Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
This article was downloaded by: [University of Hong Kong Libraries]On: 11 October 2014, At: 03:06Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Urban GeographyPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rurb20
THE PROPERTIES OF SPACE: HISTORY,GEOGRAPHY, AND GENTRIFICATIONNicholas K. Blomley aa Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BritishColumbia V5A 1S6 Canada Tel: 604-291-3713 Fax: [email protected] online: 16 May 2013.
To cite this article: Nicholas K. Blomley (1997) THE PROPERTIES OF SPACE: HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, ANDGENTRIFICATION, Urban Geography, 18:4, 286-295, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.18.4.286
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.18.4.286
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
LEGAL GEOGRAPHIES SERIES
THE PROPERTIES OF SPACE: HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, AND GENTRIFICATION1
Nicholas K. Blomley Department of Geography Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6 Canada
Tel: 604-291-3713 Fax: 604-291-5841
THE ORDER OF PROPERTY
When urban geographers talk about real property, or property in land, it is usually considered in economic terms. Clearly, there are differences in the way in which the geographies of property are construed—as an expression of the internal contradictions of capitalism, or as an expression of rational consumer choice, to name one obvious dichotomy. However, it is the economic geographies of property that are usually at issue.
Property is certainly this, but it is also more than this. Property is a legal and a political construct, as well as an economic one. To talk of property in legal and political terms is to talk of order—the two are closely related concepts. Minogue (1980, p. 11) defines property as "the concept by which we find order in things." This obtains at an etymological level: the root of the term (proprius, one's own, special, peculiar) gives us the sense of the connection between a property and what possesses it. Whiteness is a property of snow, for example. This is extended to social interaction: to the identification of modes of behavior that are appropriate or proper to a situation. "In the widest sense of the word, property neither can be justified nor needs to be justified, because it is inextricably part of the way we understand the world" (Minogue, 1980, p. 24).
To speak of real property, of course, is to speak of space, and the ordering of space. Given the above, it could be argued that this ordering obtains at two levels. First, a modern real-property regime involves the categorization and organization of space, whereby every space is known, named, and positioned. Second, property entails the establishment of rules of interaction, by which space is to be used, shared, and appropriated. These are formalized in the common law, but are also expressed informally throughout social life. The understandings that obtain when queueing at a bus stop, for example, could be said to be a form of property regime.
But as well as invoking geographies, property discourse also entails certain histories of the social and political world. In an immediate sense, the language of property is syn-
286
Urban Geography, 1997, 18, 4, pp. 286-295. Copyright © 1997 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
THE PROPERTIES OF SPACE 287
chronic: in its idealized form, it evokes the orderly alienation of land from one owner to another through formalized transfer procedures. More generally, property talk can also be connected to a wider constellation of claims concerning the construction of national histories of identity. English common law, which is very much a language of property, has very close linkages to narratives of primordial nationhood (Goodrich and Hachamovitch, 1991; Blomley, 1994). In a North American context, it could be suggested that property discourse is more overtly future oriented, linked to a meliorist liberalism and a narrative of individual advancement.
The histories and geographies of property, then, are constituted by and are constitutive of certain ideologies of the social world. The ideologies that property discourse invokes and sustains are broad and complex, touching on domesticity, contract, market relations, and citizenship, for example. Clearly, some of these representations of the "proper" ordering of property rights and relations, with their related historical geographies, are immensely influential. For example, the language of "highest and best use" and neighborhood succession, so frequently invoked to legitimate gentrification and spatial revalorization, contains prior normative assumptions concerning the necessity and desirability of spatial change. As I shall suggest below, they are not necessarily shared by all.
Perhaps this is because such historical geographies of property are not free-floating, but are rooted, in complex and recursive ways, in diverse material conditions. It is no accident, for example, that the language of property development has become increasingly global, as appeal to the necessity and inevitability of place-based competition in the elusive hunt for "world-class" urban status has become the mobilizing myth of the real-estate revolutionaries of the 1990s. However, there are other historical geographies of property, rooted in very different material conditions. The categorizations of property, and the ordering of rules of interaction, may receive a very different inflection in contexts where the political geographies of property relations have a different history.
THE GREAT CASINO FIGHT
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, the city's poorest neighborhood, may be such a place. In many ways, the Eastside is on the margins, materially and discursively. For some, it is beyond the pale, given its assumed association with criminality, welfare fraud, mental illness, aboriginality, and drug use. For other commentators, its history of grass roots activism, housing experimentation, and poverty provide a model for a humane alternative to the aggressive, pro-development line of city power-brokers. Certainly, it does not mesh comfortably with the dominant narratives of property. The vast majority of its residents are renters, living either in social housing or in the many residential hotels in the area. The area has also been, until recently, excluded from the real-estate frenzy that has fixated the city. However, this is changing, as land values escalate and yesterday's "Skid Row" becomes today's "heritage loft." The neighborhood has faced increasing pressures both from large-scale developments on its borders (notably the Concord Pacific "International Village" development to its south) and from increasing internal gentrification, with loft and condominium developments. Some interests outside the neighborhood see this revalorization as a way of "cleaning up" an area that has become, to some, an eyesore and a civic embarrassment. Conversely, neighborhood activists fear the displacement of the local population, doubly at risk given their market position and their tenurial status.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
288 NICHOLAS K. BLOMLEY
It was the latter concern, in large part, that was the catalyst for local opposition to yet another "mega-project" in 1994. For several months, the Vancouver Port Corporation (VPC), a federal agency responsible for Greater Vancouver's docklands, had been engaged in discussions over the development of its central waterfront lands. The 48-acre central waterfront site is located on a prime piece of undeveloped land, running east from the downtown, past the fast gentrifying Gastown district, terminating at the foot of Main Street, which bisects the Downtown Eastside.
In a surprise announcement, VPC announced its Seaport Centre plan in February 1994, which entailed a cruise-ship facility, a hotel, and, most contentiously, a casino. A consortium made up of Mirage Resorts Inc., a Las Vegas-based casino developer, and local developer VLC Properties Ltd. was established. A million-dollar propaganda campaign was launched by the developers. Quickly, a coalition developed within the Downtown Eastside to oppose it. Given the skill of this local group, combined with city-wide opposition to the casino, the provincial government ultimately killed the project in 1994, after refusing to allow the expansion of for-profit gambling.
The casino fight was about many things. Central to the debate was the morality of legalized for-profit gambling. At the regional level, it was unquestionably a civic distaste for "Las Vegas-style gambling" that proved the hardest challenge for the development consortium. The globalized economic geographies of property were also clearly of importance to the conflict. For example, central to the Port Corporation's argument was the argument that the city "needed" a new terminal (and a casino to subsidize it) in order to compete with Seattle for market share in the lucrative Alaskan cruise-ship industry. However, other "geographies of property" also played a leading role in the debate, particularly in terms of the impact of the proposed development on the Downtown Eastside. As we shall see, these related to the appropriate and just "rules for interaction," by which propertied space was to be shared and appropriated. I will consider the manner in which hegemonic interests construed these "rules," based on certain a priori understandings of the geographies of property. Local activists directly challenged these rules, articulating a different property claim based on collective ownership and a shared history of struggle and unjust property relations.
DOMINANT ORDERINGS OF PROPERTY AND DISPLACEMENT
For activists in the Downtown Eastside, one central concern with the Seaport Centre proposal related to the development pressure that it would place on the surrounding neighborhood. With gentrification to the east and mega-projects to the south, it is not surprising that the Seaport proposal to the north created a sense of being under siege. While local activists argued that the entire neighborhood, despite media images, was a strong and stable one, there was a concomitant recognition of its intrinsic fragility, given prevailing tenure patterns and the rent gap. The Seaport development, it was feared, would see hotel conversions for service workers or tourists, and an increase in homeless-ness as local residents were priced out. This was not idle speculation, but drew from the collective history of property relations in the community. In 1986, over a thousand residents were evicted from their hotel rooms as hotel owners prepared for the influx of tourists attracted to the city's Expo celebrations. It was commonplace for local activists to connect Expo to Seaport, fearing a similar pattern of displacement (Sigurgeirson, 1994).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
THE PROPERTIES OF SPACE 289
The response from the developers to these fears was two-fold: they both accentuated the positive, offering a package of amenities to the Downtown Eastside, and denied the negative, arguing that any negative impacts were overstated. In both cases, their arguments were underpinned by what might be termed a hegemonic "ordering" of the geographies and histories of property. Conversely, as we shall see, the community response drew from alternative historical geographies of property.
The developers were keen to accentuate the generalized benefits that would flow to the neighborhood and the city more generally, through increased jobs and tax revenues. More directly, the developers promised the Downtown Eastside a benefits package worth $29 million, which would include off-site social housing, recreational facilities, daycare, public art, and a site for a "maritime interpretive center." The jewel in the crown, however, was the promise to facilitate the conversion of the vacant Woodwards store into a mix of social housing, a food store, and a new downtown campus for Simon Fraser University. Drawing upon the expertise of local consultants who had been active in the area, the developers knew which buttons to push. The Woodwards site, for example, has long been an issue of contention in the Downtown Eastside. When it had operated as a department store, it had served as a much-needed social space for local residents and had provided reasonably priced food shopping. Attempts to convert the empty store into social housing, following its closure in the early 1990s, had failed. A promise to provide both housing and food shopping was an undeniably attractive one.
Such a bundle of promises to the local community has become commonplace in the area, as developers and some local activists horse-trade over the scope of community benefits. The emphasis on the distributive benefits of property redevelopments is enshrined in planning policy, whereby certain benefits are negotiated from the developer prior to support from city planners. The predominance of the bargaining model of development raises a vexing issue in the neighborhood: should residents negotiate with a private developer to try and get the optimal benefits package but face the risk of displacements that undermine the very existence of the community as historically constituted, or should they consciously distance themselves from such potentially co-optive relations and fight any new development (a risky option, given a generally pro-development city council)?
The latter choice goes against the ideological grain, given the paradigmatic status of what Iris Marion Young (1990, p. 15) termed the distributive paradigm, which restricts the meaning of social justice to the "morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens among society's members." Justice resides in the appropriateness of the final distribution, rather than the allocative mechanisms that underlie that distribution.
Indeed, in relation to the Seaport dispute, justice seemed to require an appropriate allocation of goods and benefits to the community, given some concerns at off-site costs. The question then became one of "pattern orientation," evaluating the "end-state pattern of persons and goods that appear on the social field" (Young, 1990, p. 18). Outside the Downtown Eastside, the debate over the Seaport proposal was fought largely in these terms: what potential benefits to the city as a whole (e.g., jobs, tax dollars, tourism, amenity) could outweigh the potential costs (e.g., increased gambling addiction and trafffic)?
While recognizing that the distribution of material goods is of profound importance to justice, one consequence of such an approach is that it tends to ignore or obscure what Young (1990, p. 22) termed the "institutional context," that being the "structured practices, the rules and norms that guide them, and the language and symbols that mediate
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
290 NICHOLAS K. BLOMLEY
social interactions within them. . . ." The effect of such a configuration of justice was that it sidelined a generalized critical analysis of the political imbalance between a largely property-less local population and a propertied complex of development interests. Fundamental questions of domination by the powerful of the disempowered were mutated into regulatory issues of distribution between formally equal "stakeholders." What gave the Seaport consortium the right to make decisions that would directly affect both the individual life-chances of residents and the long-term survival of the community as a whole? What could justify the exclusion of local residents—apart from nominal "consultation"— from a direct and enforceable role in those decisions? It is fair to say that these sorts of questions were not directly considered by most of those engaged in the Seaport dispute outside the Downtown Eastside.
This begs the question: why is a model of distributive justice dominant? What gives it paradigmatic standing? It could be argued that its commonsensical nature rests on its basis in a broadly liberal view of social life (i.e., one that assumes the priority of the individual engaged in market-like transfers of social resources). It is no accident that the dominant reading of property similarly presupposes an atomistic possessive individualism. I return to this point below.
If the first reaction of the developers was to celebrate the benefits of the developments, their second response was to deny or minimize the potential costs to the community. For the chairman of VPC, there was little connection between the development of the waterfront and displacement in the surrounding neighborhood (Longstaffe, 1996): "It's not as if we were clearing out run-down houses or old hotels and giving people notice that they must vacate, okay? We're operating on our own land, which is vacant at the moment." In part, it can be argued that the developers' (and others') seeming indifference to displacement was a willful one. However, I would argue that as the attention to the distribution of benefits was underwritten by a broader logic of liberal property, so it is the case that property is ordered in such a way that such a claim is relatively easy to sustain. The order of property, in other words, makes it easy to ignore its negative externality effects.
The central point here is that the hegemonic ordering presents property as an individualized space, rather than as a complex relational network of spatialized power. As has been noted many times, property essentially is concerned with relations between people and things. However, there is a pervasive tendency to imagine property as an unmediated relation between an individual owner and a thing. This ideologically consequential way of "seeing" property, I would argue, derives partly from dominant spatial orderings.
As has been noted, property claims are intensely visual: "visibility runs through property law as perhaps no other legal area" (Rose, 1994, p. 269). In part, this is because a claim of title depends on one's ability to signal dominion to others; "those signals are notoriously visible" (Rose, 1994, p. 69). We mark our property claims on the ground through visual cues, the picket fence and the "armed-response" sign being examples.
The most important visual medium through which we see property, however, has to be the map. Mapping and property enjoy a complex symbiotic relationship. Maps are a powerful technical medium; they fix boundaries and delineate the spaces of property in an apparently objective fashion. But maps are not an innocent medium. If we "see" property in part through maps, it is necessary to ask how the map shapes our visualization of property.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
THE PROPERTIES OF SPACE 291
Most fundamentally, the map invites us to think of property as a clearly bounded space. Given prevailing conceptions of property, that space is individualized; the central issue is the relation of that individual to that space. This is not, of course, the only way in which property could be apprehended. Pre-modern European geographies of property, for example, were far more fluid, contextual, and relational (Blomley, 1994).
The consequences of such an ordering of space and property are wide ranging. One very immediate implication is the degree to which the abstraction and reification inherent in both deflects or obscures an attention to the oppressions that are caught up in the realities of property on the ground. Property is reified as an individualized space, rather than as a bundle of state-sanctioned power relations in relation to a space. Seventy years ago, the legal realist Cohen (1927) noted that the common-law tradition assumed a division between the political world of imperium and the propertied world of dominium. The former, in the liberal tradition, is the world where a man and his goods are subject to more or less legitimate forms of external constraint. The latter is the world of freedom. Cohen (1927, pp. 12—13) exploded the distinction:
Whatever technical definition of property we may prefer, we must recognise that a property right is a relation not between an owner and a thing, but between the owner and other individuals in reference to things. . . . The classical view of property as a right over things resolves itself into component rights such as the jus utendi, jus disponendi, etc. But the essence of private property is always the right to exclude others. . . . [D]ominium over things is also imperium over our fellow human beings.
However, property is still frequently construed as "a relation . . . between an owner and a thing." In part, I would argue that this is because of the dominance of cartographic representations of property as a clearly defined space within the collective spatial imaginary. The consequence of such a representation, put more directly, is that the property form allows attributes that give an individual power over another to be separated from him or her (cf. Cotterrell, 1986, p. 94).
Property rights, of course, are not as purely individualized as the ideology of property might suggest. The local state intervenes in the relation between an owner and his or her land, at least insofar as allowed by controls over planning, taxation, and building regulations, for example. As noted above, an analysis of the impacts of the development on the surrounding neighborhood is required, and some financial compensation expected.
However, the ideology still seems to exert a powerful presence. The distributive paradigm and the spatialized ideology of property seem to share a common liberal grounding given their shared preoccupation with individuals and their resources. What matters in both cases is the distribution of resources between nominally equal and autonomous individuals, rather than the rules and presumptions that underpin those allocations.
"THIS IS WHERE WE'RE DRAWING THE LINE": THE COMMUNITY RESPONSE
The effect of the dominant ordering of property in the Seaport dispute was again to sideline fundamental questions about displacement, both through an enframing of the debate in terms of the just distribution of resources, rather than the justice of the property relations that underwrote that distribution, and through an implicit spatialization of prop-
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
292 NICHOLAS K. BLOMLEY
erty rather than a relational reading. However, within the neighborhood, both of these issues were more directly challenged.
Interestingly, from the very beginning, local activists distanced themselves from the distributive negotiation of attempting to leverage community benefits from the developer in return for acquiescence. Rather, they sought an exterior position from which to challenge the proposal as a whole. According to local activists, this tactical choice was born initially out of a sense of anger at being blindsided by the casino proposal, despite several months of prior consultation. It was sustained in the long run by the material realities of Downtown Eastside life, and a broader property claim concerning the collective "ownership" of the neighborhood (Shayler, 1996): "It was part of a Downtown Eastside tradition. For people who don't have very much, you don't have a hell of a lot to lose. And with this I think it was so apparent that, even with the carrots, it was almost a personal affront; that you were not only offering us something that was rightfully ours anyway—Woodwards— but that we had to buy into something that was going to cut our throats."
Instead of negotiating with the "guys in fancy suits all looking the same," alternate uses for the site were proposed, based on grass-roots community consultation. In community workshops and public meetings, residents clearly "grounded" the casino proposal in relation to their localized needs and concerns. In so doing, a collective property claim was figuratively staked out. It was not a separate space, but functionally, historically, and politically part of the neighborhood. Rather than the abstract maps of the developers and the planning department, "bird's eye" sketches were prepared with the help of local artists, clearly situating the Central Waterfront as the neighborhood's "front yard." Inclusive uses, including those that would appeal to outsiders, were proposed. Interestingly, the community proposals frequently included reference to First Nations history and contemporary needs: elders circles, sweat lodges, and other curative spaces being proposed to reflect not only the needs of many in the community (the Downtown Eastside contains the largest concentration of aboriginal people in the province) but also the original owners of the land itself.
In so doing, local activists directly challenged the dominant mapping of the Central Waterfront. The Central Waterfront was not an autonomous space, the disposal of which had little bearing upon their well being. It was part of "their" neighborhood as a whole. Moreover, it was not deemed "private" land. "It was ours, in theory. It was First Nations' land. . . . But also, it was federal land, it wasn't private land. And that made the argument much more compelling that, no, this didn't even have to happen" (Shayler, 1996).
Rather than coding property as purely an expression of individualized dominium, activists also sought to place the question of imperium on the civic agenda. The development was not simply about the distribution of costs and benefits, but related to fundamental questions about the right of developers to "appropriate" collective property and decide the fate of a community (Gust, 1994, p. 8): "When majority members of a specific community, regardless of rank, status, or possession, are denied proportional control of the affairs of the community, then democracy ceases to exist, and elitist social power cannibalism takes its place. But, of course, we can't allow that to happen."
This anti-hegemonic reading of property reflects the tendency of oppositional groups to unravel some of the hegemonic orderings of welfare capitalism, noted by Young. But in this case, it also speaks to a grounding of property, given the material conditions within which property was understood. When poor local residents experience property rights,
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
THE PROPERTIES OF SPACE 293
the majority do not enjoy the benefits of dominium (or, at best, they enjoy only a tenuous form of dominium), but rather they confront the sharp end of imperium, given an ever-present threat of displacement. This individual threat has become woven into the collective history of the community as a whole; a co-op housing project, for example, developed by the community, commemorates an older resident who died after being evicted from his hotel to make way for tourists drawn to the city to visit the Expo fair in 1986. To that extent, it could be said, residents experience the reality of property—as a relation between persons, in relation to a space—rather than its ideological presentation—a relation between a person and a space that bears only incidentally on others, and then on equal terms.2
According to one activist, the local refusal to buy into dominant readings of property also reflects a different tradition, born of local material conditions—that of inclusivity and sharing (Shayler, 1996):
The Downtown Eastside is tolerant and quite inclusive, and I think that's why they rail against the private developer who's saying "this is my sandbox and I'm going to do anything I want here," where people will say "I don't have much to offer, but do you want a share of it?" You see it with cigarettes, you see it with lots of things in the community, where people are social, and they meet and share things, and it might be a bottle, it might be anything. . . . It's their area, it's where they live. And I think that's why private property and the rights of private property are as foolish to them as it is to me. Because it doesn 't make any sense [emphasis added], because it's exclusive. . . . I don't think it's even necessarily a politic; it's a philosophy of life that has meaning with people.
We have to be cautious about such generalizations. As with constructions of the Downtown Eastside as a sinkhole of depravity, internal representations of inclusivity and community are partial and positioned in a wider representational contest. My concern is not so much with their "truth" as with the structure of these narratives of possession and dispossession. At the same time, we must be cautious in assuming a unity of political purpose and vision. The neighborhood has been characterized by internal political tensions and divisions: a number of groups that seek to represent community interests have clashed in the past (significantly, often over when to fight with developers and when to negotiate). However, there was evidence of internal unanimity over the casino fight.3
There is much more that can be said about the casino fight; indeed, a longer analysis is planned. However, certain questions relating to property and urban geography are revealed. It has become commonplace to note that a political struggle, like that over the casino proposal, entailed contending representations of space and time. I think it also can be argued that some of these representations entailed claims concerning property. To that extent, property entails complex geographic and historic constructions, or orderings of space and time. Put crudely, the hegemonic reading mapped property as a bounded space and offered a vision of individuals negotiating over the distribution of resources. The community response was to identify the imperium concealed within the velvet glove of dominium and to situate the space of property within a relational web of obligations, connections, and potential negative externalities.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
294 NICHOLAS K. BLOMLEY
However, in talking of representations, we must not lose track of the fact that such representations are not free floating; both were rooted in very real material contexts. On the one hand, VLC, Mirage, and VPC were seeking to invest up to a billion dollars in a parcel of prime waterfront real estate for their own diverse interests. For the Vancouver Port Corporation, for example, ". . . it [was] essential that VPC realize revenues from all land assets (1994, p. 24). The material interests of the Downtown Eastside were no less immediate and, for the residents at least, pressing. According to local activists, the future of the community as a low-income neighborhood was at stake. Their response, with its implied readings of property, drew in turn from the historical geographies of property of the area. Previous experiences with displacement, past battles won and lost, the history of struggle for waterfront access, and First Nations property claims all were invoked.
However, to the extent that material interests were at stake, the battle was contested on uneven terms. Not only were dominant interests able to deploy huge amounts of financial and instutitional resources, but they could use the language of property to their advantage. That oppositional groups were able to contest the dominant ordering speaks to the strength of their convictions, the issues at stake, and, perhaps, the porosity of the dominant order. The casino proposal was defeated in large part because of activism within the Downtown Eastside. However, there is no doubt that this defeat was also caused by successful alliance building between Eastside groups and residents elsewhere in the city, many of whom were more concerned with the morality of gambling than with a shared concern about local displacement.
This is of significance, given that with the defeat of the Seaport proposal, the Port Corporation and a local developer are presently pushing for the development of a convention center and related development on the site; they are bidding against two other possible proposals and appear to be in a strong position. Locals are concerned that a convention center, just like a casino, will cause local displacement.4 However, the lack of a casino component means that organized opposition outside the neighborhood is difficult to imagine. Yet again, the Downtown Eastside will be obliged to fight its own battles on its own terms.
NOTES
1Thanks to Steve Herbert, Jeff Sommers, Bud Osborn, Gregg Wassmansdorf, Carolyn McCool, and Nathan Edelson for their helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine alone. This research was made possible by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (401-94-1734). For an interesting discussion of the narratives of property, see Milner, 1993.
3For an extended discussion of the complex ethical positions found at Vancouver's gentrification frontier, see Blomley (forthcoming). Barb Daniel of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association is reported as claiming that the area
could lose up to 1,000 low-income housing units. The $5.6m that the developers have been asked to contribute to the local area will provide only 50 replacement units, she fears (Georgia Straight, June 20-27, 1996, pp. 6, 9).
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
THE PROPERTIES OF SPACE 295
LITERATURE CITED
Blomley, N. K., 1994, Law, Space and the Geographies of Power. New York, NY: Guilford.
Blomley, N. K., forthcoming, Property, pluralism, and the gentrification frontier. Canadian Journal of Law and Society.
Cohen, M. R., 1927, Property and sovereignty. Cornell Law Quarterly, Vol. 13, 8—30. Cotterrell, R., 1986, The law of property and legal theory. In W. Twining, Legal Theory
and Common Law. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 81-98. Goodrich, P. and Hachamovitch, Y., 1991, Time out of mind: An introduction to the semi
otics of the common law. In P. Fitzpatrick, editor, Dangerous Supplements: Resistance and Renewal in Jurisprudence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 159—181.
Gust, G., 1994, The new racketeers. Carnegie Newsletter, May 1, p. 8. Longstaffe, R., 1996, Interview with author. Chair, Vancouver Port Corporation, May 8. Milner, N., 1993, Ownership rights and the rites of ownership. Law and Social Inquiry, 18,
227-253. Minogue, K., 1980, The concept of property and its contemporary significance. In J. R.
Pennock and J. W. Chapman, editors, Nomos, Vol. 22. New York, NY: New York University Press, 3—27.
Rose, C, 1994, Property and Persuasion. Boulder, CO: Westview. Shayler, J., 1996, Interview with author, March 16. Sigurgeirson, M., 1994, Waterfront casino: An open letter, Carnegie Newsletter, May 1,
p. 5. Vancouver Port Corporation, 1994, Port 2010. Planning report. Available from author,
1900-200 Granville St., Vancouver, BC V6E 2P9. Young, I. M., 1990, Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni
versity Press.
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f H
ong
Kon
g L
ibra
ries
] at
03:
06 1
1 O
ctob
er 2
014
![Program · Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation . iv 42ND ANNUAL APPLIED GEOGRAPHY CONFERENCE ... GROUND TRUTH MULTI-SCALAR GENTRIFICATION [WORKSHOP] Spirit ... Tennessee Drinking](https://img.pdfslide.net/doc/110x75/5f7529513d7d4e545f433f29/mecklenburg-county-park-and-recreation-iv-42nd-annual-applied-geography-conference.jpg)
