Decolonizing Suburban Research

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Rob Shields

• North American Suburbs have been treated as sites of a collective amnesia concerning previous patterns of occupation and occupants. As ‘Greenfield sites’ they often either lack history or local history is shallow, rarely extending back before the agricultural tenants of the last century. A number of critics have pointed out that Indigeneity, migrancy and ethnicity have received less attention in urban and suburban research than they should have. This paper considers the challenges of researching past occupation. I begin with a overview of Postcolonial, Settler-Colonial and Decolonial theories. Case studies are brieflly reviewed for teaching purposes: Minneapollis-St. Paul suburbia, Indigenous Veterans housing, Winnipeg Metis settlements, the Oka Crisis, Caledonia Ontario land dispute and the Papaschase claim on suburban Edmonton.

• Date created

  2022-04-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • planning, Indigenous, suburbia, spatialisation, spatialization
  • Oka
  • Caledonia
  • Papaschase
  • Rooster Town
  • Minneapolois-St. Paul
  • Oka Quebec
  • Caledonia Ontario
  • Winnipeg
  • Rooster Town
  • Edmonton
  • Millwoods

• Type of Item

  Chapter

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-hqe7-5j38

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International