Abstract:
In
Vancouver, two forms of control are being exercised over its vast single-family
zone. First: Foreign wealth migration, often described in the media as Chinese,
brought new homeowners wanting express their identity through expansive
mansions. Second: Judging the newcomers’ house designs as incompatible with the
older houses, populist movements been calling for a return of English-ness as
Canada’s proper architectural identity. This paper argues that both sets of control
misses the dynamic socio-economic, ecological and geological processes at hand.
This
paper suggests ways to escape these two forms of control by using Félix
Guattari’s notion of the “Three Ecologies” (Social, Environmental and Mental) as
well as Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of de- and re-territorialisation
as enabling tools to re-relate to land, policies and even subjectivity in
non-binary manners to thus harbour the conditions from which people and spaces
yet to come can emerge.
Introduction:
In Vancouver,
there is fight between “locals” and “foreigners” over who controls the vast
single-family zone which is 70% of the city’s land mass, and this fight often
manifests as a debate about what is the right architectural fit for the
single-family zone. (See Fig. 1) This paper argues that both claims of control are
inadequate in attending to the dynamic socio-economic, ecological and
geological processes at hand. The paper then proposes an escape from this
dichotomy by using Félix Guattari’s notion of the “Three Ecologies” (Social,
Environmental and Mental) as well as Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of
de- and re-territorialisation as enabling tools to re-relate to land, policies
and even subjectivity in non-binary manners to thus harbour the conditions from
which people and spaces yet to come can emerge.
 |
| Figure #1: The red-outlined areas show the single-family zones (approximately 70% of the city’s land mass). |
A Context of Control:
On 8th
November 2016 Donald Trump won the Presidential Election. In mid November 2016,
in Richmond, a city next to Vancouver, Alt-Right flyers appeared warning Whites
that the Chinese are taking over, causing housing unaffordability, and marginalising
Whites in the community their forefathers built.
(See Figure 2) Richmond’s population is over 50% Chinese-descent.
 |
| Figure #2: An Alt-Right poster found in Richmond, British Columbia, in November 2016. |
Trump’s
ascendance added fuel to the fire, but the uneasiness with Chinese presence has
a long history: There were racial bans in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries; fear of “Hongcouver” in the eighties and nineties, and today, anxieties
over the Mainland Chinese buying property. In 2014, the average single-family
house in Vancouver is over $1 million while the average gross household income
is $76,000. Blogger
Eveline Xia started a #donthave1million
hashtag to respond to this discrepancy that is seen to contribute to housing
unaffordability.
Attempting
to objectively address the increasing stories about Mainland Chinese outbidding
“locals” in real estate wars, urban planner Andy used a name analysis
methodology to look at single-family houses sold between August 2015 to
February 2015 (172 listings in total) in some affluent neighbourhoods to find
how many of these had buyers with non-Anglicised names. Names like Wong San
Fung would be included while names like Andrew Shui-Him Yan would be excluded.
The assumption was persons with non-anglicised names were likely new immigrants
whereas those with Anglicised names were more likely to be second- or
third-generation Chinese-Canadians, hence “local” enough. His findings showed
that non-Anglicised named buyers bought 66% of those 172 houses, averaging at
$3 million each. Vancouver
mayor Gregor Robertson amongst others called Yan’s study racist and divisive.
Yan’s response was that it is often developers and politicians who cry racism
to protect their own privilege.
While, former South China Morning Post journalist Ian Young stated it is
crucial not to dismiss the impacts of wealth migration as racist and shun all
investigations.
In August
2016, the provincial Government introduced a 15% foreigner tax on properties.
In November 2016, Vancouver’s Planning Department started its Character Home Zoning Review to address anxieties
about Vancouver losing its characteristic pre-1940 houses through demolitions
and new constructions. It proposes to further revise the design guidelines for single-family
houses to ensure new projects match pre-1940 houses in form and character (i.e
West Coast Craftsman Style).
To discourage demolition the plot-ratio will be increased from the existing
0.70 to 0.75 if substantial retention of a pre-1940 house is demonstrated, and a
single-family house can be subdivided into a duplex or triplex, potentially
increasing the overall dwelling units per hectare. To disincentivise demolition,
the density for any complete new builds is limited to 0.50 and will have to
abide by guidelines to produce a “traditional” form.
While
Yan’s study reveals some impacts of Chinese wealth migration it is unable to
critically address the issue of race that has been miscast as the cause of
housing unaffordability where global wealth migration is reduced to a Chinese
problem. Even Yan’s objective article still elicits comments like “not knowing
whether you’re in Vancouver or Shanghai”.
Likewise, the Planning Department’s proposed retention plan avoids discussion
of racial biases and assumes it is a matter of architectural fit to be resolved
via quantified preferences. The fears of losing control of ownership of the residential
hinterland – the single-family zone – to those embodying less Canadian-ness is
strategically sidestepped.
These
recent anxieties are similar to those in the late eighties and nineties about
Hong Kong immigrants. Reflecting on this topic in the nineties, sociologist
Peter S. Li in his seminal paper Unneighbourly
Houses or Unwelcome Chinese explored racialised terms like “Monster Houses”.
The term is used (and continues) to describe the Chinese immigrants’ bigger
bulkier new houses, yet it is almost never used to refer to the big houses in
predominantly White neighbourhoods.
The dislike for a certain architectural expression masks an uneasiness about
the social behaviour and tastes of the new neighbours. Li noted that for some
“locals”, new immigrants were sometimes seen as simply lacking the “sublime
aesthetics of Canadians.”
But, the Chinese may not see themselves as being inferior aesthetics-wise. On
the contrary, Journalist Bianca Bosker noted for many nouveau riche, mixing
Western architectural references is not pastiche, but “a potent symbol for
their ascension to – and aspirations for – global supremacy and the
middle-class comforts of the First World.”
In Vancouver’s context, it is an attempt to assert and control their image as
part the city’s upper class. But, this is where the schism emerges.
Architecture historian Duanfang Lu noted it is precisely because the Monster
Houses were not entirely oriental and had imitated aspects of Western
architecture that they become “partial doubles of the ‘White’ houses” that threatens
the proper White original.
Englishness as the “natural essence of the place” emerged as a “cultural
defense” against the potential loss of demarcation between “local” from
“foreign”.
Li and
Lu’s respective works, though nearly two decades old, are still useful in highlighting
how some spatio-cultural turmoil cannot be resolved through rational planning’s
appeal to consensus. Depressing allowable density and implementing stricter
design guidelines do not sufficiently address the wider regional, federal and
global systems that produced the fight between new Chinese immigrants and the
“locals” over land control.
Controls controlling the Controls
Engrossed
in this fight over spatio-cultural control, both “locals” and “foreigners” never
gained insight into how their fight itself is produced and controlled by global
systems that conveniently and strategically decoupled economic struggles from
cultural struggles. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his essay Postscript on the Societies of Control suggested
the mechanisms that control preferences can even be seen by those being
controlled as helping them achieve their own
aspirations, and the race to realise these controlled preferences are presented
as healthy competitions.
Within this controlled system, both “locals” and “foreigners” see asserting
their own preference on what the single-family zone must be as fulfilment of
the land’s assumed destiny. Fuelled by China’s economic boom in its urban
centres, “foreigners” may see wealth migration and the construction of mansions
as the Chinese Empire’s logical advancement. The “locals” may see their defense
of Vancouver’s Englishness through the preservation of cottage style
architecture as the logical countenance to wealth migration.
The
global systems that enables both “locals” and “foreigners” actually encourage
this competition. By reducing this fight for control as merely different cultural
and architectural preferences, there is little query into how preserving the
single-family zones – whether it is with gabled-roof cottages or with nouveau-riche
mansions – is land control that continues to attract wealth, locally and
internationally. The wealthy often usually aspires to exactly what the single-family
zones offer: a large tract of sparsely developed land segregated from the rest
of the working city. The zoning by-laws and guidelines protects this “sanctity”.
Occupying over 70% of Vancouver’s land mass means the single-family zone borders
on almost all other zones with higher density allowances. At these border
regions, the basic urban design approach is to scale down to meet the
single-family zone’s height and character. Contrast is discouraged. Often gabled
roofs mimicking a traditional house form are required on larger buildings. (See Figure 3) While
“good” for minimising shadows and overlook, and reinforcing an image of “old”
Vancouver, this naturalised approach of
transitioning down does not begin to question how the single-family zone ‘controls’
the other zones physical, environmental and social developments. Urban design
loses its transformative/critical capacity here.
 |
| Figure 3: The newer multiple-dwelling building on the left ‘steps down’ on one side and generally uses sloped roof and other “traditional” features (like garrett dormers shown here) to transition to and become comparable character-wise to single-family house on the right. |
Some
claim Englishness expresses true Canadian-ness, some claim Englishness violates
cultural sensitivity and architectural innovation, some want old-new hybrids. Yet
the politics of difference, as philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri noted,
is often ineffective against the very system the rebellion is targeting, and
can even unwittingly support the functions and practices of that system.
Hybrids and mobility that are created from the dominant culture’s desire for
exoticised mixtures, and appeals to
genus loci and stasis, can even be controls to help maintain the traditional
economies. For Hardt and Negri, escape is through production. They wrote,
Truth will not make us free,
but taking control of the production of truth will. Mobility and hybridity are
not liberatory, but taking control of the production of mobility and stasis,
purities and mixtures is.
Take
control of the controls.
Un-Control and New Ethics: A Chinese Space Yet to Come
Taking
control of the controls involves letting go, an un-control, in order to forge
ahead.
Vancouver’s
future “Chinese space” will escape control from both wealth migration and
Vancouver’s mythic past. But this escape is not a retreat to some
middle-ground. Escaping this dichotomy begins by critically recoupling cultural
and economic issues in order to attend to and create new connections amidst the
dynamic intersections of cultural, socio-economic, environmental and geological
processes abound across the Pacific and the Vancouver greater region. This
requires a will to un-control current land-use controls so that a “Chinese
Space” ex situ may emerge.
How to
un-control these old controls that are increasingly unsustainable socio-economically
and ecologically? One way is to reformulate the personal subject so as to
differently connect it to the environment. It is not just how we change space,
but how we change in and with space.
A space, even
future Chinese space, has specificities but its location may be extensive and
its form is intensive insofar it always harbours the potential to change. To
speak of a space is to speak of the earth. A space is a particularity arising
from the earth, and subjectivity is a particularity arising from space (and the
earth). The subject is an extension of the earth rather than the earth being the
subject’s object of meditation. Deleuze and his interlocutor Félix Guattari wrote
that to engage critically with the earth, there needs to be a shift away from
we-as-subjects versus earth-as-object. “Rather, thinking takes place in the
relationship of territory and the earth.” The earth is constantly carrying out
movements that destroys territories and re-create new ones.
One does not simply think about territories.
Thinking and the thinking subject are constituted by acts of territorialisation which connects lands, ideas, mortar,
flesh, vegetation, natural resources and so forth.
Guattari in
his book The Three Ecologies wrote
that to think through the earth is to grasp the world through ecosophy: a
knowledge of ecology and an ecology of knowledge. The latter points to how
thinking and the thinking subject are tumultuous and inseparable from its
surroundings. The oikos (where we
dwell) produces the sophia (us and
our thoughts). Guattari presents three interdependent ecologies, as a
conceptual tool, to articulate this subject-world’s complex movement:
- An Environmental
Ecology, for Guattari, is a “machinic ecology,” not because the
environment is robot-like or unchanging, but precisely because like a
machine it can transform in time, parts added and taken off. The
environmental ecology is a story of the intertwined fate of humans and
non-humans. Guattari notes the necessity for not going back to what
was. Instead there should be “the creation of new living animal and
vegetable looks inevitable on the horizon.”
- A Social Ecology
is comprised of forces with the capacity to reorganise anew rather than ready-formed
groups and identities. Instead of looking for identificatory systems that
reduce difference to established social types like traditional family or
employment groupings, Guattari proposed we approach social milieus like a
diagram rather than a fixed picture. Diagrams present abstract relations
of parts, and our task is to find new relations between to those parts,
sometimes drawing in new parts. In doing so, new social milieus may,
however minutely, begin to show the capacity “to escape from itself.”
Ethics lie in productive re-organisation of parts.
- A Mental
Ecology is no longer the domain of the unchanging individual. Guattari
argues, rather than each individual having his or her own mind, there is
instead an “ecology of ideas”, which boundaries need not coincide with
individuals’ physical body or even sense of self.
It is to “reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm,
to the passage of time, to the ‘mysteries’ of life and death.” Reinvent
the relationship to media and the social ecology at large.
It is
important to note Guattari’s three ecologies function as a diagram for
re-thinking and re-mapping, exploring how differential relations between the
three ecologies can transform each other, so as to create evolving territories,
subjectivities and communities. Hence, it differs from the oft-cited three legs
of sustainability (social, environmental and economic). Specifically, each of
the three ecologies do not espouse exact values it must necessarily have so as
to bring the earth back in order.
“Back in order” suggests a paradise lost pitted against a lesser-now.
The three ecologies express an eco-logic
“concerned only with the movement and intensity of evolution processes.”
Evolutionary processes themselves are constituted by assemblages of forces
“engaging in irreversible durations.”
Ecosophy is an incomplete project.
An
individual’s thoughts (mental ecology) can move the social and environmental
ecologies’ boundaries. Simultaneously, the peristaltic pyscho-physical
movements of other individuals (social ecology), and environmental processes
natural or otherwise (environmental ecology), can transform an individual’s
thoughts and even sense of being. The mind
does not stand prior to its socio-physical environment. This is why some designers
awed by the earth’s instability place pavilions on the cliff edges, thereby transforming
the landscape to transform their already-transformed ourselves. The subject’s territory
is de- and re-territorialised by the earth.
What may
be useful for built environment professionals and citizens engaging with the
combined destructive forces of wealth migration and xenophobic nostalgia is to
“move away from the old forms of political, religious and associative
commitments,” those binaries such as nature-versus-culture, local-versus-global,
us-versus-them that have dominated social milieus.
Guattari wrote, “Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture;
in order to comprehend the interactions between eco-systems... we must learn to
think transversally.”
“It is no longer possible to claim to be opposed to capitalist power only from
the outside through trade unions and traditional politics.” Instead of these alignments
of family, community and nation as foundations, it will be a question “cultivating
a dissensus.” A
dissensus, for Guattari, is not exactly a position diametrically opposed to
Capitalism. Rather, to dissent is to work like artists, to transfigure events and
spaces (social-environmental ecologies), in doing so transform the thinking
subject (mental ecology), even the artist him/herself. An iterative territory
begins to emerge through this act.
Cartographies
of dissensus proceeds “without their authors having prior recourse to assured
theoretical principles.” The cartographer spreads out across the evolving
relations between mental, social and environmental ecologies; s/he exists as a work
in progress. Evolution
and innovation require strategic and critical infidelity occasionally. At
moments one may “feel impelled to decide on common objectives... But there will
simultaneously be periods in which individual and collective subjectivities
will ‘pull out’ without a thought for collective aims, and in which creative
expression as such will take precedence.” It is becoming an artist who on
encountering an “intrusion of some accidental detail” to his/her process seizes
that accident as serendipity.
The accident and the forms it may bring to accustomed existing territories of
practice, of community, of subject, of policies, etc, may be unsettling. But,
this is the catalyst for mental,
social and environmental ecologies to begin relating to each other different to
fuel “a constantly mutating socius.”
So, Guattari wrote,
We need new social and
aesthetic practices, new practices of the Self in relation to the other, to the
foreign, the strange.
Like Guattari,
Deleuze understood ethics as creation. For him, the ethical arises from a “long
affair of experimentation, requiring a lasting prudence.”
The ethical, he continues, is
... a question of knowing
whether relations (and which ones) can compound directly to form a new, more
extensive relation, or whether capacities can compound directly to constitute a
more intense capacity of power. It is no longer a matter of utilisations or
captures, but of socialibilities and communities. How do individuals enter into
composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad
infinitum?
From this
notion that the ethical lies not in absolute fidelity for either the local or
the global, one may suggest Vancouver’s single-family zone is not one territory
standing against the global space, and that the dissensus needed is to
creatively de-territorialise the global-wide forces that gave rise to the
existing particular (imagination of) single-family zone. Then,
re-territorialise these forces to propel the single-family zone and its varied
inhabitants into that constantly mutating socius. And in this process, what is
spatial justice will be posed differently each time it is asked. As cultural
theorist Elizabeth Grosz noted, how built spaces, amongst other forces, relate
to (and transform) the practitioner, and to what is ethical, “is a question
that thus cannot and should not be answered but must be continually posed,
rigorously raised in such a way as to defy answers.”
The infidel dissenting architect, planner, “local” and “foreigner” will be have
to think outside themselves. Their
control of the controls is to dismantle the old controls and find reinvention
each time, to surpass the mere recognition of “good” values or models. Guattari
noted, the escape from dominant ideology and practices, to forge new
environmental, social and mental connections,
... is not a question of
exchanging one model or way of life for another, but of responding to the event
as the potential bearer of new constellations of universes of references.
The
ethical moment does not begin by the application of known modelled values. It
begins through questions that may lead to the de- and re-territorialisation,
and emergence of new subjects, territories, values, and policies in the making.
Policy as Question:
If the
ethical emerges through continual questioning, can then policies which are
mostly to address ethical concerns take on a question-form, to inspire policies
always in the process of making? Can
it surpass its conventional function of designating new zones, uses and
demographics, and determining future? Can policies affirm the continuing act of
question? Can it inspire experimentation and dissensus?
To end
(and start) this paper, here are some broad questions that may lead to the
formation of policy-questions: How will historical and present First Nations
spatio-political forces be re-inscribed into the territories formed by colonial
subdivision patterns given that Vancouver sits on indigenous lands that are not
formally ceded to the Crown? How will existing single-family zone by-laws when
intersecting with environmental challenges/innovations inspire the emergence of
peoples and spaces yet to come? What kinds of space will need to be constantly
invented in order to decolonise the also-ever-changing form of global wealth migration
which roots are tied to previous centuries’ expansion of empires? And, since
this fight for control concerns heritage, how can policies be designed to open
up questions about how Vancouver’s Englishness have transformed aboriginal landscapes,
and how this same Englishness continues to exclude even when anti-racist laws
are in effect? In doing so, entail critical reflections of nostalgia that fold
in new understandings of ecological systems and wider economies.
Lastly, how will a dissenting “artist-policy-writer/designer/planner” address
these questions; thus, requiring a shift in the role of the “author”.
Chinese
spaces emerging alongside such policy-questions always have surpluses; its
“Chinese-ness” is always in negotiation. Even Vancouver and its people are yet
to come…
Vancouver foreign ownership research prompts cries of
racism in hot housing market, CBC News,
Bianca
Bosker, Original Copies: Architectural
Mimicry in Contemporary China, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2013, p.4
Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, (Trans. Ian Pindar
and Paul Patton), London and New Brunswick, New Jersey, Athlone Press, 2000, p.66-67.
