Settler-colonial City Research Articles

Cultural dissonance: heritage protests and their implications for heritage-making in settler colonial cities

ABSTRACT Heritage-making’s intrinsic dissonance has been thoroughly established in the field of critical heritage studies, and yet it is a reality that continues to be obscured in heritage practice in settler colonial cities. Authorised heritage discourse continues to project existing state-led systems of heritage-making as a self-evident ‘public good’ for current and future generations. In settler colonial cities, this increasingly includes attempts to incorporate Indigenous views and values into its framing. However, existing statutory processes that uphold normative approaches prove resilient to change. Continued prioritisation of tangible artefact amid private property rights impairs the heritage field’s ability to acknowledge alternative possibilities and to genuinely engage in decolonising transformation. This paper examines three cases where heritage dissonance has erupted into protest and protection action outside of the authorised heritage discourse: the Old Swan Brewery in Perth, Western Australia; Ihumātao in Auckland, New Zealand; and the West Berkeley Shellmound in Berkeley, California. It analyses the contestation of values that led to protest action, what ‘authorised’ attempts were made to heritagise each case and to what result. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how existing processes of statutory heritage-making continue to be inadequate for Indigenous and emerging heritage aspirations.

Shelter in Place

In this article, we interrogate the representation and construction of public park space in a settler colonial city: Toronto/Tkaronto. First, we draw on the relationship between urban neoliberalism and prudentialism to demonstrate the way public health authorities in Toronto/Tkaronto promoted a neoliberal ideology of prudentialism that emphasized individual action (e.g., social distancing, personal hygiene, sheltering in place) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, we consider the extent to which this response congealed and combined with broader anxieties that were used to manage more than the virus. We focus specifically on the way these anxieties took hold in public park space, and in particular the response to encampment communities. We theorize prudentialism, as an instrument of the white settler state, to interrogate the twin processes of organized abandonment and organized violence (Gilmore 2022), which were made visible in the treatment of unhoused people amidst the pandemic in an affluent and seemingly progressive city in a nation now known as Canada. Recognizing that COVID-19 has afflicted global cities marred by real estate speculation and the continual reliance on the commodification of Indigenous Land, which has made homelessness and urban displacement a lived condition for some, we argue that public health crises result not from—and thereby cannot be solved by—prudential responsibilization, but from the willful ignorance of the neoliberal, capitalist white settler [real estate] state (Stein 2019).

Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis by David Hugill (review)

Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis by David Hugill (review)

Everyday Equalities: Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial Cities by Ruth Fincher et al. (review)

Everyday Equalities: Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial Cities by Ruth Fincher et al. (review)

Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis

Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis

Haifa City profile: Emergent binationalism in a settler colonial city

Haifa, a major seaport in the Eastern Mediterranean, is one of Israel's “mixed cities” where Palestinians and Jews live together. Yet, unlike other mixed localities, which witness rising tensions due to relentless settler colonization, Haifa maintains a relative modus vivendi. In this city profile, we seek to explicate the causes and consequences of this outstanding situation and pose the notion of a binational city as a path to urban decolonization. Drawing on historical records, city plans, and interviews with residents, we trace Haifa's binational urbanism from its modern beginnings to the present. We show how Palestinian and Jewish urbanism developed in Haifa from the early 20th century, and how the city was transformed into an ethnically homogenous settler colonial space in the wake of ethnic cleansing. We then explain how the legacies of colonial planning, deindustrialization, and globalization led to Haifa's urban decline in recent decades, thereby making room for indigenous urban revival, and for urban relations based on more egalitarian foundations. Examining contemporary plans and urban developments, we claim Haifa presents hopeful possibilities for binational decolonization. However, realizing this potential requires redistributive efforts and instituting the principle of parity across all domains of urban politics and planning.

Decolonisation, gentrification, and the settler-colonial city: Reappropriation and new forms of urban exclusion in Israel

Focusing on the immigration of upper-middle-class Palestinian families to the Israeli town of Upper-Nazareth, originally built by the state to enhance Jewish presence in the area, this paper frames the concept of decolonising gentrification. Accordingly, it studies a unique inconsistency between economic class and ethnonational hegemony, which enables upwardly Arab minority families to overcome ethnic barriers and to exercise social and spatial mobility. Therefore, this paper explains how these socio-political dynamics challenge the local settler-colonial aspects of urban development and enable the reappropriation of colonised urban space. Focusing on the case of Upper-Nazareth and its former ‘Officers’ Neighbourhood’, we examine a distinctive contradiction between political power and economic abilities that triggers a unique case of gentrification, where the colonised minority gentrifies the colonising hegemony. At the same time, this decolonising gentrification, as we argue, takes place in restricted urban enclaves, and relies on an ethno-class price gap as it is only the minority upper-class who is willing to pay the increasing prices, due to their limited options. Therefore, as this paper shows, decolonising gentrification simultaneously challenges and recreates urban settler-colonialism, enabling limited market-oriented reappropriation while triggering ethnic-based accumulation and new forms of neoliberal exclusion.

Rethinking housing inequality and justice in a settler colonial city

This paper brings the housing studies literature into conversation with scholarship on settler colonialism to consider questions of housing justice in settler colonial societies. It begins from an understanding of Indigenous dispossession as not simply an historical context but an ongoing process in which housing is deeply implicated through its embeddedness in colonial land and property regimes. Furthermore, processes of exclusion, neoliberalisation, financialisation and gentrification have made housing central to the production of racial inequality in (and beyond) settler colonies. Liberal notions of inequality that dominate most housing policy and some scholarship are, therefore, inadequate; what is required is research and intervention oriented towards housing justice – the meaning of which is best understood through intellectual and practical engagement with movements struggling for it. In this spirit, the paper presents the story of a prolonged struggle in so-called Sydney, which suggests how housing initiatives and campaigns led by Indigenous people are iteratively reconstructing existing political and economic structures in ways that address commodification, dispossession, exclusion, and displacement. This story points to a need for housing justice scholarship to engage with concepts of reparations – an engagement towards which this paper, in its final section, makes some small but hopefully helpful steps.

Imagining the Settler-Colonial City: Introducing Urban Indigeneities and the Settler-Colonial City, a Special Issue of the Urban History Review

This article introduces the essays collected in this special issue of the Urban History Review and sketches the urban imagination of settler-colonial political traditions. It focuses on the way settler cities are imagined, argues that the settler-colonial city may be seen as distinct from other urban formations, and suggests that the urban form is a constitutive component of settler-colonial formations and their imaginaries. Settlers, the founders of political orders in distant locales, have cities on their minds precisely because they are heading in the opposite direction. They focus on the city they will build and on the cities they are escaping. They are especially concerned with the ways in which the former is going to differ from the latter. This imagination should be considered when appraising the settler colonial city, an endeavour to which this special issue contributes.

When monuments fall: anticolonial disruptions and decolonial urban practices (2022) Plenary Commentary

ABSTRACT In this commentary on Laura Pulido’s plenary, “Cultural Memory, White Innocence, and United States Territory”, we reflect on the significance of colonial monuments and their toppling in the Canadian context. Thinking through the 2022 toppling of the John “Gassy Jack” Deighton monument, we consider how this act disrupts the settler colonial city and spatial and ideological manifestations of cultural memory. Reading settler texts on Deighton’s “founding” of the Gastown neighborhood through a feminist and anticolonial lens, we insist that the monument erased gendered histories of Indigenous genocide and upheld a particular cultural memory of white settler innocence. Engaging with Squamish cultural memory and the poetry of Toyts-ten-aat Cease Wyss, we consider what it would mean to center decolonial spatial practices and Squamish geographies. Lastly, we explore the complicated politics surrounding the toppling of the Gassy Jack statue, torn down without Squamish consultation, revealing distinctions between anticolonial and decolonial spatial practices.

Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis by David Hugill (review)

Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis by David Hugill (review)

(Mis-)belonging to the climate-resilient city: Making place in multi-risk communities of racialized urban America

ABSTRACT Through climate adaptation planning cities are transforming places and relations, most recently via green climate resilient infrastructure (GRI). Yet, GRI’s incorporation into existing, racialized infrastructure systems of urban development, regeneration and finance has raised questions about the socio-cultural impacts and justice dimensions of recent directions in climate adaptation planning and urbanism. While critical scholars highlight the exclusion of historically marginalized residents, this paper’s analysis of the impacts of GRI-driven planning for sense of belonging reveals a complex and multi-faceted experience of gentrification and displacement in the racialized, settler colonial city. Drawing on insights from civic actors about their lived experience of green and climate resilient projects in Boston, Massachusetts, we develop a novel understanding of belonging, which entails degrees of (mis)belonging. Our analysis uncovers three pathways by which climate urbanism shapes belonging into various alienated, subordinated, assimilated and emancipated forms, and reveals the kinds of political subjects and socio-cultural relations that emerge from the lived experience of climate adaptation projects. More broadly, this study sheds light on how less visible placemaking practices and alternative modes of addressing socio-climate vulnerability contribute to climate justice and injustice dynamics.

Interpreting spatial struggles in the historical record: Indigenous urbanism and erasure in 20th-century Mexico

This article explores a historical struggle for a right to the city in Oaxaca, Mexico, when a mostly Indigenous-run street market resisted an elite-led urban renewal campaign centered on removing the market from city center. Bringing this case of Indigenous urbanism from Latin America in conversation with work on Indigenous productions of space and the settler colonial city mainly produced in Anglophone contexts, it demonstrates the utility of concepts central to settler colonial theory “dispossession and erasure” for the Latin American urban context. It does so through an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of discourse analysis as an interpretive strategy for uncovering the racial dynamics of such socio-spatial struggles using state archives in Mexico during a time period for which racial identifiers were rarely used. The article shows the dispossession of Indigenous lands and lifeways as not only foundational to the colonial city but also ongoing, produced through different mechanisms in different historical moments. At the same time, by foregrounding an Indigenous struggle against peripheralization and erasure, the project is shown to be perpetually incomplete.

Challenging the Linear Model of Peacebuilding Planning: The Case of Jerusalem

The complexity of planning and implementing peacebuilding processes has been discussed using various approaches, for example, adaptive peacebuilding, and the “local turn” in peacebuilding. These theories argue that peacebuilding is a nonlinear and contextual process, contrary to the linear, static conception of the liberal peace paradigm. This paper contributes to this field and seeks to learn how peacebuilding processes can be planned better, by integrating the concepts of adaptive and urban peacebuilding. Using action research and organizational ethnographic analysis of an EU-funded peacebuilding process between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem, this article lays out four general steps to improve planning for future peacebuilding initiatives: (1) integrate flexibility; (2) balance inherent asymmetries; (3) “localize” planning; and (4) plan for indirect alternatives. In conclusion, we discuss the implications for peacebuilding processes in other contested and settler-colonial cities.

Here. Again. Anti-Asian violence in the city

ABSTRACT Over the course of 2020 and 2021, several Asian-owned businesses were vandalized and individuals of Asian descent were attacked in Tacoma, Washington, part of the alarming increase in anti-Asian violence in the past several years. The incidents occurred in parts of the settler colonial city, which sits on the ancestral territory of the Puyallup nation, that are embedded with histories of privilege, dispossession, and anti-Asian violence. Many of the targeted businesses are just blocks away from where riotous White mobs with torches drove away Chinese residents in 1885, an episode known as the ‘Tacoma Method.' These very same streets were later locations on which Japanese immigrants had businesses and homes prior to being driven out and incarcerated during WWII. This paper excavates the reappearance of racialized violence in the same city spaces through the work of Allan Pred as well as scholars who consider the complexity of belonging in the settler colonial city. This excavation aims to make visible that which is unsaid and silenced in our urban landscapes so that we may counter the reproduction of expulsion/alien status and material violence in the settler colonial city.

On structures and events

ABSTRACT Patrick Wolfe's description of settler colonialism as a “structure, not an event” has made a lasting impact on the field of settler colonial studies and beyond. This short intervention considers what the metaphors of “structure” and “event” reveal and what they conceal when they are deployed in the service of understanding settler-colonial urbanism. It emphasizes the point that settler-colonial cities are multi-scalar entities produced by an intersecting range of forces and asks whether an over-reliance on Wolfe's most famous phrase might sometimes relieve analysts of the burden of accounting for the complexity of these entanglements.

The role of the diaspora: malaga, vā, and contesting the financialization of customary land in Samoa

ABSTRACT The settler colonial city has been described in relative isolation, detached from the global metropole, intent on internal enrichment through the deterritorialization of Indigenous people. This urban formation deploys familiar spatial techniques: legal borders, economic regions, and segregated enclaves. Yet for many Indigenous peoples, the relationship to land is not juridical, economic, nor socio-racial, it is genealogical. These genealogical ties to land extend the boundaries of settler-colonialism – and resistance to it – beyond the islands, across diasporic space. Decolonial Pacific studies describe a geography resistance to land reform among Indigenous and immigrant Pacific Islanders which exceeds and overspills the settler colonial city. Diasporic space – moving through and overspilling the settler colonial city – is the spatial context for understanding resistance to customary land reform in Samoa and the struggles of other Pacific Islanders against settler colonial processes of dispossession.

Fluid stories: Indigeneity flowing through the urban narrative. The example of Ōtākaro, New Zealand

Our ancestors are master story tellers. They interweave our past, present and future for us. They deliver our genealogy, connecting people and their environment, conveying identity and obligation. Can you hear their voices in the city as you move along its waterways and paths and through its structures? In recent decades there has been a resurgence in the use of Indigenous languages, knowledges, culture and stories in urban areas. For some of us, there is a sense of optimism that comes from the success of initiatives that reassert the potency and integrity of Indigenous worldviews in the urban setting. Initiatives that contribute and re-remember a richer story. In this paper, I explore how Indigenous-led urban strategies in central Ōtautahi|Christchurch are serving to prize open a space for Indigenous stories in the settler-colonial city and thereby support Indigenous peoples to be and see themselves through the resulting reconnection to place, culture, history and kin.

Layers of settler urbanization and indigenous relational place-making: uncovering an ongoing palimpsest

ABSTRACT Cities in settler colonial states imply a continuous settlement in Indigenous territories and on unceded land. With each layer of colonial enterprises, there is also Indigenous resistance to it, which in turn brings on new interruptions and displacements. Each layer relates to previous ones and, as an urban palimpsest, public spaces become multilayered places, with permanent processes of displacements and dispossession and re-territorialization and re-possession. And if the settler colonial city is a useful framework to understand the multiple layers of colonial processes happening in an urban public space, we suggest that the notion of the palimpsest enlightens also the multiple layers of Indigenous presence and continuous place-making as a resistance to these processes.

Settler urban geographies of decommissioned prisons: an invitation to a discussion

ABSTRACT As urban colonial prisons are becoming obsolete, cities must reckon with their enduring presence in landscapes that are continuously developing. Examining how decommissioned prisons are placed within urban development agendas in settler colonial cities, I consider the heritagisation of urban prisons as extractive; it captures and manipulates time through the juxtaposition of defunct carceral sites with the so-called “post” carceral city. This move is profitable for the city first since it generates “monopoly rent” from unique “cultural heritage” sites, and second since it “frees” urban land – now cleaned from its carceral past – for capitalist investment. Against this, the paper asserts that carcerality is a living structure of settler colonial cities. In these cities, racial capitalism has always been intertwined with punitive and extractive measures against Indigenous people, who remain unprecedently overrepresented in Australian prisons.