Susan Pell

MOBILIZING URBAN PUBLICS, IMAGINING

DEMOCRATIC POSSIBILITIES

Reading the politics of urban redevelopment in

discourses of gentrification and revitalization

Publics are not what they were once imagined to be. A growing body ofinterdisciplinary work is shifting attention to processes in which publics aresummoned, constituted and mobilized within political struggles. Nowhere is theformation of publics, as multiple, contingent and contested, more evident than inthe varied responses to the transformation of urban spaces. Publics are emergingaround issues of belonging, heritage, rights and participation within increasinglydivided and unequal cities. Through a close reading of discourses of revitalizationand gentrification in the case study of the controversial redevelopment of theWoodward’s building in Vancouver, Canada, I examine how the formation ofissues imagines and mobilizes publics and further how these discourses work todefine possibilities of democratic participation. I show that discourses of revi-talization, relying on economic and cultural logics of urban redevelopment,imagine an exclusive, individualized and passive public. In contrast, anti-gentrification discourses, advancing social and political logics of redevelopment,mobilize a collective, active and more inclusive public. In exploring publics withinthe relationship between issue formation and political participation, I suggest thaturban struggles, such as that at Woodward’s, are sites in which to understand howmeanings of democracy are being contested and rewritten in the contemporarymoment.

Keywords publics; issue formation; democracy; revitalization;gentrification; urban redevelopment

Urban publics and democratic possibilities

Many studies of urban publics focus on space, looking at its democraticpotential in terms of providing a platform for visibility and solicitation onpolitical issues (Walzer 1995, Bridge and Watson 2003, Mitchell 2003, Kohn

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2004). Often in this approach either public or democracy is taken for granted(and sometimes both), as the political uses of space in the city are investigated.While these studies suggest that there is a deep-seated relationship betweenpublics and democracy, what tends to be overlooked is that neither is stablenor certain. As a result, studies of urban struggles, whether they are aboutparticipation, inclusion or entitlement within various spaces of the city, oftenmiss the ways in which the very meaning of public(ness), democracy and therelationship between the two are unsettled and subject to contestation.However, when publics and democracy are approached as dynamic, contestedand contingent, the questions shift to: how are urban publics constituted andmaintained? How is democracy defined and practised? What are the relation-ships between publics and democracies? Whose notion of public anddemocracy is privileged and, critically, how was that collectively decided?

These questions draw attention to the communication practices at theheart of political struggles and point to the role discourse has in theconstitution of publics and democracy. A focus on discursive practices enablesone to explore the emergence of publics as a dual process of forming acollective issue and addressing an (imagined) audience through various forms ofpublicity and collective action, as well as connecting these publics to differentdemocratic formations (Dewey 1927, Warner 2002). In reading the discursivepractices that underwrite public issues and public spaces (Patton 1995), thisapproach does not regard language as if it was layered on top of places; rather,it recognizes publics as communicative spaces generated through discursivepractices that work to configure and enact the political. Studying urban publicswith attention to discursive practices shifts the focus from clashes overdifferent uses of city spaces to an analysis of assumptions about belonging andrights (that is, democracy) carried within urban discourses. It has the potentialto expose implicit political logics operating within various urban struggles andto bring attention to competing notions of publics and democracy currently atwork in the transformation of cities.

In this paper, I join others in the use of a discursive approach to urbanstruggles (Lees 2004, Jacobs 2006, Watt 2008), as I seek to understand therelationship between the formation of publics and possibilities for democraticparticipation. Grounded in an empirical case study, I compare discourses ofgentrification and revitalization during the controversial redevelopment projectof the Woodward’s building in Vancouver, Canada. The efforts to convert thislocally iconic department store building into mixed commercial and residentialspace emerged as a key public issue in the inner city neighbourhood of theDowntown Eastside (DTES) throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Spanningdecades that witnessed Vancouver’s shift to a more neoliberal, globallyimagined city, the ‘future of Woodward’s’ as the home of market or socialhousing1 figured prominently in debates over urban redevelopment. Somepeople expressed concern about economic decline and heritage preservation inthe DTES, while others were concerned about the displacement of the

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neighbourhood’s poor and their meaningful participation in the redevelopmentprocess. In coming to terms with contradictory stories of Woodward’s,I analyse the formation of public issues about the redevelopment project,how the various discourses of gentrification and revitalization imagine andmobilize publics and how competing definitions of democratic participation aresubsequently (re)produced. To do this, I investigate the positioning of actors,practices and spaces of the political in discourses of Woodward’s within ananti-gentrification campaign, public hearings and local media representationsduring the initial phase in the redevelopment process. I locate the emergenceof publics within various practices of publicity and collective action andthrough various modes of identification and authority. I compare the differentways in which belonging, heritage and rights circulate within these discourses,and the impact this has on participation and inclusion within the politics ofthe city. Using the case of Woodward’s, I argue that it is not only the urbanspace that is being transformed in the processes of gentrification, but it is alsothe possibilities of democracy. I end by suggesting that an analysis of themobilization of publics around urban issues contributes to understandingcurrent struggles over democratic participation and citizenship more broadly.

The formation of issues at Woodward’s

‘Woodward’s is a tradition, a building, and the centre of a lot ofcontroversy and politics.’ Paul R. Taylor (1997, p. 7), a low-incomecommunity advocate and Carnegie Newsletter editor

Woodward’s is located in the DTES of Vancouver, one of the oldest andpoorest neighbourhoods in the city. Following the general economic decline ofthe neighbourhood during the 1980s and 1990s, the nearly 100-year-oldWoodward’s department store declared bankruptcy, closing in 1993. Coveringmost of a city block, the scale and (political, financial and symbolic)significance of Woodward’s placed its redevelopment as a deciding factor inthe future of the DTES and the fate of the local residents. Embedded in thelarger contexts of a shifting regional economy in British Columbia (fromreliance on natural resources to tourism), broad restructuring of social welfarein Canada and rising value of urban properties in global markets, Woodward’sredevelopment localized many key political urban struggles, with housing,development, social policy and participation within collective decision-makingprocesses topping the political agenda in the DTES.

Starting in the early 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, privatedevelopers, city politicians and low-income community advocates in the DTESbattled over Woodward’s. Spanning a series of development proposals andprotests that clashed over the issues of social housing and financial viability,

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ownership of the empty building shifted between private and public hands forover a decade. The City of Vancouver bought Woodward’s in 2003, putting inplace a plan to convert it into a commercial, retail and institutional space,mixed with market and social housing. However, when Woodward’s finallyreopened in 2010 it was met with mixed fanfare. Reproducing the oppositionalpositions that marked its redevelopment, the new Woodward’s was lauded bysome for revitalizing the DTES by bringing new businesses and residents tothe area (Enright 2010) and charged by others with leading gentrificationin the area by upscaling the neighbourhood to the detriment of local low-income residents (Carnegie Newsletter 2010). That the controversy continuedthroughout and beyond the redevelopment process suggests seeminglyirreconcilable visions of Woodward’s and the DTES. I suggest these competingviews go beyond the stated conflict between private developers and DTESactivists on issues of housing. They point to different understandings ofbelonging and rights in the city, suggesting competing underlying assumptionsabout the meaning of democratic participation.

While there were many points of contestation in the redevelopment ofWoodward’s, this paper focuses on the initial proposal for an all-markethousing development project by Fama Holdings Corporation in 1995, whenthe language of gentrification and revitalization emerged and became more orless established discourses in Vancouver. At this point one can start to see ashift in understandings of the place of the poor in urban struggles and theimplications this has had for democratic participation in the city.

Mobilizing discourses of gentrification and revitalization

Private developer Fama Holdings proposed to develop the vacant Woodward’sbuilding into 350 market priced condos and three floors of commercial andretail space in the spring of 1995, sparking a flurry of discursive activity in theVancouver media and on the streets of the DTES. In the lead up to the City ofVancouver’s Development Permit Public Hearing on Fama’s initial application,the low-income community advocates launched the campaign, ‘See you atWoodward’s’ (Carnegie Newsletter 1995b), initiating resistance to the allmarket-housing proposal. This campaign was grounded in the belief that aslong-time residents of the DTES, the low-income community had a privilegedrelationship with Woodward’s and should have a say in its redevelopment. Thecampaign emphasized Woodward’s history as a social hub within the working-class neighbourhood, calling on residents to come together to protect it. Thefirst in a series of public actions, community members cleaned the areasurrounding the vacant building and painted pictures on the windowpanes.It was ‘a symbolic act of reclamation’ (Carnegie Newsletter 1995b, p. 19),physically and symbolically marking the building as belonging to them.2

Describing the action in the local Carnegie Newsletter, Marty Pranzo (1995, p. 2)explains:

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For more than two generations, it was a familiar phrase in Vancouver’slexicon: ‘‘See you at Woodward’s.’’ The big old building on Hastings wasnot just a department store, but a public gathering place, a reference pointof downtown streets, the heart of a community.

. . .

Cleaning the windows and painting them on May 6 was an act ofaffirmation for our neighbourhood. A happy, positive community-unifyingstatement of the affection and connection we feel for this piece of ourhistory.

It meant taking back a piece of the community’s space, creating colour andlife and togetherness on a block of boarded up storefronts where thespeculators and the property-flippers have left only a drab and dangerousvoid.

The collective action asserted the place of Woodward’s within the communityand also criticized the actions of the developers who were seen as caring moreabout money than the neighbourhood. To counter private developers, thecampaign also aimed ‘to bring people in the community together to createa model development that reflects the historical sharing of Woodwards’(Carnegie Newsletter 1995c, p. 13). They wanted an inclusive project,‘accommodating a range of citizens and services’ (Pranzo 1995, p. 2), with agoal, ‘To plan a comprehensive housing strategy that will protect existinghousing while creating new housing to house people who wish to stay in theircommunity, while welcoming others who value it’ (Carnegie Newsletter1995b, p. 13). This vision of inclusivity called for social housing inWoodward’s, in contrast to market-housing that would cause ‘evictions,homelessness and neighbourhood-busting’ (Pranzo 1995, p. 2). The campaignopposed gentrification, which they defined as ‘the process by which middle-class urbanites move in on cheap property, often heritage buildings, evictingthe poor who live in the area’ (Carnegie Newsletter 1995a, p. 12). Startingfrom the perspective of the low-income community, the campaign for socialhousing and an inclusive model of development at Woodward’s assumed therights of poor people to housing in the DTES and their right to participate indecisions about the future of the area in which they resided. It publicizedreasons to fight for Woodward’s and critiques of private development,mobilizing DTES residents to participate in collective demonstrations and tospeak out at the fora on Woodward’s redevelopment with the hope of securingtheir place and rights in the neighbourhood.

Support for Fama’s all-market housing proposal at Woodward’s was alsomobilized in Vancouver, yet, unlike with the DTES activists, it happenedunder the radar, with no public demonstrations or direct publicity. Rather, its

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focus was on the two civic fora on Woodward’s redevelopment ! theDevelopment Permit Board and Advisory Panel’s (DPBAP)3 Public Hearingand the Special Council Public Hearing (SCPH) on the building’s heritagedesignation, where supporters wrote letters4 and spoke in favour of Fama’sproposal. At the DPBAP, the representative for Fama did not take on anadvocacy role, rather, he pointed out that the application met the technicalrequirements of the development permit and fulfilled heritage preservationpolicies for the Woodward’s building, while also noting that there was not asimilar requirement to include social housing in the application (DPBAP 1995,p. 3!4). Supporters of Fama’s proposal, mainly representing businessassociations in the downtown areas surrounding Woodward’s, focused oneconomic benefits of the project. They argued Fama’s plan would ‘revitalizethe area’ and ‘balance’ the neighbourhood, providing financial stability(DPBAP, p. 5). They pointed out that the city was losing out on propertytaxes with the building being vacant and this plan would ‘preserve one ofVancouver’s heritage resources through private funding’ (DPBAP, p. 5). Theyreminded the Board that previous attempts to redevelop Woodward’s withnon-market housing failed because of lack of funding and argued ‘a project ofthis size should not be held hostage by a general lack of social housing in thecity’ and ‘the area will continue to deteriorate if the only new development isfor social services or non-market housing’ (DPBAP, p. 5). Stated even morestrongly a month later at the Special Council’s Public Hearing (1995), aproponent of Fama’s proposal asserted, ‘This application should not be refusedon the basis it does not contain non-market housing’, adding, ‘Poor people donot want to be ‘‘ghetto-ized’’, and would prefer to have other people live inthe neighbourhood who could afford to buy a condominium. Poor peopleaspire to improve their situation, and are not opposed to progress’ (SCPH, p.7). Market housing at Woodward’s could therefore be a role model for futuredevelopments in the DTES, and its buyers a role model for the currentresidents.

The campaign for Fama’s application relied on two discursive practices.First, common-sense claims (like progress) and economic necessity for markethousing were used to justify notions of urban revitalization through privatedevelopment. Second, heritage preservation as an assumed social good wascoupled with market housing and revitalization, while social housing wascharged with threatening the neighbourhood with continued economic decline(i.e. creating a ‘ghetto’).5 Using the economic logic of the market, heritagevalue was located in the built environment, rights to housing came throughproperty and decisions about neighbourhoods were made by developers andprofessionals. In these discourses belonging was equated with individualownership, which worked to deny the existing residents a special claim to theneighbourhood based on a tradition of inhabiting the place.6

Not surprisingly, speakers opposing Fama’s application, who representedthe area’s non-profit and community associations, refuted the claims of

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revitalization and property-based understandings of heritage. They challengedthe solely positive effects of revitalization, stating, ‘the revitalization that hastaken place since 1979 has displaced 3,000 units of SRO7 housing’ (DPBAP,p. 6) and that, ‘Revitalization for residents of the DTES means getting kickedout of the community’ (SCPH, p. 8). They argued that market housing wouldgentrify the neighbourhood and not improve it for current residents (DPBAP,p. 6). For members of the low-income community, they also challenged thenarrow conception of heritage as tied to the built environment, stating,‘Heritage is more than buildings ! it is also people and community’ (SCPH,p. 8), and moreover, ‘the heritage of the DTES is its people, and theWoodward’s building is an important part of their community’ (DPBAP,p. 6). They emphasized the needs of long-existing, low-income residents, acommunity, which they asserted to be intact and stable (DPBAP, p. 6), andthey expressed fears of displacement, reflecting their concerns about thequality of life of people in the neighbourhood more than the value of property.Beyond Fama’s proposal, the low-income community advocates criticizedthe lack of meaningful public discussion about Woodward’s and the City’s lackof a housing strategy in the DTES. Repeating the demands of their campaign,they wanted Woodward’s to be a model of inclusive development, andbelieved a forum should be held before decisions were made on Fama’sapplication. However, even while the members of the Board regretted the lackof provisions for social housing in the project (DPBAP, p. 8),8 because it metthe technical requirements, Fama’s application passed unanimously, andWoodward’s heritage status was amended with Fama receiving densitybonuses from the City Council for its rehabilitation of the building (SCPH,p. 11).9

Working within the context of existing policies, the civic fora’s technicalorientation bracketed the political dimensions of Woodward’s redevelop-ment.10 This meant only issues of heritage preservation and financial feasibilitycounted as heard, not issues of social value and need. On the surface, theBoard did not a make a political decision about the type of redevelopmentproject Woodward’s would be; rather, it was a technical decision that carriedthe consequence of acting against the interests of the low-income community.In this reading, though regrettable for some, democratic rules and procedureswere followed. However, in terms of meaningful public participation, theCity’s civic hearings on Woodward’s redevelopment circumscribed democ-racy.11 However, the political outcomes were clear; property was valued overpeople. The built heritage of the DTES was privileged over the living history ofthe low-income community in the DTES. The interests of the City officialsconverged with Fama’s market-housing proposal on the issue of revitalization,helping to secure private developers’ economic approach to urban decline oversocial or political solutions. The fora did not allow for meaningful introductionof issues, dialogue or co-construction of decisions, being more bureaucraticthan democratic. Participation was a public ritual (re)producing a certain sort

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of order (i.e. consent of pre-conceived actions), where competing perspectiveswere made visible (voiced, publicized), but did not impact the decisions underdiscussion. (For that matter, even arguments for market-housing were moot,since the application already fulfilled the technical and policy requirements!) Inthis context, the low-income community advocates’ participation was nominal.They could state their views but lacked the ability to advance them. Thus, theirinterests were marginalized within official spaces of decision-making. As apublic forum, and as a political space, the Woodward’s redevelopment processwas skewed towards a rigid and narrow definition of democratic participation.However, it is not just in the public hearings that the meaning of democracycan be understood. More insidiously, notions of democratic participation werecirculating within the competing discourses of urban redevelopment andworking to reconfigure the public culture of the city.

Mobilizing publics in discourses of gentrification andrevitalization

While public is commonly used to describe the abstract whole of a society(‘the public’), the discourses of revitalization and gentrification imagined andmobilized different publics, and democracies along with them. Interdisciplin-ary work on publics has similarly emphasized that they are multiple, contingentand dynamic, emerging in contested practices, relationships and spaces (Fraser1990, Mitchell 1995, Angus 2001, Newman 2007, Barnett 2008, Mahonyet al. 2010, Moore and Pell 2010). This work argues while discourses do notdetermine the formation of publics, it is through and around discourses thatpublics are constituted (Warner 2002), varying in their orientation, intentionand scale of address (Pell 2010). Communicative spaces are created withindiscourses that allow citizens to imagine and insert themselves into dialogueson public issues (McGee 1975, Warner 2002). Moreover, the rhetorical formof some discourses actively seek to construct identification between theaudience and the issue, eliciting certain actions in response to it (Charland1987), while others function through disidentification, disassociating audiencesfrom issues and preventing actions (Patton 1995). In publicizing collectiveissues and promoting collective action on them, publics are central fordemocracies. It matters then who is imagined to be the public of a discourse(and who is not), how these publics are mobilized, where and by who and withwhat effects.

In the lead up to the public hearings, the low-income community advocates’campaign actively sought to build mass participation in the protest againstFama’s market housing proposal, and to open up a dialogue amongst DTESresidents about what type of development they wanted at Woodward’s. Thisdialogue was publicized through their collective actions (e.g. demonstrations)

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and in their own publications (e.g. community newsletters). They addressedthe low-income community in the DTES, and also tried to engage withthose in positions to affect the DTES, such as planners and private developersat the City fora. As forms of activist rhetoric, their campaign used languagethat addressed the audience as a potential ally in the struggle, invitingidentification with issues and calling for action (e.g. ‘See you at Woodward’s’).Their public-making discourses had both internal and external functions(Fraser 1990) that helped to constitute a group around Woodward’s and toposition themselves in relation to other groups (Moore and Pell 2010). Theyprovided reasons to join the campaign (i.e. Woodward’s should be an inclusivemodel of development, it is the heart of the DTES and a part of its history, thedangerous void left by the ‘property-flippers’ and so on). They also developedcritical discourses about gentrification (i.e. it causes displacement, socialexclusion, neighbourhood-busting). The positions articulated by the anti-gentrification advocates enabled people to identify with the issues, constitutinga collective identity (e.g. a ‘people’ of the DTES) and encouraging theircollective action. The campaign aimed to challenge the shift towards market-driven urban redevelopment and criticized the City government for notproviding meaningful spaces for public dialogue. They made their case at thepublic hearings using statistics about the loss of social housing in the DTES,which asserted the social value of the community and assumed their right tostay in the neighbourhood, and argued the consultation process excluded thepoor from decision-making on Woodward’s. Recognizing their marginalizedposition and an imbalance in power in the Hearings, the anti-gentrificationadvocates’ discourses summoned a politicized, collective and active public thatsought to mobilize a critical mass around issues of inclusion within theneighbourhood and participation within City Hall.

Publics were mobilized differently in discourses of revitalization. In part,this was because of the different role publicity and public action played in thecampaign for revitalization. Instead of using public advocacy or collectiveactions to advance market housing, Fama (and the supportive local businessassociations) took a behind-the-scenes role, concentrating on the bureaucraticprocess required to receive a development permit for their project andprivately mobilizing speakers for the Hearings. Nevertheless, speaking first,Fama’s proposal set the debate and focus of the Hearing around issues ofrevitalization, pre-emptively discrediting charges of gentrification withoutdirectly addressing them. This was done through linking revitalization of theDTES to the heritage preservation of Woodward’s, and then stating privatedevelopment of market housing was financially necessary to redevelop thebuilding. By tying together market housing and heritage preservation,Woodward’s redevelopment appeared as a choice between protectingVancouver’s built history or letting the building continue to decay (and byextension, the neighbourhood with it). In such a context, revitalization becamevirtuous, being capable of saving the neighbourhood. This transformed the

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demand for non-market housing, and by association its advocates, into a threatto the preservation of Woodward’s heritage, and shifted attention away fromthe needs of poor residents in the DTES and their vulnerable place in theneighbourhood. Thus, proponents for market housing did not explicitlyadvocate for revitalization and critiques of gentrification were neither taken upnor acknowledged, yet the low-income community advocates were put on thedefensive. Fama and its supporters appeared as individual, disinterestedspeakers during the Hearing, the type of actors most often valued in officialpublic spheres. The discourse of revitalization carried with it then a distant,exclusive and authoritative form of politics, one that did not require publicdialogue and participation, relying instead on the hegemony and common senseof market rationales for urban redevelopment. This marks a differentdiscursive form of advocacy to that of identification. While anti-gentrificationadvocates sought to mobilize a public through taking positions on an issue andbuilding sites of identification, revitalization advocates left much of their posi-tion unstated and minimized the formation of a public around Woodward’s.The redevelopment was placed as a bureaucratic issue (not a public one) thatrequired professional knowledge, not public discussion. Neither publicity norparticipation was central to Fama’s proposal at the public hearing whichsuggests that revitalization relied on a more exclusive, passive, individualizedand privately assembled public.

However, while Fama lacked a public campaign for private development,Vancouver’s mass media effectively acted as an advocate, creating a climateconducive for revitalization in their representations of Woodward’s redeve-lopment. Spanning the two public Hearings, reports in the city’s leadingnewspaper, the Vancouver Sun, coupled revitalization with ‘social mix’ (Bula1995a), social housing with ‘ghettos’ and market-housing with ‘balance’ (Bula1995b). These stories legitimatized economic rationales to gentrify theneighbourhood with middle-class homeowners (Bula 1995c). Culturalrationales for revitalization were also advanced in the mass media. Quotesfrom residents in the DTES were used to support the movement of the middle-class into the neighbourhood, refuting anti-gentrification advocates’ claims thatbuilding market housing for this group would lead to the marginalization anddisplacement of the current residents. For example, a DTES resident states,‘My choice is gentrification or ghettoization. Which one would you want?’Later in the same article, this resident disputes the clash of cultural values,stating, ‘I may be poor, but I like coffee. Are we so different that we’re notallowed to have a cappuccino?’ (cited in Bula 1995c, p. A2). This suggests notgentrifying the neighbourhood would deny existing residents the privileges ofthe middle-class. These news reports echo sentiments expressed by Fama’ssupporters during the public Hearing (e.g. ‘Poor people do not want to be‘‘ghetto-ized’’’, the development would revitalize and balance the neighbour-hood), and disseminated these ideas to a broader audience.

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The media’s discourses of gentrification and revitalization, like those ofmarket housing advocates, placed the middle-class at the centre of politics inthe city. While opposition to ‘ghetto-izing’ poor people and terms like ‘socialmix’ appear to be affirmative, even progressive, social commitments, theyworked to shift attention away from the difficult political questions about theneed for social housing, its funding and placement. It also evoked andrepresented the voice of potential homeowners in the DTES and placed issuesof revitalization and property value on the agenda. This strengthened thepolitical agency of potential residents and developers, while weakening claimsto belonging and the rights of the low-income community in the DTES. Thus,while facilitating the formation of a public around the issues of the middle-class, publics forming around issues of gentrification were undermined by thelack of sympathetic coverage in the media, if not made invisible in this publicsphere. Media discourses on gentrification (as mix and balance, notdisplacement) had the political effect of expanding popular opinion aboutmarket-driven urban redevelopment. They subtly legitimated and reinforcedthe outcomes of the public Hearings, helping to assemble a (general) publicaround Woodward’s redevelopment that overlapped with those imagined byrevitalization advocates, and expanded upon it.

Rereading issue formation at Woodward’s and imagineddemocracies

Neither the mobilization of publics nor the political logics in discourses ofrevitalization and gentrification were explicitly articulated in the statements bythe market housing or low-income community advocates. Rather, they operateas discursive formations (Foucault 1972), enabling some types of statementsabout urban redevelopment to be made, and not others, encouraging someforms of political engagement, and not others. An analysis of the discourses ofrevitalization and gentrification within the struggle over Woodward’s shows acompetition between socio-political logics and economic logics in strugglesover urban redevelopment. It also helps illuminate how publics are imaginedand mobilized, and further, how the formation of publics is connected withpossibilities of democratic participation.

While varying to an extent, discourses of revitalization emerging in thelocal mass media and within the public Hearings converged around similar(economic) issues and a similar public was mobilized as a result. Revitalizationof the building and neighbourhood were key issues in terms of Woodward’sredevelopment. These were achievable through heritage preservation (at apolicy level) and market housing (at a practical level). By mobilizing technicalknowledge on the one hand and common sense economic reasoning on theother, private development was given the appearance of being an impersonal

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and non-political choice in urban transformation. On this plane, Woodward’sredevelopment was abstracted from the everyday lives of the poor residents inthe DTES and outside their realm of agency. In their place, the property rightsof the middle-class were reinforced and legitimated, with belongingdetermined through property ownership, while the heritage value of the builtenvironment undermined the historical place of the poor in the DTES.Discourses of revitalization thus seemed to depopulate the public, summoningan aggregate of private individuals, with politics being professionalized andexclusive, and democracy held at a distance from the practices of ordinarycitizens and issues of everyday life.

On the other hand, the anti-gentrification campaign politicized theredevelopment because it affected the everyday life of local residents. Theredevelopment of Woodward’s was represented subjectively and as part of acontinuous struggle for the rights to the neighbourhood, secured through socialhousing and local participation. Low-income community advocates drew onhistorical and experiential knowledge of the neighbourhood, as well ascritiques of global trends of gentrification, to make political claims based onsocial values of belonging and inclusion. Discourses of gentrification positionedlocal residents as key social agents, who should have a voice in the decisionsthat affect them. Thus anti-gentrification advocates campaigned for the issuesand interests of those occupying a marginalized position within city politics.They sought multiple means to publicize their issues, building sites ofidentification with the needs of the low-income residents of the DTES andexpanding the space of political action beyond City Hall and into the street.Discourses of anti-gentrification advanced a more direct and active publicbased on an inclusive and collective understanding of politics that worked toexpand the boundaries of political participation.

The publics mobilized in the discourses of gentrification and revitalizationpoint to underlying assumptions about what sort of politics happen, how ithappens, where it happens and who participates. Those advocating revitaliza-tion mobilized in private (outside public space) and indirectly (through themedia), and this exclusivity was reproduced within the public consultation onWoodward’s. Similarly, market solutions minimized public participation,relying on professional expertise and private actions. Conversely, social needsdemanded collective action. Anti-gentrification advocates mobilized throughuse of public space, attempting to build broader identification with the needsof the low-income community and to strengthen their voice in the publicconsultation. A public campaign was initiated because of residents’ experiencesand fears of displacement. They sought political solutions to secure the socialinclusion of the poor in the neighbourhood (i.e. non-market housing) andparticipation within the City’s decision-making processes. The differentpolitical logics reflected in discourses of revitalization and gentrificationhighlight competing (and seemingly incompatible) notions of belonging andrights in the city. Advocates of revitalization focused on the value of property

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and the entitlement that goes along with it. They privileged economic solutionsto urban issues, without considering people already living in the area. Anti-gentrification advocates were also aware of property relations. However, theyprivileged the low-income people historically living in the area, positioningthem as both belonging and having rights to the DTES. Urban redevelopmentwas social and political, and needed to be dealt with as such. These discoursesthus defined the problem differently (economic versus social need), centredthe locus of concern on different subjects (property versus people), and, as aresult, called for different solutions (market-housing versus social housing).Publics were addressed in both of these discourses; however, the character ofthese publics were imagined and positioned differently. The anti-gentrificationadvocates viewed Woodward’s redevelopment as a collective issue, promptinga politically active public, mobilized around social justice in the DTES. For therevitalization advocates on the other hand, Woodward’s was not framedpolitically and the public was not directly engaged or called to participate.

In illuminating the relationship between the formation of public issues, themobilization of publics and the possibilities for political participation,Woodward’s redevelopment contributes understanding to broader democraticstruggles. In privileging particular forms of participation as either passive andlimited (public hearings and mass media), or active and expansive (activists),they advance certain understandings of what it means to be political, legi-timating some practices and discouraging others. Discourses of revitalization,because they started from the position of property, centred middle-class peoplewithin the politics of urban transformation and marginalized poor people. Anti-gentrification discourses, because they started from the position of marginalizedpeople, demanded broader inclusion of both agents and issues into the formalredevelopment process. The former perspective made democracy a ritual ofperforming the consent of pre-determined decisions. The latter perspectivemade democracy a constitutive and contested process of collective decision-making. Such conflicting relationships between collective issues, publics anddemocracy suggest discourses are not merely reflecting reality, but areproductive within the struggles to construct reality. Further, it highlights thatpublics, democracies and the relationship between the two are multiple, as wellas being contingent, contextual and changing. Studying urban redevelopment atthe intersection of issue formation and public mobilization therefore helps toshow the material, and unequal, effects of discourses, pointing to theproduction of exclusions within spaces of democratic participation.

Moving beyond Woodward’s

The story of Woodward’s is not only important in the history of contentiouslocal politics in Vancouver, its significance also extends beyond the city. With

M O B I L I Z I N G U R B A N P U B L I C S 41

developers, local politicians, DTES residents and affordable housing advocatestaking up familiar positions and discourses of gentrification and revitalizationthat reoccur across urban spaces (Smith 1996, Brenner and Theordore 2002,Sommers and Blomley 2002, Slater 2004, Lees et al. 2010), an analysis ofWoodward’s redevelopment has potential to speak to broader issues ofchanging democratic cultures accompanying the transformation of cities. Itbuilds on other studies that investigate the ways in which clashes overknowledges, uses and visions of neighbourhoods rewrite possibilities ofdemocratic participation (Magnusson 1996, Isin 2000, Mitchell 2003, Kohn2004). To these, it contributes an example of urban publics emerging withinstruggles over the meaning of belonging, heritage, rights and participationwithin a contested urban redevelopment project. Much like other examples ofanti-gentrification struggles, the battle over Woodward’s became a polarizedcontest between those fighting against the marginalization and displacement ofthe poor and those focusing on the economic value of revitalizing an inner-cityneighbourhood. Studying the discursive practices underlying these positions atWoodward’s uncovers competing political, social, economic and culturallogics at the core of debates over urban redevelopment, explaining in part whythese positions are seemingly irreconcilable. It emphasizes that it was not just abuilding that was a stake; it was also the terms of belonging in theneighbourhood and the city.

This study of Woodward’s goes a step beyond analysing discourses ofurban redevelopment to investigate the relationship between discursivepractices, the formation of publics and the possibilities of democraticparticipation more broadly. It shows discourses of revitalization andgentrification advancing competing economic, cultural, social and politicallogics that in turn reconfigure the meaning of belonging, heritage, rights andparticipation within the city. Discourses of revitalization emphasize values ofproperty over people, privileging economic and cultural practices and placingrights and belonging within individual ownership. On the other hand,discourses of gentrification value historical relationships between people andplaces, privileging social and political practices and placing rights and belongingwithin collective ownership. These discourses draw from and (re)producecompeting sources of social knowledge and enable and restrict possibilities fordemocratic participation. Conflicts over urban redevelopment are thus keylocations in which to understand the processes by which competing interestsand issues publicly emerge, form into collective positions and compete witheach other. In the mobilization of urban publics one can see democracy beingpractised and reconfigured.

This study of Woodward’s joins with empirical work on the formationof publics that challenge their image as static, singular and pre-constituted(Fraser 1990, Mitchell 1995, Angus 2001, Warner 2002, Newman 2007,Barnett 2008, Mahony et al. 2010). It seeks to shift attention to processes in

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which multiple publics are summoned, constituted and mobilized withinpolitical struggles in order to highlight the ways in which discourses,subjectivities and practices come together in both complimentary andcontradictory ways when decisions about collective life are at stake. Yet, inhelping to rethink publics, their relationship with democracies is also openedto questioning. Losing the ideal of a guaranteed space or process where citizensparticipate in the formation of public issues and collective decision-making,democracy is repositioned as a project and practice, changing with theinclusion and exclusion of issues and participants (Mouffe 1992, Magnusson1996, Isin 2000, Angus 2001). Without assuming a natural or necessarycoupling, empirical work on the particular, dynamic, contingent and contestedrelationship between publics and democracy witnesses and details the processesin which politics is reconfigured not only in the spaces of the state and in thepractices of the government, but also in the spaces of the everyday, and in thepractices of various social actors.

Focusing on publics imagined and mobilized within discourses ofrevitalization and gentrification, the study of discourses at Woodward’shighlights the formation of collective issues and modes of participation thatinvolve competing notions of the actors, practices and spaces of politics. Itbrings attention to the uses of publicity and public action by social actors intheir various advocacy practices. It shows how identification and authority areused to mobilize support for and against gentrification and revitalization, andthat these vary in their definition of the problem, the subjects of concern,implicit values and proposed solutions. Together these discourses (re)pro-duced different modes of democratic participation: one that expanded it,another that limited it. However, as the case of Woodward’s also shows, byengaging in competing practices of issue formation, the mobilization of thesevarious publics do not only occupy competing positions within politicalstruggles, their discursive and spatial practices construct the very realities inwhich these struggles take place. Understanding how democracy is imaginedand enabled within discourses of urban redevelopment at Woodward’stherefore helps to see urban publics not just as scenes of political contestationwhere competing issues become visible, but as constitutive of the politicalitself, where the actors, practices, spaces and rules of democracies arecollectively defined and determined. It is rarely ever then just a building orneighbourhood that is at stake in struggles over the city; rather, it isdemocracy itself that is being fought over.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada.

M O B I L I Z I N G U R B A N P U B L I C S 43

Notes

1 In Canada, ‘social housing’ refers to ‘all forms of housing developed undergovernment subsidy programs in both the private and public sectors’(Moskalyk 2008, p. 1) and includes non-market housing, government-owned public housing, non-profit housing, subsidized housing and someforms of co-operative housing (Hulchanski 2007).

2 Blomley (2008) argues this approach to property in the DTES represents aform of collective ownership, with Woodward’s being part of the ‘commons’.

3 The Development Permit Board and Advisory Panel is a municipal forumthat assesses and grants development permits according to existing citypolicy and guidelines (City of Vancouver 2012a). Special Council meetingsare public fora held on an ad hoc basis, with the mayor and city councillorsbeing in attendance (City of Vancouver 2012b).

4 Even though happening without publicity, the success of mobilization forFama’s application can be seen in the high number of supporters at the twocivic fora. At the DPBAP’s public forum on 19 June 1995, 21 people spoke infavour of Fama’s application and 12 spoke against it (DPBAP, p. 4!6). Evenmore supporters came out at the Special Council Public Hearingto amend a Heritage Bylaw in regard to Woodward’s on 19 July 1995.Here 30 people spoke in favour of the application and 154 letters werereceived in support of it, while only 48 letters were received opposing theapplication. The opponents to Fama’s application submitted a petitioncontaining 38 signatures, and four people spoke against it. They also notedtheir request to the City to change the venue of the meeting in order to allowspeakers from the DTES to attend, which was not granted (SCPH, p. 6!8).

5 ‘Poor-bashing’ (Swanson 2001) and the tendency to pathologize the low-income community in the DTES have been well documented (e.g. Sommers2001, 2003!2004, Blomley 2004).

6 A parallel can be drawn between assertions of private property modelsand the dispossession of aboriginal land in Canada (Cardinal 2009). Thiscontinues to be a contentious issue for many residents in the DTES, which islocated on unceded Coast Salish Territory (Schatz 2010).

7 SRO refers to ‘single residency occupancy’. It is a form of housing,prevalent in the DTES, that is affordable for people with low incomes orliving on social welfare benefits, yet often maintained by private landlords atsubstandard housing conditions.

8 Because the DPBAP’s role is to assess and grant development permitsaccording to the existing City policy, during the Hearing on Fama’s proposalfor Woodward’s the focus was on the heritage preservation policy, not thatof social housing. As Mr Scobie, one of the Board members, noted inapproving Fama’s proposal, ‘the Board’s mandate is to administer ratherthan establish policy . . . . There is heritage policy in place to support this

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initiative; there is no policy in place which would require the provision ofsome non-market housing’ (DPBAP, p. 8).

9 Two amendments to the motion to change Woodward’s heritage statuswere put forward by Councillor Jenny Kwan (SCPH) (1) to tie the densitybonus to guaranteed provision of non-market housing units in Woodward’sand (2) to have the City staff consult with the developer, government andcommunity members to work on a ‘mixed inclusive development plan thatwill meet the needs of all the residents in the Downtown Eastside, Gastownand neighbouring communities’ (SCPH, p. 8!9). Both amendments lost,being voted against by the rest of the Council and the Mayor.

10 Of course the bracketing of political contestation within civic public hearingsis predicated on previous debates and policies that privileged and enabledthis technical orientation (Ruppert 2006).

11 Fraser (1990) differentiates ‘weak publics’ and ‘strong publics’ according tothe effect the deliberative practices have on opinion formation and decision-making. This suggests that there is a relationship between publicity andpublic action: where one not only has the ability to voice one’s positionpublicly, but also possesses the possibility of persuading an audience andaffecting the outcome of the public action under consideration. This is adefinition of public participation in line with radical democracy (see Young1990, Mouffe 1992, Angus 2001).

Notes on contributors

Susan Pell is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Sociology at GoldsmithsCollege, University of London. She is currently investigating the politics ofknowledge production within social movement archives in Canada and the UK.

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