The Mainlander | 2012 March

From the monthly archives: "March 2012"

Fabricating the Creative City: In search of a present-tense (3/3)

By Graeme Fisher and Andrew Witt On March 25, 2012 · 1 Comment

‘Fabricating the Creative City’ is a three part series commissioned by The Mainlander. In Part 1, the authors pried into Vancouver’s rendition of ‘creative city’ ideology and its particular relationship to public art. In Part 2, ‘The New Monuments,’ the authors mapped the local state’s search for a new type of public sculpture, interwoven with the urban plan and built form of the city. Part 3 concludes with an extended meditation on the distressed relationship between art and politics in the contemporary conjuncture. The running thesis of the series is that the work of art at the creative city is not any singular “work” per se, but the production of the City as a total work of art.

Today Vancouver is conceived as a monopolizable totality, everywhere placed in circulation for consumption and contemplation. As every square-inch of the city becomes privatized for Vancouver’s capitalist class, the balance of forces veer in favor of profit, enjoyment, and the preservation of crisis. Beating with the mercurial blood of surplus value, the pulse of the city is tightly constricted by the developer-monopoly tourniquet -- a tried, tested and true apparatus of monopoly-capitalist development that equilibrates the terms of supply and demand in order to keep housing prices impossibly high.

From this perspective, what are we to do with the intersection of official politics and state art in Vancouver at the moment when these two surpluses -- surplus value and surplus enjoyment -- intersect. If one accepts the thesis that the city is now a monument for social reproduction of the commodity-form, we should add with equal weight that it remains the space of encounters: it breeds antagonism, collective resentment, as well as self-affirmation when any number of people come together in opposition to the dominant ordering of the world. Against the drive to sustain the status quo, politics is instead the name of the movement that permanently demolishes the existing state of things. The city, on the other hand, is the site of this struggle, where the transformation of the regime of private property is met with the people’s ability and capacity to cooperatively construct something new outside the logic exploitation and its barren self-interest.

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Tenants Fight Renoviction at 577 East 8th Avenue

By andrea bennett On March 20, 2012 · 4 Comments

On Monday, March 19, current and former tenants of Richard Watson Court, 577 East 8th Avenue, gathered for a press conference on the sidewalk outside their building. Of the approximately 50 people who lived in the building last year, only four remain. When Richard Watson Court was built in 1983, all of its 39 suites were constructed with accessibility in mind, and 9 were specifically designed for wheelchair and scooter use: lower-set stoves and sinks, wheel-in showers, and five-walled bedrooms, allowing for easier movement around a bed. The property’s mortgage was held by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation until 2006, when it was transferred to BC Housing; up until that transfer, the building was managed by the Voice of the Cerebral Palsied. According to Tristan Markle of the Vancouver Renters’ Union, the building was then neglected under BC Housing’s management. Before the building was sold to a private developer in November 2011, the balconies were rotted and tenants were ordered to stay clear of them.

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BOOK REVIEW | One-Dimensional Woman

By Amy De'Ath On March 15, 2012 · Add Comment

Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman, London: Zero Books, 2009. 81 pages. ISBN: 9781846942419 Nina Power’s One-Dimensional Woman provocatively takes the cue for its title and premise from Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man. Power invokes Marcuse’s concept of a system of production and consumption that creates ‘false needs,’ flattened social relations, and an illusory sense of individual autonomy. Power frames her own book as a retooling of this critique, intended to address a much more recent rhetoric of consumerism and contemporary feminism which – in similar and new ways – creates a barrier to productive critical thinking about work, sex and politics. Power is based at Roehampton University, part of the University of London, where she teaches philosophy. In the past year, however, she has been just as likely to be seen taking part in student protests against the recent tripling of tuition fees at UK universities, or at the solidarity camp that sought to prevent the eviction of Irish Traveller families from their land at Dale Farm in Essex, or of course, around the Occupy London Stock Exchange encampment outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. She can also frequently be found among the Guardian’s comment is free pages. One Dimensional Woman is published by the upstart Zero Books as part of a series of readable texts intended as 'another kind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist.' While this short book came out before the wave of protests surrounding the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement took hold, we might hope that its message will be more immediately understood as a result of these events. And indeed Vancouver, as the birthplace of Botox -- and a city long-preoccupied with cosmopolitan surfaces and spectacle -- seems its ideal target.

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Task Force Interim Report: Neoliberal Strategies for Vancouver’s Housing Crisis

By Sean Antrim On March 13, 2012 · 2 Comments

Yesterday, the Mayor’s Developer Task Force released its interim report. On the surface, the four page pamphlet does not provide anything new, containing only the standard free market jargon and housing bubble diagrams we have seen for the last three years. As former planner Brent Toderian has recently stated, the plan regurgitates much of what the City has already proposed. Instead of proven solutions, there will be only market solutions to housing affordability built by for-profit housing developers. The same mechanisms that gave us a housing crisis in the first place will now be used to address it. The report is clear that those who need housing the most will be left out of the mandate of the task force: the task force will only be looking at how to build housing for people with incomes above $21,500. It is claimed that individuals who make less than this amount will have their housing needs addressed by the City’s Housing and Homelessness Plan. The Housing and Homelessness Plan calls for the construction of 38,000 units of housing -- 20,000 of these condos -- over the next ten years. This amounts to 3,800 units, in other words, less housing than the 4,000 or more units that have been built annually for the past decade.

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News
- City and VPD move to arrest PiDGiN picketers, residents bring opposition
  18 Apr 2013
  
  Photo credit: DM GILLIS
  
  After ten steady weeks of nightly protests by anti-poverty activists in front of the PiDGiN restaurant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, police have stated that they plan to arrest picketers. In a press conference delivered yesterday, Vancouver Police Department spokesperson Brian Montague stated that his department is “anticipating an arrest soon.”
  
  A letter issued yesterday by the VPD states that PiDGiN picketers can now be arrested for “shouting, screaming, or swearing.” The statement cites section 430(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada, which means that the VDP is seeking to label the protest a criminal action. An associated VPD release states that the police are issuing the arrest order to prevent Vancouverites from being “denied the lawful use and enjoyment of property.”
  
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- Vancouverites walk for Welfare Justice
  1 Apr 2013
  On Wednesday, March 27, residents across the city joined together to walk 14.5km across Vancouver for Welfare Justice. The walk was organized by the Raise the Rates coalition to highlight the need for a significant increase in welfare rates as well as a comprehensive anti-poverty plan in the lead-up to the provincial election this May. The walk commenced at Christy Clark’s office on West 4th Ave in Kitsilano and ended almost 8 hours later outside Adrian Dix’s office at the Joyce Street skytrain station.
  
  Homeless Dave joined the walk for Welfare Justice on the sixth day of his hunger strike against displacement and gentrification. Welfare and housing are intimately connected and as Vancouver’s low-income housing stock erodes, people on income assistance are being hit the hardest. In 2012 alone, 426 SRO units in the DTES became unaffordable for people on welfare. A recent article by Seth Klein shows that despite government press releases, the actual increase in the social housing stock in BC has been negligible since 2006.
- Homeless Dave on sixth day of hunger strike against gentrification and displacement
  27 Mar 2013
  
  At noon on Friday March, 22nd, Homeless Dave began a hunger strike in support of housing rights and social justice in the Downtown Eastside. The strike was announced in front of the controversial Sequel 138 development site at Main and Hastings, where a developer is planning to build unaffordable market condos using a financial subsidy from the BC Liberal government.
  
  Homeless Dave, who is now housed and goes by the name “the artist formerly known as Homeless Dave,” has put three demands at the front of the indefinite hunger strike: that the city decline the development permit for Sequel 138; that the former Main Street police station be used for social housing; and that the Downtown Eastside be declared a “social justice zone.” “We’re not about smashing windows,” stated Dave, “we’re about smashing the old broken paradigms and building new paradigms that are more just and equal.”
- Anti-poverty activists call out Adrian Dix, demand a commitment to increase unlivable welfare rates
  31 Jan 2013
  
  This morning, anti-poverty activists protested inside NDP leader Adrian Dix’s office in the Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood of Vancouver. They say that the NDP has yet to make a commitment to decreasing poverty in British Columbia. Recent research has shown that British Columbia is among the most unequal provinces in the country.
  
  Today is the one year anniversary of NDP MLA Jagrup Brar’s completion of the “Welfare Challenge.” For the month of January in 2012, Brar lived off the $610, the amount allocated to single welfare recipients in BC. During his challenge, the MLA lost 26 pounds.
  
  His challenge was an emulation of a similar challenge taken by former NDP MLA Emery Barnes in 1986. Since Barnes’ campaign, welfare increases have lagged behind increases in the cost of living.
  
  One of the organizers Bill Hopwood said: “A year ago today, Jagrup Brar finished his welfare challenge. He couldn’t afford to live on $610. He got in debt, had to borrow money, and lost 26 pounds. Nobody can afford to live on that.”
  
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- Protest against government bailout of Pantages condo project
  11 Dec 2012
  
  Tues Dec 11, 2012 — Today at 2pm, the Downtown Eastside not for Developers coalition (DNFD) is holding a demonstration against the government bailout of the Pantages condo project on the 100-block of East Hastings. News was recently leaked to the Province newspaper that BC Housing has bailed-out condo developer Marc Williams/Worthington Properties with $23 million in sub-prime loans. BC Housing said that it has a mandate to fund “revitalization.”
  
  The Province reported: “Dan Maxwell, vice-president, corporate services, and CFO of B.C. Housing, said Williams’ application to the province’s community partnership program was accepted because the development will revitalize the block.”
  
  The organizers of today’s demonstration are “calling on Marc Williams to sell the Pantages parcel to the City at the 2010 assessed value and for the City to buy the site and work with BC Housing to develop it as 100% resident controlled social housing with low-income community space on the ground floor.”
  
  Read Full Article →

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Fabricating the Creative City: In search of a present-tense (3/3)

Tenants Fight Renoviction at 577 East 8th Avenue

BOOK REVIEW | One-Dimensional Woman

Task Force Interim Report: Neoliberal Strategies for Vancouver’s Housing Crisis

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