" - which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes. Of these, the ubiquitous ‘slum’ is the most prominent. Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum, subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self-organization and politics. This is a vital and even radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity. However, this article is concerned with the limits of and alternatives to subaltern urbanism. It thus highlights emergent analytical strategies, utilizing theoretical categories that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment such as the megacity, the slum, mass politics and the habitus of the dispossessed. Instead, four categories are discussed — peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and gray spaces. Informed by the urbanism of the global South, these categories break with ontological and topological understandings of subaltern subjects and subaltern spaces.
There is growing attention across the social sciences to the mobility of people, products, and knowledge. This entails attempts to extend and/or rework existing understandings of global interconnections and is reflected in ongoing work on policy transfer—the process by which policy models are learned from one setting and deployed in others. This paper uses a case study of the development of an innovative approach to drug policy in Vancouver, British Columbia to deepen our understanding of what I call ‘urban policy mobilities.' It details the often apparently mundane practices through which Vancouver’s ‘four-pillar’ drug strategy—which combines prevention, treatment, enforcement, and harm reduction—was learned from cities outside North America and is now increasingly taught elsewhere. In doing so it draws on a neo-Foucauldian governmentality approach to emphasize the role of expertise (specialized knowledge held by many actors, not just credentialed professionals) and the deployment of certain powerful truths in the development of the policy. The paper concludes by discussing the spatialities of urban policy mobilities and raising questions about the political and conceptual importance of also maintaining a focus on the causes and consequences of policy <?tf=“t906”>immobilities.
Widely known as Vancouver's 'skid road' the Downtown Eastside struggles with the pressures of socio-spatial polarisation. While the neighbourhood has experienced deepening poverty, widening disadvantage, the entrenchment of an open air drug market, epidemic levels of HIV/AIDS and rising crime rates, it has also undergone extensive residential and commercial revitalisation. This paper explores, qualitatively, the City of Vancouver's policy and planning role in the spatial and temporal collision of both upgrading and downgrading within this single urban neighbourhood. Particular attention is paid to the unintended geographic and social impacts of municipal policy and the challenges faced by the city in attempting to address the conflicting expectations of community interests and the possibility of diametrically opposed, yet equally possible, neigh-bourhood futures. The paper points to the necessity of continued research on the local dynamics, policy implications and scale of intra-urban socio-spatial polarisation. Copyright (c) 2003 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.
Downtown Eastside Local Area Plan. Vancouver, Canada: Department of City Planning
- City
- Vancouver
New wealth seeks a “home”: The global rise of the hedge city
- J Dorfmann
The Right To Remain Exhibit
- Gallery Gachet
Vancouver to revive Hogan’s Alley community with help of American architect
- A Dimoff
Revitalizing Japantown? A Unifying Exploration of Human Rights, Branding, and Place
- K Shimizu
- B Carter
- A Franks
Crisis: Rents and the rate of change in the Downtown Eastside
- J Swanson
- L Mugabo
Memories of Our past: A Brief History and Walking Tour of Powell Street
- A Kobayashi
Vancouver homeless man alleges police brutality. Canada Broadcasting Corporation
- Cbc News
After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region
- W Compton