Gastown, Vancouver's birthplace, is a small historic district embedded within the broader
community of the Downtown Eastside. Over the past 25 years Gastown has been slowly
upgrading; refashioning itself as a loft style residential neighbourhood and central tourist
destination. Over the same period the Downtown Eastside's reputation as the city's "skid road"
has become firmly entrenched. The pace of this community's upgrading and downgrading has
quickened over the past five years and resulted in a current geography where we find loft-style
condominiums, cappuccino bars and rising affluence interspersed with needle exchanges,
homeless shelters and deepening disadvantage. What we see within the Gastown/Downtown
Eastside community is a convergence of the spatial processes of social polarisation and the kinds
of conflicts and negotiations that result.
Polarisation, most broadly defined, describes a growing socio-economic and spatial divide
between the "haves" and "have-nots" of Western societies and cities. While considerable
attention has been paid to polarisation's conceptual meaning and empirical definition at the
national and intra-urban levels, little focus has centered on how the process can be identified and
analysed at the intra-community level.
In the same way that polarisation at broader scales of analysis can be viewed as the sociotemporal
coincidence of pauperisation and professionalisation, this dissertation defines intracommunity
polarisation as the simultaneous occurrence of socio-spatial upgrading and
downgrading. Using quantitative data from the census tract level, this dissertation investigates
the empirical evidence of social polarisation within Gastown/Downtown Eastside. Using
qualitative data the study explores the extent to which both revitalisation and deterioration are
competing for the community's future and this polarisation is being experienced and negotiated
by the varied residents and stakeholders of this urban community. Ultimately this dissertation
sheds light on how the characteristics and causes of community based polarisation differ and
parallel those at other scales of inquiry. It also outlines the truly local factors that affect
polarisation's development, entrenchment and impact and illuminates the process' inconstant
character and the time lag that exists between its qualitative experience and its quantitative
identification.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10914 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Smith, Heather |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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