Deborah Cowen and Susannah Bunce

One group of dickheads wants us to gussy up our industrial spaces and attract precious fucking urban professionals. Another group wants to securitize our ports because of September 11, still. It’s neoliberalism vs. neofascism playing out on the waterfront, and in Canada, despite the fact that our port security was by all accounts more than adequate, we’ve been leaned on to adopt a lot of American procedures and an American way of looking at the whole thing: the language of “homeland” security, etc. Because protecting America is Canada’s job. (But not a job we can be trusted to do, and in addition to the expansion of our own apparatus we now have American officials in our major ports!) And they are trying to create physical cordons and the other guys are like noooooo! we need oyster bars! And in the US there’s been scary stuff like the legislating away of the right of longshoremen to strike and racial profiling. In short, “The power struggles that have shaped urban waterfronts for the past couple of decades between harbour commissions, city governments, appointed public–private redevelopment boards, urban planners, real- estate capital, condominium residents, federal coastguards and others, are deeply affected by the new powerful presence of port security agents and agendas.”

And they’re trying to sell it as commerce-oriented because like, if we have all kinds of securitization and it all runs smooth then there won’t be any slowdown of imports and whatnot (not, and this is a conflation that the authors make that I didn’t like, that the development dickheads are the same as the corporate dickheads that care about getting ipads and coffee into the shops). In Vancouver, the shutting down of a bunch of cycle paths, those crown jewels of gentrification, on Burrard Inlet for security purposes caused a stir.

And the authors don’t really get into prescriptions—they just remind us this stuff is happening and given us some deets, and end on this true note: “
Poor, working-class, and racialized people, the homeless, youth and countless other ‘others’ may only be welcome as cleaners, landscapers, domestic workers, and in other kinds of disciplined, casualized and precarious employment to service the lives of elites. Urban waterfronts may be planned as amenity areas for transnational professionals in a global economy or alternatively as national border spaces in a world at war, or most likely a combination of both, but of central importance is the impact that these agendas will have on spatial justice in waterfront cities." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.… (más)