Mapping Municipal Colonialism: Counternarratives of Neighbourhood-as-Home in Strathcona, 1968–69
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent scholarship on neighbourhood organizations and their attempts to stop urban renewal focuses on the agency of citizens and the difficulty in defining the boundaries of what makes a neighbourhood. This article contributes to the scholarship on neighbourhood activism by examining the formation of the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association, in Vancouver in 1968, through the lens of decolonial performance studies to illustrate the differing definitions of home and domesticity during the postwar period. The City of Vancouver’s justification for demolishing the neighbourhood of Strathcona followed a colonial progress narrative, which conflated home and housing as an economic commodity, whereas for the residents of Strathcona home was more than an investment as it also encapsulated their feelings of belonging to their dwelling, each other, and the surrounding commercial areas. This article challenges the view that urban renewal is a different phase of urban development, but instead highlights the continuity between early settler-colonial and postwar ideas about housing to argue that colonialism is a structure embedded in civic attitudes and language in discussions of housing, homemaking, and domesticity that are then reinforced through zoning, by-laws, and neighbourhood regulations. By drawing parallels between early settler-colonial use of maps, surveys, land-use guidelines, and urban renewal plans, this article explains how the same tools and ideas implemented to justify the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands were reanimated as tools of expropriation in the post-war period to justify the demolition of a multicultural working-class neighbourhood. The residents in Strathcona successfully countered the City of Vancouver’s view of their neighbourhood by creating their own maps, surveys, and suggestions for how land could be used to justify rehabilitation and preservation of their sense of home, thereby illustrating that there is nothing neutral or objective about urban development practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".