City of perpetual displacement: 100 years since the destruction of the Kitsilano Reserve

EDITORIAL. This year marks 100 years since the dispossession of the Kitsilano Reserve. Today also marks the renewed displacement and dislocation of diverse communities in East Vancouver, with the intensification of land struggles in Grandview-Woodlands and the Downtown Eastside, two areas of the city with diverse indigenous communities. This article argues that the 1913 destruction of the Kitsilano reserve is connected to the present through a past that has, in fact, never been resolved.

False Creek Indian Reserve, Granville and C.P.R. Kitsilano bridges, the McCreery and Johnston residences and a cannery ca. 1880 [1]

In 1971, the Downtown Eastside was officially designated a “historic area” in the City of Vancouver. In addition to neighborhoods like Shaughnessy — which for decades received special status for planners and politicians — Gastown was singled out as a founding neighborhood of the city. Today Gastown is the epicentre of city-backed revitalization, pushing into neighbouring areas DTES and Grandview Woodlands, with a concerted attempt by planners to make the old into the new. The attempt to repackage the past, however, makes the real stakes of history more relevant than ever.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside plan deregulates housing by-laws, fails to include new social housing development

Low income residents taking the street at a Rally against Displacement and Gentrification on June 14th
Photo credit: p0stcap

Last week the City of Vancouver released its draft report of the Local Area Plan for the Downtown Eastside. Reviews of the report have been mixed. While the city’s planning director Kevin McNaney calls it “innovative, aggressive and achievable,” the Carnegie Community Action Project characterized the draft report as “a recipe for displacement.” What exactly is promised in the city’s brand new 10-year plan for the DTES?

First, the good news: the plan admits that gentrification is taking place, that it displaces low-income residents, and that this displacement has negative social impacts. These acknowledgements mark a change of position for the City and can be attributed entirely to the anti-gentrification struggle of DTES residents.

Vancouver’s Trayvon Martins

It’s Sunday early evening and we’re at Victory Square, a park in Vancouver, holding a Vigil for Trayvon Martin. We’re here to mourn Martin’s murder and express our outrage with the system that made it happen.

Martin, 17 years old, was simply walking home one day when George Zimmerman spotted him, called 911, assumed he was “up to no good,” confronted him, and eventually shot him dead. In the aftermath, Martin’s character was analyzed and condemned. Many believed Zimmerman’s story that Martin attacked him. Many accepted that Martin was a menace. Many clung to “damning” reports that he had marijuana in his system, that he’d been suspended from school, and that he, like so many young kids, had a habit of macho posturing in photos.

Few of them lingered on the fact that Zimmerman has a history of violence and paranoia. He was once arrested for fighting an officer, his former fiance filed a restraining order for domestic abuse, and he’d made 46 separate 911 and nonemergency calls between August 2004 and the day he murdered Martin. One relative even accused him of sexual assault.

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The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Eviction of a Political Idea | Part I

“That the world is out of joint is shown everywhere in the fact that however a problem is solved, the solution is false.” – Theodor Adorno

After years of political negligence, a failed architectural proposal, and prolonged economic recession, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is finally getting a new building at Larwill Park. A good dose of public elation, institutional relief, and civic boosterism has accompanied the announcement. But situated squarely within the double-edged contradictions of cultural production and presentation, the new VAG might be less a rebirth than a last gasp. To complicate matters, a wild spate of developer-city-state evictions of artist-run spaces have recently exacerbated the fierce symptoms of Vancouver’s rapid gentrification. And with the surprising yet decisive re-election of a BC Liberal majority at the provincial level, coupled with unilateral corporate control at the municipal level, the political and aesthetic status quo appears practically guaranteed. The VAG’s announcement in the context of ongoing neoliberal reforms and much decried cultural fragmentation and displacement, may yet be a “kiss of death” for Vancouver — sweet at contact, but fatal in the long run. Viewed critically, the announcement seems more sobering than joyous, more foreboding than fortunate.