In the last 15 years, urban change in Vancouver, British Columbia, has been broadly
understood in racial terms. Media and academic treatments of landscape transformation
have suggested that Vancouver, as a 'gateway city' to the Pacific Rim, will inevitably
experience Asian-lead change, economism, and 'creative destruction'. Oppositely, white
Canadians are often portrayed as the defenders of tradition, the environment, and
Vancouver 'as is'. The epithet 'monster' house, used to describe large, new, and
predominandy Chinese-owned houses in Vancouver's elite Anglo neighborhoods,
evidences how built form has been strongly correlated with the concepts of race and
culture in popular representations of landscape. This thesis problematizes these
essentialist, race-driven narratives by examining the ways in which textual
representations of urban change are embedded within existing relations of power,
particularly taken-for-granted subject-object looking relations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8348 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Wang, Holman |
| 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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