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The entanglement of Vancouver’s infrastructure in settler colonialism and racialized exploitation

Vancouver, Canada, has long been held up as an environmentally conscious coastal refuge and model of progressive urban planning. Unpacking the troubling complexities that lie beneath the city’s otherwise tidy self-image, Terminal City reveals the long, recurring patterns of racialized violence and Indigenous dispossession crucial to its formation.

Examining the histories of Vancouver’s infrastructures, including railways, ports, the freeway system, fossil-fuel pipelines, and property, Michael Simpson details the various spatial manifestations of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that constitute the city’s urban environment—using it as a case study to reveal such tendencies around the world. Simpson exposes how the seizure of Indigenous lands and the destruction of Black communities has been foundational to the development of the city, and he highlights its structural dependency on these violent legacies, as well as the ongoing struggles to dismantle them.

Bringing together theoretical insights from the fields of urban geography, political ecology, and Indigenous studies, Simpson provides a distinctive intervention into contemporary debates around the material basis of logistics and circulation. At a time when massive upheavals to urban infrastructure are taking place in the hopes of establishing greater sustainability, Terminal City raises important questions about how this moment of transition might be harnessed to bring about decolonial abolitionist futures that redefine what a city can become.

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Winner of the CASCA Labrecque-Lee Book Prize

In both local and international imaginations, Vancouver, Canada, is often celebrated as one of the world’s most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and livable cities. Simultaneously, the city continues to be ground zero for successive waves of public health emergency and intervention, including a recent and unprecedented drug overdose crisis driven by the proliferation of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related analogs in the local drug supply. In The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver, Danya Fast explores these politics of place from the perspectives of young people who use drugs. Those who are the subject of this book were in many ways relegated to the social, spatial, and economic margins of the city. Yet, they were also often at the very center of city life and state projects, including the project of protecting life in the context of the current overdose crisis.