The indigene’s settler colonialist dilemma: Thilo van der Haegen, ‘The Vancouver socioecological fix: indigenous real-estate development as the city’s imagination of sustainability, affordability, and reconciliation’, Urban Geography, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The indigene’s settler colonialist dilemma: Thilo van der Haegen, ‘The Vancouver socioecological fix: indigenous real-estate development as the city’s imagination of sustainability, affordability, and reconciliation’, Urban Geography, 2024

27May24

Abstract: In Vancouver, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations are constructing several large real-estate developments that will deeply impact the Nations and the city itself. Developments such as Sen̓ákw, Heather Lands, and Jericho Lands envision the construction of thousands of new apartments that will yield billions of Canadian dollars in profits from the Vancouver housing market. This paper is concerned with the enabling conditions for such developments found within the city of Vancouver’s planning policies and underlying geographical imaginations. Through the application of the “socioecological fix”, the paper describes how Vancouver’s planning policies aim at fixing problems of sustainability, housing affordability, and reconciliation based on specific geographical
imaginations. This results in the conceptualization of reconciliation as the profit-oriented construction of green and affordable realestate. In light of scholarship that highlights the intertwined nature of colonialism and capitalism, the paper raises the predicament that the reconciliatory approach conceptualized in city strategies and actively pursued by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh is envisioning reconciliation as the reproduction of Vancouver realestate capitalism. How should scholarship contend with reconciliatory approaches that are both reproductive of settlercolonial capitalism, while also offering reconciliation in a concrete form?

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