The Vancouver socioecological fix: Indigenous real-estate development as the city’s imagination of sustainability, affordability, and reconciliation

In Vancouver, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations are constructing large real-estate developments with thousands of apartments. This paper is concerned with such developments’ enabling conditions within the city’s planning policies and underlying geographical imaginations. By applying the ‘socioecological fix’, the paper describes how Vancouver’s planning policies aim at fixing problems of sustainability, housing affordability, and reconciliation by conceptualizing reconciliation as the profit-oriented construction of real estate. Therefore, the paper highlights the predicament that the reconciliatory approach conceptualized in city strategies and actively pursued by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh is envisioning reconciliation as the reproduction of Vancouver real-estate capitalism.

Image © Thilo van der Haegen.
Image © Thilo van der Haegen.

More information
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2024.2343578