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After dispossession: An urban rights praxis of remaining in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

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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.

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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.
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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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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...
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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.
Article
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