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Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies

Originally a single article series, this is now a category covering Stuart’s articles about place, space, cities, landscape and disinhabitation

The Anti-Cosmopolitan City (part 2): The Intolerant Urbanizer

Real Problems and Crises in Rural and Northern Canada
Wally Oppal is probably one of the most accomplished people every to have served in elected office in BC history. He served, from 2005 to 2009, as Gordon Campbell’s Attorney-General, Minister of Justice and Minister of State for Multiculturalism. He was part of the one four-year stretch of benign technocratic liberalism the BC Liberal Party managed to deliver during the second quarter of its sixteen years in power.

He was part of the government that unexpectedly introduced English Canada’s first carbon tax, one that course corrected to the political centre, after four years of slash and burn neoliberal austerity and privatization. Having already made a name for himself as a Supreme Court and Appeal Court justice, following his electoral defeat in 2009, Oppal was deemed that ideal person to chair a government commission into one of the worst episodes of police failure and dereliction of duty, the 2010 Missing Women Commission of Inquiry into the multi-year reign of murderous predation serial killer Robert Pickton inflicted on the survival sex workers of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).

The does not stand alone. It is one of a half-dozen reports by different levels of settler and indigenous governments and international NGOs that investigated the larger phenomenon of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada, including but not limited to Northwestern BC’s infamous Highway of Tears and Southwestern BC’s infamous DTES.

But while the report does not stand alone, it does stand out as the best of such reports. Like all others it has two main demands: (1) restore the bus and (2) close the camps.

If you want female members of the rural underclass to be abducted, raped and murdered less, they should probably have an affordable way to get from the Indian Reserve (i.e. brutally underserviced rural ghetto) to town for groceries, smokes, a movie, a trip to the pub. So, allowing the bus service to be withdrawn and then restoring only a fraction of it, with there being no bus service on most days and no on-reserve stops on most reserves is probably not a great thing. If only we could get the bus service back to 1997 levels!

The other demand, to close the camps, is equally obvious. Rural and Northern Canada is being emptied of towns and villages which are being replaced with temporary worker camps, known colloquially as “man camps.” Reversing Cold War policies that sought to settle workers in the industrial periphery in towns and villages with schools, hospitals and public amenities, neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies have sought to dismantle small towns and replace them with temporary encampments, single industry towns composed almost entirely of young men, without basic amenities, government services or an environment in which children could be raised.

Gone are the mining towns of the past with their community halls, small elementary schools and newspaper offices. Gone even are the restaurants and cafes as camp workers eat in enormous mess halls when not suppressing their appetites with central nervous system stimulants whose use is widely tolerated in the camps.

Because these camps are so dominated by energy sector workers, usually existing to construct pipelines, frack natural gas or build macro-hydro projects, enterprising academics in the US have found they can construct predictive murder maps just by knowing fracking and pipeline construction locations. The isolated, young, stimulant-using young men typically work two weeks in, two weeks out, spending the rest of their time in communities like Fort Mac and Fort St. John. To briefly reference an earlier article, this is why I tend to call the communities Rex Murphy idealized “Jeckyllvilles.”

Oppal’s Underappreciated Insights Into Self-Fashioning
But Oppal went beyond the usual “close the camps,” “bring back the bus” chorus to write in detail about how women and girls’ at-risk status follows them from low income rural communities in ways that have little to do with race. Oppal observed that the non-indigenous women targeted by Pickton and other predators shared key demographic characteristics: they were low-income and had migrated to the Vancouver as young adults.

Oppal argued that, for young, low-income migrants, urbanization is a crucial part of identity formation and self-fashioning, that becoming a fully agentive person with her own distinct identity and choices is strongly conflated with moving to the city for young women who find themselves in at-risk work, at-risk housing or in conflict with the law. To return to a rural community or even request help from people still residing in it is a shameful act for young adults who centre urbanization in the creation of their adult self.

In other words, the use of urbanization narratives in self-fashioning, in and of itself, places young women from the rural and remote communities at material risk by constraining their access to material and the range of places they can live. Not only is it shameful to return to one’s supposedly benighted community of origin or obtain aid from its residents; it is shameful to admit that one has experienced, violence, intolerance of exploitation in one’s new place of residence. It creates incentives for narrating painful, dangerous and exploitive work as more voluntary and less harmful than it actually is.

And this kind of thinking is hardly limited to survival sex workers and members of the urban underclass.

When one examines those most enthusiastic about stripping urban life of ideological pluralism, religious diversity, etc. we tend to see urbanizers disproportionately represented among the most intolerant. They tend to espouse the belief that the kind of community they left was not merely situationally problematic at the time that they but that rural communities are inherently benighted and that the kind of people who voluntarily live in such places are, axiomatically, people who are some mixture of ignorant, evil and stupid.

I am not, of course, referring to all people who move from small communities to large communities. I am referring to a particular subset in which the intolerance is most concentrated, although hardly universal.

Profiling the Intolerant Urbanizer
Most people who move to larger communities do so to take up a new job or attend an educational institution. These individuals typically do not centre their urbanization the same way when fashioning an identity and a life story. Those who move for college typically place their education at the centre of the adult identity they create; similarly, those who move for work typically place their new job at the centre of their self-fashioning project. It tends to be individuals who move and then find work or take up low-status employment prior to moving so as to finance the move.

Similarly, individuals who aspire to live in a particular city about which they developed an interest as a younger person and who move to a far-away city rather than the nearest major centre, are less likely to become intolerant urbanizers because their narrative is centred on attraction to a specific urban space, not their rejection of life in a small community. Intolerant urbanizers therefore tend to have come from lower-income backgrounds with fewer educational prospects and to lead adult lives with lower-education, lower-status jobs. Paradoxically, they often tend to accord greater respect to white collar work and higher education than those with more education and higher status jobs.

Because of this, they tend to see qualities in themselves that they value such as having high status friends and associates, being well-read and politically well-informed as arising primarily from their decision to live in a city. Consequently, they also tend to strongly associate rural communities with intolerance, ignorance, dead-end jobs, etc.

And because their decision to relocate is so central to their identity, it must always be viewed as an unalloyed and permanent good. For this reason, they are often hostile to positive news about rural and remote communities. An increasingly diverse and high quality culinary scene, the opening of a local university, these things annoy them but the news from home that intolerant urbanizers are typically most upset by is the election of non-conservatives by their former community. If their former community is expressing the same political views as the one in which they live now, its status as a benighted and unimprovable place that could never have been reformed, only escaped-from is compromised.

This is why “guns and religion,” “basket of deplorables” and “unacceptable views” discourse and quips by progressive politicians are so tempting to pepper a stump speech or interview with. They play so strongly to the intolerant urbanizers in the room whose self-fashioning narrative is premised this image of people from small communities as almost ontologically distinct from urbanites.

Obviously, there is considerable irony to this reality, given that intolerant urbanizers are leading the charge to make cities into the very sort of place they indict the countryside for being: rigid, unchanging, intolerant, pious and homogeneous.

While there have been intolerant urbanizers for as long as there have been cities, the authoritarian turn our society is taking amplifies their social power and encourages the ugliest, most problematic aspects of their worldview. Insecurity over this obvious irony, unfortunately, only magnifies the authoritarian impulse. Criticism of the widening gap between the ideal of the permissive, diverse, cosmopolitan city and the day-to-day reality of our increasingly authoritarian urban culture only increases the impetus for shunning, silencing and punishment of critics, a tightening of the circle and a further chilling of speech.

It is really the height of irony that the highest priority when it comes to controlled and coerced speech is the demand for a chorus of agreement about just how free, diverse and tolerant city life really is. From preschool onwards, educators, news media and opinion leaders relentlessly “celebrate” just how wonderfully tolerant the contemporary progressive city is. But those most committed to these celebrations are those raised outside of the cities, who have made changing their residential address in their teens or twenties the most important thing about themselves in the fragile identity that sits atop this migration story.

Self-made identities and self-fashioning projects are not equally important or present in all human societies. The intolerant urbanizer is part of a larger phenomenon about which I have written in the past: our society’s reversion to a baroque culture, one deeply concerned with social rank, one that transacts an increasing portion of social power through dynamics of honour and offense. Such societies tend to encourage and foreground forms of self-presentation as central to identity dynamics and the intolerant urbanizer is just one element, just one example of how these new social trends are curdling urban life in the Global North.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Anti-Cosmopolitan City – Part #1: the Tolerance Horseshoe

The Tea Party and Trump Waves
I was living with an American woman, the daughter of evangelical Christians and major Republican donors. They had a framed wall-length signed portrait of George W Bush in their entry foyer and had FoxNews, which Rachel termed “the Jonestown loudspeaker of conservative America” running on the television in at least one room at all times. I moved to the US with my beloved in 2010 and continued residing in the US, even after we split up, through 2012. I celebrated Thanksgiving in 2010 at the home of a Tea Party organizer in Fort Worth, Texas. I was living in Kansas City when Rick Santorum won the Missouri GOP primary in 2012. And, from 2002 to 2022, I was part of a community of tabletop role playing gamers centred in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the locations the America’s conservative and liberal tectonic plates collide.

So I want to make clear that I experienced the dark turn of American conservatism up close and personal, from the Sarah Palin nomination through Charlottesville. And there is no doubt that less dense, less urban, more rural and smaller communities led America’s descent into the various forms of intolerance and woolly thinking that blossomed in those years. Palin’s “real America” was more easily duped by conspiracy theories, more likely to blame outsiders for problems, more inclined to political hyperbole and polarization and grew more suspicious of the rest of America, leavened by all that Koch Brothers money.

But the Tea Party and Trump waves were not especially remarkable. Political scientists and historians expect reactionary movements to come from smaller, more rural, more remote communities, to be concentrated in economic sectors that appear to be in their sunset years. Scholars expect those with less education, residing in less demographically diverse communities to be more prone to nativism, xenophobia and “us versus them” thinking.

What is far more shocking, far more in need of explaining and far more pressing an issue is the way in which it has become the most educated, the most urban, the most progressive who now lead Anglo America’s charge against political pluralism, free speech, scientific literacy, religious tolerance, press freedom and representative democracy.

While history is full of intolerant cities and welcoming, pluralistic small towns, historical moments when rural areas are more culturally and politically pluralistic than urban areas in the same society are rare. Times are rare when educated people are more ideologically inflexible and hostile to new information than those with less formal education. If people are going to be beaten in the street for their unorthodox views, if books are going to be banned, if the places of worship of minority peoples are going to be burned, we expect small towns to commit those sins prior to and more prolifically than the big cities, not the reverse.

Yet, as of about half a decade ago, this is the reality into which Anglo America and much of the rest of the Global North has entered.

The Crisis of Intolerance in Our Cities
When Meghan Murphy, the gender critical feminist journalist, was driven out of her home town of Vancouver, a key moment was the day she left her house in the morning to discover her photo plastered on lamp standards around her neighbourhood, calling her a hate criminal and suggesting that violence against her was appropriate.

During her nearly successful bid for mayor of Ottawa, Catherine McKenney (they/them), then a city councillor, organized a public beating of “Billboard” Chris Elston, the children’s rights campaigner and following his public flogging, threatened a more severe beating should he attempt to return to Ottawa with his “children can’t consent to puberty blockers” campaign.

When the hundredth church arson attacking non-white Christians took place in Regina last month, directed against a Catholic congregation primarily comprising three racial groups, Africans, Middle Easterners and Filipinos, a Conservative motion condemning the burning was shouted down in parliament by members of the overwhelmingly urban caucuses of the Liberal and New Democratic Parties. And when David Eby, NDP premier of BC was approached through back-channels by those seeking stronger law enforcement around church burnings (perpetrators have only been charged in 2% of cases), Eby reacted by announcing new measures, not to prevent hate crimes against racialized Christians, but to criminalize the beliefs of the parishioners.

When the Million March for Children took place last fall and thousands of Canadians turned out to oppose government programs to chemically lobotomize and sterilize children without parental knowledge or consent, rallies were able to take place in rural communities but in urban centres, “counter protesters” did everything in their power not merely to stage their own protests but to drown out or disperse rally participants. Murphy, during one of her brief trips to Canada was charged by counter-protesters attempting to physically assault her. They failed to hit her but still managed to prevent the rally coming off and her from speaking. My comrade Lierre Keith, head of the Women’s Liberation Front, was not so lucky. She was punched in the face at two rallies in the Pacific Northwest while attempting to speak that year.

And as we saw in rallies from Melbourne to Dublin to Vancouver to San Francisco, it is not merely that the police failed to hold back violence against the protesters. Police officers were often shown assisting violent mobs in carrying out their beatings, in some cases being caught on film pointing and laughing as vigilante mobs beat unarmed protesters with fists and weapons.

And this goes beyond organized politics. Vehicular collisions are up. Pedestrian deaths at the hands of drivers are up. Stranger assaults are up. Exhibitionism and other contactless sex crimes are up.

Ancient Alexandria and the Urban Scale Horseshoe
I have long expressed outrage at the dark turn my city and so many others have been taking but it is long past time to go beyond that outrage, that we began thinking about both the short- and long-term factors that are giving rise to this curdling of the cosmopolitan city because there is no single force, no single explanation that can adequately or fully account for what is happening. A confluence of factors has made the increasing intolerance of our cities self-magnifying, as those fearing persecution and intolerance move to smaller, more human scale communities or out of the Global North altogether.

As a historian, the first place I naturally go when seeking to answer such a question is the past: when, in the past, has it been the cities that have led their rural counterparts when it came to intolerance?

The pogroms against the Jews of Alexandria in 38 CE under governor Flaccus are a striking example and one of the few times in Antiquity that urban Jews fared worse than rural Jews at the hands of pagans or, later, Christians. On the occasions that urban communities outdistanced the hinterland in their persecution of Jews and other minorities, up to Germany in the 1930s and 40s, there may be some patterns.

The cities in which pogroms were most enthusiastic and popular (as opposed to being driven from above) tended to have a geography segregated primarily by religion rather than by class. While all cities have tended to experience natural religious ghettoization, this has been tempered by countervailing and competing forces, like occupational and class-based segregation of “unclean” work and workers. The multi-confessional character of industries like butchering, tanning, fishing and logistics produced kinds of residential congregation and segregation that could undercut religious uniformity in an area.

There is also the question of scale. Alexandria was one of the few pre-modern cities with a population that exceeded a million. This scale permitted something highly problematic that Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish intellectual, who leaves us the best written records of the 38 CE pogroms, which he survived, called out in his time.

Philo was concerned that many of his neighbours and coreligionists in Alexandria were falling away from the Jewish sumptuary laws, not keeping kosher, not honouring the Sabbath, etc. This was because, he observed, unlike a Jew in a smaller city, an Alexandrian Jew could experience his identity as a Jew just by rising in the morning and heading out the door. Everyone he would meet that day, everyone with whom he socialized, everyone with whom he worked, everyone from whom he bought something would be a Jew. In this way, living at such a massive demographic scale actually replicated the life of a Jew in tiny village off the Jordan River.

There was no need to maintain behavioural boundaries or to be behaviourally distinct; geography and economy took care of all that for you. And if that was happening to Jews, it was most certainly happening to the pagan majority which held political power in the city, backed by an imperial army and navy drawn from a military hegemon with forty million residents.

I want to suggest that one of the most pernicious elements of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, “Queer”/Pharma Pride, the rise of social media “call-out” culture and various other forms of cultural authoritarianism is the way in which they help to recreate Philo’s Alexandria. Even if people in a workplace have diverse opinions and affiliations politically, they are increasingly required to express identical views in their workplace for fear of losing employment. Progressive urbanites on Facebook routinely see threats from friends and family on their screen, telling them what virtuous political position they must now express in order to be spared public humiliation and ostracism.

In smaller, more human scale communities, complete segregation from those who disagree with you is less feasible. Ideologically recalcitrant people cannot be wholly purged from or cowed within the labour system. The break room in a company in a smaller town is more likely to contain people who express unorthodox political views.

In other words, there is a kind of horseshoe effect when it comes to community size: make a city large enough and it can segregate its way to small-town religious and ideological parochialism, provided there exists a strong enough “us-them” dynamic and an enforcement system with the muscle to back it up.

Purity and Pollution in the Modern City
Key to such an “us-them” dynamics are ideas of purity and pollution. As I have been arguing the past two years, I believe that the class differences between the rural and industrial proletariat and the rest of the population have been magnified to the point where they exhibit the qualities of caste.

I have made my cultural arguments concerning race, economic sector, public health policy and a host of others concerning the amplification of cultural difference and the need to segregate “unclean” persons from the rest of us. Pseudoscientific myths concerning Covid vaccination and transmission, the re-description of unorthodox speech as “unsafe” the repackaging of anti-Métis racism as “anti-racism” and the growing state-sponsored conspiracy industry that labels me a hate criminal and Diagolon a white supremacist terrorist paramilitary have helped to give rise to moments like the East Vancouver anti-Truckism (Terry Glavin’s term, not my own) protest of 2022.

A solidarity convoy was organized in the dying days of the Ottawa convoy to show support for the increasingly nutty remnant of the protest in Ottawa and arrived in Vancouver but the people of East Vancouver were ready with a counter-protest. I asked a friend who supported the counter-protest what they were counter-protesting, given that the convoyists had basically stopped issuing coherent demand. Which of the trucker demands, I asked, were people protesting.

The answer was horrifyingly honest: people were not turning out to protest a political position the truckers were taking. They were protesting their existence as human beings, the fact that they were people who existed and wore the wrong clothes, worked at the wrong jobs, enjoyed the wrong recreational activities and lived in the wrong places. As Glavin had cleverly pointed out with a nonsense neologism, there was no “truckism” to protest.

That is why, when the two groups of protesters finally clashed at First Avenue and Commercial Drive, the truckers, forced to a standstill by the protesters honked their horns and waved their Canadian flags and the counter-protesters chanted “trans rights are human rights!” again and again.

But another way to examine this caste-making is to look at the function of caste within a market economy. Caste had made the Indian economy the most dynamic and productive in the world and, its spread to Europe and the New World, through the creation of “black” and “Indian” (the American kind) as heritable castes, is inextricable from the sustained growth and dynamism we associate with mercantilism and capitalism in the early modern world.

One of the reasons caste makes a market economy more effective is by reserving certain kinds of work for certain castes and constraining the labour supply for that work by rendering certain castes ineligible for it. Truckists cannot simply enter the commissar class simply by obtaining the right training and professional credentials. They must also at least appear to embrace the American space religion the commissars practice, with its veneration of self-harm, special grammar and usage rules, numerous novel holidays, special flags and costume, and complex system of etiquette.

An increasing number of professional degree programs now require the taking of loyalty oaths to the ideology of the commissars as do many workplaces. More difficult to fake than a loyalty oath are official records of regular Covid mRNA vaccinations. And, given the highly urban character of most commissar class jobs, aside from frontline elementary education, there is the matter of urbanization.

It deserves a whole article.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Pro-Social Traffic of Dar Es Salaam

Since moving to Dar Es Salaam four months ago, I have been urged by friends around the world to write about my experiences of life and culture here. But I have not really done so, mainly for this simple reason: I have just barely scratched the surface. Although I love the landscape, the culture, the cuisine, the antiquities and the wildlife of the Swahili Coast, and although those things helped me to choose to live here, I did not come here to appreciate those things.

I have neither the time nor the money to be much of a tourist. And my arrhythmic brain makes is extremely challenging for me to operate in languages other than English. So, generally, I have little to report because I can’t understand anything anyone says in Swahili (or any other language other than English for that matter) and I spend all my time either writing or sitting at home or in a café with my head in my hands processing all the shit that has gone down in the past decade of my life.

But there is one thing I feel I can talk about now with some authority: the greatness of Dar’s social contract when it comes to getting around. Let me begin with what I do not mean by that: I do not mean that the government has good policies or rational infrastructure for transportation.

There is an elevated light rail system, they just stopped building a few years ago, despite it being about 80% complete. There is no plan to resume work. There are two bus systems, a city-wide bus system that is completely opaque and incomprehensible to non-Swahili speakers, with no posted schedules or routes I can find anywhere and a local rapid-bus system that goes nowhere near my home or anywhere I want to go and whose schedules and fares can only be discovered in-person at the depot. There is also a commuter rail system whose schedules and fares are equally hard to locate and which is plagued with service interruptions that it is almost impossible to find out about.

Zalishamali Street between my apartment and Kajenge on a rainy morning

The local road system is similarly idiosyncratic, to say the least. Aside from the divided highways, the major thoroughfares all have seemingly randomly situated large speed bumps. And 80% of the roads are unpaved and ungraded, meaning that, with the precipitation levels the city experiences, roads like the one in front of my home, Zalishamali Street are an undulating mass of rock, dirt, mud and deep puddles. Following the logic of places back home like Prince George’s Cranbrook Hill and Vancouver’s pre-Olympic Mackenzie Heights and Southlands, often the most unnavigable roads lead to the homes of the richest people, because they keep all but the sturdiest i.e. most expensive vehicles out of the neighbourhood. When I was looking at moving to a nicer apartment, the swankiest building I visited on a gated road that more closely resembled a seasonal creek and required four-wheel drive to navigate.

Yet it is in the context of this transportation maelstrom that I have the opportunity to experience the most prosocial transportation social contract I ever have, one that combines the best individual and collective impulses of the crowd.

The Horn: My Plan Not Your Mistake
While not unique to Dar, Dar traffic culture is especially exemplary of a phenomenon we see with city traffic throughout the Global South. There is a fundamental difference in understanding of what car horns are for. Where I am from, people use their car horns for one purpose: to express criticism and displeasure towards other drivers. One only engages the horn if one is so unhappy with what another driver is doing that one wants to begin a confrontation.

When you hear a car horn in Vancouver, you know that a driver thinks you or someone else is making a mistake, behaving badly and needs to tell you that, in those shoes, they would make better, smarter choices. In other words, almost all car horn use is purposeless. It serves no function other than to engage in social conflict and criticism of others’ actions.

In Dar, the function of the car horn is to announce one’s plans. Common messages are “I am in a hurry so I can’t let you in right now, even though I know you’d like to get in,” “I don’t think I can stop; please let me through,” and “I’m going into this lane I shouldn’t stay in but I’ll be out soon.” If people have an honest-to-God beef with another driver, they can damn well shout at them or pull over and gesticulate. Car horns are too important to be wasted on social conflict and catharsis.

Be the Best You Can Be At What You Are
Dar’s roads and sidewalks are a roiling mass of pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, bajaji (mini-cabs), cars, buses and trucks. Most major roads have sidewalks but not all and there are a few crosswalks and pedestrian lights. While cars are good at staying in their lanes, smaller vehicles and pedestrians are not expected to. Indeed, one of the reasons to order a mini-cab rather than a taxi and why one will often happily pay more is because it is expected that bajaji will squeeze between lanes of traffic, veer onto sidewalks and around pedestrians, accelerate through gaps in traffic when the light is against them and briefly cross into oncoming lanes if no traffic is coming.

While these behaviours are common throughout the Global South, what I find especially congenial about Dar’s traffic is that everyone supports this behaviour. Cars will tack to one side of their lane to make space for a bajaj to squeeze through; pedestrians will scoot to the edge of the sidewalk or hop up onto a curb to make way for a mini-cab. That is because people’s instinctive thought is not “if I can’t do that, no one should be allowed to” but “I can’t do that but it’s cool this driver can. What can I do to enable that?”

This deference also applies among mini-cabs. If there is a manoeuvre one cab can make but another cannot, the driver who cannot make the move will situate himself in such a way that the other one can. This even crosses over into paying fares. One of the things a bajaj driver with a fare can signal with his horn is that he’s on the clock. A driver who is just searching for fares or heading back to the depot will move to the side and yield because he is invested in the other cab’s fare arriving as promptly as possible. And by the same token, if a bike or a motorcycle can make it through a tight spot or negotiate a move a bajaj cannot, mini-cab drivers will themselves yield accordingly.

Being Alive and Awake
Because there is a lot of traffic and a distinct lack of through roads suitable for all vehicles and pedestrians, the paved road space that exists has to operate at peak efficiency. That means that every scrap of available pavement needs to be used when it is needed. Pedestrians are expected to adapt to this situation. With few crosswalks and a laissez faire attitude to those that exist, pedestrians are expected to be as awake and vigilant as drivers, crossing not just when there are gaps in traffic but also assessing the manoeuverability of vehicles if there are no clean gaps.

If you must cross with traffic coming towards you, wait until it is composed of highly manoeuvrable vehicles, motorbikes and bajaji and make sure to walk at a consistent speed and do not stop. That way, these vehicles can drive around you as you cross the street. Drivers are used to proceeding with precision and will whiz by quite closely if they have confidence in you being self-possessed and observant. If you freeze or look like you’re not paying attention, they will always stop. And even then, no criticism is expressed; no horn is honked. The worst criticism you can get is a look of mild disappointment.

This is not a place where one sees a lot of seniors behind the wheel. Driving is not just a young person’s game but a young man’s game. Being highly vigilant and proficient with one’s vehicle is not optional; it is baked into the social contract. Driving is not a right in Dar, nor is it a privilege. It is an art, and a respected one at that.

We All Have To Show Up Looking Okay
I have mostly been living here during rainy seasons. I arrived in the Little Rainy Season in December. Now it is the Big Rainy Season. That means that not only are there often big puddles and oozing mud covering my local street but sometimes the main drag, Kajenge Road and the parking lot at the local mall where I make my big foreign goods purchases have big pools of water. Even Bagamoyo Road, the recently upgraded divided highway through in my neighbourhood will often have long deep puddles.

As many road users, especially during morning rush hour are pedestrians on their way to work, dressed in business attire, one would expect constant splashing incidents as everyone is trying to go as fast as circumstances permit their vehicle to go.

But no.

Unlike the assholes of Vancouver, London and the other great rainy cities of the world, the drivers of Dar slow right down if there is a chance they might splash someone on their way to work and screw up their nice polished shoes and carefully ironed work clothes. As with the ethos around mini-cab fares, one of the great things about being in this majority Christian yet culturally Muslim place is that everyone is invested in everyone else succeeding at their business, their enterprise.

One of the ways in which Islam was more successful than Christianity in its efforts to confront and bridle the power of the agora is that it chose to regulate commerce by sanctifying its practice not by condemning, criticizing or marginalizing it. Unlike any place I have lived, other than the mid-town Toronto streetcar suburbs, people here support each other being successful at work. Everyone is economically and spiritually diminished if another person’s success is thwarted through a lack of vigilance and consideration on our part.

In all my time here, on all the rainy days, not only have I not seen one vehicle splash a pedestrian or cyclist; I have never seen a wet pedestrian or cyclist who appears to have been splashed while I was not looking.

Dar Traffic Makes Me a Better, More Complete Person
Every time I have gone out with my fly unzipped accidentally, every time I have failed to notice some other major sartorial error on my part, I have been immediately notified by people I meet on the street or see at the café. Nobody is mad that my shirt has ridden up, my belt has broken, my fly is half done-up. They just let me know these things matter-of-factly.

And, as anyone who has met me in person, whether I’m walking down the street, crossing the road or trying to dress myself in the morning, I am one of the most incompetent noticers on the face of the earth. But here, in Dar, it’s like everyone is my friend Karin Litzcke, who has spent almost the entirety of our friendship sorting errors I have made with my shirt collar or buttons.

The great thing about Dar’s street culture is that it is making me notice things more, it has helped get me in tune with my own senses, exist more in the moment, more in the physical world. And I credit the fact that this place has a culture of people who are fully awake to their senses but see those of us who are less awake as slightly disabled people who require their assistance, not screw-ups who require a scolding.

The Social Costs of Safetyism
But of course, there is a politics to all this too. This wouldn’t be one of my essays if it did not say something political at the end. I am beginning to understand the full implications of “safetyism,” one of the master discourses of the progressive social order in the Global North: our traffic cultures are too safe, too rules-oriented, too coddling of the inattentive. All of this safetyism makes people self-centred, inattentive and grievance-based in their day-to-day experience of moving through space with other people.

People are shut down, disengaged from their immediate surroundings and when something happens that they do not expect or desire, their reaction is to blame and accuse others of failing them, rather than thinking about their own conduct or how maybe this is not a problem so much as a thing that happens. Ultimately, what has pushed me out of Canada is that our normative culture has become one of unempathetic, inattentive, self-centred angry scolds.

For much of my life, I have applauded, welcomed and even campaigned for new rules, new infrastructure, new protocols to make people “safer.” I know we have saved some lives and definitely prevented a lot of injuries along the way while we have done that but, in the course of our uncritical and endlessly elaborating embrace of safetyism, we have may have gone too far, rendering our lives less worth living and ourselves less worth saving.

I have likened my experience of the social transformation of progressive Canadians to a zombie invasion in that I wake up every morning wondering which of my friends has, since I last saw them, become a mindless walking corpse, hell-bent on eating my brain. I realize now that one of the reasons ordered progressive societies are more susceptible to zombie invasions is that zombies, with their flat-footed tunnel vision and simple angry brains can more easily pass for human in a city like Vancouver than they could in Dar Es Salaam.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies | fusangite |

After Twenty-Five Years, Is It Time for Second Look at Harm Reduction (Part #1)

If you are just here for the actual article, skip ahead of this first section and go to section two, Denormalization Revisited. If you are already familiar with my writing on denormalization and caste-making, skip ahead to the Collapse of Vancouver’s Four Pillars.

Retention Fatigue or Why Drug Policy Now?

There is no doubt that many reading this blog have been faithful readers since before 2020, before I departed from the progressive consensus on gender identity. Since then, my reading audience has shifted and I have had to think carefully about how to manage this shift. Not only do I continue to lose readers who identify with the contemporary left, I keep gaining readers who are identified (often against their will) with the contemporary right. And there is no sign that this shift process is going to end any time soon.

Furthermore, as I continue to exit the left social scene, even as I grow more committed to some kind of Eco-Marxism as my personal politics, distance is allowing me to gain perspective on issues where I have not publicly questioned the orthodoxies of the left. When I discover another issue where I am now out of step with the left, I am faced with a practical dilemma: if I write about my thoughts, how many of my old readers will I lose? And how many new readers will I gain?

For that reason, I have been cautious about raising yet another issue on which I am out of accord with progressives, always worried that my next unorthodox opinion will be the final straw for someone and that I will lose another reader, another comrade or another friend.

But after three years of living like this, I am done. I am sick to death of walking on eggshells, wondering if my next unorthodox view will produce another cancelation campaign that gets me another blizzard of hate mail from people who were my friends until five seconds ago and gets my loyal friends harassed and threatened. I cannot handle this slow process of cancelation continuing indefinitely. For months now, I have actually been exaggerating how many conservative views and conservative associates I have just so that the people who are on the fence about canceling me will just get the fuck on with it. So now, fuck it! Drugs!

Denormalization Revisited

Two years into the Covid epidemic, I departed from the increasingly untenable progressive consensus concerning Covid vaccines, not with respect to their efficacy but rather the public policies concerning vaccination in my article, “Denormalization: From Failed Public Health Strategy to a Path to a Liberal Majority.”

In the fall of 2021, we learned that vaccine passes were not effectively limiting the spread of Omicron and later Covid variants because, while vaccination typically made Covid symptoms less severe, sometimes saving lives and preventing permanent disability, it did not have a significant impact on transmissibility. Governments’ reactions to this news were perverse, to say the least.

Rather than abandoning VaxPasses, our federal and provincial governments rolled out more restrictive policies, further abridging the assembly and mobility rights of unvaccinated or insufficiently vaccinated Canadians. When questioned about the efficacy of these policies in limiting the spread of Covid, our governments were disturbingly frank, largely admitting that these measures’ primary purpose was to stigmatize and punish those who continued to refuse the vaccines. Our leaders seemed eerily okay with just admitting the passes were a cudgel, designed to coerce recalcitrant holdouts.

Except that I refused to accept that this was even what was going on. What anyone with the most basic knowledge of the social science of public health knows is that by de-normalizing something, like smoking, for instance, you actually make that thing more popular with people who are already marginalized, who are already stigmatized and understood to be either at society’s margins or entirely outside society. And, as anyone familiar with the social determinants of health could have predicted, the Vaxpasses intensified and solidified both vaccine hesitancy and opposition to the passes themselves, ultimately culminating in the Freedom Convoy.

Had the government actually wished to promote vaccination among people of faith, manual labourers, rural Canadians and non-Indigenous racialized Canadians, it would have involved conservative faith leaders, popular rural politicians, grassroots labour leaders and small business owners in forestry, mining and oil, in making tailored appeals to vaccine hesitant populations.

But that was not, I believe, their agenda. It was instead, to create a group of pestilent “deplorables,” to engage in caste-making.

The Collapse of Vancouver’s Four Pillars

Canadian cities and those of America’s Blue State Pacific Coast are experiencing not just increases but increasing rates of increase in drug addiction, overdose deaths, homelessness and street violence, an increasing portion of which is disorganized violence of which individuals experiencing addiction and mental health struggles are both an ever-increasing proportion of both perpetrators and victims.

It is now twenty-five years since my city, Vancouver, adopted its Four Pillars policy on drugs as part of our decision to be one of the first cities in the Western Hemisphere to embrace harm reduction as the basis of our drug policy. I was one of the thousands of Vancouverites who chalked this up as a victory. Now, we thought, things will start turning around in the Downtown Eastside. At last, homelessness, prostitution, addiction, disease and misery will stop increasing and enter a slow, steady decline as drug users come out of the shadows and have their problems dealt with in the full light of day

Although these increases have a clear statistical correlation to de jure and de facto decriminalization of both soft and hard drugs, the response of progressives has been that we are just not making drugs legal, accessible and plentiful enough. In my city, purchasing and possession is no longer illegal for any drug, nor is dealing, provided one keeps one’s personal inventory low. Opinion leaders in my community are now advocating that the government get into the business of selling cocaine, heroin and other hard drugs and, when it comes to the most addictive and toxic drugs, my government is literally giving them away.

The thinking of the people backing an amplification of our already-failed policies is based on three main fallacies: (a) that the number of drug users is essentially fixed, that public policy cannot change the number of people who want to use drugs or who do use them, (b) that simply increasing the purity, affordability and accessibility of the drug supply actually is “harm reduction,” and (c) that drug use is not strongly conditioned by material and cultural factors.

To review, the Four Pillars policy Vancouver city council adopted to great fanfare in 1998 were (1) Prevention, (2) Treatment, (3) Harm Reduction and (4) Enforcement. This tetrad of policy reforms were based on a pre-existing model which showed promising results in Australia, Switzerland and Germany in the 1990s. But did Vancouver, in fact, follow the four pillars approach?

Prevention?

Prevention, i.e. policies designed to prevent people from falling into problematic substance use, were of two main types: material and educational. Material prevention policies in the places where the Four Pillars had succeeded included the provision of housing and other basic material supports to people who might otherwise become homeless or enter into survival sex work, given that homelessness, especially street homelessness and prostitution, especially survival prostitution create powerful incentives for habitual hard drug use in order to survive in these extremely damaging and challenging circumstances.

Instead, the provincial government, which provides these services to Vancouverites undertook a series of austerity programs in 1993, 1997 and 2001 to reduce income supports for housing and food. Following a 10% cut in 1993, income assistance rates in British Columbia were capped at 1993 levels for the next twenty-four years, not even permitting increases to keep pace with inflation.

As all federal and nearly all new provincial investment in affordable housing ended in 1993 and did not resume for a decade or more, the effective supply of housing continued to contract, especially as, when provincial investment did start again in the late 00s, it was increasingly directed to what is called “supportive housing,” of which there were essentially two types: (a) housing projects composed entirely of hard drug users and (b) housing projects that summarily evicted tenants for drug use, drug possession, overnight guests, etc.

Furthermore, the “shelter allowance” for those on income assistance remained capped at $375.00 per month from 1993 to 2023. Still dire but not as dire, the minimum wage remained capped at $8.00/hour from 2001 to 2011 and did not exceed $15/hour until 2021. Given that state-subsidized housing was so scarce as to be nigh-impossible to obtain for all but those in the most extreme straits, low-income people at risk of losing their housing saw their incomes decline relative to inflation while housing costs often increased at double the overall inflation rate.

In other words, government policies with respect to poverty did not merely fail to prevent substance abuse and addiction; they actively facilitated it.

Of course, we older folks do not immediately think of poverty when we hear the word “prevention.” We remember the school assemblies, the tone-deaf public service announcements, the awkward classes with our high school guidance counselors. Prevention, for us, conjures up the “scared straight,” “just say no,” and “this is your brain on drugs” after school specials and TV ads, designed to make kids frightened to try drugs, especially the harder stuff.

These traditional campaigns are denormalization campaigns. And that means that they produce perverse effects on people who already consider themselves to be marginalized. Amy Salmon and Fred Bass, the health scientists who made the empirical case studied anti-smoking de-normalization campaigns and found that they functioned like highly effective cigarette adds for young, low-income Indigenous women and girls.

De-normalization continues to be our main form of above-ground public “prevention” campaign but these campaigns are taking place in the dual context of an increasing portion of the population being economically marginalized and an increasing portion of the population receiving strong incentives and “identifying into” identities understood to be marginal, e.g. “trans,” “queer,” etc.

And it appears that both groups, both those materially marginalized by structural factors and those adopting boutique identities they believe make them marginalized, are experiencing the perverse effects of de-normalization and becoming more attracted to street drugs of all kinds. To an ever-increasing proportion of our population, our anti-drug propaganda is experienced as ads for the very drugs that we are supposedly discouraging.

Treatment?

Supposedly, there were going to be a whole lot more in the way of treatment facilities, approaches and services by now. But, as with housing and income, the reality has been escalating austerity and chronic labour shortages, compounded, most recently, by BC’s decision to be the only province in Canada that has refused to hire back its unvaccinated health care workers and, instead, to stand by as the BC College of Nurses and other healthcare syndical regulators proceed with internal witch hunts to deprive unvaccinated members of their professional accreditation, as though losing their jobs was not enough.

When it comes to the medically adjacent caring professions, like social work, the story has been even bleaker. There were mass layoffs of social workers in 1993, 1997 and 2001. And, when it comes to psychiatrists and psychologists, there are almost none remaining in the public system. I, myself, have been trying to obtain a psychiatrist through the public system for the past thirty-six months and have yet to have my first appointment.

The waiting list for detox and drug rehabilitation beds lengthens by the month and those that are available are often situated in neighbourhoods like Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, directly adjacent to the most active drug distribution and consumption scenes in the entire country.

Today, Vancouver has an “assessment centre,” to which one must be referred by a doctor, where one signs up to apply to be allowed to see a psychiatrist. If your case is urgent, the wait to see a social worker there is still two months; if it is not urgent, it is more like four to six. If you convince the social worker you are in serious distress, you wait another month or two to be interviewed by a psychiatrist. And even if you get the go-ahead, it is no one’s job but yours to somehow find you a psychiatrist who remains in the public system who is still taking clients and, if you do find one, your job to get them a referral not just from the centre but from the physician who referred you to the centre.

In other words, treatment options have declined significantly and remain out of reach for all but the most persistent and sophisticated, whereas you’re always just a phone call or taxi ride away from a baggie of heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, lorazepam or methamphetamine any hour of the day or night.

Harm Reduction?

The term “harm reduction” refers to the reduction in harms associated with the purchase of an illegal product, such as conflict with the law, adulteration or poisoning of said product, the need to pay increased costs because criminalization has increased prices, the spread of infection through unsafe consumption practices, and the use of drugs with unsafe equipment or in unsafe settings.

In this area, we experienced early and obvious gains. Our safe injection site did reduce the transmission of AIDS and hepatitis. The addition of a supervised site from crack use also appeared to produce tangible public health dividends generally.

But we have not seen commensurable improvements in public health once the state moved from creating supervised spaces and began to enlarge its own role in drug distribution while looking the other way as non-profit organizations, left-wing political parties and for-profit dealers became more public and ambitious in handing out drugs. Instead, the deterioration of the whole scene has sped up.

To help us understand why this is the case, it may be helpful to begin with Ricky from Trailer Park Boys in the episode where he trains school children to steal barbecues as part of their “Junior Achievers” after school program for aspiring entrepreneurs, “it’s the same whether you’re breaking the law or not. Profit, capital. Supply and command.” Or let me introduce this idea another way: if Canadians are really excited about an issue, the first thing they decide is that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to it.

You will notice that people who are excited about liquefied natural gas (LNG) and believe that fracking more of it will help us save the planet make the following argument: for every joule worth of LNG we produce and export, the country to which we send it will reduce the amount of coal they burn by the same amount. They assert that the quantity of fossil fuels that are burned in the world is a fixed amount and that no matter what the price is or how large or small the supply is, the exact same amount will be burned.

But of course that is not how the market for any commodity works. If you supply the same amount of coal and simply increase the amount of LNG, prices for both commodities will fall and the total amount of fossil fuels consumed will increase. This is the first thing you learn in a first-year economic class. It is called “the Law of Supply and Demand.” If you make something cheaper, more plentiful and easier to obtain, the more of it will be consumed.

This idea that increasing the amount of legal fentanyl or cocaine on the market will lead to precisely commensurate reductions in illegal use is insane. It is stupid. It is contradicted by the evidence we receive every month as overdose deaths continue to climb and it is contradicted by everything basic economics predicts.

Drug users do not have a fixed quantity of their drug(s) of choice they need or desire in a day, after which there are satiated. The more cocaine you do, the more you want. The cheaper the price, the more you can do. The easier to access, the more you can do. The state is actually promoting the consumption of illegal fentanyl by providing free or low-cost fentanyl. Doing so depresses fentanyl prices both by flooding the market and by fixing a low cost with which for-profit dealers must compete.

Enforcement?

In the original design of the policy, new approaches to enforcement were supposed to focus policing on drug production and distribution points, to target major dealers and producers, especially of drugs that can be synthesized in urban settings. In other words, it was premised on the idea that restricted supply was a goal in the policy.

But now that we have adopted increased supply rather than restricted supply as our approach, the police are rudderless in this area, left with a legacy policy functioning in direct opposition to current approaches.

Why would anyone expect to see outcomes in Vancouver in the twenty-first century based on the Four Pillars, if only half of one pillar is even standing? We are not practicing the Four Pillars. We are not even practicing harm reduction. We are just throwing more drugs and easier, faster access to drugs into a rising tide of human misery.

Culture: the Mastodon in the Room

But missing in all of this is a much bigger factor, something that had already walled-off the Swiss, German and, more recently, Portuguese approaches to drug policy, even as we began to consider reform in the 1990s: culture. How you interact with a drug is strongly conditioned by the larger cultural context of your society and by the more local subcultural context of your drug use community.

Anglo America does not have the same culture as Portugal, Germany or Switzerland. How one engages with drugs is about something more than the material and public policy factors I laid out above. But that is for the second part of this short series, where we look at distinctive experience of substance use in a young city shaped by colonization.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |

The Omnicide and the Level Boss: Thoughts On A Weekend With Deep Green Resistance

On the last weekend of August, I gathered with a group of two dozen extraordinary people. All of us are members of Deep Green Resistance. Like pretty much every group I join, I like DGR’s analysis a lot but am not sold on their eschaton, kind of like my relationship to Marxism and Christianity. I don’t think we actually have the capacity to make any plans about really big, complicated things, like, for instance the end of the world.

One of the things I like most about DGR is that Derrick Jensen is the Saint Jerome of environmental thought; they have turned a maelstrom of factional arguments and a disorganized, variegated body of writing into a coherent synthesis. Back in the 80s and 90s, during the first generation of Green politics, there were four (as opposed to zero, in the present) intellectual movements that vied to become the dominant Green philosophy: Bioregionalism, Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology and Social Ecology. Or rather, Bioregionalists were happy to work with any of the other folks and everyone else was having a fight.

Those were heady intellectual times, times that I, in my youthful exuberance, helped to shut down. Perhaps, had those philosophical debates continued into the present, there might have been some intellectual guardrails, some moral scaffolding to prevent the BC and German Green Parties from running brute squads for and handing sacks of cash to the fossil fuel industry. Oh well…

Like Saint Jerome and his associates, DGR has recognized where these philosophies actually reinforce each other and agree, where the power of their analysis has revealed some more predictive and relevant than others. And, instead of engaging in the massive cut-and-paste operation Jerome did, Jensen and his collaborators’ books synthesize these ideas into a single authorial voice as well. There is Dave Foreman’s biocentrism from Deep Ecology, the close connections between male domination of women and societies’ treatment of the land from Ecofeminism, and the belief in valley-scale society from Bioregionalism. And, fortunately, no sign of Social Ecology (our Gospel of Thomas, I guess).

DGR also has the distinction of being the first left organization to be canceled due to Genderwang, way back in 2012, and rendering their campaigns subject to sabotage by genderist-captured environmental groups, who would rather side with the corporations than tolerate non-Woke environmentalists succeeding at saving endangered ecosystems. Seeing the danger these folks pose, Jensen’s co-leader and author, Lierre Keith, spun off the Women’s Liberation Front, now at the forefront of fighting for the rights of incarcerated women.

Anyway, I encountered some amazing people doing amazing work. But, because of the authoritarian turn we are experiencing, many are secret members who, if exposed as DGR members, would lose their jobs, friends and connections to the mainstream of the movement, not because DGR advocates the total destruction of industrial civilization but because they do not believe women have penises.

Those who had come out not as members but merely as associates of members told stories of losing 60-80% of their organization’s volunteers, their funding and almost all of their mainstream media access. And that is not to mention the personal toll. Activists from around the Global North recounted the social carnage that surrounded them, most of their long-term relationships, friends, coworkers, romantic partners: gone.

It was there that I realized two very important things: (1) no one, no matter how brilliant, no matter how organized, has figured out how to either withdraw from or to confront rising authoritarianism that stops the authoritarians continuing to harass and sabotage them (after all, Keith was punched in the face on live video by ANTIFA last fall and not a single word of condemnation was uttered by anyone on the mainstream left) and (2) the first priority of any rational socialist or environmentalist should be to fight genderwang, not, because of facilitating prison rape, mass-sterilizing autistics, practicing FGM, cheering for conversion rape, beating women in the street and the host of other associated atrocities it entails, but because it is the means by which authoritarianism is being enabled. The point is that until you defeat the authoritarians, the only politics that exists is defeating the authoritarians.

Getting politics back is the prize we will win only if we defeat them.

To believe that politics can be carried out when people’s speech, association and assembly rights are being annihilated is simply naïve. Recall that in the early 1990s we were all surprised to learn what the actual political views were of people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn actually were. That is because as long as the USSR existed, as long as any authoritarian regime runs, there was only one political identity an opposition politician could have: dissident.

The authoritarians that ran the USSR and its client states conflated all opposition to party orthodoxy as capitalist stoogery, and contrary to what you hear these days, identities really are social constructions but actual social constructions, not personal fantasies, i.e. you are who society decides you are. You can’t identify out of the social construction in which you are placed.

In Wokeistans like Canada, Scotland, New Zealand and Australia, it does not actually matter what you think your political identity is. Everyone at the event who was an “out” DGR member was, like me, understood by the hegemonic ideology to be a member of the “far right,” along with Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand and Noam Chomsky.

Until this state of affairs changes, our first priority must be to dismantle the power of the authoritarians who have captured our political parties, news media, law enforcement and educational institutions, so as to make politics possible again. Until that time, society will remain in a post-political state and all projects that assemble broad coalitions that challenge the establishment will be impossible to form. Our only hope of that being possible is to form a coalition whose sole basis of unity is anti-authoritarianism.

In other words, we have to punch our way out of this corner.

This bums me out, obviously because I think there are some rather urgent matters that I have to place on the back burner to deal with this atrocious state of affairs. It is not like any part of our stressed global ecosystems has the luxury of time. This is, after all, The Omnicide. And that is not to say I will not keep doing environmental activism; I just have to recognize that society has placed stringent limits on those activities that I cannot just break out of by an act of will.

I have come to think of this political moment in videogame terms: you want to get up to Level Six where you get back to battling Royal Dutch Shell and its many minions but unfortunately, this is Level Five, the Woke level, where you have to defeat the Woke level boss so you can get back to the fight you came here to have. Of course, you should pick off any oil industry enemies you can on this level but recognize that most are going to be out of range until you defeat the exploding milk demon.

Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 3): What If Homelessness Is a Spectrum?

I have long been a critic of the unscientific and excessive use of the idea of things existing in a spectrum. The idea that neurological disability and sex exist as spectra has had serious negative social effects. People who are simply a little socially maladroit or have minor sensory deficits have used the “autism spectrum” idea to self-diagnose their way into communities of the disabled whose political and social spaces they then dominate, allowing them to redirect accommodations for people with serious, crippling disabilities towards themselves.

And those who follow my writing in Feminist Current or track my daily activities on Twitter know how I feel about the social impacts of “sex is a spectrum” on women, gays and lesbians. In addition, “sex is a spectrum” is also unscientific by conflating the biology of sexually dimorphic species with that of clownfish and slugs. The “sex spectrum” has opened the door to progressives embracing a pseudoscience defended by an orthodoxy in a similar way to the effects of climate denialism on the credulity of conservatives.

But today, I would like to dust off the idea of spectra to talk about a phenomenon that we have organized into a binary, which is, in fact, a spectrum: homelessness.

Of course, homelessness is only a spectrum if “home” has a definition appropriate to such an analysis. In fact, the idea for this piece came to me because I spent time thinking about the implications of my favourite definition of home, that of American literary giant Robert Frost, “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Upon contemplating that quote, I realized that almost everyone living in a neoliberal economy today is homeless, to one degree or another. And that shocked me.

Over the past decade, I have spilled much ink on this blog discussing Enclosure, the process by which feudal title was transformed into fee simple title, permitting the mass evictions of European peasants, first in England and the Netherlands and then, century by century, extending its geographic scope.

Enclosure spelled the end of the medieval socio-economic order and began the transformation of Europe’s economies from feudal to capitalist economies by way of an intermediate system known as mercantilism.

In the feudal economic order, holders of productive agricultural land were lords of one kind or another (barons, counts, seigneurs, etc.) and their land tenure was contingent upon their protection of the peasants living on it on behalf of the crown. When feudal lands changed hands, their new lord received them packaged complete with the peasants living there. These peasants, in turn, owned their homes, their tools and enjoyed permanent tenure over the land their homes occupied. Medieval villages, furthermore, also typically had a Common, a bunch of arable land that people who lacked customary rights to feudal land could occupy and raise food upon.

Medieval Europe also had big, capacious family systems that did not just include extended family members like aunts, uncles and cousins living nearby; the term “gossip” originates from the words “God” and “sibling.” The common term for most friend relationships was not “neighbour” or “friend” but “gossip,” someone to whom one was connected through a shared godparent, usually a respectable commoner with a high-status job like miller or smith who was sought out as a god-parent by the children of parents of lower status.

Families faced considerable social pressure to house their poorer members and it was viewed as a black mark against every member’s respectability if one member of the family were sleeping rough. Particularly women bore the brunt of this social disapproval in that their duty to keep those with addictions, dementia, madness or just bad seeds housed and fed. But what this community disapproval meant was that relatives, both real and fictive (i.e. gossips and godparents), were under tremendous social pressure in their communities to house members of their extended family systems if that person could not keep themselves housed.

In addition to these structures, medieval society did also have long and short-term emergency housing. A significant portion of the places medievals called “hospitals,” were not medical treatment facilities but the equivalent of things we call transition housing, supportive housing and emergency housing today. Anyone willing to spend a certain number of hours praying for the souls of donors’ families to be released from Purgatory could become the resident of a residential hospital. In other words, prior to Enclosure, homelessness was not an experience it was easy for regular people to fall into and the danger of becoming homeless did not shape people’s consciousness.

I have written and spoken more about this elsewhere and so I will quickly summarize the transformation Enclosure wrought in people’s housing security. First, many peasants were evicted from their lands by members of the gentry whose used new forms of land title under which there were no feudal obligations to those already resident upon it. At the same time, monastic lands and village common lands were also seized by the crown and their residents, evicted. The hospitals were also shut down. New laws were then enacted criminalizing begging and sleeping rough. And penalties for robbery and trespassing were significantly increased. And homelessness was born! There were thousands upon thousands of people for whom there was no home that was obliged to take them in.

During the first phase of the Cold War, the West’s primary strategy for winning hearts and minds was matching whatever claim of equity or generosity the communist world made, but within the capitalist world, resulting in the birth of the “the welfare state.” Indeed, one of the first parts of the welfare state to be built was the bureaucracy ensuring that returning war veterans would not be sleeping rough by the thousands of World War I veterans had.

Some welfare states like Canada even wrote a “right to housing” into our laws. But whether de facto or de jure, welfare states built housing on a large scale and ensured that social assistance and minimum wage rates were sufficient for low-wage and unemployed people to obtain housing.

But, as we know, the West’s strategy changed during the second phase of the Cold War, in the first half of the 1970s.With the rise of neoliberalism, the guarantees of the welfare state began to be cut away and, for the first time since the 1930s, “the homeless” became an identifiable group. Contemporaneous with the election of Ronald Reagan and the acceleration of neoliberal reform in the Global North, the first food banks also appeared.

As former Vancouver city councilor Jean Swanson has remarked: there were still anti-poverty activists and campaigners for income equality in the 1960s and 70s. It’s just that there was no constituency of people called “the homeless” nor was their visible or widespread evidence of people sleeping rough in the city. There was still poverty just not the kind needed to recreate “the homeless.”

But what has received less attention is the way that major industrial mergers and takeovers began to place people who were housed in the homeless spectrum. The emergence of the Rust Belt in Anglo America and across Germanic Europe resulted from the violent consolidation of the auto sector and other areas of major industrial production.

Obviously, layoffs played a significant role, first as industrial producers downsized and supposedly cradle-to-grave careers suddenly stopped in mid-life. Much ink was spilled by neoliberal propagandists and media in creating sufficient consent for these changes and establishing new socio-economic norms that allowed non-industrial sectors to also engage in “downsizing,” “right-sizing” and various “efficiencies” designed to make workers more insecure, now that social expectations concerning the reliability and predictability of employment were being adjusted to the new economic order.

But what is often missed by those who recount this well-rehearsed story of the decline of the American working class is the impact of the economic restructuring on pensions. During the 1980s, the pension funds of workers became a thing it was acceptable to liquidate or sell during auto sector mergers. Even if one did stay in work until retirement age, one was no longer working at a cradle-to-grave job because the pension into which one had paid one’s whole career might be stolen by corporate raiders and looters.

At the same time, governments de-indexed or flat-out cut universal state pensions, causing them to decline against inflation while encouraging citizens to replace this rapidly declining retirement income security by investing in special state-sanctioned mutual funds designed for retirees. And I have written elsewhere about how government workers experienced comparable kinds of increased insecurity under neoliberal governments.

By the end of the 1990s, a simple stock market correction, a bad broker, a corporate merger, acquisition or raid could annihilate most of one’s retirement income. It seemed that there was only one place where one’s savings might be safe: real estate.

In most of the Global North, in spite of the causes and consequences of the 2007-08 financial crisis, real estate remains the main strategy and best bet one has for staying afloat in retirement. And because of that, people are willing to borrow larger and larger amounts of money to enter or stay in the housing market. The upshot of these changes has been that an increasing number of us now exist on a homeless spectrum.

Returning to the original Robert Frost definition, let us note that when people’s primary source of funds for surviving in retirement is one’s primary residence, retirement for an increasing number of us entails moving to a steadily smaller and/or remote dwelling, so as to access equity stored in the previous dwelling until one becomes a renter again.

Given that generational wealth transfer is increasingly necessary for younger people to obtain mortgages and purchase housing, this state of affairs prevents the downward transfer of family equity to younger family members, potentially locking them out of the housing market. And, for younger people who have experienced profound financial or medical reversals, even if they remain on good terms with older relatives, these relatives simply do not have surplus space to house them while they struggle back to their feet.

And whether young or old, let us be clear that many mortgage holders are little more secure than renters. A few missed mortgage or rent payments and it doesn’t really matter whether one is bound by a tenancy agreement or a mortgage, the effect is the same: your landlord throws you out. The only difference is that, for mortgage holders, one’s retirement savings vanish at the same moment one is evicted.

Other than those who own their homes outright or who are part of intact family systems with members who have both outright ownership and surplus space, the rest of us exist somewhere on a spectrum of homelessness: i.e. people who no one has to take in if things go wrong. No one is obliged to house victims of foreclosure or eviction.

Those furthest along the homelessness spectrum are those who are unhoused and sleeping rough but I would argue that degrees of homelessness now apply to a majority of the population. Next to those unhoused and sleeping rough are couch surfers; next to the couch surfers are those living in a vehicle they own; next to those sleeping in their cars are people in “supportive housing” (housing from which one may be evicted for such innocuous things as having guests or alcohol in one’s room); next to those are women staying with abusive men because their rent is being extracted in sexual favours; next to those are unemployed renters; next to those, unemployed mortgage-holders; and then the employed renters;  et cetera; et cetera.

We now live in a society in which most people live with the consciousness that if things go badly, no one will take them in, that nothing more than luck (be it a large amount or a small amount) stands between them and sleeping rough with no ability to meaningfully own anything more than the clothes on their back.

This naturally engenders a profound sense of insecurity in people. Human beings are meant to have homes, not merely be housed. People need somewhere they know they can always go. If they don’t have that they become, as we have seen, more squirrelly, more desperate, less empathetic. People need a material floor to support healthy emotions; having a sense of homelessness pervade one’s consciousness reminds us that we lack that floor, that at any moment, the ground could open and we could fall, right out of society.

In 1994, Canadians were well into austerity when the Chretien government repealed the 1966 Canada Assistance Plan legislation that recognized every Canadian’s “right to housing” but it is an important symbolic watershed because it was the formal denial of the basic anthropological truth that everybody needs a home.

And this knowledge must form the foundation of land reform in this country.

Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies US Politics | fusangite |

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 2): Rural Land Reform Lessons from Latin America

One of the most significant differences between Canada and the other countries of the Western Hemisphere has been not just what it has (or has not) done in response to the massive dispossession and oppression of Indigenous people during the European conquest but where that impetus has come from.

As I stated previously, most countries in the Americas have sought democratic political resolutions to land inequity through their legislatures. Candidates have run in elections on platforms of reconciliation, been elected and carried these programs out to varying degrees of success. The history of Canada has no such episode and recent Canadian history shows no real attempts.

In 1969, the Pierre Trudeau government put forward its white paper on Indigenous peoples, proposing termination, the legal doctrine the US had unsuccessfully applied 1894-1933 and which Mexico had tried 1857-1920 to similarly disastrous effect. Not only did First Nations leaders oppose this policy and rebuke the Trudeau government but so did many settler Canadian voters, not so much because they opposed abolishing Indigenous “status” and Reserve governments but because this radical rewriting of settler-Indigenous relations had not been placed before voters in the 1968 election.

Since Trudeau’s shelving of the doctrine of termination before the 1972 election, pretty much every significant advance in Indigenous rights in Canada has emanated not from parliament and the provincial legislatures but from the courts. As rehearsed in my essay last fall, this has produced a number of perverse and pernicious effects when it comes to resolving the land question.

With the exception of BC Premier Mike Harcourt’s proposed BC Treaty Commission, which failed to settle one single demand for land reform during its decade in operation, political leaders no longer go to the voters with plans for settling the Indigenous land question in the form of any discernible government program. Their essential message is that they will ape the language of the courts and follow the decisions of the courts because it is the judicial not the legislative branch of government that should decide the land question with respect to Indigenous peoples.

When it comes to the land crisis experienced by settlers, along with non-status, Métis and off-reserve Indigenous people, a completely different, unconnected, siloed conversation ensues. First of all, once treaties are off the table, the land question is thought to be a wholly provincial matter, or at least has functionally been so since (a) crown land south of 60 degrees was distributed to the provinces and not the federal government since the 1867, and (b) the federal government abandoned its guarantee of every Canadian enjoying a “right to shelter” when it defunded federal housing programs and enacted the Canada Health and Social Transfer legislation that untied provincial transfer payments from housing guarantees.

Shockingly, even though the vast majority of land in every province west of the Gaspé is state-owned “crown land,” governments have not come to the voters with land redistribution plans to alleviate unemployment or the housing affordability crisis. And in a divisive and perverse move, they have argued that because so much land is covered by flawed, corrupt and non-consensual “numbered treaty” system, treaties whose meanings are in dispute and often before the courts or, was simply seized by the state without a treaty, it would violate the rights of Indigenous people to redistribute land to settlers.

In reality, neither settlers nor any group of Indigenous people have meaningful, functional, stable access to the crown land near them, nor do they have any democratic control over its use, as it is typically under the direct control of forest, fossil fuel, bottled water or mining companies, or of provincial government departments responsible for selling water, minerals and timber.

The only programs remotely resembling what one might call “land reform” were some experimental pilot “community woodlot” programs in Western Canada in the 1990s, where some crown land was alienated to a local municipality or corporation with community ownership to be controlled for the limited purpose of producing wood for a local mill. Multi-use, non-extractive use, these forms of community land tenure are not even on the table, not even part of the debate.

Meanwhile in our cities and towns, the housing affordability crisis is being fobbed-off on the private sector in the same way the Indigenous land question is being fobbed-off on the judiciary. Provinces and cities rarely use their own land to solve housing problems; even when they decide to take public land and dedicate it to housing, the first step in that process is typically privatization, after which times, the failure of the land to provide what it was intended for is blamed on the free market.

This is a messed-up state of affairs but the good news is that it is uniquely Canadian. If we stopped seeing our land crisis as multiple, separate, siloed or competing land crises but as one, we could chart a different course. And if we saw our legislatures, not our courts or our markets as the place where our land problems are solved, we could chart a different course. Finally, if we looked to the rest of the continent at how to build majority coalitions for land reform, we could create the social movement needed to chart that course.

The Mexican Revolution was a complex, multi-phase, multi-faction process that effectively re-founded Mexico a century after its initial separation from the Spanish Empire in 1821. The basis of this re-founding was the restoration of something Mexicans call the ejido. Previously privatized lands that had been held by major landowners and foreign corporations were seized by the government and redistributed to rural cooperatives.

Eligibility for these lands was based on three main things: (1) the grassroots, inclusive and cooperative nature of the project, (2) the economic viability of the business it sought to create and (3) the material need for the land. In other words, the government redistributed land to the rural proletariat and peasants based on self-organization on the basis of class.

Of course, it went without saying that the primary beneficiaries of the ejido were Indigenous Mexicans because class and race function synergistically. Consequently, this policy proved very popular with Indigenous people. But it was also popular with the non-Indigenous rural poor because it did not walk back the reforms of 1857 that had abolished separatist race-based courts and race-based systems of land tenure. The fact the ejido equally available to settlers and Indigenous people located in the same geographical and class position.

The ejido proved the most popular and long-lasting of the many reforms of the Mexican Revolution but was ultimately destroyed as a condition of Mexico joining NAFTA in 1994. This attempt to re-privatize the ejido has led to an ongoing insurgency, the Zapatistas, in Southern Mexico for the past generation.

Between 1950 and 1953, Guatemala undertook a hugely popular land reform program very different from the Mexican one. There, the government expropriated private land the big fruit companies had left fallow for three or more consecutive years. This land was then parceled as family farm plots and distributed to families who had previously been sharecroppers on the fruit companies’ lands. The government assessed a market value and automatically qualified the landless family receiving the land for a mortgage with the government bank. Families began working the land and paying off their mortgages within months and Guatemala’s banana production actually rose; but much more importantly, kitchen gardens got a lot bigger and families were able to meet more of their food needs on their own land.

The program was so successful and popular with the peasants that the fruit companies convinced the Eisenhower Administration to remove the government in a coup and begin reversing the reform in 1954.

As in Mexico, the overwhelming majority of the beneficiaries were Indigenous but, as in Mexico, the land reform was based on people’s class, location and financial need. And the reforms were popular because they benefited a broad class-based coalition from all three of the country’s main castes (i.e. races), indio, ladino and criollo.

Another interesting example of land reform was that of the Peruvian dictatorship installed by the Johnson Administration at the beginning of 1969. Whereas the Mexican and Guatemalan revolutionaries were anti-capitalist (despite the Guatemalan reform being a capitalist reform designed to move the country forward historically, in the style of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1980s China), the Peruvian regime was installed by the US as a bulwark against communism and an example of how even something like land reform is possible under capitalism.

Unlike the Mexicans and Guatemalans, the junta running Peru was constrained by its alliance with the US from engaging in uncompensated expropriation. But years of corruption and tax fraud allowed the government to purchase land far below market value because the owner had been paying property taxes based on land values artificially depressed by fraud and collusion between tax assessors and the landlord class.

Like Mexico’s land reform, self-organized cooperatives rather than family units were the beneficiaries of the reform and the types of cooperatives were evaluated based on similar metrics to Mexico but with greater sensitivity to the wide diversity of Peruvian ecosystems, commodities and the amount of processing required before goods were sold for further processing or sent to market. Whereas Mexico and Guatemala had already gone through a process of termination, eliminating Indigenous land tenure, Peru had not. This meant that the junta converted pre-existing Indigenous collective lands into land cooperatives, not dissimilar to the Alaskan reorganization that was taking place at the same time. In this way, land reform was the means by which Peru effected termination.

Yet, termination was embraced by most Indigenous groups because the new cooperatives were more dynamic, democratic and prosperous and meaningfully more land. Complications later arose with these Indigenous lands but the complications stemmed not from objections to the loss of traditional forms of land tenure and government but the tendency of small holders to function more as neighbourhoods of independent yeoman farms with only superficial economic cooperation.

As with the other examples, there is a common theme: reform was conducted based on class; settlers and Indigenous of that class benefited equally; the overall program primarily benefited Indigenous people.

I am not proposing to copy any of these, except with respect to one thing. Canada should embark on a project of land reform that is driven not by the courts or the private sector but by our parliament and legislatures. And that project should benefit and be supported by a broad coalition of Canadians needing land, rural and urban, settler and Indigenous. In the next piece, I will look at global examples of reforming and redistributing urban land.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Race | fusangite |

Canada Needs Land Reform (part 1): We Are Not As Divided As We Think

One of the reasons the establishment has been so keen to import US-style cultural politics and the moral panics they generate into Canada is that keeping Canadians divided culturally grows more important every year as our material interests and needs become increasingly aligned. The growing disagreements in Canada about gay rights, women’s rights, free speech and coercive public health measures mask a broad convergence on the material interests of Canadians.

Today, there are virtually no ordinary, decent working people in this country who are not victims of Canada’s land inequity crisis. Most land in this country is owned by the banks or by real estate and development firms. Now, it is true that much of that land is technically held in the name of one or more individual Canadian “homeowners” but most of these individuals are functionally indistinguishable from renters. They must transfer a vast amount of money to a third party to avoid the loss of their home and subsequent eviction. In some senses, the average heavily mortgaged property owner has less housing security than the average renter because more legal protections exist against eviction that repossession.

For a while, this thing urbanites call “the affordability crisis” was largely limited to cities and resort areas but in recent years, all Canadian real estate, from un-serviced lots in Central New Brunswick to bungalows in the village of Valemount (despite the closure of its only sawmill and main employer), has massively inflated in cost and can only be purchased with the “assistance” of a bank.

Since Covid’s arrival on the scene, rents in rural industrial and agricultural communities have increased faster than those in resort and urban areas, almost catching up. That means that whether renting or owning, a home is an increasingly exorbitant cost and the largest cost in almost all household budgets.

Even among people who owe little or nothing to a bank, things are scarcely better. That is because as housing and land prices rise astronomically, property tax rates do not even need to increase for annual property tax bills to double in the space of less than half a decade. This is especially impactful because those who own their homes outright or almost entirely are typically seniors or people at the very end of their working life.

And because neither private- nor public-sector pensions have kept up with inflation, RRSPs grow more unreliable as the stock market in which they play grows ever more casino-like and our governments keep stripping away legal protections for private sector and union pension funds, not only are seniors incomes both volatile and in decline, they are caught in a double bind. They need their home to continue to appreciate in value so as to deal with rising inflation rates, declining income and declining income security by selling or borrowing against their home.

Finally, there are the Canadians who live on Indian Reserves. While these people’s housing is technically “free,” chronic shortages mean that not everyone entitled to reserve housing can obtain it or are forced into incompletely constructed, incompletely renovated or dilapidated housing. Furthermore, those who are unemployed (and on-reserve unemployment rates remain more than double off-reserve unemployment rates) typically have half or more of their provincial government income assistance withheld as it is categorized as a “shelter allowance.” And as we well know, a shocking proportion of those houses are connected to inferior or non-existent utility grids, often lacking in everything from reliable electricity to potable water to internet access.

Few reserve governments have been permitted by provincial or federal governments to levy their own taxes (the Sechelt and the Nisga’a nations being notable exceptions). Consequently, with such woefully insufficient and insensitive block grant funding from the federal government, reserve governments do not have a ready mechanism to fund infrastructure improvements, housing repairs or new housing. Urban reserves have increasingly turned to using their own meagre land holdings to conduct real estate megaprojects that they hope will produce a secure revenue stream. And rural reserves have been forced to accept “benefit agreements” from forestry and mining companies in exchange for endorsing industrial activities on their traditional territories.

In other words, young or old, rural or urban, conservative or progressive, owner or renter, Canadians are suffering under and trapped in an intensifying national land crisis. And a key part of the establishment’s trick in intensifying and profiting from this crisis has been to redescribe it as a set of unconnected, separate problems or, worse yet, a set of competing priorities canceling each other out in a perverse zero-sum.

Let me just list some of the most egregious and obvious ways Canadians are being divided on the land question:

Owners versus Non-Owners

Most Canadians who “own” their home are in one of two situations: (a) the bank owns their property and they need its value to appreciate because mortgage payments are so high, there is not room in the family budget for adequate retirement savings; they rely on constant appreciation to replace lost retirement savings and declining pensions; (b) they own their property almost entirely or outright but are now living on a fixed retirement income that is steadily declining against inflation and a finite number of RRSPs they will run out of in a few years; they too rely on constant appreciation as their sole source of new equity and income.

Non-owners are generally in two groups, lifelong renters and aspiring owners. Neither group is served in any way by the continuous rapid appreciation of housing. Rising mortgage costs due to appreciation and interest rates raise rents in the basement suites and laneway homes in which an ever-increasing proportion of our renters live, also driving up prices in purpose-built rental as basement suites typically occupy the bottom of the rental market. Obviously, constantly increasing home prices pull potential homes out of the reach of first-time buyers with the consistency of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown every year.

As both groups’ financial desperation intensifies, so too does their polarization. Every years one group needs prices to rise even more, just as the other needs them to stop rising.

Landlords versus Tenants

A witty publication in my home town coined the term “artisanal landlording” last year. It pointed to the fact that a shockingly large proportion of people’s rental housing needs are being met in basement suites or laneway homes by landlords who are renting-out between one and three suites in order to meet crippling monthly mortgage payments. These artisanal landlords typically have full-time jobs and often children as well. In addition to being short of time, they often lack even the most basic building maintenance and repair skills and knowledge and often also lack the liquidity to engage tradespeople in a timely manner to deal with matters as urgent as blocked plumbing or malfunctioning heating systems.

Without any real control over rising mortgage payments, these landlords often lack financial wriggle room when provincial governments cap rental increases at a level lower than their costs have increased and are often one major flood or other architectural disaster away from their whole miniature real estate empire collapsing like a house of cards. For this reason, they often have an incentive to be slow and inattentive to repairs because, in most provinces, a landlord can only make major rent increases when switching tenants.

Tenants, consequently, face not just rents increasing as fast as legally permitted. They are dealing with increasingly incompetent, underresourced, overworked and harried amateur caretakers who will try to push them out of their home if met with a big bill or mortgage payment hike. Furthermore, tenants who live at closest quarters with their landlords and being set up to have the most acrimonious relationships. Worse still, these declining standards in the promptness and quality of maintenance and repair work in these isolated new units allow purpose-built rental businesses to cut back on their repair and maintenance spending.

Indigenous People versus Settlers

In both rural and urban environments, Indigenous people are usually the most underhoused, poorly housed and insecurely housed people. And most are associated with a “traditional territory” on which they have no title, sovereignty or rights of occupation, except at a theoretical, legal, unenacted level.

As I have long suggested, the “land acknowledgement” is one of the most odious woke racist humblebrags out there. Settlers stand in front of other settlers and engage competitive acts of weepy, emotional histrionics about how guilty they feel about doing whatever they want with the land they are standing on without, themselves, consulting anyone Indigenous about what they are doing.

In rural areas, land injustice is thrown into sharper relief than it can be in any urban environment. Tiny Indian Reserves sit in the middle of huge swaths of alienated public land, realms the size of European countries that have been alienated to pipeline, mining and forest companies. This technically public or “crown” land containing trap lines, spawning streams, sacred and historic sites and other sources of long-term sustenance, both financial and physical but it is under the sole dictatorial control of a single resource-extraction company that sees no value in other things the land produces. Indeed, it is in the interest of these companies to ruin things of value to other economic sectors as quickly as possible to reduce land use conflicts over precious things: destroy the biggest trees, most beautiful vistas and the richest sources of fish and game first.

But what many in Southwestern BC miss is that the settler towns are not in any significantly different position. Like many living on Reserve, many are of mixed Indigenous descent and have a variety of legal statuses with respect to their personal Indigeneity. Like many living on Reserve, they depend both on short-term jobs from the companies liquidating the natural capital on the land around them, and on that land not being liquidated so that it can provide recreation, food and a sense of place and belonging.

If one lives in the extractive belt from Timmins to Terrace, whether one is a settler, on-Reserve Indigenous person or off-, one enjoys no democratic control over the land around one’s community. Decisions are made by corporate boards or branch offices of transnational corporations in Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto, overseen by governments comprising legislators mainly elected in suburbs and cities far, far away.

The most demoralizingly extractive jobs, which often involve the physical destruction of places and activities with which one has grown up are, outside of white collar government work, pretty much the only family-supporting jobs in much of Western Canada’s rural industrial periphery. Consumers in the city demand wood, natural gas, pulp, etc. and then blame the workers who do their bidding for the environmental destruction they, themselves, have demanded they enact. Consequently, it is crucially important to prevent any multi-racial class-based alliance among the workers of Canada’s rural industrial periphery.

Dividing rural workers on a racial basis has been the strategy of the establishment in the West since the first cannery started paying a different wages to Chinese migrants, Anglo migrants, Tlingits and Tsimshians. But our current situation is best traced back to the 1980s and 90s when the combined effects of unsustainable over-cutting and mechanization thinned the ranks of Canada’s International Woodworkers of America from 40,000 to 8,000. The 1990s mining industry capital strike in BC and Saskatchewan produced similar effects in adjacent industries.

Whereas bush work had been largely racially integrated (even if the towns in which the workers lived often fell short of that mark with de facto restaurant, laundromat and other commercial business segregation), the layoffs were not. The minority who managed to keep their logging, mill and mining jobs were whiter than those who lost them.

Reserve governments are often as or more motivated to sign benefit agreements in order to guarantee jobs for unemployed residents as they are to gain a new revenue stream. Guarantees of a portion of new pipeline, mining or logging jobs, however temporary they may be are the best shot these communities have at resolving catastrophically high on-reserve joblessness. But those agreements are made in the context of a zero sum of bush work; every job gained by someone living off-reserve is a job that doesn’t go to someone who resides in a conventional municipality or regional district.

Similarly, court-mandated and government-negotiated land claims settlements are reasonably understood by those living off-reserve as endangering one of the few sources of non-government employment in the region. In other words, both the benefit agreements won by pro-industry reserve governments and the land claims made by traditional, hereditary governments are understood as either transferring settler and non-status bush work jobs to Indigenous people or annihilating them altogether.

A Call For Unity

But what if we swept all this aside? What if instead of pitting people against each other, we recognized that the real problem is this: forest companies, mining companies and banks have seized control of our land, the land of all people living in this country. What if we took our land back, together? What if #LandBack was not code for transferring title and sovereignty from people of one race to people of another? What if it stood for ordinary, decent, working people coming together to take our land back from the super-rich and the transnational corporations they control and use to extract the value of our land, of our work?

What if we realize that we were all being manipulated to fight each other, as a distraction by the bastards who have stolen our land and reap astronomical profits from it? The next several articles in this blog will be about how we might overcome the obstacles to building a coalition of settlers and Indigenous people, on-reserve and off-reserve, urban and rural, renter and small owner to take our land back together and all gain more land, more financial security and true political independence.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Race | fusangite |

Political Geography of Community – Part 5: Dispossession, Disinhabitation and the Invention of Landscape

Yesterday, I listened to a simple but a profound and compelling speech by Wet’suwet’en activist Jennifer Pighin in support of the rights of her people to protect a part of their traditional territory from a natural gas pipeline being forced through it. The pipeline will connect the fracked natural gas from the Peace Region to Kitimat, the town where the BC NDP is paying Royal Dutch Shell over a billion dollars to build a massive carbon bomb called LNG Canada, a megaproject that will ship fossil fuels to East Asia.

But this article is not about my furious and ongoing opposition to that particular crime against humanity. The arguments against Kitimat LNG and against doing business with apartheid shills and murderers of the Ogoni people have been made elsewhere.

What struck me most was what Pighin had to say about the process of connecting with her Indigenous identity. Her mother, like so many Indigenous Canadians (and a surprising number of non-Indigenous ones) was a victim of the “Sixties Scoop,” the mass abduction and institutionalization of the children of Canada’s underclass. Her mom, like so many others, lost her fluency in the Wet’suwet’en language and, through protracted separation, her sense of connection with her people’s traditional territory.

Pighin talked about how, to regain that connection, to make herself fully Wet’suwet’en, she had to return to that territory, to live in it, to walk through it, to swim in it, to physically reconnect with the land. She was talking, in essence, about reinhabitation.

Too often, when we think about colonialism, we think of it as being about importing a new population to seize and build on the lands of indigenous peoples. But the reality is that, in a place like British Columbia, colonialism more often means the opposite. It means finding indigenous people inhabiting the land and expelling them from that space. Beginning with the congregación projects of the Spanish Conquest in the 1550s, when Indigenous villages were amalgamated into a single settlement and the original settlements burned, disinhabitation has been the Janus face of the settler occupation we associate with colonialism.

Whether in the service of logging, mining, industrial agriculture or tourism, the main business of the settler state, when it comes to land in BC, has been to clear that land of human habitation and human activity: the disinhabitation of the land. Today, the Wet’suwet’en people who have been living and working on their trap lines for centuries are being evicted to make way for the pipeline.

They will be replaced, Pighin tells us, by a “man camp,” a particular kind of extractive, temporary community. Men will live there, often in a twenty-day or thirty-day cycle, spending half of their time working long hours at the camp and the other half at their real home hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away. Such communities are designed to be impermanent, not just physically and economically but socially. No families live in them. No children grow up there. Government and business look the other way when it comes to the drug abuse and gender-based violence against nearby indigenous populations that we know they will bring.

Then the man camp will be gone and all that will remain will be the pipeline. A pipe buried under an emptied land.

It is no coincidence that the beginnings of modern capitalism coincide in time and space with the start of this process of disinhabitation. The project began on the other side of the Atlantic in the first two Calvinist nation-states, Tudor England and the Dutch Republic. The new economy of Northern Europe that we associate with the Protestant Reformation and the domination of the countryside by central governments was fueled by what we call the “Wool Boom.”

In the 1400s, specialized winter clothing became a major item of trade throughout Europe and this clothing was made almost exclusively of wool. Finally the long-term north-south trade deficit vanished. And soon, more value in wool was flowing south than wine flowing north. The countries that made the most money during that boom were those that were most effective in converting land into sheep pasturage.

And it was in this that the English and Dutch excelled. As I wrote in the last post in this series, a decade ago, this meant the mass dislocation of rural peasants. The common lands they farmed were seized and sold. As Thomas More then observed, men no longer eat sheep; “now sheep eat men.” In my last piece, I focused on what happened to the people, the women and men whose lives and homes were eaten by sheep. They became the world’s first “neighbours.”

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But what became of the land? The sheep pastures that Enclosure produced had a distinctive look. Their look was “pastoral.” A common trope of the pastoral aesthetic, the focus of the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century, had become “the Ruined Cottage,” as the William Wordsworth poem attests.

We refer to these vistas as landscapes. The corollary of the neighbour is the landscape.

The story of how the term entered the English language might surprise you: it is a loan word from the Dutch Landschap. Its original meaning was: a vista resembling a Dutch landscape painting. Long before the French and English Romantics, it was the Dutch who first aestheticized the disinhabitation of the capitalist project. There was a strange, haunted beauty to lands from which human beings had been evicted, leaving minute traces or none at all. The first landscapes aestheticized the eviction and pauperization of the European peasant, and everywhere they have appeared since has arisen from a capitalist project of disinhabitation, forced eviction and human suffering.

Landscapes are not “natural” in the sense that the term sometimes means (when it is able to mean anything at all) “non-anthropogenic” because the absence of humans is not caused by human absence but rather by the creation of a state powerful enough to evict humans from huge swaths of territory to make way for some larger economic objective.

When the environmental movement first appeared in the United States, it arose from an intersection of the romantic movement, the spiritualist movement, the growth of the power of the central government and its massive subsidies to railway companies. The first modern park, Yosemite, we must remember, was created through the genocide of the people for whom it is named—a genocide motivated by the commodification of an aesthetic.

When transcontinental railway companies reached the places we today call Yellowstone, Jasper, and Banff, they were faced with places that lacked high-value timber, easily accessible subsoil minerals and no real estate development potential. They were turned into landscapes, so that they could enter capitalism, as an experience purchased by the guests of the four-star hotels the rail companies were permitted to build inside the parks whose boundaries they chose. By that, I mean that the indigenous people living inside their boundaries were all evicted like the Nez Pierce of Yellowstone or murdered like the Ahwahnee of Yosemite. The only way the companies could make money was by turning beautiful places into landscapes, by disinhabiting them. That required guns. That required money.

Stanley Park in Vancouver, Central Park in New York: these places were also rendered landscapes, their boundaries chosen because they were the places the poorest people with the fewest property rights were living. Today, they are landscapes—places which the state uses all of its power to keep uninhabited. That’s the thing about disinhabitation; it is continuous, relentless.

Landscape painting, as an aesthetic project, is, among many other things, the documentation of the loss, grief and alienation that capitalism inflicts. It is, in a way, the corollary of the aestheticization of post-industrial sites as in Vancouver’s Granville Island Market or Providence’s India Point Park. But instead of showing the vanished and failing power of the mythologized industrial workplace with its union halls and family-supporting jobs, they show not only the resilience and beauty of ecosystems; they also show the power of capitalism regnant, triumphant, still able to empty a land, not just of its resources but of its human inhabitants. It is this paradox that causes vistas that should be haunting and foreboding to be misinterpreted as reassuring and nostalgic in the capitalist imaginary.

It is the task, not just of Indigenous people, to reverse this, to reinhabit and restore our lands.

Los Altos Institute will soon be accepting registrations to its spring landscape intensive course co-taught by my partner, Corey Hardeman, one of Canada’s premier landscape painters, and me. To join the Wet’suwet’en defense of their land or learn more about it, go here.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies | fusangite |

Thanks for Saving Downtown Prince George, Homeless Folks

I host a talk show on community radio in Prince George, BC, an industrial town and regional centre of 74,000 souls. My show is the Monday edition of After Nine, a show that runs on weekdays. Last week, the Thursday host of After Nine had a twenty-five minute interview with and five-minute editorial in support of a new downtown business owners’ group, as yet unnamed, fronted by two downtown commercial property owners, Melanie Desjardins and Jason Luke.

They presented a picture of a downtown overrun by homeless people living on the street, mostly indigenous and mostly opiate addicts, who engage habitually in not just property crime but violent crime. This group of people, they explained, are making downtown unsafe and, consequently, need to be “rounded up” and permanently removed from the downtown. Such an action was possible, they argued, because, by virtue of being opiate addicts, these individuals are habitual offenders and habitual offenders, in their view, “have no human rights.” It is only because “the human rights have gone too far,” they explained, that businesses are not prosperous downtown.

The only solution, they argued, was the forcible mass relocation and indefinite detention of a criminalized and racialized group of people. In other words, a pogrom. And, if the police wouldn’t do this, they might well take matters into their own hands.

Once the podcast of the show came out and more and more Prince George residents who do not listen to community radio normally began listening to the interview, local social media has lit up with expressions of horror, disgust and incredulity. Prominent local opinion leaders are now leading a boycott of the station.

The response of the businesspeople has largely been incoherent and self-contradictory, repeatedly disavowing and then restating the same views over and over again. But there is now one new message: “well, how are you going to solve this problem?” By this, they do not really mean homelessness; besides, we know how to do that, with Finland-style “housing first” government policy at the provincial and federal levels that administer social programs. What they really mean is “how will my business become more prosperous and get more customers?” And, not because I deem their question sincere but because they have accidentally started a community dialogue, I have decided to use this post to answer it.

 

The first thing we must recognize is that one of the groups that contributes most to our downtown’s current functionality is the very group they seek to extirpate. Were it not for the street homeless of Prince George, our downtown would truly be in bad shape. Our downtown has been badly understood and, consequently, badly planned and badly managed. It is only by luck that we have as much commerce there as we do.

Eyes on the Street

That is because study-after-study over the past half-century has validated the theory of street crime put forward by Jane Jacobs in 1961, “eyes on the street.” In other words, the single biggest factor in whether someone commits a crime of opportunity against a stranger on the street is whether they can see other people watching them. And the theory is specific, beyond this, about which eyes have the greatest crime-reducing power. They are eyes with the fewest sheets of glass between them and the potential criminal. Eyes behind a window or windshield are a small fraction of being as effective as eyes on a stoop, a patio or a sidewalk. And eyes that might be watching from a camera are less effective still. And it turns out that it does not matter very much whose eyes are watching, just that there are other human eyes.

Because Prince George has over-prioritized the availability of parking spots downtown, many people who come downtown to shop will get back in their car repeatedly during a single trip, and move it to the next location in downtown. This means that most shoppers are not, during most of their trip “eyes on the street.” They are behind glass in a store or behind glass in their vehicle. In this way, we have shunted almost all of the work of having eyes on the street to the very people we think are making downtown unsafe.

What makes a place unsafe are empty sidewalks, hedges, privacy fences, arcades and indoor malls because they suck eyes off the street and place them behind things that prevent them from observing crime.

Slow Space
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Another contribution that our local underclass makes to our prosperity and the life of our downtown is the way they help to generate the most coveted kind of urban space when it comes not just to commerce but to a vibrant civic life: slow space. To give credit where it is due, our city has helped to generate this kind of space by narrowing streets with angle parking, widened sidewalks and four-way stops in recent years. But this is not enough.

If one visits the most commercially successful, prosperous and friendly streetscapes, we see a mixture of slow-moving cars, bicycles being ridden without helmets and pedestrians paying some, but not too much, attention to traffic signals. People cross against lights, cycle slowly so they don’t get sweaty on the way to their destination, drive in circles, looking for a perfect spot or take ages to pull in and out of their hard-won parking spot. That is what is going on in the strip malls of Scott Road in Surrey, on Granville Island in Vancouver and all over the commercially successful parts of every major, mature European or Asian city.

People moving through slow space make more unplanned purchases, more unplanned library visits and have more unplanned conversations with friends and neighbours. Every time a member of the underclass crosses against a light or jaywalks, they are slowing our downtown space, making it more vibrant and prosperous. Cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create slow space, and here it is in Prince George, welling-up around the dispensary.

Petty Commerce

One of the reasons that my partner and I often go to the malls at Spruceland or Pine Centre to shop, instead of downtown is a lack of opportunities for convenience and petty commerce. There is nowhere downtown for me to buy cheap groceries if I need to make a last-minute purchase of something I have forgotten. There are no convenience stores downtown. There are no grocery stores. There is no liquor store. In other words, downtown is understood by Prince George residents to be a place to make specialty purchases, not a place to do a daily or weekly shop.

Places downtown that are for daily or weekly shopping, like the pharmacies, rely for their walk-in traffic on the minority of residents who do not use cars and find themselves at the bus terminus at 7th and Dominion or are getting around on foot. Again, the underclass of street homeless and marginalized people who hang out downtown are over-represented in this group. Chocolate bars, cups of coffee, energy drinks, pizza slices, deli sandwiches, 13 oz booze, tweezers, nail scissors, menstrual products, shoelaces, gum, mints: these are the lifeblood of any truly vibrant commercial area—convenience stories, groceries and pharmacies transacting small purchases are the places that keep a downtown going.

And again, the people who go to the most trouble to find the only cheap chips at Birch and Boar or actually buy their menstrual products at the Pharmasave or pick up some cheap gum at Third Avenue Pharmacy are the people who are on the street all the time.

Finally, A Shout-Out

I have lived all over and, frankly, I have to say that if you think Prince George has a zesty, rough or greasy downtown, stay here! You may be rugged and tough enough to survive a Prince George winter but I cannot imagine you being able to handle most of downtown Toronto, Providence, Boston or pretty much anywhere else interesting that I have lived or visited. Even Salt Lake City might be too much for you. But at least there, they have a merchant community and government that have the same bad ideas and keep trying to push vital parts of the community out of the city core and then suffering for it.

Anyway, a lot of friends have asked me how I like Prince George and its street life. The story I tell, every time, is how, whenever I buy flowers for my partner, women having tough lives, who don’t know me, that see me on the bus or on the street, take time to commend me for buying payday flowers and bringing them home. Every bouquet of flowers has generated at least one conversation with a stranger; and none have ended with me being hit up for money.

And that is what I really admire most about the people having a tough time on our streets: they don’t hold a grudge against people who look like me, just because of some bad apples among the downtown business community, the way so many people who look like me hold a grudge against them.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |