ABSTRACT
Amanda Winter explores two cases of camping in tents on public land as acts of resistance to state-corporate power. By drawing on two examples from Vancouver, a Canadian settler city on unceded Coast Salish Territory, Winter aims to explore the detachment of social from environmental justice concerns. Her first example refers to a tent city in a public park in Vancouver’s slum where those involved saw living in tents as a way to bring attention to the housing crisis. Her second example refers to environmental activists camping on the site where an energy company planned to conduct survey work for their tar sands oil pipeline on a conservation mountain in Greater Vancouver. Although both cases are different in their trajectories, communities and tactics, Winter argues that in both cases communities and activists are resisting the neoliberal commodification and privatization of land by resorting to camping as resistance, as it symbolizes a stake and a relationship with the land, while creating new space of solidarity and new ideas towards an environmentally and socially just urbanization.
