Vancouver

No Gentrification Here or Anywhere

Free public forum with gentrification expert Neil Smith and Vancouver activist Jean Swanson

2:00pm
Sunday April 17 2011

No Gentrification Here or Anywhere

Discussion with Prof Neil Smith, a gentrification expert from New York and Jean Swanson, Carnegie Community Action Project

Free public forum

---

Sunday April 17 — 2pm —
Japanese Language Hall (487 Alexander St)
(Free!)

---

Over the last three months the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council has taken on a huge struggle against zoning changes in Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside. Through door-to-door petition drives, building and other community meetings, and five public hearings where more than 120 community members spoke out against the city's plan the community came to understand how the threat of a building heights regulation change and a shift in policy at the city government level will have a terrible impact on the lives of thousands of DTES residents. The low-income community in the DTES understands that gentrification means displacement from homes, increased policing in the streets, and the loss of community assets that city government can't understand and doesn't value, like feeling at home in a community.

Join us (with short notice!) to have a discussion with Professor Neil Smith and Jean Swanson to talk about the DNC's work for community control over planning and development and to protect the assets of the low-income community as part of a global fight against gentrification.

Neil Smith is a professor in geography in New York. He's written a major book about gentrification that is one of the most cited books about gentrification ever written, Urban Frontiers: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. His recent work continues to look at gentrification as a global policy and process. You can read one of his recent articles, Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy. (See more about Neil Smith below)

Jean Swanson has been organizing against gentrification in the Downtown Eastside for decades. A founder of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, Jean is currently the coordinator of the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) and a natural community member of the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council. She wrote a recent report on the gentrification threat posed to Chinatown by Vancouver City Council's proposal to raise heights to profit developers; you can read the report in sections on the DNC's Fight the Heights website:

Cheap rent and stores in Chinatown threatened

Hundreds of low-income residents vulnerable to gentrification

Myths about the city's plan to allow towers in Chinatown

For more info:
Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council
http://dnchome.wordpress.com
Urban Subjects
http://www.lot.at/Urban_Subjects_US/index.html

(More on Neil Smith)
Neil Smith works in Anthropology and Geography at the City University of New York Graduate Center and is the Chair in Geography and Social Theory at the University of Aberdeen. From 2000 to 2008, Smith was the Director of the Centre for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center. He is the author of The Endgame of Globalization, New Urban Frontiers: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, as well as the co-editor of Democracy, Justice, and the Struggle for Social Justice, The Politics of Social Space, Geography and Empire: Critical Studies in the History of Geography, and Gentrification of the City, amongst other volumes. Since 1984, Smith's work in critical geography has provided a compelling and evocative call to social justice in the city as well as a clear analysis of the history and impending death of neoliberalism.