Promoting Truth & Reconciliation in Land Use Planning

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Precarious dwelling: what is the housing question under settler-colonial urbanism?

  • 8 Jun 2022
  • 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
  • Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) Annex, 720 Bathurst St., Toronto

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York University's Faculty of Environment & Urban Change is pleased to collaborate with Shared Path Consultation Initiative to present this conversation between Professors Libby Porter, Heather Dorries, and Lisa Myers.

To say that there is a ‘housing crisis’ in Australia, and globally, is an almost glib understatement. Deepening debt, growing insecurity and displacement from home and livelihood are dimensions of the ‘crisis ordinary’ being experienced by increasing numbers of people. In a city like Melbourne, that takes up the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation, precarities of dwelling have been the founding, constitutive feature of contemporary urban life. This raises important questions about how we can attend to the links between contemporary housing injustice and the racist myth of terra nullius that has informed people-place relationships here since invasion. Drawing on a conceptualisation of dwelling as ‘becoming home’, this public event will examine ways of thinking about and methodologically attending to precarities of dwelling in the contemporary settler-colonial city, where the injury of displacement is a constitutive feature of urban process.

Speakers:

Professor Libby Porter is a scholar in planning and urban geography, based at the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University in Melbourne. Libby lives and works on the unceded sovereign lands of the Kulin Nation and is a writer, researcher, educator and activist about displacement and dispossession in cities. Her books include Planning in Indigenous Australia: From imperial foundations to postcolonial futures with Sue Jackson and Louise Johnson (Routledge 2018); Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (2010 Ashgate), Planning for Coexistence? (with Janice Barry Routledge 2016) and Whose Urban Renaissance? An International comparison of urban regeneration policies (co-edited with Kate Shaw 2008 Routledge).

Heather Dorries is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Geography and Planning and Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban planning and settler colonialism and examines how Indigenous intellectual traditions—including Indigenous environmental knowledge, legal orders, and cultural production—can provide the foundation for anti-colonial approaches to planning. She is of Anishinaabe ancestry and a member of Sagkeeng First Nation in Treaty 1. She is also on the board of directors for Shared Path Consultation Initiative.

Lisa Myers is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the Environmental Arts & Justice Coordinator. She holds the York Research Chair in Indigenous Art and Curatorial Practice, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University. She is an independent curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. She has a Master of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial practice from OCAD University. Her recent work involves printmaking, stop-motion animation and performance. Since 2010, she has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking, and stop-motion animation. Her participatory performances involve sharing berries and other food items in social gatherings reflecting on the value found in place and displacement; straining and absorbing. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in venues including Urban Shaman (Winnipeg), Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her writings have been published in a number of exhibition publications in addition to the journal Senses and Society, C Magazine and FUSE Magazine. She is based in Port Severn and Toronto, Ontario and is a member of Beausoleil First Nation.

COVID 19 Protocols: Masks are encouraged.

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