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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

With a title like this, the only sensible thing is to begin by talking about wool.

Wool has a lot to do with the way that English-speaking who can trace their lineages to Great Britain seem to have got a pretty good deal this past half-millennium or so. Wool, strangely enough, was crucially helpful in teaching the English people how to make selves that are especially well-adapted to capitalist relations between human beings.

This remaking of the self in capitalist terms, and its sweeping political implications can be found in Thomas More’s Utopia in which the author comments on a process called “Enclosure,” whereby collectively-owned shared lands on which peasants raised crops were privatized and fenced through a series of acts by the English state. Instead of people eating sheep, More observed, with Enclosure, now, “sheep eat men.” Land used by humans to raise food to feed themselves became land that was converted to range land for sheep.

It was not enough to dispossess peasants, More went on to observe; they were then criminalized, as they are today, for their dispossession through laws against begging, brigandage, vagrancy and debt. This process, which had begun nearly a century before More wrote, only escalated over the next two centuries and more and more English commoners were dispossessed for a wider and wider range of land uses as the English state financed itself through privatization.

Once they were dispossessed, powerful forces set to work on those who had lost their lands to encourage relocation. People moved to find work; and if they couldn’t find work, the state and its agents would find it for them by converting them into convict labourers, indentured servants or pressganged members of the armed forces. For the most part, people were eager to find work and moved considerable distances – down brigand- and beggar-infested toll-roads to find somewhere to work.

These people were no different from the economic migrants of any era; their choices were conditioned by familiar factors. Is there work where I’m going? How can I persuade people to let me do the work when I get there? Are there people I know there? If I get there and something happens to me, will there be someone to bail me out? England’s market towns, which had begun their demographic rebound in the 1400s, were often the destination but many people urbanized into London and many still simply moved from one rural area to the next, often in short-term work directly associated with the wool industry. As Britain’s sheep population grew, so did the ranks of the dispossessed and dislocated.

Because these mass economic migrations were not actually associated with new technologies as much as new market conditions, the English people had the curious honour to being in the vanguard of a process that would reshape even the rest of Western Europe decades or centuries later. While processes like this had taken place at many other places and times, the sheer scale and duration of Enclosure created a critical mass of a certain kind of unstable, disconnected migrant consciousness. By the seventeenth century, common English folk thought about their relationships to their place, family and job differently than others on such a large scale that a whole new discourse emerged, a discourse that the state intervened to help shape.

We know this because of the King James Version of the Bible, a very expensive state-sponsored project to produce a text around which a new, Protestant, capitalist English identity was to be built. The KJV provided a dislocated, increasingly socially literate populace with popular, universal words to help them make new selves and new worldviews for the strangely kinetic, insecure people into which they were being transformed by the privatization of indivisible collectivities, like families and family. It did that by replacing the word “brother” with “neighbour” hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Let us be clear that English neighbours centuries ago were like our neighbours now: people you don’t really know who might or might not stick around. Now, as then, we have words for the relationships that can develop out of neighbourliness: friend, spouse, co-worker, cousin, brother-in-law, etc. Medieval English people had other words too from before the era of the neighbour like “gossip,” from the compound word “god-sib” – someone connected through a god-parent, a ubiquitous institution that linked huge portions of the population together.

But, in the world of Enclosure, new ideas of “neighbourliness” became crucial new forms of solidarity. The English people had a shared imperative, whether working as translators for one of the greatest state-directed propaganda campaigns of all time or simply trying to survive a move to a new town, where they had heard there might be some shepherding work, without first starving to death, to idealize a new form of community, neighbourliness. Neighbours were a new kind of person: a person forced into physical proximity with you by economic exigency.

As the Nobel Committee has recently recognized, one of the most effective means of surviving large-scale market-driven and state-supported dispossession, dislocation and social service downloading is through the mobilization of private micro-credit. The ideals of neighbourliness as propounded by popular early modern English writers like Thomas Tusser were, first and foremost, means of mobilizing micro-credit within a marginalized population. A cup of sugar or flour lent by one’s neighbour remains, to the present day, our idealized image of what neighbourliness ultimately means. A few pence, a little flour, an egg – in Jacobean England, the ability of the dispossessed and marginally employed to rely on new acquaintances for sustenance was crucial for the success of the first socially capitalist society.

This new social ideal and associated practices were, at once, forms of solidarity amongst the dispossessed and marginalized, crucial for the generation of the minimum material and political security needed to survive and a means of pacifying a populace in the face of oppression while concurrently reducing the material obligations of the rulers to the ruled.

These techniques may also damage penile tissues leading canadian cialis pharmacy to other dangerous situations. A viagra sale mastercard man has to take it at least 40 minutes to mix with blood and start working. What are the symptoms of Erectile miamistonecrabs.com cheapest levitra Dysfunction? If you are facing erectile dysfunction. Relaxation, medical hypnosis, meditation, acupuncture, acupuncture with customized hypnosis CDs, and massage are all ways to combat this issue is by using a prescription medication known as buy online viagra. What neighbourliness was not and is not is a natural form of social organization – it is necessarily a social response to the prolonged, systematic physical dislocation and atomization of a populace due to economic exigencies. It is no coincidence that the labour movement sought to undo the great intentional translation errors of the KJV. It was not simply that labour discourse in the past two centuries has sought – almost unconsciously –to restore the meaning “peoples” in place of the KJV’s “nations,” as the translation for εθνη; it has been even more invested in changing “neighbour” back to “brother.”

While leftist thought has grappled seriously with the ways in which discourses of “nation” have reinforced racism and imperialism, the response to the other great KJV linguistic reordering has received short shrift. While a handful of important scholars have recognized the ways in which neighbourliness serves to inhibit class consciousness in that it is locates identity formation – and hence, solidarity – in residential rather than work spaces, this only scratches the surface of the problem of neighbourliness.

People imagine, incorrectly, that neighbours, neighbourhoods and the neighbourly ethic are timeless, pre-capitalist things. And while we can trace the word to the time before Enclosure, its universalization in the sixteenth century was part and parcel with it coming to refer to a probably impermanent, quasi-stranger. To be neighbourly was to engage in reciprocity as an act of faith – to enact solidarity in the absence of the trust or knowledge one might expect in the world before Enclosure.

What are the implications of this to the Jane Jacobs urbanism that has come to be so uncritically embraced by self-identified leftists and progressives? Let us historicize neighbourliness and see its fetishization as an ideal as a reasonable proxy for instability, atomization and dislocation. And let us consider the implications of understanding the neighbourhood as a form of defensive solidarity that emerges when more genuine and complete forms of community in place are under constant attack.

Of course, today’s neighbourliness is not identical to the kind developed in the sixteenth century. In Vancouver and many other major cities, neighbours are, more often than not, families forced by the housing affordability crisis to move farther from work, to suburbanize, or, conversely, childless people who work longer, more irregular hours in order to stay close to work and reduce their commuting time.

What does it mean when friends, relatives and coworkers have been evacuated from your physical locale and you are surrounded by strangers? Or, worse yet, what if you are one of the new strangers, desperately trying to narrate your relevance to a series of closed doors and impersonal shops? Faced with these socially fraught circumstances, some of us lean on the idea of neighbourliness to fight back. We know those people – they are the elderly people on your doorstep with a petition for something, the odd cadre of corduroy and tweed-wearers who attend the annual general meeting of your community centre, the acquaintances who cold-call you to ask your feelings about the decline in parking spaces and, increasingly under Vision Vancouver, the people eating finger sandwiches and writing on white boards at some kind of city-financed meeting that always seems to be taking place in Multipurpose Room C, next to the swimming pool.

Those people are very much doing what self-defined neighbours have done for centuries: using a concept that is being actively popularized by the state as a means of social control and service downloading to attempt to organize against state-supported economic development and community reorganization projects. This minority of actively-neighbourly neighbours think they are part of a big, fictive community that contains you and everybody who lives near them, with whom they hang out at the Canada Day block party that never quite gets around to happening. As I have argued elsewhere, these people are actually quite unlike most people they live near; the people they are like are the neighbourhood activists who live in other parts of the city.

Neighbourhood activists often see the majority who never seem to be around for the public meeting about the development permit application as, in some way, deficient in civic virtue. As in most discourses of civic virtue, dating back to Ancient Athens, those most lacking in civic virtue are typically the most economically dislocated, those whose time is most occupied by working, commuting and fundamental household tasks like child-rearing. Or, as conversely put by Marianna Valverde, “The local champion role is one that can be played private citizens as well as politicians… playing the role of micro-local champion is time-consuming, which may be a reason this role is generally played by people with few work and childcare responsibilities.”

Ironically, those who represent neighbours are those least like them. Those able to engage in acts of representation and advocacy are situated at the polarities of economic security with their ample time arising either from considerable familial wealth or from self-inflicted poverty in order to remain in their chosen geographic area. This mirrors the situation at the inception of neighbourliness where those most active in the civic life of the neighbourhood. Early modern England’s most active neighbours were epitomized in the figure of the neighbourhood patron, an aspiring gentleman and town notable, or the disrespectable scold, the “crazy cat lady” of her day.

Furthermore, those who use their limited time to, in preference, associate with lovers, friends, coworkers, teammates or relatives, who congregate around activities like sports, co-parenting, drinking or gambling in preference to micro-governance are understood to, in some way, be quasi-citizens, people who have lost their full franchise. Maybe that is why neighbourhood activists are so comfortable in asserting what “the community,” or “the neighbourhood” really wants in these public processes—they have annexed their neighbours’ citizenship to themselves.
I write this not because I prefer the agenda of Vision Vancouver to that of the party that came fifth in the last election, Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver. By and large, I find their policies preferable to Vision’s on nearly every front, despite the party’s stated purpose being the governance of the city by the very people I just disparaged.

I offer this harsh critique not because what groups like COPE, NSV or the Green Party are doing is wrong but because it is inherently insufficient. The conservative fantasy of the neighbourly past that these groups evoke when they point to the Greenwich Village of Jane Jacobs becomes a more entrancing mirage each year precisely because the real bonds between people are being destroyed through dislocation and replaced with neighbourliness, a state-sponsored fiction designed, from its inception, at the height of Enclosure, to pacify the populace by substituting a counterfeit for real community.

More in the next part on alternatives based on organic experiences of community.