For the final version of this draft, please see:

1997. "Conflicting Geographies of Democracy and the Public Sphere in Vancouver, B.C." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22(2): 162-179.

Imagine Walter Benjamin's angel of history looking back from the twenty-first century. This Shaughnessy neighborhood, a landscape of creative destruction in fin de siècle Vancouver, B.C., draws his particular interest. Is it because the houses truly are 'pieces of shit' that are 'falling to pieces,' the piles of debris growing skyward at an especially alarming rate? Or does the angel take a philosophical turn and, like Benjamin himself, seek to understand how a particular urban landscape entered the public consciousness and held sway over its imagination, how it was a "precise material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of the dreaming collective?"(Buck-Morss 1991:39).

The 19th century shopping arcades of Berlin and Paris were, for Benjamin, potent historical artefacts, public spaces that could illuminate not just the physical experience of a particular time and place, but the actual consciousness of an entire metropolitan generation. Benjamin was drawn to these buildings because of their central role in a narrative of capitalism and modernity, a narrative that he wished to both elucidate and debunk. The arcades, as public paens to progress and the commodity, served as the perfect conduit for this comprehensive critical project: their advanced technological construction, saturated years of consumer glut, and early demise provided, for Benjamin, the material evidence of "all of the errors of bourgeois consciousness... as well as all of its utopian dreams" (Buck-Morss 1991:39).

The Parisian arcades are seen and used as evidence of rupture in the seeming seamlessness of capitalist progress. But what of these new "atrocities they call a house" constructed in the somewhat less famous locale of Shaughnessy Heights? What intervention in the narrative of capital and the commodity is witnessed here? How has this contemporary landscape provided the material evidence of a moment of rupture sufficient to attract the special attention of the Angelus Novus?

In this article I examine how the residential architecture of an urban landscape in British Columbia enters the public consciousness and becomes a condensation point for many of the processes associated with rapid economic change. In particular, I focus on the conflicts that have arisen over the "monster" houses built in Shaughnessy, and the ways in which the land use decisions and recent controversies within this neighborhood have spurred a rethinking of democracy and the public sphere in Vancouver.

Shaughnessy Heights is a wealthy, upper-class neighborhood located in the west-side of Vancouver (See Figure 1). One of the features of rapid change evident in Shaughnessy and many of the city's other west-side neighborhoods in the 1980s was the demolition of older homes and the construction of extremely large houses in their place. These larger homes, which generally extended to the edges of the lot, came to be known as "monster" houses. A common feature that many of the new homes shared was a large, rectangular and boxy shape. The house itself occupied the maximum lot surface coverage and was built to the maximum height and square footage in size. Other widespread features included a grand entranceway with double doors, a two-story entrance hall, large, symmetrical, unshuttered windows with glass brick detailing, and external finishes composed of brick or stone on the ground floor, and stucco, vinyl or cedar siding on the second. Often, the area around the house was paved and fenced, and the landscaping was sparse (See Figure 2).

The newly constructed houses contrasted vividly with older, British-style residential architecture and provided a highly visible example of the economic and cultural changes then underway in Vancouver. Most of these changes were associated with the transnational flows of capital, culture and people from Hong Kong and Taiwan—flows which increased sharply in the 1980s and early 1990s. These expanded transnational movements across the Pacific were facilitated by federal regulatory shifts in the areas of immigration, finance and land control. New Canadian immigration procedures initiated in the 1980s, for example, allowed those with money to jump the processing queue and enter Canada ahead of others awaiting visas.¹ Following the signing of the Basic Law treaty in Hong Kong in 1984, tens of thousands of wealthy Hong Kong Chinese took advantage of this quick and permeable border and moved to Canada to establish citizenship.²

Financial borders were similarly dismantled in the 1980s, with the crossing of previously regulated boundaries and fixed lines of control in the Canadian banking industry. Particularly important for overseas businesspeople was the elimination of the Foreign Investment Review Act. FIRA had been considered a disincentive for foreign investment because of regulations that hindered overseas majority share ownership in joint ventures. FIRA was replaced by Investment Canada, which, as the name implies, offered quite a different mandate for foreign investment.

In the area of land usage, provinces such as British Columbia began a vast campaign to sell off Crown land, much of which had been acquired during previous political regimes. This privatization of large swathes of land provided a great stimulus for global real estate players such as Li Ka-shing to invest in the region. His acquisition of the former Expo '86 lands (comprising one sixth of the Vancouver downtown) was but one of numerous Hong Kong ventures into Vancouver real estate during the latter part of the decade (see Gutstein, 1990).

The long-standing connections between Canada's major west coast city and the cities of the Asian Pacific Rim were thus strengthened and accelerated by the processes of global restructuring affecting each region. The physical transformation of Vancouver's built environment associated with these heightened connections was immense and was met with great dismay from a large section of the local population. Cultural and economic changes such as were visibly demonstrated in the proliferation of "monster" houses in the west-side, threatened various kinds of identity for established Vancouver residents. As a result of the perceived threat to established values, aesthetics and atmosphere in neighborhoods such as Shaughnessy Heights, efforts were made to arrest these changes through the "public" avenues of land use opinion and decision-making.

Changes in the urban landscape of Shaughnessy Heights focused public consciousness on the processes and repercussions of the transnational flows characteristic of late capitalism. The primary condensation point for these processes of change was the "monster" house, a residential form in stark contrast with the architecture of the pre-existing streetscape. Conflict associated with the construction of "monster" houses occurred in putative public and democratic spaces such as public meeting halls, City Council chambers, neighborhood property rights associations, urban planning sessions and the media. I argue that in these institutional spaces, through the struggles and resolutions connected with the "monster" house affair, a formative Canadian understanding of the liberal public sphere was contested and reworked.³ In the Vancouver context, the vigorous, highly racialized contestation over the urban landscape in spaces widely perceived to be democratic and public served to open up and call into question the meaning of the public; at the same time it helped to expose past exclusions involving public spaces and the public sphere, and to engender the crisis and rethinking of the meanings of democracy and citizenship in contemporary Canadian society.

In the following section I examine why the public contestations over the Shaughnessy landscape represents a significant intervention in a Canadian narrative of liberalism and democracy. In order to understand why this spatial conflict has such profound social repercussions, it is useful to examine notions of the bourgeois public sphere and its place in the formation of a liberal welfare society. Following a brief discussion of the 'ideal' public sphere as theorized by Habermas, I introduce the historic and contemporary struggles over land control and the shaping of Shaughnessy Heights.

The most formative discussion of the public sphere was initiated by Habermas, who examined the emergence of new kinds of bourgeois public spaces in 17th and 18th century Europe (Habermas 1989). In his account, these new public spaces, (coffee houses, centers of philanthopy, scientific or cultural establishments, etc.), were notable as sites of rational discourse located between the state and civil society. In theory, because of their separation from both civil society and the state, these spaces could operate as sites of critical public discussion; public questions, such as the common consensus of justice, could be freely pursued in rational-critical debate within these institutional locations. These spaces could thus form a nascent public sphere in which practical reason would be institutionalized through the norms of reasoned discourse.

Ideally these spaces of rational discourse were open to all citizens concerned with questions of general interest. In the liberal conception of the public sphere, a sharp division between the public interest and private desires or beliefs was necessary in order for the public sphere to function. Yet it was also necessary for there to be enough common ground in terms of citizens' general interests: the rational pursuit of a common consensus of truth and justice required a basic level of shared interests and understandings. "The very idea of the public was based on the notion of a general interest sufficiently basic that discourse about it need not be distorted by particular interests (at least in principle) and could be a matter of rational approach to an objective order, that is to say, of truth" (Calhoun 1992:9; see also Habermas 1989:27).

Although Habermas analyzed the salons as historically specific spaces, his interest was primarily in this question of the 'ideal' public sphere—a space where truth and the right policy could be pursued through rational argument. By focusing on the ideal, he abstracted away a 'kernel of truth' from these actual spaces which he then held up as a normative ideal. However unsuccessful the realization of the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas hoped nevertheless to "reach beyond the flawed realities of this history to recover something of continuing normative importance" (Calhoun 1992:1).

The kernel of truth that Habermas sought to recover in the ideal public sphere is also the ideal core at the heart of liberal democracy in Canada and other liberal welfare states. In contemporary Canada, the ideology of the public sphere as a site of rational discourse is an important foundation and a key rhetoric; furthermore, the "institutionalized influence of informed discussion and reasoned agreement" is absolutely central to democratic theory as a whole (McCarthy 1989:xii). For a society founded on liberal democratic ideals, the public is the space where 'intuitive ideas' pave the way for a consensus on justice; it can also be understood as an arena of 'neutral principles' which allows the state to justify its policies on neutral, purely procedural grounds.⁴ In both of these conceptions, a sharp separation of private and public space becomes essential; the citizen, who is conceived as a permanent member of a well-ordered society, must be able to separate the private spaces of 'diversity' and 'incommensurability' from the public spaces of procedural rationality and the pursuit of justice. Definitions of the 'good life' should not be pursued within the public realm, for plural societies must make room for competing notions of the good (Allejandro 1993). The private sphere of philosophical, religious or moral doctrines should therefore not intrude on the neutral spaces of the public sphere, where individuals must make choices based solely on rational criteria.

This notion of 'making choices' within the public sphere is also central for the ongoing legitimacy of liberal democratic societies. The consent for state leadership is won and the state legitimated through the notion of choice within representative democracy (Anderson 1977; see also Eley 1992:291). Particularly in a self-defined plural society such as Canada's, the ideology of choice in representative democracy has become a cornerstone of state liberalism. The liberal public sphere in Canada represents the arena where individual choice can be exercised. It is a crucial space for state legitimacy since the representation as a "modern" state—operating by consent rather than coercion—is necessary in a society holding to the ideals of procedural rationality.

In the following section I examine the actual workings of institutions associated with the public sphere in the arena of land use decision-making. I will show some of the historic exclusions from the so-called spaces of rational debate and individual choice in architecture and urban planning institutes, real estate agencies, and property owners' associations. Despite the ideal of rational decisions made for the public good by elected officials or volunteer leaders of society (eg. those participating in property owners' associations), in effect most land use decisions have never encompassed all of the public. This is clearly manifested in both historic and contemporary class and ethnic exclusions from the information necessary for informed choice and from the discussions and decisions involving land and property in the neighborhood of Shaughnessy Heights.

Since the time of the first Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) subdivisions of the land in 1909, the planned, west-side neighborhood of Shaughnessy Heights was produced for and remains predominantly the home of wealthy, Canadians of British heritage (Roy 1980; Hardwick 1974; Macdonald 1982; Duncan and Duncan, 1984; Duncan, 1994). Through the discretionary use of various principles of land control, the borders of this neighborhood were carefully demarcated and patrolled to exclude both unwanted development and undesirable people (Weaver 1981; McDonald 1981). Fire and health regulations were invoked in the early part of the century to complement private zoning covenants, and the negotiation of building loans, sale of finished homes, and securing of mortgages were scanned to ensure a buyer's proper 'qualifications' for living in the area.⁵ In this manner a highly effective informal strategy of exclusionary zoning operated in juxtaposition with more formal zoning measures.

The informal zoning procedures that were used to shape urban residential development were also used to shape the taste of potential home-buyers (Majury 1990). Real estate developers accented exclusivity in advertisements and manufactured a desire for selected west-side neighborhoods based on image (see, for example, B.C. Magazine 1911; Opportunities 1910:46). Part of the image of these suburban elite neighborhoods revolved around the ethnic and class exclusions of groups that differed from the wealthy, Anglo majority. This image was maintained and protected by the selective enforcement of zoning measures that excluded "Asians" and other "undesirables" from the area. Representations of cultural difference were frequent in the media and in all three levels of government policy, and were naturalized as essential, racial characteristics. This fabrication and naturalization of cultural difference, such as opium smoking or lack of hygiene, was then used to warrant the ongoing exclusion of members of those "races" that did not fit the image of the neighborhood (see Anderson 1991).

In addition to these informal measures, the exclusiveness of Shaughnessy Heights was legally inscribed by the Shaughnessy Settlement Act, passed by the provincial legislature in 1914. This act "recognized and sanctioned the undertakings of the CPR to ensure Shaughnessy's status in the City" (Vancouver, 1982:3). In 1914, eighty percent of the members of Vancouver's social register lived in Shaughnessy Heights; the social register was composed almost entirely of the city's business leaders and their families. Of the approximately 300 business leaders in Vancouver at the turn of the century, over 90% were from Canada, Britain or the United States, and of these, the vast majority were Protestant or Anglican (Macdonald 1982; McDonald 1986). Ensuring "status" in the neighborhood thus involved the continuation of an elite Anglo residential architecture and community (see also Duncan, 1994; Ley, 1993; Li, 1994).

Other restrictions were placed on neighborhood development through the Shaughnessy Heights Building Restriction Act of 1922. This act removed zoning control from the municipality and gave it to neighborhood property owners. It also prohibited further subdivision of the land—ensuring the preservation of the large incomes necessary for home ownership as well as the large lot sizes. Conditions for land use in the area included the stipulation that no buildings could be erected on the land "which should be a nuisance to the person or persons owning other land in the area" (Vancouver, 1922). Selective definitions of the "nuisance" factor provided a regulatory restraint for every new construction in the neighborhood. The CPR placed further restrictive covenants on Shaughnessy deeds by insisting that only single family homes could be built—an act which ensured that lower income families and shared households could not afford to live there.⁶

Shaughnessy land was developed with the expectation of long-term profit predicated on the ability to establish and maintain the neighborhood's desirability. This desirability was established by the provision of extremely high quality infrastructure, much of which was paid for by provincial and municipal governments (Macdonald 1982). High profitability in the area induced further infrastructural improvements and municipal money in a snowball effect: as the promise of profit in west-side developments grew, so did the interest of investors and developers in even fancier projects, parks and plans. The British Columbia Electric Railway Company, for example, opted to provide extensive tramway service to the Point Grey (west-side) area long before the population level warranted the initial capital outlay (Bartholomew 1928:88-91; Roy 1980:401).

The interest in Shaughnessy Heights as an exclusive suburban development continued through World War II. The controlled and carefully defined borders between east-side and west-side communities in Vancouver became further entrenched during these years. While east-side and downtown neighborhoods were seen as ethnically mixed, west-side neighborhoods, such as Shaughnessy, remained coded as "white" through World War II, and in some areas well into the 1970s. Family incomes in the neighborhood were consistently the highest in the city (see Vancouver Local Areas 1985, 1988; Barman 1986:114-15).

Although Shaughnessy Heights has been protected by strict zoning covenants since the original CPR subdivision of the land, these regulations became even stricter in the 1980s in response to the increasing threat of streetscape change. In May of 1982, after a background report was prepared by the Vancouver City Planning Department (at the instigation of the SHPOA and at municipal expense), the City Council rezoned the Shaughnessy local area from RS-4 (One Family Dwelling District) to a special zoning category called FSD (First Shaughnessy District).⁷ The Director of Planning wrote of the role of the SHPOA in this change: "Early initiatives undertaken by the Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners' Association were instrumental in drawing City Council's attention to the need for a new plan in Shaughnessy. SHPOA played a key role in responding to those pressures threatening to destroy the historic and aesthetic character of First Shaughnessy by developing a set of goals and recommendations for the area" (Vancouver 1982:ii).

On the same day as this shift in zoning status, the City Council further approved a series of "design guidelines" for the area, amended the subdivision by-law, and established the First Shaughnessy Advisory Design Panel (Vancouver 1989). The design panel was established to serve as an additional level of protection against unwanted development by reviewing proposed developments with respect to both the original Shaughnessy by-law and the First Shaughnessy Design Guidelines. These guidelines were extremely detailed, including minute architectural design features such as the preservation of roof, entrance and fire escape treatment, as well as broader principles of massing and siting (Vancouver 1988). The SHPOA attempted to extend these strict guidelines to Second and Third Shaughnessy (the southern end of the district) with a preliminary design report in 1984. In this report the growing desire to keep out the new, extra-large houses and to retain the old houses was explicit. The old houses were described as "interesting without being overpoweringly busy in appearance", while the new houses were seen as ostentatiously decorated, "thin and flat" (cited in Ley, 1995:194). Further efforts to establish stricter zoning amendments to both massing and house style in South Shaughnessy and the adjacent southern neighorhoods of Kerrisdale and Oakridge were undertaken jointly by the City Council and the SHPOA in 1988 and 1990.

Why was there a threat of streetscape change at this particular moment in time? Why were there even stricter massing and architectural design stipulations added to the earlier, already rigid regulations? Why the closing of ranks around seemingly insignificant details such as the preservation of roof, entrance and fire escape treatment in the 1980s?

The fuss over changes in streetscape design in Shaughnessy arose in the early 1980s in response to the rapid transformation of many east-side communities in the prior decade. A number of extremely large houses, known locally as 'Vancouver Specials', appeared in east-side neighborhoods in the 1970s. These new houses provoked fear that the carefully regulated borders demarcating communities would be lost in the advent of rapid urban transformation. With the disappearance of an exclusive architectural and landscape design, residents worried that the ability to preserve the 'character' of neighborhoods would also be lost. In a public hearing of 1985, a spokesperson for the SHPOA expressed anxiety about the burgeoning Vancouver Specials and urged rapid action on a first set of proposed regulations for the neighborhood. His comments were reported in a local west-side newspaper:

By the late 1980s, the incipient 'threat' to west-side neighborhoods seemed confirmed, as the number of demolitions in the area skyrocketed (Vancouver 1992). Numerous houses and five-story walk-up apartments in west-side areas were torn down, some to be replaced with luxury condominiums, but most falling to what soon became widely referred to as the "monster" houses (Vancouver Monitoring Program 1992; Vancouver Trends 1992). The new houses varied in form and style in different neighborhoods but were uniformly large in context with the other houses which remained on the street.

Before the arrival of the "monster" houses in the late 1980s, the restrictive measures enforced on lot divisions and lot and house prices in the northern third of Shaughnessy had ensured that variation occurred only within a spectrum of extremely high-end designs and materials. The most common style for the area was the English Tudor manor, and the general ambience of the neighborhood was that of the British landscape tradition (Kalman and Roaf 1974:145-164; Holdsworth 1981, 1986:29-30). The gently contoured lawns, scattered clumps of bushes and trees, irregular, curved shapes and natural-looking borders were patterned on the landscape tradition of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, British garden and park designers of the eighteenth century.

The use of British architectural and landscape symbols in Vancouver's west-side neighborhoods was deliberate. The CPR, which owned most of Point Grey, intentionally modeled the elite subdivision of Shaughnessy Heights on the pastoral myths of the English countryside (Duncan and Duncan 1984:270; Duncan, 1994). By claiming an ongoing, albeit transformed English tradition in the new spaces of Vancouver, an easy, unhurried grandeur and an idyllic, pre-industrial way of life gradually became recognized and incorporated as the symbols and codes of the new suburban elite of "British" Columbia. The appropriation and reworking of these symbols over time operated on an aesthetic level that enabled residents of these neighborhoods to feel pride of place, security and well-being and to assume a universal notion of the 'appropriateness' of this landscape. Much of the anxiety of loss expressed in the late 1980s related not to the actual buildings or trees that were demolished, but to a more general fear concerning the possible diminution, deprivation and dispossession of this way of life.

The Anglo-Canadian 'way of life' of Shaughnessy residents was threatened by the entry into the neighborhood of wealthy Hong Kong Chinese immigrants, many of whom purchased the so-called "monster" houses in the late 1980s and early 1990s.⁸ These new residents were part of a significant exodus of Hong Kong elite from the British colony in advance of the changeover to Chinese communist control in 1997. Taking advantage of Canada's highly selective business immigration policy, which specifically targeted this group, many Hong Kong investors and entrepreneurs applied for citizenship and entered Canada during this time (Nash 1992). Owing to family ties, a good climate, and relative proximity to Hong Kong, as well as to the leadership of the Hong Kong property magnate, Li Ka-shing, a large percentage of this business class chose to settle and purchase residential property in Vancouver in the late 1980s. Much of the residential investment was made in elite, relatively underpriced and highly desirable west-side neighborhoods such as Shaughnessy Heights.

The arrival of an outside group, perceived not only as a different class fragment, but also as a different race, signified the loss of exclusiveness in what had previously been an extremely homogeneous neighborhood. Changes in the streetscape, including the demolitions of older houses, the removal of mature trees, and the construction of extremely large houses, reflected many of the wider changes that were occurring in the socio-economic profile of the community at large. The inability to protect the streetscape, which was felt to be a public good rightfully owned by community residents, mirrored the inability to protect the desirable character of the neighborhood from change. This desirable character was "lost" largely because of the longterm, naturalized association of desirability with the exclusion of those groups which had historically been rendered as inappropriate to the landscape.⁹

Shaughnessy's streetscape has operated historically as a repository of symbolic capital—capital that has been predicated on both exclusivity and an ongoing process of creating outsiders. The creation of outsiders who live in different places and have different cultural tastes, has allowed the consolidation of both an internal social identity and an insider's locale. As Bourdieu (1984:56) has written, "it is no accident that, when they (tastes) have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively by the refusal of other tastes. Not only does taste identify a particular way of life with a particular class fragment through daily practices of consumption and lifestyle, it also legitimates that taste and casts others into doubt."

The ability to distinguish between tastes—good and bad, beautiful and 'atrocious,' highbrow and lowbrow—aids in the confirmation and marking of social identity. And social identity is intricately linked with economic capital. The anguish of the reaction against the streetscape changes in Shaughnessy betrayed the profound fear that the symbols of the established and dominant Anglo group were being eroded, and with them, the chance of appropriating the rare rights and assets dependent upon a privileged position in social and geographical space.

Prior to the 1980s, the Shaughnessy streetscape was an aesthetic space that remained separate on a number of levels from the other spaces within Vancouver. From its inception, the neighborhood was deliberately produced for an elite group. This deliberate process, however, was abstracted through time, so that by the late twentieth century, the relations between Shaughnessy Heights and the Anglo elite of the city appeared natural and appropriate. Following the norms of everyday life and given the "proper" moral order, it seemed "natural" that the historic relationship between certain kinds of spaces and certain kinds of people, would be quietly but inexorably reproduced. The transnational movement of capital and people with capital, however, altered this stasis in new and shocking kinds of ways. In the following section, I describe some of the extraordinarily large sums of Hong Kong money that began to circulate in the Vancouver property market in the late 1980s.

The exact amounts of capital flows between Hong Kong and Vancouver are not documented by statistical agencies in either city. The business immigrant statistics, however, provide one approximate measure. According to Employment and Immigration Canada, the amount of estimated funds brought to British Columbia in 1988 (most of the funds brought into the province wind up in Vancouver), was nearly one and a half billion Canadian dollars (Canada, 1989). Figures from 1989 show an approximate capital flow of C$3.5 billion from Hong Kong to Canada, of which C$2.21 billion or 63% was transferred by the business migration component (Nash, 1992: 3; Macdonald, 1990). I consider these figures conservative. Most applicants underdeclare their actual resources by a significant margin for income tax purposes.¹⁰ Bankers and immigration consultants I interviewed in Hong Kong in 1991, put the overall numbers as high as six billion dollars being transferred from Hong Kong to Canada annually in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Of that amount, approximately one third would be destined for British Columbia (see also Wong, 1989).

The largest bank involved in facilitating the increasing movement of people and capital from Hong Kong to Canada in the 1980s was the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp (Hongkong Bank). David Bond, the vice-president of the Hong Kong Bank of Canada, its Canadian subsidiary, said of the business investors moving to Vancouver: "If I was the czar of immigration, I'd send a fleet of Boeing 747s to Hong Kong to pick them up. This is a unique chance to engage in a transfer of human and financial capital that is unprecedented anywhere in the world (Quoted in Claiborne, 1991)."

All of the major international banks operating in both Canada and Hong Kong emphasized their global connections and services in order to attract and retain customers. The vice-president of the Royal Bank of Canada, Jim Lawrie, claimed that "with operations in more than 30 countries, we can provide worldwide linkages for the investment and personal interests of our private banking clients (Quoted in To, 1990)." As with the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada offered "premier V.I.P services" for its Hong Kong clients, including "a comprehensive package of services to meet all your emigration financial requirements."¹¹ Help in real estate ventures—both personal and commercial, was particularly emphasized. Soon after the new immigration regulations of 1986, the Royal Bank executive in charge of private banking operations established an investor immigrant service to help wealthy clients purchase real estate in Canada and to structure five-year offshore tax programs.¹² The first phase of the service package provided for fund transfers and the opening of new accounts in the bank's main branches in Canada; in the second phase, the package provided for mortgage financing of Canadian properties (Suen, 1988).

Many bank officials I interviewed in Hong Kong estimated that most of the funds transferred from Hong Kong to Canada were invested in property. Some trust companies, which also became involved in the immigrant investor scenario, gave direct assistance on both immigration and property investment through subsidiary or sister companies. Royal Trust Asia Ltd., for example, acted on real estate matters through its sister company Royal lePage, the largest real estate broker in North America. By combining departments or subsidiary firms, companies were able to provide services tailored for the wealthy Hong Kong emigrants, and to get a jump on the property and development markets at the same time (Gossen, 1990).

Despite government attempts to channel capital into productive sectors, the majority of business immigrant funds, particularly in the early years of the program, went into property investment. The Financial Post estimated that in 1990, foreign investment in privately held real estate in Canada nearly tripled from the 1985 figure of U.S.$1.2 billion; if the debt portion (bank financing) of the real estate transactions were included, the total investments of 1990 would exceed 13 billion (Fung, 1991:18).¹³

Vancouver was a particular favorite on the global shopping scene. Larence, Lim, a real estate broker at Goddard and Smith Realty Ltd., said of the real estate market in Vancouver in late 1989: "The saturation point for Hong Kong investment in Vancouver real estate hasn't been reached yet because people now look at this city in a global context, whereas ten years ago only western Canadians were considered potential purchasers (Quoted in Farrow, 1989)."

In the following section I examine the participation of the Vancouver City Council and several local newspapers in the effort to impede the transformation of the city occasioned by these massive flows of people and capital from Hong Kong. The reputedly neutral spaces of rational debate were implicated in a strong discourse of normality and abnormality, in which the new Hong Kong Chinese residents and "their" houses were cast as inappropriate additions to the existing landscape. Despite a rhetoric of open discussion, these public arenas served primarily as a vehicle for a dominant (Anglo) discourse concerning the past and future of Shaughnessy Heights and other west-side neighborhoods throughout the 1980s.¹⁴

In a move to wrest back neighborhood control, the residents of one small area of Third Shaughnessy (the southern end of Shaughnessy Heights) attempted to maintain the norms of space and design through legal action. John Pitts, a Shaughnessy resident, spent C$15,000 to draft a bylaw to rezone nearly 200 houses between 37th and 41st and Granville and Maple streets. Bylaw 6694, labelled Preservation District No. 1 by the residents and sarcastically titled the 'Pitts-Stop' by city planners, was approved and passed by City Council on July 24, 1990. The intent of the new zoning was "to preserve the single family usage and character of the district outlined... with special regard to encouraging retention of existing dwellings and regulating demolition and replacement of them as a Conditional Use."¹⁵ The bylaw reduced floor-space ratio to just below the FSR set by a City Council zoning amendment of 1990, and demarcated stringent property set-backs specifically designed to end the construction of "monster" houses in the neighborhood.

Numerous west-side social movements followed with similar agendas, some aimed at preventing the removal of trees, while others focused more sharply on the demolition of houses and low-rise apartment buildings. At the same time as the physical changes were contested, a fierce battle over ideology was waged in the media. Countless articles, editorials, and letters to the editor on the "Asian Invasion," emphasized the strangeness of the new houses and, implicitly, the new house buyers (eg. Shaw 1989; Cox 1988; Wiseman 1988; Taylor 1989). In the late 1980s, there was a concerted effort to "renormalize" the landscape, to bring back the appropriate taste for west-side neighborhoods. These efforts involved making the outsiders themselves appear "monstrous". In one letter to the editor in 1990, a Vancouver resident wrote:

The concept of the "normal" Canadian family is crucial here, as those occupying the new "monster" houses were cast as either odd, by virtue of having large, extended or fecund families, or operating illegally, by building basement suites. The definition of the norm, of what is appropriate behavior for the neighborhood is clearly an important site of contestation. Outlining the normal and the abnormal in spatial terms establishes both physical and cultural borders; defense of these bordered spaces can thus be made on both natural and moral grounds.¹⁶

Dismay over the inefficacy of old borders and landscape meanings was accompanied by a growing fear of the economic and cultural power of the new Hong Kong residents. Anxiety over the extended family and the construction and use of extra-large houses reflected a fear of takeover; the newcomers were quite literally 'taking up too much space'.¹⁷ The fear of competition over limited resources, such as space in the desirable Shaughnessy enclave, was also expressed in concerns about schooling. Many white residents who spoke with me in interviews felt that the Chinese students were "too competitive," or "too one-track minded." They worried that their own children, who were more "well balanced," would lose out to this new group scholastically. Several also expressed dismay at the high cost of expensive English as a Second Language (ESL) courses, which they felt siphoned off resources from after-school activities and art programs.

The City Council responded to these fears by working closely with property rights associations and urban activist organizations such as the SHPOA, the Kerrisdale Concerned Citizens for Affordable Housing and the Kerrisdale/Granville Homeowners' Association in an effort to ameliorate the urban transformations. Public hearings were frequent throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s on the general topics of appropriate land use and on discussions of specific downzoning amendments. After years of debate and following the passage of three zoning amendments for west-side neighborhoods in 1988, 1990 and 1992, a series of public hearings in September, 1992 addressed two more proposed options for downzoning in South Shaughnessy. These hearings soon became a lightning rod for the disparate communities interested in Shaughnessy's future landscape.

The most openly confrontational events between the older, Anglo-Canadian residents of Shaughnessy Heights and the more recent Hong Kong Chinese residents in the neighborhood occurred in the autumn of 1992. In a series of six long and agonizing public hearings on the topic of downzoning in South Shaughnessy, the polarization of these two groups became immediately apparent. In the public hearings a majority of Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners' Association (SHPOA) members advocated restrictions on future redevelopment in the area. The general propositions of regulation and preservation were similar to the restrictions enumerated in earlier amendments. A group composed almost entirely of recent Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong, quickly formed an ad hoc committee in opposition to these proposed development restrictions. This committee, which later convened as the South Shaughnessy Property Owners' Rights Committee (SSPORC), campaigned strenuously against the downzoning. Aided by a number of developers, most prominently Barry Hersh, a housebuilder and president of the West Side Builder's Association, the campaign used allegations of racism to discredit the SHPOA and its followers.

After the first meeting in September, leaflets were sent to Chinese homeowners in the area, urging them to ask Chinese friends from the lower mainland to attend the rest of the hearings in a show of public alliance. These leaflets were written in Chinese, whereas the original survey questionnaire on the topic of downzoning had been written in English only. At the public hearings, Chinese speakers complained that the survey distributed by the Vancouver Planning Department had not been translated into Chinese, reducing the information necessary to make informed decisions about the proposed change.¹⁸ Some of these speakers spoke Cantonese at the hearing and used an interpreter. At several points, they were heckled by Anglo-Canadian members of the audience for not speaking English.

The widespread publicity of this racial polarization (the hearings were televised and reported globally), and the manipulation of the definitions of racism by both the Chinese residents and developers indicated new stakes in the battle over urban design and control of the Shaughnessy streetscape. Public hearings are generally presented as models of democratic debate and spaces of rational decision-making. But in most land use decisions, as noted in the discussion of Shaughnessy's landscape history, they have rarely functioned this way. Debates over appropriate land use in Shaughnessy generally led to restrictions which excluded by class and ethnicity (see also Anderson, 1991). The six hearings in 1992 represented the first time that a radically different interpretation of the community good for a west-side area was promulgated and won by a group not composed primarily of Anglo-Canadian residents.

For the first time in the city's history, large numbers of wealthy capitalists who were perceived as "non-white", moved to west-side neighborhoods that were formerly protected by virtue of their high prices and exclusive zoning covenants. This outside group was able to form alliances with local capitalists for a pro-growth agenda that threatened the carefully established symbolic value of west-side neighborhoods. By raising the spectre of racism, which could be easily buttressed by the historical evidence of racism in prior zoning measures, the Hong Kong Chinese and west-side builders effectively controlled the public hearings and defeated the SHPOA-designed effort to restrict further development in the neighborhood. As a further warning to their Anglo opponents, some members of the SSPORC publicly threatened to write Chinese friends and contacts in Hong Kong and worldwide, reporting that Vancouver was a racist society, and advising against further investment in the city (Interview, November 1992).

In defence of their position against downzoning, many Chinese speakers extolled the virtues of a perceived Chinese way of life. Rather than contesting cultural difference, Chinese homeowners in Shaughnessy used it to their advantage, lecturing enthusiastically about family, respect for the elderly, communal closeness, education and hard work—and contrasting these values with their representations of lazy, unfamilial and undemocratic white Canadians. Similarly, they appropriated the meanings of racism and nationalism to their advantage, decrying English-only language survey forms as inherently un-Canadian, and neighborhood rezoning proposals as manifestly racist.

The understanding of what constituted the community good became a major source of contestation. Definitions of what it meant to 'be Canadian' or to 'live in Shaughnessy' were opened up for interrogation and negotiation. Rather than simply contesting the Anglo definition of 'Chinese-ness' and of appropriate Chinese places to live, however, the financial power and cultural savvy of the new group gave them the power to completely invert this process of racial and spatial definition, and allowed them to represent dominant Chinese definitions of 'Anglo-ness.'¹⁹ The new Chinese homeowners in Shaughnessy were able to ally themselves with developers, realtors, and politicians eager to join capitals in new, increasingly international business ventures. This slight shifting of the economic and political power ballast in the neighborhood allowed the public voicing and material representation of Anglo values and norms as perceived from the outsider's perspective. The spaces of rational discourse, an integral component of the liberal public sphere, were thus employed to contest implicit notions of the "common good," which had operated in the neighborhood since its inception. Through this process of contestation and inversion, some of the actual spaces of the public sphere (public meetings on land use) were exposed as traditional spaces of hegemonic production for a dominant group.

To give final weight to this inversion, many of the Chinese residents voiced their concerns in Cantonese, and deliberately employed the language of popular democracy in defense of their individual and economic rights. They further spoke of these rights as integral to the Canadian liberal and secular welfare state. In the hearings, much to the dismay of their Anglo-Canadian listeners, Chinese-Canadian speakers invoked notions of freedom, family, individual rights, property rights and democracy itself in defense of their position. One Chinese-Canadian speaker (using an interpreter) said:

"I live in Shaughnessy and we built a house very much to my liking. The new zoning would not allow enough space for me... I strongly oppose this new proposal. Why do I have to be inconvenienced by so many regulations? This infringes my freedom. Canada is a democratic country and democracy should be returned to the people."²⁰

The threat to established norms that this position heralded became clear in an interview with a SHPOA member. She said to me:

"I can't describe to you how it feels to be lectured to about Canadian democracy by people who have to use an interpreter... Lectured about laziness, how we don't need big houses because we don't take care of our parents like the Chinese do... I cannot understand how anybody could go to another country and insist they can build against the wishes of an old established neighborhood. The effrontery and the insolence takes my breath away."²¹

Historic zoning patterns and landscape struggles in Shaughnessy Heights give some indication of how public spaces have been implicated in the reproduction of a dominant Anglo elite in Vancouver. The contemporary conflict over downzoning also demonstrates how, by using alternative concepts of public and private, appropriate behavior and justice, and by employing the language of individual rights and popular democracy, the recent Chinese residents in the community were able to contest and even dominate this public space in the early 1990s. In the following section I examine why this contestation represents a significant intervention in a Canadian narrative of liberalism and the public sphere, and how shifts in the nature of capitalism itself have enabled this rupture. I will focus on three areas in which established understandings are disrupted: first, in the liberal conception of the citizen; second, in the arena of neutral principles; and third, in the separation of the public and private.

The conception of the citizen as a private person admitted to debate within the public sphere is of central importance in liberal welfare societies. This assumption presupposes that all persons have the chance to become citizens, and gives credibility to the state rhetoric of both choice and of the restriction of choice within representative democracy. Habermas writes: "If everyone, as it might appear, had the chance to become a 'citizen', then only citizens should be allowed into the political public sphere, without this restriction amounting to an abandonment of the principle of publicity" (Habermas 1989:87).

Despite the ideology of equal access, however, numerous scholars have shown how citizenship has been formed historically through various processes of exclusion. These exclusions, which have been based on gender, race and class distinctions, enabled the entrenchment of a new white, bourgeois, male order of 'citizens' (Eley 1992; Benhabib 1992; Ryan 1992). Furthermore, as Fraser (1989:127) has shown, the citizen's role within the public sphere was not gender-neutral, but manifestly masculine. The positions of wage earner and politician within classical capitalism were defined as masculine positions, whereas the roles of consumer and family member were coded as distinctly feminine.

In Shaughnessy Heights, the conflict within the public spaces of land use decision-making disrupts and subverts these classical dichotomies. The Asian man, feminized by the West in an ongoing orientalist discourse since the period of colonialism, emerges within the Canadian public sphere as a powerful actor in the 1980s.²² The suburbs, commonly perceived as 'feminine' by virtue of their location as the site of the home and the family, are infiltrated by the new Chinese homebuyer. With his monetary and cultural capital, the Asian male is cast as entering the white female suburbs and usurping the white man's public power as citizen within the public sphere. This successful subversion confounds the exclusions that have been implicit in the actual construction of a highly masculine and racialized citizenship in Vancouver through time.

The second assumption underpinning notions of the public sphere in Canada has been that of 'neutral principles'—the principles which allow the state to justify policies on neutral grounds (Allejandro 1993). Ideally, regardless of status, the citizen can speak within the public sphere 'as if' on an equal level with all other citizens; the public sphere is a neutral arena where rational deliberations are made distinct and separate from the non-neutral spaces of the private realm. In this conception, social inequities are not an impediment to participation, as the public sphere is a neutral, status-blind arena of deliberation.

In actual public spaces, however, Fraser (1990:64) and Mansbridge (1990:127) have discussed how informal obstacles to participation often remain long after formal exclusions are removed. These obstacles take many forms, and are frequently cultural and economic rather than legal. For example, a distinctive culture of civil society is based on cultural exclusions that are implicit in the process of bourgeois class formation. Thus, the cultural markers of status infect deliberation regardless of legal or formal 'neutrality'. Fraser (1990:65) writes: "In stratified societies, unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles. The result is the development of powerful informal pressures that marginalize the contributions of members of subordinated groups, both in everyday life contexts and in official public spheres... Subordinated social groups usually lack equal access to the material means of equal participation. Thus, political economy enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally".

Given the historically unequal participation of subordinated groups such as women, minorities and the working classes, the ideas of the dominant group are generally normalized and reproduced as neutral ones in the context of the public sphere. They are then used as the justification for state policy. In the case of the new Hong Kong immigrants to Vancouver, however, this normalizing process is contested. The Hong Kong Chinese who are able to buy property in Shaughnessy Heights are a dominant class fraction with a distinctive set of cultural markers. As an established class, the members of this group have the finances, the self-confidence, and the cultural capital to promote new forms of cultural and economic distinction in the landscape. They are able to enter the public meetings and voice their differences and their desires in a manner that must be heard. In this way, they successfully contest the assumed connections between high culture and a landscape inspired in the tradition of a British elite. They also dispute the privileging of the landscape in terms of "character" or use value over "profit" or exchange value. Through the allegations of historic, institutionalized racism in zoning and urban design measures in Shaughnessy, the Hong Kong Chinese ad hoc committee effectively opened up the implicit connections between landscape "character" and the ongoing hegemonic reproduction of an Anglo-Canadian elite.

The third assumption of the liberal public sphere that is contested by the new Shaughnessy residents is the necessary separation between the public and the private. For Rawls and other liberal theorists, this separation is essential for the public sphere to function; without it, private interests would dilute the rational discourse necessary for a common consensus on public issues. Fraser, Eley and others have shown, however, how notions of the private and the public are cultural classifications which are inherently bound up in relations of power. The labels of private and public are frequently deployed "to delegitimate some interests and valorize others (Fraser, 1990:73). In the past, the invocation of privacy has often functioned ideologically to delimit the boundaries of public discourse—particularly in the realm of private property.

With the public meetings on downzoning in Shaughnessy in 1992, the 'private' arena of racism was brought into public focus. The issue of racism, like that of domestic violence in preceding eras, was considered a private affair that should be addressed on an individual, case by case basis. The normal boundaries of public and private were thus transgressed as the Hong Kong Chinese residents in Shaughnessy claimed that the downzoning amendment was functioning as a screen for racist desires to exclude non-white people from the neighborhood. In this case, the unspoken norm of a predominantly white neighborhood was exposed and challenged through the refusal of existing notions of appropriate public discourse. In an ironic twist, the owners of private property invoked their dominant class position to open public discourse rather than the reverse.

The new Chinese homeowners also publicly pursued notions of the common good divergent from established neighborhood norms. By emphasizing perceived Chinese values of filial piety, respect for education and hard work, and by contrasting these with their perception of Anglo values, the recent immigrants opened up for interrogation the formerly implicit neighborhood understandings of the common good. In the ideal public sphere of liberal theory, notions of the good life belong in the private realm; historically, however, these public-private distinctions have been shown to normalize dominant values. By similarly questioning the assumptions of an appropriate Shaughnessy landscape—one founded on the image of pastoral England—the construction of a racially defined and spatially secured dominant elite was also exposed.

In this manner, the assumptions of a public-private split and a neutral arena were shown to mask a cultural norm that benefited a dominant Anglo elite in Shaughnessy Heights. This norm was reproduced through a process of consent essential in the ongoing production of hegemony. The successful reproduction of a dominant group, such as the local Anglo elite in Shaughnessy Heights, operates largely via the consent implicit in representative democracy. As Perry Anderson has argued (1977:26-30), the idea of consent is a fundamental building block of hegemonic control in liberal welfare societies.²³ The arrival of a culturally sophisticated group which did not "consent" to the cultural norms of the Shaughnessy landscape disrupted the moral and cultural leadership necessary for the dominant group to maintain this hegemony. At the same time, by exposing the non-neutrality of the so-called neutral principles of the liberal public sphere, state policy itself was implicated.

Why is the struggle over the public landscape of Shaughnessy Heights occurring now? What is significant about this particular historical and geographical period? Why is this the moment that has caught the special attention of the Angelus Novus?

Many scholars have shown how the restructuring of the global economy in the past fifteen years has greatly affected the organization of capital, labor and finance worldwide (Harvey 1987, 1989; Thrift 1990, 1992; Smith 1989; Sassen 1991). With this general restructuring process, an increasing globalization of production, finance, trade and information has initiated a widespread renegotiation of local borders and of local-global articulations (Pred, 1995; Pred and Watts 1992). As old borders and cultural understandings are reworked, new kinds of spaces are often opened up in the interstices. In the case of Shaughnessy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I suggest that the transnational flows of capital and culture characteristic of global restructuring have opened new spaces of negotiation around the shaping of the Shaughnessy landscape.

In a time when new kinds of citizens and publics are being formed, old borders are more easily eroded. In the past, the position of people as legal subjects in the public sphere generally occurred through the ownership of commodities in the market. But in Vancouver until relatively recently, it was safely assumed that legal subjects would be limited to those of Anglo heritage. First Nations people and non-Anglo immigrants did not generally own commodities in the market. The entry of a significant influx of people with both money and claims to citizenship within the public sphere is a contemporary phenomenon and, I believe, reflective of the transnational movements of late capitalism.

With the immigration of Hong Kong subjects into Shaughnessy Heights, there was a new kind of contestation over public space. The borders of public and private were renegotiated by the recent Hong Kong Chinese residents, as was the understanding of citizenship as a white male domain. With alternative interpretations of the common good aired publicly in the battle over downzoning in Shaughnessy, the heretofore normalized conceptions of the landscape were shown to operate historically in the interests of a dominant, racially exclusive class.²⁴

More importantly, the struggles emerging with new forms of transnational articulations were not merely over particular public spaces, but over the ideology of the public sphere itself.²⁵ The Chinese immigrants into Shaughnessy used the language of popular democracy in order to contest the status quo of representative democracy.²⁶ The normalized understanding of democratic principles in representative democracy as the 'freedom to choose' (what has become more and more the freedom to choose a commodity) rather than as the freedom to think and organize politically, was highlighted by this action.²⁷ As the deep flaws in any actual realization of the ideals of equal participation and rational choice were thus brought to light, the legitimacy of state policy and of democracy itself were opened for debate. Benjamin might have written about the Shaughnessy houses, as he did for Paris of the Nineteenth Century:

^*Many thanks to the following people for their useful critiques of this paper in all its myriad forms: Matthew Sparke, Dick Morrill, Peter Jackson, Kay Anderson, Roger Lee, David Hodge, Linda Becker, Don Mitchell.

¹ The business immigration program was clearly targeted at wealthy Hong Kong residents seeking citizenship outside Hong Kong in advance of 1997. In order to qualify for the "investor" category, the applicant must have a proven track record in business and a personal networth of at least Cdn$500,000 by the time of application. He or she was further obligated to commit a certain amount of this money to a Canadian venture over a three year period. During the 1980s British Columbia required a minimum investment of Cdn$250,000.

²From 1984 through 1991, Hong Kong led as the primary source country under the business immigration program, jumping from 338 landed immigrants in 1984, to 6,787 by 1990. The total number of landings from Hong Kong in 1990 was 29,266, up nearly 10,000 from the year before. Statistics show that approximately 35-40 percent of business immigrants to Canada settle in Vancouver. See Lary, 1992; Canada, 1989, and BC Stats, 1991.

³I am drawing primarily on the broad formulation of the liberal public sphere in the works of Habermas. In this paper I am interested in the ways in which the limits of a particular understanding of the public sphere become manifest in a particular geographical and temporal setting—Vancouver in the 1980s—and how those limits may be linked with changes in the global economy. The nuances of the many differences between Canadian, U.S., and European understandings of the public sphere are beyond the scope of this paper.

⁴The theory of the public as a space of 'intuitive ideas' is forwarded by John Rawls; that of 'neutral principles' is advanced by Charles Larmore. See the discussion of these liberal debates around the public sphere in Roberto Allejandro (1993 chapter one).

⁵This was true for most of Vancouver's west-side neighborhoods. For example, Chinese laundromats were often excluded from west-side suburban commercial strips on the grounds of health violations. These same violations did not seem to apply to Chinese laundromats in east-side neighborhoods. See Weaver (1981:431). The real estate company, British Properties, was especially notorious for its racistly exclusive marketing of west-side and north Vancouver real estate well past the end of World War II.

⁶The 1922 act was amended in 1927, 1933, and in 1939. Through the lobbying of the Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners' Association (SHPOA), the act's restrictions were extended until 1970. The SHPOA also petitioned the government to include a provision whereby SHPOA could register complaints against offenders of the act. See Vancouver (1922).

⁷First Shaughnessy occupies the northern edge of the district. It is the oldest third of Shaughnessy Heights and has adopted the strictest zoning guidelines. As Duncan (1994) has noted, the founding principal of these guidelines has been the preservation of an English architectural style and landscape tradition.

⁸The exact numbers of Hong Kong Chinese buyers in the neighborhood are difficult to ascertain and are widely debated. Several real estate-based estimates indicate approximately 80 per cent of the "monster" houses were purchased by families from Hong Kong or Taiwan. My own observation is taken from surveys, telephone interviews and participant observation in neighborhood meetings in Vancouver between 1990 and 1992. See Pettit, 1994 , and Ley, 1995 for similar findings.

⁹Feelings of anger and a deep sense of loss were strongly articulated in many of the in-depth interviews that I conducted between 1990 and 1992; these feelings were also expressed in scores of letters to the editor and to City Council during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

¹⁰As Robert Puddester, the head of Canadian Immigration in Hong Kong, said in a newspaper interview, "The more money they have, the less they declare." Quoted in Ben Tierney, "B.C. Now Top Destination for Hong Kong, Taiwan Investors," Vancouver Sun, February 11, 1992.

¹¹"Emigrating to Canada?" Royal Bank of Canada brochure, Hong Kong, 1991.

¹²Interview with an executive at the Royal Bank of Canada, Hong Kong, May 21, 1991.

¹³Victor Fung, "Hong Kong Investment Funds Pour into Canada," Financial Post, June 17, 1991, p. 18.

¹⁴This was the case through most of the decade, although by 1989 the ways in which the "monster" house debates were represented in the media and discussed in municipal meetings were highly contested. For example, the widespread contestation of the Vancouver Sun's coverage of Hong Kong led to an in-house discussion of the newspaper's methods and to the general airing of the issue of racism in the city at large. In the weekend issue of April 1, 1989, the paper devoted an entire page to letters to the editor concerning the Hong Kong coverage. The role of big business in these types of interventions is discussed in Mitchell, 1993.

¹⁵From a draft of the proposal to create a new zoning bylaw schedule submitted to Vancouver City Council on February 15, 1990. This draft was given to me by John Pitts.

¹⁶Foucault (1979; 1980) and Bourdieu (1990) discuss the power of definition over the 'normal' and the 'natural' and how these concepts are institutionalized and reproduced spatially and culturally. Anderson (1991:29) links these concepts to the production of racial categories in Vancouver and their establishment in particular places such as Chinatown.

¹⁷See Gilroy (1991) for a discussion of a similar employment of racial ideology in Britain. He notes that the fear of competition over limited resources is exacerbated by the representation of black people as abnormally fecund; i.e. by 'out-producing' white people they will attain greater access to desirable resources.

¹⁸Benny Hsieh Chung-pang, the founder of the ad hoc committee, noted ironically that the refuse collection circular had been translated into six languages, whereas the SHPOA-designed questionnaire was written in English only.

¹⁹For a discussion of this kind of representational reversal and its power dynamics in black culture, see hooks, 1992.

²⁰This testimony at the public hearing of October 5, 1992 is cited in Ley, 1995. For a further discussion of the arguments presented at these hearings see, in particular, pp. 196-199.

²¹ Interview, November, 1992.

²²Said (1978) has discussed the process of feminization of the 'Oriental' man in the context of the Middle East. Anderson (1991) touches on this theme in her discussion of state representations of the Chinese man in Vancouver.

²³In an early model of hegemony Gramsci discussed the importance of consent won through the cultural ascendance of the ruling class. In this model, the cultural leadership within civil society ensured the consent of the populace and thus the stability of the capitalist order; state control, by contrast, was equated with more coercive forms of domination. Perry Anderson critiques this model by examining the primary role of consent in contemporary, liberal welfare societies. He argues that the idea of consent itself is the "ideological lynchpin of western capitalism" and operates through the general form of the "representative State". According to Anderson, the bourgeois state "'represents' the totality of the population abstracted from its distribution into social classes, as individuals and equal citizens. In other words, it presents to men and women their unequal positions in civil society as if they were equal in the State." Legitimacy for the dominant group and for a capitalist social formation is thus repeatedly won through the abstracting and fetishizing subterfuge of political consent implicit in state representative democracies. See Anderson (1977: 26-30) and Lee (1993).

²⁴See Hall (1988) for a discussion of hegemony as tendency rather than fact. The understanding of hegemony as a shifting and highly contested process gives weight to the argument that certain moments in the production of hegemony allow for greater negotiation and resistance than others.

²⁵The ideological importance of the public sphere—particularly in relation to urban spaces—is detailed in Mitchell's study of People's Park in Berkeley, California. See D. Mitchell 1995: 116-117.

²⁶In Williams' (1976:85) examination of the social etymology of the term 'democracy', he notes the different usages of the word in the modern era. In the more radical tradition, democracy meant popular power; in the liberal tradition, "democracy meant open election of representatives under certain conditions (democratic rights, such as free speech) which maintained the openness of election and political argument." In the contemporary period, these two usages often "confront each other as enemies"-- as was evident in the struggle over the meaning of democracy in the public sphere in Shaughnessy Heights in 1992.

²⁷Appadurai (1990:307) writes: "These images of agency are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser."