Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
extravaganza of Expo 86 was at first opposed by Michael Harcourt, social
democratic Mayor of Vancouver from 1980-86. Finally locally, in the
neighbourhoods of Vancouver and its suburbs, rapid development spawned
slow-growth and anti-development movements in the culturally and politi-
cally liberal 1970s, and did so again in the late 1980s, leading to a vigorous
politics of turf. The important point to emphasize here is that at several geo-
graphical scales, and prompted by a variety of stressors, political mobilization
against lowering the defences to expansion of the unfettered domain of the
market already existed before the arrival of millionaire migrants in signifi-
cant numbers after 1986. Just as these newcomers brought with them an
embodied view of property, so they entered an arena where a pre-existing
politics of development was an important regional context. In these entan-
gled webs of meaning careful navigation was necessary and cultural and
political disagreements might have been expected.
In accounting for resistance to off-shore property investment, another set
of contexts, the province's deeply troubled racial past, has drawn much
greater attention from the media, academics and partisan local interests.
During most of British Columbia's first century the actions and prejudices
of government statutes and their implementation by street level bureaucrats
institutionalized to a significant degree popular racist attitudes and practices
(Anderson 1991).
3
Some authors have extended this history with little
apparent need for revision to the present.
4
Certainly complaints about Asian-
themed malls in Vancouver's suburb of Richmond and Markham/Richmond
Hill in suburban Toronto,
5
and the tense atmosphere around the 'monster
house' issue in Vancouver's most exclusive neighbourhoods give such critics
some material to work with. But while arguments from critical race theory
have identified racism among the long-settled as the primary motive for land
use conflict in the reception of wealthy immigrants from East Asia, my own
emphasis will incorporate also class and status dimensions. I shall reveal a
complex intersection of both anti-growth sentiment and also protection of
an existing integration of place and elite identity acting separately and for
some residents in conjunction with a reluctance to embrace cultural diver-
sity. The argument in this chapter will suggest a more intricate construction
of 'whiteness' than often appears in anti-racist literature. We begin with a
closer examination of relevant historical contexts to land use conflicts during
1988-92, before moving to interpretation of the conflicts themselves.
Challenges to Open Borders
While some critics have promoted Canada's Pacific Rim strategy as an
alternative to a dangerously close dependence upon the United States, the
official position was to see them as complementary, particularly in the 1980s
