Searching for Aboriginal/Indigenous Self-Determination: Urban Citizenship in the Winnipeg Low-Cost-Housing Sector, Canada

Abstract

Theorists concerned with processes of urban citizenship have not accounted for their connections to a changing national citizenship regime and their internal dynamics, notably as they relate to evolving Aboriginal/indigenous rights. Using transformations in the low-cost-housing sector in Winnipeg, Canada as the empirical basis, I examine how changes in the trajectories of social and Aboriginal citizenship have intersected at the urban scale. This is done by combining document and policy analyses with data from thirty-seven semistructured personal interviews with Aboriginal and nonAboriginal housing actors. Following changes to federally driven social-housing policy in 1993, housing stakeholders in Winnipeg self-organised to engage all sectors of society in processes of urban citizenship around low-cost-housing goals. Aboriginal citizenship pursuits have not been interwoven with the pursuit of these social goals. There is a role for the federal government in ensuring the coupling of Aboriginal with urban social citizenship.