Mapping Municipal Colonialism: Counternarratives of Neighbourhood-as-Home in Strathcona, 1968–69

Abstract

Recent scholarship on neighbourhood organizations and their attempts to stop urban renewal focuses on the agency of citizens and the difficulty in defining the boundaries of what makes a neighbourhood. This article contributes to the scholarship on neighbourhood activism by examining the formation of the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association, in Vancouver in 1968, through the lens of decolonial performance studies to illustrate the differing definitions of home and domesticity during the postwar period. The City of Vancouver’s justification for demolishing the neighbourhood of Strathcona followed a colonial progress narrative, which conflated home and housing as an economic commodity, whereas for the residents of Strathcona home was more than an investment as it also encapsulated their feelings of belonging to their dwelling, each other, and the surrounding commercial areas. This article challenges the view that urban renewal is a different phase of urban development, but instead highlights the continuity between early settler-colonial and postwar ideas about housing to argue that colonialism is a structure embedded in civic attitudes and language in discussions of housing, homemaking, and domesticity that are then reinforced through zoning, by-laws, and neighbourhood regulations. By drawing parallels between early settler-colonial use of maps, surveys, land-use guidelines, and urban renewal plans, this article explains how the same tools and ideas implemented to justify the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands were reanimated as tools of expropriation in the post-war period to justify the demolition of a multicultural working-class neighbourhood. The residents in Strathcona successfully countered the City of Vancouver’s view of their neighbourhood by creating their own maps, surveys, and suggestions for how land could be used to justify rehabilitation and preservation of their sense of home, thereby illustrating that there is nothing neutral or objective about urban development practices.