The New Urban Political Economy

Housekeeping Items Trying to arrange a workshop who are interested with a research librarian. What days and times work best? Reminder that outlines are due in a week. Did anyone go to the Sustainability Fair yesterday? Today I will talk more about the Strathcona neigbourhood in Vancouver as an example of urban renewal and show a short film about Africville.

Strathcona In the mid-to-late 1950s, Vancouver’s planners and politicians began to import the U.S. doctrine of “urban renewal.” This doctrine said that slums represented diseased urban tissue that could not be healed. Such tissue was seen as a contagion that would spread by contact with other neighbourhoods. The only solution was to remove the inhabitants, demolish the slums, and install the residents in new and sanitized housing projects where they could learn a more upright way of life. Strathcona, Vancouver’s first residential neighbourhood, bore the brunt of local urban renewal schemes. There was no question that the neighbourhood was a bit run- down, but people loved their community and most residents owned their own homes.

Strathcona Part of the problem was the neighbourhood was sandwiched in between industry and a city dump, and bankers were reluctant to extend loans for people to fix up their houses. Moreover, being populated by immigrants, the neighbourhood was stigmatized by the city administration and little effort was made to upgrade local infrastructure. In 1956, a city report stated that “Chinese quarter to the east of Main Street is at present of significance only to the people who live there” (qtd. in Hasson and Ley 1994, p. 16).

Strathcona Despite the vibrancy of the community, the planners and politicians – the vast majority of whom were Anglo-Canadian – began to designate Strathcona as a slum, partly because, given their class and ethnic biases, it didn’t look like their vision of a ‘proper’ neighbourhood. Armed with federal money, they began to make plans to demolish the entire district and replace it with housing projects. Before being stopped in their tracks, the planners and politicians succeeded in demolishing sixteen square blocks and replacing them with concrete high-rise and low-rise housing blocks, with a total of more than 3,300 people being displaced, some to enclaves in the city where they were socially and linguistically isolated. They offered residents of the condemned blocks a pittance for their houses, pitted neighbour against neighbour, and threatened the holdouts with expropriation.

Strathcona Finally, in the late ‘60s, the residents (most of whom did not speak English or did not speak it well) formed a community association and took their cause to any politician who would listen at the federal, provincial and municipal levels. They were successful in defeating a second phase of the project that would have razed another 15 blocks and displaced another 3,000 people. The ‘renewal’ process was stopped and, based on a pilot project developed by the residents themselves, the federal government launched two new programs to help similar communities upgrade themselves: the Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program (RRAP) and the Neighbourhood Improvement Program (NIP). Both programs were later implemented across the country.

Strathcona This new approach represented an about-face in planning policy. Rather than seeing run-down neighbourhoods (and their residents) as beyond redemption, it started from the premise that people want to live in decent neighbourhoods and have the will and the skills to make them better. What they need is a little help. The NIP program provided a combination of grants and loans to residents so that they could repair and re-paint their homes, and provided money to municipalities to replace aging infrastructure. Africville was not so lucky…. Despite upheaval of ’60s, not much has changed in some communities. Ferguson, MO: population- 21, %- white, 67.4%- Afro-American. Ferguson’s police chief and mayor are white. Of the six City Council members, one is black. The local school board= 6 whites, 1 Latino. Police force= 53, 3 of whom are black.