The Complications of Colonialism for Gentrification Theory and Marxist Geography (original) (raw)
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Urbanizing settler-colonial studies: introduction to the special issue
Settler Colonial Studies, 2017
Urban settlement has been central to the making of European settler-colonial societies since their inception. Settlement, or more sharply invasion, is given material presence and organizational shape through processes of urbanization. The establishment of towns and cities are synonymous with 'development' and 'progress' in the colonialist endeavor, and constitute a distinct activity literally building the settler-colonial nation. The process and materiality of urbanization continues to be a primary mechanism operationalizing the spatial and economic dispossession of colonized peoples. Further, the racist imaginary deployed by colonizers of Indigenous peoples has worked to render the urban as a place not Indigenous, profoundly spatially and temporally disconnected from Indigenous histories and geographies, despite the obvious fact in settler-colonial societies that most cities and settlements sit on unceded territories. Cities in settler-colonial contexts, then, occupy a paradoxical kind of site in relationships between colonizer and colonized. They occupy Indigenous lands and form a central component of the settler society, yet at the same time render Indigeneity profoundly out of place. The settler city is often portrayed as a symbol of a 'new world', a space of liberalism and democracy, a hub of globalization, a magnet for international migration, or a center of investment and corporate powerall dominant discourses that conceal their ongoing colonial nature. Such cities are symbols of the profound displacement, erasure and often destruction of Indigenous histories and geographies and are at the same time precisely the form that keeps that displacement hidden. Cities barely register as the actual locations of claimed lands in global land rights struggles, and yet contain the very sites where the actions of those struggles, on the streets, in Parliaments and courtrooms, materialize. The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring the context and process of the city more explicitly into conversation with the dynamics of settler-colonial power and Indigenous struggle. It is somewhat surprising that critical urban theory, which has developed since the 1970s into a major field of research, has generally overlooked the skewed dynamics of power in settler-colonial contexts as a key dimension for theorizing contemporary cities. Like much of the social sciences, urban studies have been focused on the global Northwest, and have tended to theorize from that vantage point, focusing on the major categories of inequalities produced through capitalism, globalization, citizenship, gender and immigration. These studies have consistently overlooked the perceptions, logic and mobilizations of Indigenous people as apparently irrelevant to contemporary forms of
Urban History Review, 2010
This article uses settler colonialism as a specific analytic frame through which to understand the historical forces in the formation of settler cities as urbanizing polities. Arguing that we must pay attention to the intertwined histories of immigration and colonization, the author traces the symbolic and economic functions and origins of the settler-colonial city to reveal its political imperatives, the expropriation of Indigenous land, and the dispossession, removal, sequestration, and transformation of Indigenous peoples. Taking as a case study the city of Victoria, BC, and its Lekwungen people throughout the nineteenth century, the author charts the shift from a mixed and fluid mercantilist society to an increasingly racialized and segregated settler-colonial polity. This transition reveals how bodies and urbanizing spaces are reordered and remade, and how Indigenous peoples come to be produced and marked by political categories borne of the racialized practices of an urbanizin...
This paper engages the global nexus of colonization, racialization, and urbanization through the settler colonial city of Kelowna, British Columbia (BC), Canada. Kelowna is known for its recent, rapid urbanization and for its ongoing, disproportionate ‘whiteness,’ understood as a complex political geography that enacts boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The white urban identity of Kelowna defines Indigenous and migrant communities as ‘missing’ or ‘out-of-place,’ yet these configurations of ‘missing’ are politically contested. This paper examines how differential processes of racialization and urbanization establish the whiteness of this settler-colonial city, drawing attention to ways that ‘missing’ communities remake relations of ‘rightful presence’ in the city, against dominant racialized, colonial, and urban narratives of their absence and processes of their displacement. Finally, this paper considers how a politics of ‘rightful presence’ needs to be reconfigured in the settler-colonial city, which itself has no rightful presence on unceded Indigenous land.
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019
In 21st century Toronto, the labour of caring for urban trees is entangled with both gentrification processes and the social reproduction of settler colonial space. This paper contributes to the study of environmental gentrification through a study of the social reproduction of settler colonial relations to land in the Parkdale-High Park area of Toronto. Specifically, I take up the hyper-visibility of some forms of social reproduction, in order to shed light on how the mundane, quotidian 'non-work' of living in/with/for capitalism becomes a site of privilege and a luxury pursuit for more affluent residents. The paper highlights the processes and practices whereby settler colonial urban subjects seek out 'nature' as a temporary outside where they can escape from widely accepted downsides of capitalist urbanism, including a diverse array of social and physical ills, from stress, to obesity, to ecological degradation. The paper asks: whose social reproduction does the presence of urban trees serve? In the context of 21st century financialized gentrification, cities are increasingly normalized as spaces of wealth and luxury. It is therefore crucial to pay attention to the raced, gendered, and colonial micro-politics through which urban ecologies are transformed in the service of an anti-democratic vision of the city as a space of leisure and luxury.
PLACING PROPERTY: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities
In the conspicuously geographical debate between 'North' and 'South' urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the 'North' but embody 'South-like' colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from 'any city', this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property––as object, as redress and as land––and use case vignettes from Israel/ Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.
Racial capitalism and the production of settler colonial cities
Geoforum , 2019
This article considers how racial capitalism can be productively mobilized to extend contemporary work on settler colonial urbanism. It argues that scholars interested in the latter have much to gain from the recent flourishing of geographical work on the former. Our contribution begins by surveying some of the core tensions and affinities between the theoretical commitments that animate the settler colonial and racial capitalism frameworks. It then examines the historical development of Winnipeg, Manitoba in an effort to ground our thinking in an empirical context. In doing so, it surveys the key dimensions of that city's settler colonial urban history, focusing on the ways that property relations have functioned as a technique of racial domination. It concludes with a consideration of how an engagement with racial capitalism offers important opportunities to develop a more expansive understanding of racialized oppression in this and other contexts.
Are There Limits to Gentrification? The Contexts of Impeded Gentrification in Vancouver
Urban Studies, 2008
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.
Rethinking gentrification: beyond the uneven development of Marxist urban theory
1984
Abstract In this paper, I make a critical assessment of the ways that issues relating to the'gentrification'of inner-city neighbourhoods have been conceptualised, especially in North America, in both positivist and extant marxist work. I aim to rethink the processes generating'gentrification'and'gentrifiers' and our'ways of seeing'the results of these processes. First, I address epistemological problems of neoclassical and marxist approaches to this subject.
Gathering place: Urban indigeneity and the production of space in Edmonton, Canada
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2016
Most major Canadian cities have displaced existing indigenous settlements and gathering places. The city of Edmonton, Canada today includes what will soon be the nation's largest urban Aboriginal population. Though urban space and planning reflect colonial relationships, it has launched progressive initiatives preceding and following the work of the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This article examines material and intangible traces of Aboriginal history and cultural presence in a theoretical context concerned with public spaces promoting transformative, dialogic, cross-cultural encounters. Case studies consider urban spaces as gathering places in terms of their relevance to indigenous practices of metissage. What is at stake for settler colonial cities in the recognition and inclusion of indigenous presence and historical relationships? Aboriginal cultures can and must play a critical role in the development of a mature civic identity rooted in a complex mutual history, with implications for urban social and ecological sustainability in the future.