Unsettling public space: property and the politics of home in Vancouver

Thesis

The central motivation of this thesis is to explore the relationship between the settler-colonial city, homelessness, and public space in Vancouver, Canada. By tracing the historic and contemporary tensions over two public spaces in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, the thesis aims to understand how they have been implicated within – and thus serve as a lens through which to understand – the evolution of the settler-city. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in the Downtown Eastside, including 57 semi-and un-structured interviews, over 200 hours of participant observation, and archival and case law analysis, the thesis traces the social, political, and legal threads that weave together to produce the shape of, and life within, public space in the neighbourhood. Overall, the thesis reveals how people in the settler-city experience, live in, and embody public space – and the ways in which they weave and negotiate new subjectivities, modes of sociality and home, and politics in the settler-colonial city. This work makes significant, novel contributions to scholarship on settler-colonialism, geographical understandings of home and of homelessness, and socio-legal definitions of public space. It highlights the ways in which the settler-colonial State comes to bear on intimate, everyday geographies and subjectivities beyond the Indigenous/settler dichotomy. It argues that current neighbourhood residents domesticate public space in ways that reveal, resist, and rework the wider carceral domesticities of the neighbourhood and, in turn, the enclosure of home under settler-colonialism. Finally, it posits that this unsettling of home and of public space produces new possibilities for multiple lived and legal relations to – and definitions of – public space, revealing the ways in which public space is a critical site of struggle in the settler colonial city.

Authors: Hills, TG

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-az146pyxy
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: public space; political geography; urban geography; homelessness; legal geography; Vancouver; settler-colonialism
• Subjects: Human geography