Saturday 11 March 2017

Negotiating Chinese Space in Vancouver: Control and Escape

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.[1] (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.[2] 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.[3] Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson amongst others called Yan’s study racist and divisive.[4] Yan’s response was that it is often developers and politicians who cry racism to protect their own privilege.[5] 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.[6]

In August 2016, the provincial Government introduced a 15% foreigner tax on properties.[7] 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).[8] 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.[9][10]

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”[11]. 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.[12] 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.”[13] 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.”[14] 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”.[15]

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.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18]

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.[19] 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.”[20]
  • 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.”[21] 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.[22] 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.[23]

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.[24] 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.”[25] 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.[26] 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.”[27] “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.”[28] 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.[29] 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.[30] 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.”[31] 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.[32]

Like Guattari, Deleuze understood ethics as creation. For him, the ethical arises from a “long affair of experimentation, requiring a lasting prudence.”[33] 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?[34]

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.”[35] 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.[36]

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. [37] 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…



[1] Jessica Chin, Richmond Racist Flyers Call On 'Whitey' To Save City From Chinese People, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/11/21/richmond-racist-flyers_n_13130166.html (Accessed: 2017-01-21)

[2] Median Household Income by Metropolitan Area, Statistics Canada, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/famil107a-eng.htm (Accessed: 2017-01-24)

[3] Andy Yan, Ownership Patterns of Single Family Home Sales on Selected West Side Neighborhoods in the City of Vancouver: A Case Study, http://bingthomarchitects.com/btaworks/ownership-patterns-of-single-family-home-sales-on-selected-west-side-neighborhoods-in-the-city-of-vancouver-a-case-study/ (Accessed: 2017-01-21)

[5] Douglas Todd, Nothing Racist about Vancouver Housing Study: Expert, Vancouver Sun, http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/nothing-racist-about-metro-housing-study-experts-say (Accessed: 2017-01-24)
[6] Max Fawcett, Interview: Ian Young on Racism and Real Estate, Vancouver Magazine, http://vanmag.com/city/the-van-mag-qa-ian-young/ (Accessed: 2017-01-21)
[7] Ministry of Finance, Additional Property Transfer Tax on Residential Property Transfers to Foreign Entities in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, http://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/taxes/property-taxes/property-transfer-tax/forms-publications/is-006-additional-property-transfer-tax-foreign-entities-vancouver.pdf (Accessed: 2016-11-20)
[8] City of Vancouver, Character Home Zoning Review, http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/character-home-zoning-review-background.pdf (Accessed: 2017-01-21)
[9] City of Vancouver, Character Home Zoning Review, http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/character-home-zoning-review-zoning-options.pdf (Accessed: 2017-01-20)
[10] Various Signatories, Open Letter to the City of Vancouver, Abundant Vancouver, http://www.abundanthousingvancouver.com/characterreview (Accessed: 2017-01-20) The Character Home Zoning Review is not without criticism. An open letter to the Planning Department suggests downzoning new builds will exacerbate the housing crisis. Currently, many single-family houses have a rental secondary suite in the basement or attic as a mortgage helper. Downzoning to 0.50 and enforcing a steep pitched roof produces an envelope that cannot adequately accommodate a secondary suite. Furthermore, the letter also noted many cherished pre-1940 residential houses are well above a 0.50 plot ratio. As such, downzoning to 0.50 implies that even some historical densities are inappropriate today.

[11] Vancouver foreign ownership research prompts cries of racism in hot housing market, CBC News,

[12] Peter S. Li, Unneighbourly Houses or Unwelcome Chinese: The Social Construction of Race in the Battle over ‘Monster Homes’ in Vancouver, Canada, IJCRES, Vol. 1, (1994), p.23.
[13] Li, pp.27 - 28.

[14] Bianca Bosker, Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2013, p.4

[15] Duanfang Lu, The Changing Landscape of Hybridity: A Reading of Ethnic Identity and Urban Form in Vancouver, TDSR, Vol. 11, No. 2, (2000), p.25
[16] Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, in Rethinking Architecture, (Ed. Neil Leach), Routledge, London and New York City, 1997, p.310.
[17] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2000, p.142.
[18] Hardt and Negri, p.156.
[19] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What if Philosophy?, (Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell), Columbia University Press, New York City, 1994, p. 85.
[20] Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, (Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Patton), London and New Brunswick, New Jersey, Athlone Press, 2000, p.66-67.
[21] Ibid, p.60
[22] Ibid, p.54
[23] Ibid, p.35.
[24] Ibid, p.67.
[25] Ibid, p.44
[26] Ibid, p.67
[27] Ibid, p.43
[28] Ibid, p.50.
[29] Ibid, p.40.
[30] Ibid, p.52
[31] Ibid, p.68
[32] Ibid, p.68
[33] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, (Trans. Robert Hurley), City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1988, p.115
[34] Ibid, p.126.
[35] Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001, p.59.
[36] Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, (Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis), Power Publications, Sydney, 1995, p.18.
[37] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, New York City, 2001.

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