Name
Moments of urban care within and beyond the housing-property nexus in Vancouver, Canada
Date & Time
Friday, May 23, 2025, 10:15 AM - 10:30 AM
Description
As Canadian cities respond to housing crises under settler colonial racial capitalism, deepening our understanding of the relationship between property and housing is urgent. Access to housing is intimately shaped through property (Blomley, 2020). Recent urban work begins to examine entanglements between property and housing, as well as the role of property relations in shaping everyday urban lives: such as through property’s subject-making power, its connections to housing precarity, and more. Yet, how can we envision housing futures beyond the precarious confines of property? We suggest that feminist care theory offers pathways for interrogating these possibilities and tensions. Care is the individual/collective provision of practical and emotional support. Care in housing offers a relational approach to consider how housing might be provided, experienced, and accessed, while remaining attentive to power. Building on insights from recent studies which discuss “care for” land following capital flight, we aim to understand how such relations appear in cities with housing and property markets that have been subject to sustained capital infusions. We look to Vancouver and ask: how can we use care to understand relationships and tensions between housing and property within sites of housing advocacy? To explore this question, we engage feminist methodologies to examine an illustrative moment of disruption to hegemonic, individualistic private property regimes. We consider how non-normative ideas of home and housing disrupt, and are disrupted by, liberal democratic property logics. We argue that care analyses of the property-housing relationship can illuminate radical housing futures beyond the limits of liberal democratic private property under the ownership model.
Location Name
Nicol (NI) 3020
Session Type
Oral Presentation
Abstract ID
115
Speaker Name
Trevor Wideman
Speaker Organization
Vancouver Island University
Session Name
CS149 Geographies of Housing