[van-announce] Discussion on gentrification w/ Neil Smith & Jean Swanson (*This Sunday!)

[Ivan D. Drury]

Free public forum


No gentrification here or anywhere:
Discussion with Prof Neil Smith, a gentrification expert from New York and Jean 
Swanson, Carnegie Community Action Project


---

Sunday April 17
2pm
Japanese Language Hall (487 Alexander St)
(Free!)
---

Over the last three months the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood  Council has 
taken on a huge struggle against zoning changes in Chinatown  and the Downtown 
Eastside. Through door-to-door petition drives,  building and other community 
meetings, and five public hearings where  more than 120 community members spoke 
out against the city’s plan the  community came to understand how the threat of 
a building heights  regulation change and a shift in policy at the city 
government level  will have a terrible impact on the lives of thousands of DTES 
residents.  The low-income community in the DTES understands that gentrification  
means displacement from homes, increased policing in the streets, and  the loss 
of community assets that city government can’t understand and  doesn’t value, 
like feeling at home in a community.

Join us (with short notice!) to have a discussion with Professor Neil  Smith and 
Jean Swanson to talk about the DNC’s work for community  control over planning 
and development and to protect the assets of the  low-income community as part 
of a global fight against gentrification…

Neil Smith is a professor in geography in New York. He’s written a  major book 
about gentrification that is one of the most cited books  about gentrification 
ever written, “Urban Frontiers: Gentrification and  the Revanchist City.” His 
recent work continues to look at  gentrification as a global policy and process. 
You can see one of his  recent articles, “Gentrification as Global Urban 
Strategy” here: 
http://neil-smith.net/articles/new-globalism-new-urbanism-gentrification-as-global-urban-strategy
 (See more about Neil Smith below)

Jean Swanson has been organizing against gentrification in the  Downtown 
Eastside for decades. A founder of the Downtown Eastside  Residents’ 
Association, Jean is currently the coordinator of the  Carnegie Community Action 
Project (CCAP) and a natural community member  of the Downtown Eastside 
Neighbourhood Council. She wrote a recent  report on the gentrification threat 
posed to Chinatown by Vancouver City  Council’s proposal to raise heights to 
profit developers; you can read  the report in sections on the DNC’s “Fight the 
Heights” website here:

“Cheap rent and stores in Chiantown threatened” 
https://sites.google.com/site/fightfor10sites/cheaprent

“Hundreds of low-income residents vulnerable to gentrification” 
https://sites.google.com/site/fightfor10sites/hundredsthreat

“Myths about the city’s plan to allow towers in Chinatown” 
https://sites.google.com/site/fightfor10sites/myths

For more info:
Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council
http://dnchome.wordpress.com
Urban Subjects
http://www.lot.at/Urban_Subjects_US/index.html


(more on Neil Smith)
Neil Smith works in Anthropology and Geography at the City  University of New 
York Graduate Center and is the Chair in Geography and  Social Theory at the 
University of Aberdeen. From 2000 to 2008, Smith  was the Director of the Centre 
for Place, Culture and Politics at the  Graduate Center. He is the author of The 
Endgame of Globalization, New  Urban Frontiers: Gentrification and the 
Revanchist City, Uneven  Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of 
Space, as well as  the co-editor of Democracy, Justice, and the Struggle for 
Social  Justice, The Politics of Social Space, Geography and Empire: Critical  
Studies in the History of Geography, and Gentrification of the City,  amongst 
other volumes. Since 1984, Smith’s work in critical geography  has provided a 
compelling and evocative call to social justice in the  city as well as a clear 
analysis of the history and impending death of  neoliberalism.