The place of the poor: Poverty, space and the politics of representation in downtown Vancouver, 1950--1997 (British Columbia)
Опубликовано на портале: 19-05-2004
2001
Организация: |
Simon Fraser University (Simon Fraser University) |
Подтип: | PhD |
Тематические разделы: | Социология, Социальная стратификация |
Aннотация:
This dissertation examines the social construction of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood since 1950, challenging the recent narrative of urban decline which has situated the area as a skid row district where an influx of drug addicts has displaced a poor but respectable working class community, inducing a spiral of decline.
Contrary to this nostalgic memory, this part of Vancouver has been labelled as skid
row for at least fifty years and has been the site for an array of programs focused
on ‘normalizing’ the district and its population. Such programs have
institutionalized ways of looking at and talking about this part of the city that
have stigmatized the place and its inhabitants, providing broad continuity between
the contemporary narrative and an earlier version of skid row. In Vancouver, as elsewhere,
skid row appeared in the official lexicon shortly after World War II as shorthand
for the centre of the city's lodging house district. The notion of skid row combined
assumptions about the isolation of and the distinction between the deserving and
undeserving poor with post-War anxieties about gender roles and panic by the local
elite over sagging downtown competitiveness in a narrative of decline that situated
the largely impoverished, male lodging house population as the source of decay and
therefore as an impediment to renewal. The programs of urban renewal, population
dispersal, and individual rehabilitation justified by this narrative were only challenged
with the advent of the social rebellions of the 1960s and the rise of indigenous
organization. Central to this challenge was the formation of a counter-narrative
that reconfigured the identity of the population and place, situating them in terms
of the area's past at the interface of the urban and rural frontier industrial economy.
The anomic decay of skid row was displaced by the image of a neglected, exploited
but nonertheless proud community which served as a mobilizing tactic in the pursuit
of neighbourhood improvement. However, this self-consciously oppositional symbolic
politics of community was unable to escape the skid row narrative, which persisted
as its ‘constitutive outside’. As the social geography of Vancouver shifted
in the wake of the 1986 world's fair, with gentrification of old working class neighbourhoods
and the massive residential redevelopments on the once-industrial peripheries of
the CBD, the Downtown Eastside is once more cast as a marginal skid row district
with a population that threatens the well-being of Vancouver's downtown.
Ссылки: |
http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/ |

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