Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Others sensed lack of respect even with a high position: 'I was a manager at
the hospital with 700 staff under me, making good money. But I still did not
feel respected by the local staff.' While at school, some children felt ostra-
cized if they could not speak English, or were picked on by a hostile teacher.
A number of respondents interpreted the issue as a failure of respect, 'being
looked down on'. In their view this was a class response, and the wealth of
more recent immigrants from East Asia had turned the tables. Yet others
had not run the racist gauntlet: 'having lived in Vancouver, I didn't feel
much discrimination. I do, however, understand that it is difficult to have
closer relationships with other people'. Respondents did not regard negative
experiences as systemic, for they were often accompanied by appreciation
of government policy, and differentiation of more and less discriminatory
citizens among other Canadians - 'Canadians are very nice, I can say 80
percent or even 90 percent'. They recognized too that discrimination could
be (and was) practised by immigrants as well as by the native-born.
Grieving for a Lost Home
A third context to opposition to residential redevelopment emerged from
a much more local neighbourhood subjectivity. In 1963 psychiatrist Mark
Fried reported the results of forced displacement from an urban renewal
programme in Boston's West End, an Italian inner city district. A range of
psychosomatic, stress-related conditions accompanied the prising apart of
residents from a familiar and much-loved setting. Earlier, Walter Firey
(1945) had noted the bonding power of 'sentiment and symbolism' in the
preservation of several old districts in the same city, including the adjacent
Italian North End as well as the elite in-town area of Beacon Hill. In each
case, land uses predicted from 'highest and best use' theories of the urban
land market were blocked by competing values associated with the mean-
ingfulness of local environments in sustaining landscapes and social life
that were integral to a shared local identity. Inner Boston in the 1960s
became an important laboratory for this type of analysis. Just before Fried's
celebrated article, Herbert Gans (1962) had published his seminal eth-
nography,
The UrbanVillagers
, of the same West End district, documenting
the dense social networks and social capital, in fact the pervasively social
basis of everyday life. This tightly intertwined bonding of society and
space, place and identity, the private and the public, created neighbour-
hood as a larger communal home. And so when, against their will, families
had to leave the West End before a 'slum clearance' order, when the village
was disrupted by external change agents, measurable physical and mental
health reactions occurred. Residents were, as Fried (1963) put it, grieving
for a lost home.
