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Barr, Caolan

University of British Columbia

Building on established frameworks of housing justice, urban studies, legal geography, conservation and environmental studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous studies, this work argues that to properly understand housing injustice and the increased prevalence of urban encampments, settler colonialism as a set of ongoing power relations needs to be centered within housing justice scholarship and organizing. Grounded in firsthand accounts of supporting an encampment of unhoused residents at Meegan or ‘Beacon Hill Park’ in Victoria BC, this project reveals the settler colonial discourses and spatio-legal relations underlying efforts to displace unhoused communities from urban parks. Through autoethnography, participant observation and interviews with local community organizers, I examine the connections between settler colonialism and housing injustice through the frame of ‘settler revanchism’. In doing so, I apply a shoreline analytic in which Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice are revealed to be relationally situated struggles connected through everyday resistance to settler colonial power. Across nine chapters, understood as islands connected across seemingly disparate shores, this thesis examines: the development of encampments on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories during the Covid-19 pandemic; the urban history of the City of Victoria focusing on the spatial exclusion of Songhees and Esquimalt people as central to the city’s urban development; the history of Beacon Hill Park, the City’s ‘Crown jewel,’ and the symbolic meanings it carries for settlers in urban space; the ways in which a campaign to evict campers sheltering in Meegan mobilized conservation discourses to retrench settler colonial forms of control; mobilization of the colonial land trust to evade questions of justice for unhoused residents; reflections experiences of organizing through mutual aid at the Meegan encampment relationally with Indigenous sovereignty movements, and; finally, I bring the concepts of sovereignty and value into friction with one another in settler-led solidarity movements, grounded in the everyday care work within encampments in the City today.

Thesis/Dissertation

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0447705

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD

Arts, Faculty of; Geography, Department of

2025-05

Graduate

DSpace