Jordan Stanger-Ross

Municipal Colonialism in Vancouver: City Planning and the Conflict over Indian Reserves, 1928–1950s

This article explores the entanglement of city planning with settler claims to Indian reserves in Vancouver. The Plan for the City of Vancouver, first published in 1928, devoted significant attention to the Kitsilano and Musqueam reserves. In the decades that followed, municipal officials drew upon the plan in their descriptions of the particular problems created by reserves in the city. Municipal officials came to think that the reserves harmed the rest of Vancouver and that modern urban areas presented a special case for dispossession. Marshalling the theories and methods of city planning in their attempts to control and acquire the reserves from the 1930s to the 1950s, city officials fashioned a distinctively municipal colonialism. Cet article examine la façon dont la planification urbaine se mêle aux prétentions des citadins sur les terres des réserves amérindiennes à Vancouver. Le Plan pour la Ville de Vancouver publié en 1928 s’étend considérablement sur la question des réserves Kitsilano et Musqueam. Au cours des décennies qui suivent, les fonctionnaires municipaux puisent à cette source lorsqu’ils décrivent les problèmes particuliers créés par la présence de réserves dans la ville. Ils en viennent à penser que ces réserves nuisent au reste de Vancouver et que les zones urbaines modernes présentent un cas particulier justifiant la confiscation des terres. Prenant appui sur les théories et les méthodes de la planification urbaine pour mieux contrôler et acquérir les réserves, les fonctionnaires de la Ville élaborent, entre les années 1930 et les années 1950, un colonialisme municipal original.

Falling Far from the Tree: Transitions to Adulthood and the Social History of Twentieth-Century America

Employing the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series of the University of Minnesota, we chronicle the changing timing and duration of transitions to adulthood in the twentieth century. Successive generations of young Americans reinvented the transition to adulthood to accommodate shifts in the economy and the American state. The patterned choices of young people delineate three eras of social history in the twentieth century: the era of reciprocity (1900–1950), the era of dependence (1950–70s), and the era of autonomy (1970s-2000). We also explain why African Americans differed from the general trend; they developed distinctive transitions to adulthood in response to persistent inequality.

Neither Fight Nor Flight Urban Synagogues in Postwar Philadelphia

This article uses case studies of two Philadelphia synagogues to argue that postwar cities remained places of opportunity for creative local institutions and that the geographic flexibility of synagogues did not necessarily entail flight from declining urban areas. After their North Philadelphia Jewish residential enclave dissipated, Mikveh Israel and Rodeph Shalom recast the meaning of community and membership to accommodate their dispersed congregations. Rather than remaining neighborhood synagogues, Mikveh Israel and Rodeph Shalom connected members dispersed across the metropolitan area who were committed to preserving their religious institutions at the center of the city. Postwar Jewish community at these two synagogues developed metropolitan contours.

Suspect Properties The Vancouver Origins of the Forced Sale of Japanese-Canadian-owned Property, WWII

In 1943, after Japanese Canadians were uprooted from coastal British Columbia, federal officials commenced selling all of their property without consent. This article argues that the dispossession of Japanese-Canadian-owned property has an urban history that has been largely overlooked, as arguments for the dispossession emerged from the Vancouver municipal government, which focused federal attention on the historic Japanese-Canadian neighborhood in the city. Federal officials seized upon the condition of a small number of deteriorating “slum” properties as a justification of wholesale dispossession. An initiative town planners in Vancouver thus helped to motivate the wholesale dispossession of Japanese Canadians.

‘My land is worth a million dollars’: How Japanese Canadians contested their dispossession in the 1940s

On July 31, 1944, Rikizo Yoneyama, a former resident of Haney, British Columbia, an agricultural area east of Vancouver, wrote to the Canadian Minister of Justice to protest the sale of his property. Two years earlier, when he and his family had packed their belongings for their forced expulsion from coastal British Columbia, they could take with them only what they could carry and, like other displaced people, they left much behind. “I realize that we are the victims of a war emergency and as such are quite willing to undergo … hardship … to help safeguard the shores of our homeland,” wrote Yoneyama, “however, I do urgently desire to return to my home … when the present emergency ends. May I plead your assistance in the sincere request for the return of that home?” When letters like his did receive a response from the federal government (there is no record that he did so in this case) it came in the form of standard letter, acknowledging that “the disposal of … property will be a matter of personal concern” but informing Japanese Canadians that, in conformity with a new federal law, everything, including their homes, would be sold.