Big Moves: Global Agendas, Local Aspirations, and Urban Mobility in Canada (Volume 13) (McGill-Queen's Studies in Urban Governance)

All countries have distinctive urban regions, but Canadian cities especially differ from one another in culture, structure, and history. Anthony Perl, Matt Hern, and Jeffrey Kenworthy reveal that despite the peculiarities and singular traits that each city embodies, a common logic has guided the development of transportation infrastructure across the country. Big Moves analyzes how Canada's three largest urban regions - Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver - have been shaped by the interplay of globalized imperatives, aspirations, activism, investment, and local development initiatives, both historically and in a contemporary context. Canadian urban development follows a distinct pattern that involves compromise between local viewpoints and values and the pursuit of global capital at particular historical junctures. As the authors show, the success or failure of each city to construct major mobility infrastructure has always depended on the timing of investments and the specific ways that cities have gained access to necessary capital. Drawing on urban mobility history and global city theory, this book delves into the details of the big moves that have affected transport infrastructure in major Canadian cities. Knowing where urban development will head in the twenty-first century requires understanding how cities' major mobility infrastructures were built. Big Moves explains the shape of Canada's three biggest cities and how their mix of expressways and rapid transit emerged.

Engineering & Transportation

Perl, Anthony

Kenworthy, Jeffrey

Hern, Matt

Transportation

McGill-Queen's University Press

An investigation into gentrification and displacement, focusing on the case of Portland, Oregon's systematic dispersal of black residents from its Albina neighborhood.
Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the United States. It has walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, low-density housing, public transportation, and significant green space -- not to mention craft-beer bars and locavore food trucks. But liberal Portland is also the whitest city in the country. This is not circumstance; the city has a long history of officially sanctioned racialized displacement that continues today. Over the last two and half decades, Albina -- the one major Black neighborhood in Portland -- has been systematically uprooted by market-driven gentrification and city-renewal policies. African Americans in Portland were first pushed into Albina and then contained there through exclusionary zoning, predatory lending, and racist real estate practices. Since the 1990s, they've been aggressively displaced -- by rising housing costs, developers eager to get rid of low-income residents, and overt city policies of gentrification.
Displacement and dispossessions are convulsing cities across the globe, becoming the dominant urban narratives of our time. In What a City Is For, Matt Hern uses the case of Albina, as well as similar instances in New Orleans and Vancouver, to investigate gentrification in the twenty-first century. In an engaging narrative, effortlessly mixing anecdote and theory, Hern questions the notions of development, private property, and ownership. Arguing that home ownership drives inequality, he wants us to disown ownership. How can we reimagine the city as a post-ownership, post-sovereign space? Drawing on solidarity economics, cooperative movements, community land trusts, indigenous conceptions of alternative sovereignty, the global commons movement, and much else, Hern suggests repudiating development in favor of an incrementalist, non-market-driven unfolding of the city.

What a City Is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Mit Pr

Seeking new definitions of ecology in the tar sands of northern Alberta and searching for the sweetness of life in the face of planetary crises.
Confounded by global warming and in search of an affirmative politics that links ecology with social change, Matt Hern and Am Johal set off on a series of road trips to the tar sands of northern Alberta―perhaps the world's largest industrial site, dedicated to the dirty work of extracting oil from Alberta's vast reserves. Traveling from culturally liberal, self-consciously “green” Vancouver, and aware that our well-meaning performances of recycling and climate-justice marching are accompanied by constant driving, flying, heating, and fossil-fuel consumption, Hern and Johal want to talk to people whose lives and fortunes depend on or are imperiled by extraction. They are seeking new definitions of ecology built on a renovated politics of land. Traveling with them is their friend Joe Sacco―infamous journalist and cartoonist, teller of complex stories from Gaza to Paris―who contributes illustrations and insights and a chapter-length comic about the contradictions of life in an oil town. The epic scale of the ecological horror is captured through an series of stunning color photos by award-winning aerial photographer Louis Helbig.
Seamlessly combining travelogue, sophisticated political analysis, and ecological theory, speaking both to local residents and to leading scholars, the authors propose a new understanding of ecology that links the domination of the other-than-human world to the domination of humans by humans. They argue that any definition of ecology has to start with decolonization and that confronting global warming requires a politics that speaks to a different way of being in the world―a reconstituted understanding of the sweetness of life.
Published with the help of funding from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan fund

Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (Mit Press)

Biographies & Memoirs

Johal, Am

Professionals & Academics

MIT Press]

An investigation into gentrification and displacement, focusing on the case of Portland, Oregon's systematic dispersal of black residents from its Albina neighborhood.
Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the United States. It has walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, low-density housing, public transportation, and significant green space―not to mention craft-beer bars and locavore food trucks. But liberal Portland is also the whitest city in the country. This is not circumstance; the city has a long history of officially sanctioned racialized displacement that continues today. Over the last two and half decades, Albina―the one major Black neighborhood in Portland―has been systematically uprooted by market-driven gentrification and city-renewal policies. African Americans in Portland were first pushed into Albina and then contained there through exclusionary zoning, predatory lending, and racist real estate practices. Since the 1990s, they've been aggressively displaced―by rising housing costs, developers eager to get rid of low-income residents, and overt city policies of gentrification.
Displacement and dispossessions are convulsing cities across the globe, becoming the dominant urban narratives of our time. In What a City Is For, Matt Hern uses the case of Albina, as well as similar instances in New Orleans and Vancouver, to investigate gentrification in the twenty-first century. In an engaging narrative, effortlessly mixing anecdote and theory, Hern questions the notions of development, private property, and ownership. Arguing that home ownership drives inequality, he wants us to disown ownership. How can we reimagine the city as a post-ownership, post-sovereign space? Drawing on solidarity economics, cooperative movements, community land trusts, indigenous conceptions of alternative sovereignty, the global commons movement, and much else, Hern suggests repudiating development in favor of an incrementalist, non-market-driven unfolding of the city.

What a City Is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement (Mit Press)

The MIT Press

Deschooling Our Lives

Science & Math

Environment

Library Company of Philadelphia

Does institutionalizing our children for six hours a day, five days a week, really bring out the best in them? In this provocative book, Matt Hern argues that there are effective alternatives to school as we know it. Hern believes that local communities are in the best position to decide what kind of schooling their children need. In suggesting ways that we can leave the traditional school model behind, he sketches a future in which personal autonomy and social change go hand in hand. In the process, he shows how children thrive outside of school and make every day a field day.

Field Day: Getting Society Out of School

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

New Star Books Ltd.

From warnings on coffee cups to colour–coded terrorist gauges to ubiquitous security cameras, our culture is obsessed with safety.
 Some of this is drive by lawyers and insurance, and some by over–zealous public officials, but much is indicative of a cultural conversation that has lost its bearings. The result is not just a neurotically restrictive society, but one which actively undermines individual and community self–reliance. More importantly, we are creating a world of officious administration, management by statistics, absurd regulations, rampaging lawsuits, and hygenically cleansed public spaces. We are trying to render the human and natural worlds predictable and calculated. In doing so, we are trampling common discourse about politics and ethics. Hern asserts that safer just isn’t always better. Throughout Watch Yourself, he emphasizes the need to rethink our approach to risk, reconsider our fixation with safety, and reassert individual decision–making.

Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better

New Star Books

Parks are importantly fertile places to talk about land. Whether its big national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks, or humble urban patches of grass, we tend to speak of parks as unqualified goods. People think of parks as public or common land, and it is a common belief that parks are the best uses of land and are good for everyone. But no park is innocent. Parks are lionized as "natural oases," and urban parks as "pure nature" in the midst of the city -- but that's absurd. Parks are as "natural" as the roads or buildings around them, and just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism everyday. Furthermore, parks are not private property, but while they are called 'public', they are highly regulated spaces that normatively demand and closely control behaviours. Parks are a certain kind of property, and thus creations of law, and they are subject to all kinds of presumptions about what parks are for, and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks -- as they are currently constituted -- are colonial enterprises. On This Patch of Grass is an investigation into one small urban park -- Vancouver's Victoria Park, or Bocce Ball Park -- as a way to interrogate the politics of land. The authors grapple with the fact that they are uninvited guests on the occupied and traditional territories of the Musqueam (x&#695;m&#601;&theta;k&#695;&#601;y&#787;&#601;m), Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (s&#601;li&#318;w&#601;ta&#660;&#620;) nations. But Bocce Ball Park is also a wonderful place in many ways, with a startling plurality of users and sovereignties, and all kinds of overlapping activities and all kinds of overlapping people co-existing more-or-less peaceably. It is a living exhibition of the possibilities of sharing land and perhaps offers some clues to a decolonial horizon. The book is a collaborative exercise between one white family and some friends looking at the park from a variety of perspectives, asking what we might say about this patch of grass, and what kinds of occupation might this place imply.

On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land

Couture, Selena

Couture, Daisy

Couture, Sadie

Fernwood Publishing

"Matt Hern's brilliant and captivating&nbsp;Outside the Outside&nbsp;presents an urgently needed, theoretically sophisticated street-level perspective on some of the most pertinent ongoing critical debates about life and politics in our decentered suburban world." --Roger Keil, author of Suburban Planet Modern "sub-urbs" as a place of vibrancy, conflict and resistance Matt Hern argues that the changing relationship between the urban center and the suburban periphery forces us to rethink the entire identity of the city itself. Today, most of the Western world lives on the city outskirts. Yet these neighborhoods that once offered security and respite from the perceived dangers of the city center have been radically transformed in the last few decades to poor, working-class and racialized communities. Outside the Outside maps these changes and argues for a revival of the social life of the city as a whole. Hern shows how language that relegates parts of the urban to the "outside" and designates other parts as the "center" echoes colonial forms of domination. This should come as no surprise in an era when communities are forced onto the periphery and beyond by gentrification. With on-the-ground reportage in, among other places, Vancouver, Portland, London, Ferguson and Rabat, Hern demonstrates how we need to challenge our misconceptions and see the "sub-urbs" as vibrant places of resistance and regeneration and to celebrate the movement, circulation and difference to be found there.

Outside the Outside: The New Politics of Suburbs

Verso

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