https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7465-4766
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Abstract
Leisure scholarship that operates within traditional frames celebrates placemaking as an inherently good, participatory, and emancipatory process. In doing so, the bulk of leisure scholarship fails to account for the ways that placemaking is complicit in the historic and pervasive violences of systemic racism, settler colonialism, gentrification, and socioeconomic elitism. Working through the case of Goudies Lane, a recently place-made space in so-called Kitchener, Ontario, we demonstrate how humanist approaches to placemaking predicate erasures and perpetuations of these violences. We argue that thinking differently may allow for a more engaged, equitable scholarship that accounts for the reality that every placemaking is always already an unmaking of something, and that these unmakings perpetuate racialized and socioeconomic injustices under the guise of a collaborative, participatory process of “revitalization” and “progress.”
Notes
1 We are reluctant to provide concrete definitions for complex issues like “gentrification” and associated terminology like “revitalization” which references the effects of gentrification from the perspective of those who are positioned to benefit from them. Our reluctance stems from the fact that gentrification is an inadequate, and at best partial concept, as Dahmann (Citation2018) explained: “Gentrification did not start in 1960s London. This belated discovery and naming should not obscure the often-explicit continuation of imperial warfare and colonial pacification.”
2 Writing as “we” to convey our shared experiences and referring to “our” field are stylistic choices rife with political ramifications. As Sundberg (Citation2014) explains: “Who constitutes this ‘we’ is never located. Instead, the coordinates of this particular ‘we’ are to be found in relation to the geopolitical location of the sources cited and examples given, which are all Anglo-European.” (p. 36) We use “we” and “our” in the absence of alternatives, while looking for alternative ways that might resist the very erasures imposed by them.
3 Although “revitalization” is intended to be a gentler way of upscaling the settler colonial city, “revitalization” is sometimes treated as separate from gentrification as it is intended as a more participatory, bottom-up upscaling (National Low Income Housing Coalition, Citation2019). “Revitalization,” cannot occur outside of systemic oppressions. In as much as “revitalizing” a façade of a “derelict” building may seem innocuous, it exists in histories, networks, and chains of relation to settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, and gentrification, as the benefits of “revitalization” are not equitably distributed (Jackson, Citation2017).
4 Although we deliberately write of colonialism and gentrification as entangled processes of displacement, we caution that the processes and outcomes of these violences warrant individual attention and remediation. In writing of them together, we caution against the use of colonialism as a metaphor for gentrification (Tuck & Yang, Citation2012).
5 The City of Kitchener Queen Street Placemaking Plan (2017) refers to places like Goudies Lane as “opportunities”: “façade improvement opportunities,” “green wall opportunities,” “mural opportunities.”
6 “Social mix” is the enacting of rhetoric that promotes revitalization and integration of under-waged and Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies, while eschewing that the strategies promoting “social mix” (e.g., mixed-income housing) are inherently “inequitable and revanchist process of class transition” (Addie & Fraser, Citation2019, p. 1373).
7 We refer to the names of these places as “so-called” to subvert their colonial namings, recognizing that the Haudenosaunee, Anishnawbe, and Neutral / Attawandaron peoples (among others) lived on, cared for, and have deep histories and claims to these lands since time immemorial, and that their “borders,” formations, and names varied. Though some accomplish this by referring to so-called Canada (and North America more generally) as “Turtle Island,” we are leery of the ways that this may impose a pan-Indigeneity that erases localized cultures and land use, as “Turtle Island” is not an agreed upon naming across all Indigenous peoples.
8 Out-migration from urban areas and suburban sprawl are racially motivated processes engrained in systemic racism, Jim Crow era segregation laws, red lining, and white flight (Slater, 2006).
9 Notions of chaotic, dangerous, and unsavoury places are often rooted in prejudiced and unwarranted socioeconomic elitism, racism, and an ill-formed opinion of addiction as a moral failure.
10 The emerging literature on Indigenous and decolonial placekeeping (e.g., Chung-Tiam-Fook, 2020; Hickey, Citation2020) is an encouraging starting place to those interested in re-thinking their engagement with placemaking as a form of settler colonialism.
11 We ask these questions as we reflect on how the topic of “placemaking” and “place” have been tended to in our combined 22 years of leisure education and scholarship.
12 As authors, we are also likely complicit in reinscribing hegemonic ways of thinking about placemaking in our critique of them rather than simply dismissing them, and demonstrating how we might work differently towards more equitable scholarship.
13 Doan (Citation2020)
14 See Areguy (Citation2020) regarding Land Back camps in Kitchener.
15 The consultation process for Goudies Lane involved an online survey that elicited community member’s responses to photographs (EngageWR, n.d.). This method of consultation is inherently ableist, classist, and exclusionary, as it is premised on the assumption that all people whose perspectives should be captured in the consultation process have access to a computer / the internet, and are able to view images and type responses to them.
16 Following Gibson-Graham (Citation1996) argument that referring to capitalism as a totalizing economic system makes the task of resisting it dauntingly tremendous, we refer instead to “capitalist relations” recognizing that these relations exist alongside plentiful other sorts of economic relations that offer more hopeful alternatives.
17 Wood (Citation2009, p. 146) explains capitalist teleology as a process through which “all history is a drive – though sometimes, perhaps more often than not, thwarted – toward capitalism, where the capitalist destination is always prefigured in the movements of history, and where the differences among various social forms have to do with the ways in which they encourage or obstruct that single historical drive.”
18 “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) is an example of the types of “revitalization” we are leery of (i.e., those that call for a return to a perceived glory moment).