Open Collections

Eaton, Jonathan D.

University of British Columbia

Within a generation, residents of Vancouver, Canada have come to realize that their city faces a major seismic threat with uncertain timing for which they are not fully prepared. Simultaneously, Vancouver is confronting a housing crisis, a drug toxicity crisis, and a climate emergency that has intensified wildfires, heat waves, and flooding. This dissertation explores how a convergence of crises on differing timescales affects planning and governance, along with the values that undergird these decisions. Specifically, how do place-based values inform processes of planning for disaster recovery in Vancouver? My research engages with multidisciplinary literatures on disasters, heritage, affect, anticipation, and governance to explore both formal and informal avenues of planning and place-making. Through policy analysis, neighbourhood walks, participant-observation, and interviews with community-based groups in the Vancouver neighbourhoods of Dunbar and Grandview and with local professionals in the heritage and disaster fields, I follow the ways that people anticipate future disasters and act to preserve what they value. This ethnography demonstrates how my interlocutors’ efforts constitute a holistic form of disaster recovery planning, building a sense of community around shared values to face an uncertain future. By studying the connections between people, heritage, and place, I establish heritage as an emplaced expression of values with a relationship to materiality that goes beyond the physical and is always both changing and threatened by change. Heritage values circulate within a moral economy of place, connected to processes of development, displacement, and belonging that give rise to neighbourhoods that are at once cherished, inequitable, and at risk. The seismic, social, and climatic risks facing Vancouver are neither evenly expressed nor addressed, as varying disaster temporalities affect place-making practices through what I call anticipatory crisis governance, a policymaking framework in which planning for an uncertain future is inflected through present crises. Conversely, my interlocutors demonstrated values-based techniques of imagining ‘otherwise’ for future disaster recovery – harnessing the speculative nature of disaster planning to envision alternatives for building or restoring a community. Though rooted in Vancouver, this ethnography suggests ways of envisioning post-disaster recovery that can positively affect many communities – urban and rural – today.

Text

2024-10-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89504

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/