Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The '
Future Growth, Future Shock
' series came less than a year after the
Laurier reports that had advanced a similar set of conclusions favouring
unconstrained markets. In the 1990 Vancouver civic election the pro-growth
NPA scraped through, just winning an election they had expected to lose.
Once again academics had proved themselves useful contract workers in
wresting hegemony for the globalization campaign.
So this was the political geography into which millionaire migrants moved.
Attempts by senior government to press a neo-liberal agenda rolling back
national and local barriers to the free flow of capital had been resisted at
the ballot and in informal protest, while a continuing public debate over the
previous two decades had raised repeatedly the question of appropriate
limits to local and regional growth. The recognition of the neighbourhood
as an appropriate planning unit in the 1970s, and neighbourliness as a land
use objective, highlighted the value of such public goods as social planning,
public space, and cultural landscapes. Reform councils began to accommo-
date neighbourhood claims for preservation of landscapes of special charac-
ter. In Vancouver, and some of its suburbs, there was a well-honed political
culture protective of the local and committed to a multidimensional set of
objectives, the mélange of economic, cultural, social and political ends often
lumped together in that ambiguous sobriquet, the quality of life.
The Place of Race
Opposition to free trade, open borders and unfettered development have
not usually been acknowledged as relevant contexts in explaining opposi-
tion to the impacts of substantial overseas investment in the Vancouver land
market. More common has been the charge of racism, a disposition all too
evident in the anti-Asian and specifically anti-Chinese sentiment that pol-
lutes Canadian (and American) social history. The cultural diversity of early
Vancouver had led to quasi-apartheid living arrangements of Asian,
European and Aboriginal populations; certainly Furnivall would have rec-
ognized characteristics of the colonial plural society in the place of race in
early Vancouver. Xenophobic stereotyping, the monopoly on power held by
white Canadians, and the resulting institutionalisation and enforcement of
difference in asymmetric patterns of privilege and marginality led to what
Cole Harris saw as a 'particularly virulent racism… race became the pre-
eminent symbol. It defined simply and effectively, with no need to go into
details, who was acceptable and who was not' (Harris 1997: 268). The spa-
tialization of difference - in Chinatown, Japantown, the aboriginal reserve,
European districts - gave a sharp edge to the contours of race.
Here was the deployment of racism in ideal typical form: crude and some-
times hateful stereotyping, power asymmetries, the institutionalization of
