Terminal City Infrastructures of Racial Colonial Capitalism in Vancouver

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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Michael Simpson is senior lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is coauthor, with Rueben George, of the award-winning book It Stops Here: Standing Up for Our Lands, Our Waters, and Our People.