Weaving a Local, Grassroots Web
- Joy Xiang
In an excoriating year, on many fronts and unequally felt, mutual aid and long-standing activist and abolitionist movements have become mainstream, in wide popular and digital media circulations, where folks are helping each other survive, materially, emotionally, politically. Local groups are, and always have been, fighting in the arenas of public and community space for the equitable consideration of all. But whose public space? And who is given rights to public space and resources, anyways, in so-called Canada, on land stolen by colonizers and parceled out in property models, often under coercive treaties?
In Hamilton, Keeping Six (K6) is a peer-based harm reduction action league formed in 2018 out of the opioid crisis, by organizers who met working together at the city’s first safe injection site, in an effort to give voice to people who use drugs. Since the pandemic, K6 has been doing direct outreach sessions instead of its weekly drop-ins, which included food, socializing, planning, and sharing what people were hearing on the streets. But the organization’s art and writing drop-in at Wesley Day Centre is still running, and artists can submit to Keeping Six Quarterly—a zine outlet and tool of visibility.
The zine features personal stories, survival tips, bad-drug alerts, visual art and fiction, and updates on city policies on encampments. Kelly Wolf, K6’s arts coordinator and a theatre maker, says the publication has been a release for people who are ignored or criminalized in the public realm. Outside of the direct community, the quarterly also circulates in places like coffee shops, and K6’s “Love in the Time of COVID-19” issue was nominated for Broken Pencil’s 2020 zine awards. That visibility “becomes part of the landscape of our city, like there’s this organization that’s looking out and sharing and reminding you of these people,” Wolf says. “Art can’t not be political, even in the absence of political statements.”
Last year, K6 was part of a coalition of medical and legal groups that successfully filed an injunction with the provincial Superior Court to prevent the City of Hamilton from tearing down large encampments downtown. The Hamilton Encampment Support Network (HESN) emerged from this organizing, and its members de-escalated and legally observed encampment removals after the injunction and participated in the two-week protest and sit-in at Freedom Camp, which rallied to defund Hamilton police and instead invest in free housing. Out of this groundwork, HESN officially launched in May 2021 to connect people with food, resources, clothes, and art supplies, and has a hotline for supply requests and alerts of city teardowns. Gachi Issa, an organizer with HESN, imagines a scene in the city directed by the needs of houseless people and grounded in relationships, disability justice, agency, and boundaries, and not saviourism, which is rooted in whiteness. “We’ve never seen this many people on the ground before,” says Issa. “This is exciting—I think we’re building power in Hamilton that wasn’t [previously] there.”
HESN also looked toward and consulted with the Encampment Support Network (ESN) in Toronto. Mobilized in the spring of 2020 by a group that includes many artists and musicians, ESN started with painting slogans on signs that encampment residents requested. The colourful, graphic signs (“We Are Not the Virus!”, “We Need Permanent Housing Now!”) can still be seen all over encampments and other parts of the city, disrupting and influencing the imaginary of public space. Temporary housing and aggressive encampment evictions (because bylaws state no camping on public property) only further displace houseless people, forcing them to move again and again, or to invisibilize themselves to keep safe. The bylaws don’t recognize encampments as their own communities, necessitated out of the very failure of policies and official social supports.
In addition to delivering supplies, ESN has an online toolkit for pushing back against imminent evictions, a newsletter, active social media, and a podcast—We Are Not the Virus—that tells stories from encampment life, arranged elementally around earth, water, wind, and fire. Artist Jeff Bierk has spoken about intentionally politicizing these mutual-aid actions to reveal gaps in city agencies, which lose connection to actual people the more that their processes become centralized (and alienating).1Together, these efforts are demonstrative of what Aliya Pabani, producer of the podcast, says about creating counternarratives, where unhoused people give their own analyses, and thus “reconfigur[e] existing relationships between neighbours, housed and unhoused,” practicing new solidarities.2
Other anti-displacement work includes advocacy for adequate and affordable rental housing, and for new conceptions of development that do not rely on dislocating pre-existing communities, especially affecting racialized and working-class neighbourhoods. Organizers recently saw Little Jamaica, concentrated around Eglinton Avenue West in Toronto, officially designated for a study to become a heritage conservation district,3 through a unanimous city council vote in April 2020. This came after more than two years of advocacy by groups including Black Urbanism TO (BUTO).
One strategy of this advocacy was the “cultural mapping study” Black Futures on Eglinton (BFoE) in 2019–20, developed in partnership between BUTO and the non-profit urban planning firm CP Planning, led by Cheryll Case, which took both a creative and human rights approach. Case emphasizes the importance of BFoE in recording and preserving the rich cultures of Little Jamaica, through publishing a poem book, producing videos and events, hosting live reggae nights, and involving people who do not normally take part in alienating policy conversations.4 The resulting report intentionally translated the lives and cultures already extant in the neighbourhood in order to make them readable to policymakers and the very language of policy, where action, in this case, was possible.5
Many grassroots initiatives strategize through creative expression, subversion, and intervention, including the Friends of Chinatown Toronto (FOCT), who launched its first public campaign in 2019 with a parody development sign—the first non-English one in the city, mimicking an official one located at 315-325 Spadina Avenue. The site, hosting restaurants and places of ineffable and unrecorded communal movings, has been a grounds to fight gentrifying issues facing Chinatown specifically, as well as city cultural enclaves, widely and internationally. At a FOCT virtual town hall in February 2021, more than 160 people attended, listening to the exploration of establishing a community land trust (CLT) in Chinatown.6 CLTs are one non-profit tool to take land off the real estate market and place it under community control—leveraging the act of owning under settler capitalism to self-govern properties, which leaves room to establish accessible housing and communal public space, and to resist destructive development. Other examples of Toronto CLTs include the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust and Kensington Market Community Land Trust, which FOCT is looking to as a model, as well as, elsewhere, the Boston Chinatown CLT, Bay Area CLT in California, and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, also in California. Yet, CLTs are only part of an ecosystem of other tools for building community agency, as indicated by urban planner Chiyi Tam 譚奇一meaning continual collective care and reciprocal feedback have to be part of CLTs’ operations to avoid replicating predatory landlord practices.
Thinking about local anti-displacement work raises the question: What are the processes by which discounted peoples enter into recognition, here and everywhere? Grassroots movements mark direct, measurable, connected, and cumulative acts, often in coalition with each other. It’s necessary to also attune to the ways “culture” may be weaponized to create “attractive” urban areas and to act on the responsibility of artists, many familiar with precarity themselves, to resist.7 These times call for adopting infinite (and strategic) flexibility, continually asking questions. Like moments of action, or dancing to fill space; as the actor Bruce Lee said, be like water: fill the container of violent systems, choose when to flow and when to crash.
See Connections ⤴