In the course of my volunteering with Downtown Eastside-based social justice advocacy organization Pivot Legal, I encountered and interacted with many different facets of this vibrant neighbourhood that I never knew existed before. Through my time interacting with residents, distributing streetpapers, organizing contests, and attending local events, the one thing that struck me the most was the unifying sense of community which permeated this area. Everywhere I looked, locals were taking pride in and rallying around the everyday achievements of those who lived in this impoverished neighbourhood. In this blogpost, I would like to use the Carnegie Community Centre’s biweekly newsletter as an example to discuss this sense of communal identity in the context of the DTES’s social and political positioning in relation to society at large.
As I wrote in an earlier post (which you can find here), community newsletters can be a very effective instrument for the creation, maintenance, and transmission of communal identities. Indeed, the Megaphone streetpaper is a fantastic example of how DTES residents can fashion a positive and constructive self-identity. The articles, editorials, and photographs found in Megaphone “cultivate and propagate a narrative that valorized the day-to-day efforts of the DTES community to survive and to fight for its own rights in wider society”. The same can be said for the content of the Carnegie Community Centre’s newsletter, which publishes cultural programs, local workshops, editorials, and creative writing by residents. One can easily see from the language being used (“making our community led festival such a success”, “talented people… in the downtown eastside”, “our beloved community”) (Carnegie Newsletter) that building an affirmative self-identity is a central theme of this newsletter. Incidentally, the Centre’s “Monthly Speaker Series” for November features none other than Dr. Tom Kemple, the UBC faculty sponsor for the student-directed seminar that is conducting this blog. Suffice to say, this newsletter is a platform for promoting activities designed to enrich the cultural and recreational experiences of people living in the DTES.
However, this is not the only way in which the Carnegie Newsletter engages in community-building. As can be seen in many of the editorials and creative writing pieces, the newsletter is also engaged in discussing the problems faced by the DTES. However, it does so in a way that is completely different from the journalism found in mainstream media, which tends to utilize an almost uniformly negative “rhetoric of ‘skid row’” to position the DTES as dangerous, diseased, and destitute (Ley & Dobson 14). Most of all, the media has an overwhelming tendency to blame the residents of the DTES as responsible for these conditions (Liu & Blomley 130). Even a cursory reading of the latest issue of the Newsletter will reveal that that is not how the locals see themselves.
In fact, instead of accepting this externally-imposed burden of responsibility for their misfortunes, the Newsletter allows DTES locals to make and disseminate claims that are in alignment with what the sociologist C. Wright Mills calls the “sociological imagination” (4). This perspective allows people to see their “personal troubles” in the context of “the public issues of social structure”, which constrains the opportunities available to individuals and defines the choices that they are able to make (4). In essence, the sociological imagination allows people to see beyond the limit of their individual circumstances and realize that certain problems are “incapable of personal solution” and thus beyond the reductive notion of individualized blame circulated by mainstream journalism (6). This line of thinking can be seen in editorial after editorial identifying “big money”, “the malicious media”, “greedy developers”, “measly welfare cheques”, “collapsing SROs” (single room occupancy), etc. (Carnegie Newsletter) as the true causes of the denigrated living conditions of the DTES. In this way, the Newsletter also becomes a vehicle through which residents can make counter-claims that politicize the issues of the DTES and resist mainstream typifications.
By situating the roots of the “personal troubles” faced by those living in this neighbourhood in wider social structures such as welfare policy, free-market capitalism, and social housing, these editorials shine a more positive light on their communal identity while making the problems that they face rallying points around which locals can organize to make demands for change. In fact, this phenomenon is one that has been conceptualized by Ley and Dobson in their study on gentrification in Vancouver as a “distinctive local moral culture that accepts the right to the city for poor people” that is the product of “sustained political mobilisation” (2494). Clearly, the Carnegie Newsletter acts as a vibrant, grassroots-oriented platform for this mobilisation. It is an excellent example of one way through which a stigmatized group can create a constructive communal identity around which they can organize to make political claims for social justice.
“Carnegie Newsletter.” Carnegie Community Centre. N.p., 15 Nov. 2014. Web. 23 Nov. 2014.
Ley, David, and Cory Dobson. “Are there limits to gentrification? The contexts of impeded gentrification in Vancouver.” Urban Studies 45.12 (2008): 2471-2498.
Liu, Sikee, and Nicholas Blomley. “Making news and making space: Framing Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 57.2 (2013): 119-132.
Mills, C. Wright. “The promise of sociology.” Seeing ourselves (1959): 1-6.