Fight the power: Redressing displacement and building a just city for Black lives in Vancouver

Past and present planning practices impacting Black people in Canada are brought into focus in this master’s project that traces Hogan’s Alley, a Black community that existed in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood and that was displaced through a series of racially-motivated decisions spanning decades. The project documents the efforts made by the contemporary Black community to seek redress for the past displacement, and how the City of Vancouver reacted to those efforts. Engaging critical race analysis along with justice-based planning theory, the project uses auto-ethnography to document the specific justice-based interventions made by the author and other members of the Black community, including the proposal for affordable housing and a non-profit community land trust on the former Hogan’s Alley site. This work expands urban studies scholarship by including the histories and perspectives of Black communities, foregrounding the way race influences the ordering of cities and how city planning pedagogy, policy, and practice maintain white colonial hegemony.