Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 20: Politicizing the urban park — with Selena Couture & Matt Hern
Speakers: Melissa Roach, Maria Cecilia Saba, Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, Rachel Wong, Am Johal, Selena Couture, Matt Hern
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Melissa Roach 0:13
You’re listening to Below the Radar, a knowledge mobilization project recorded out of 312 Main. This podcast is produced by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Maria Cecilia Saba 0:23
Below the Radar brings forward ideas to encourage meaningful exchanges across communities.
Jamie-Leigh Gonzales 0:28
Each episode we interview guests on topics ranging from environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community building, and urban issues. This podcast is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
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Rachel Wong 0:51
Hello, my name is Rachel Wong and I work for SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, and I’m excited to introduce our guests for Below the Radar this week. In this episode, we talked to Selena Couture and Matt Hern. Selena is an Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Alberta, and Matt is an author and community-based activist and organizer who teaches Urban Studies at SFU, Cape Breton University, and UBC. Matt and Selena are co-authors of the book On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land, that was published earlier this year by Fernwood Publishing. Together with our host Am Johal, Matt and Selena talk about land politics of parks as colonized spaces, as well as the ways different activities are regulated or policed on what is supposed to be public land.
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Am Johal 1:48
Great, really happy you could join us this week on Below the Radar. We’re here with Selena Couture and Matt Hern who have published a book, along with their daughters, Daisy and Sadie. The book is called On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land with Fernwood Press. Welcome!
Selena Couture 2:03
Thanks Am! Nice to be here.
Matt Hern 2:04
Thanks for having us, you guys.
Am Johal 2:06
Yeah, so I’m wondering if both of you could start with how the concept of the book came about.
Selena Couture 2:13
I guess there’s a few ways. One is that we’ve lived on one side or another of that park which is — it’s specific, I guess, it’s called On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land, but it is specifically engaged with a park in East Vancouver that we know as Bocce Ball Park, officially known as Victoria Park. It’s on Victoria Drive, and bordered by Kitchener, Grant, and Salisbury — it’s like a little city block — and we lived on one side or another of that park, really since 1990 — I don’t know, 91? Are we going to say 91? — okay sure, so a lot of years, and spent a lot of time in it, and both of us have an interest in the City of Vancouver, the parks, Indigenous lands, and thought that this would be a really interesting way to actually really engage with this place that we spend so much of our time, and our kids have spent so much of their time, thinking about, you know, what’s our relation to this park and other people’s relation to this park, and how can we have the best relations possible given the circumstances?
Matt Hern 3:23
That’s true, I agree with all that you said. There’s also a bunch of other (laughs) There’s also a whole bunch of, I’d say, interlocking factors, to think about that park. One is it’s just a place that I would say we know better than any other place in the city. We spent so much time there in so many different ways, and also that it is a place of so much — it’s a tiny little park, for those of you who don’t know it, it’s a small little park — and it’s full of all kinds of uses. There is, it’s called Bocce Ball Park because there’s a longstanding tradition of Italian bocce ball players who look like they’re standing around having a good time, but they’re actually gambling fiercely. So in any non-snowy or pouring rain day, there’s people gambling in the park. But there’s also a lot of social drinkers, there’s a lot of people, street engaged people, who use it as a safe zone. But there’s also a really nice playground, so there’s a lot of gentrifying, middle-class parents using the playground. There’s dog people. So there’s an intense level of usage in this one little tiny park, and in that, it’s a generally pieceable park, I would say. There’s certainly a consistent number of police incidents, less so now that Commercial Drive has become so gentrified over the last decade or so. But there still a certain number of volatility, certain amount of volatility, a certain number of police incidents and ambulances and first responder incidents, and that kinda gave us, thinking about that park and about how people how closely, of very diverse backgrounds and very diverse interests and very diverse activities interact in that park, gave us a way and an access point, I think, to thinking about land in a particular number of ways. In particular, for at least my end, is critiquing commons discourses. To think through about the, to my mind, the obnoxiousness, the commons discourses often are — the ways that commons discourses are used in an obnoxious way to paper over difference, to paper over issues of politics, to paper over issues of land theft. So using that park as a way to think through a whole number of issues, certainly thinking about Indigenous land, thinking about our own familial whiteness and our own familial settlerness, to think about residents, to think about ownership, to think about sovereignty, it seemed like a really fecund and robust way to think about land. And it’s really the patch of land that we know the most about.
Matt Hern 5:43
In a much more prosaic way, it’s a fun thing to do. It was something we wanted to do with our family, it’s something to do, and it’s certainly our family that did it — it’s me and Selena and our two biological kids — but there’s a huge number of other people that are involved. So there’s an intro by Denise Ferrera Da Silva, there’s an outro by Glen Coulthard, and there’s a huge number of interviews in the middle of the books, there’s like 15 different interviews of different kinds of park users. So certainly it’s a familial project, but it’s also a project of, that’s much more collaborative, even than that.
Selena Couture 6:13
Yes, and also you forgot to mention Erick Villagomez who did all the drawings of the park.
Matt Hern 6:17
My most sincere apologies, Erick!
Am Johal 6:19
Selena, when you were working on your dissertation, you were doing a lot of research related to Stanley Park. Did that play into how you were looking to researching how, around the park you live next to now?
Selena Couture 6:30
Oh, absolutely! I...my section of the book comes out of — the question I had, and was part of a question that I worked with in my doctoral research in Whoi Whoi — was thinking about when and how did the land change from Indigenous land to something that could be bought and sold. The story of Stanley Park is very clear because Stanley Park is fetishized in such a way that there is a numerous amount of historical research on that park, and I thought, it would be interesting asking that question of this really unassuming little patch of grass next to our house. When did that shift from being Indigenous land in the colonial imaginary to something that could be bought and sold? So that was the question I went in with, and in doing title searches and looking through the archives, found actually quite a sort of interesting story of Campbell and Heatley who bought it with all the rest of what has become East Van, and then following, you know, when did the — as the title changed hands from one settler to another, for whatever reasons I could trace, and turned out most of those people who were buying that land were all the people who’s — the streets of East Van are named after all of them. So kinda like, it gave me more of a sense of the story of East Vancouver and how it’s been, places have been named here that are quite related to this land. And as I was researching, and because I did all this other research on the history of Indigenous lands and performance and protest and resistance about colonial land theft here, I was able to kind of tell a parallel story of, as these White settlers were buying and selling this land and having it change hands, what were Indigenous people doing all along, which was loudly resisting and refusing that their land could be bought and sold in such a way. And it becomes a park in 1911, and from that time, has been a City, part of the City Parks and Recreation Board and managed by them, and that’s another interesting story because of the work in Vancouver with the city parks that’s going on right now.
Am Johal 8:42
I just ran into someone who works at the Parks Board and people are already talking about this book and the bureaucracy, because I think it talks about parks in a really novel way. Matt, you’ve written about parks before, and about cities and urbanizations. I’ve seen you in that park, organize potlucks, probably involved in sports and probably playing bocce as well! But I’m wondering if you can talk a bit about how to place your thinking about this book around what you’ve written about parks before in terms of messiness and noise and rules that bound parks as well as the kind of convey a certain type of way that public space ought to be utilized that’s being conveyed by the state or by neighbourhoods or by regulatory uses.
Matt Hern 9:21
There’s so much in there, and part of that is certainly the case which is that in parks are in urban planning and urban discourses, they’re often valourized as the ‘apex’ of urban life: it’s a free place, it’s a place where people can do anything they want, it’s a place where all kinds of people can gather, where all kinds of activity are permitted that wouldn’t be otherwise permitted, and in many ways that’s true, and many of those claims for the virtue of parks are super valid and are certainly the case for Bocce Ball Park. And while we want to talk about Bocce Ball Park in its specificity and its historical emergence, we’re trying to use Bocce as a larger example to think about parks in general and then to think even more about our relationship to land. Because it does appear at face value that parks are a place where all kinds of people can do all kinds of things. But take a second glance and you’ll realize that in fact, the activities that are permitted in parks are very closely prescribed. So for example, in a place like say Stanley Park or a place like Bocce, it is certainly fine to throw a ball, to walk a dog, to push your kid on a swings, in Bocce Ball Park, to play bocce — and those are all good things, those are, I’m glad people get to do those things in Bocce Ball Park. But what you all then notice is that there’s a much larger panoply of things that are disallowed, and Indigenous people, of course, will point that right away. So our friend Cease will say that the number of times she’s been disallowed from gathering herbs in Stanley Park, a place where her family’s traditionally grown up. That there are certain activities that are disallowed — some of those are commercial activities, some of those are ceremonial activities. But then there are a whole range of activities that are very closely prescribed — sometimes disallowed, sometimes regulated, sometimes part-only accessible via very obscure bureaucratic permitting process. So for example, a book launch for example, about a book, is explicitly denied in the park. We were doing a launch but despite my best efforts and despite my general pissiness about it, the park bureaucracy absolutely refused to let us do a book launch in the park, because it constituted a promotional activity, and there’s no such thing as promotional activities in the parks, except if you own a Cactus Club restaurant or you own a Stanley Park Tea House, and that kind of promotional activity is totally fine, or if you’re doing a film shoot. And what’s interesting about that is that parks pretend — like in so many other commons discourses — they pretend to be open. They pretend to be accessible and they pretend to be public when they’re not at all. They’re an area of activity with some very closely prescribed activities and a huge range of activities that are regulated, that are controlled, that are contained, and that are not permitted. And typically — what are permitted and what are not permitted — overlap very closely with the performative whiteness. And so the parks historically have been built in cities for very explicit class reasons — that is to say, there’s supposed to be safety valves to prevent any kind of class upswell of resentment, they’re supposed to be pacifying, they’re supposed to be sanitizing. Parks have always had a very particular kind of social pacification intent, and in this case, parks — in particular, in this part of the world, I would say — are maybe our most and most public attempts to perform whiteness on a public scale.
Am Johal 12:49
It’s amazing that you got your two daughters involved in this project as well! Can you talk a little bit about that process and the parts they wrote about, because they can’t be here right now?
Selena Couture 12:58
Yeah, both of them are busy right now.
Matt Hern 13:02
“Busy”! (laughs)
Selena Couture 13:08
They each contributed as they wanted to, or as they wanted to interact with the park. Daisy, for an entire year, every day for a year, she took a photo of the park from the same spot. And so her contribution is a short introductory essay about what it is she was doing and things that she learned from taking a photo every day from the same spot, and then a collection of photos. And those are grouped in the middle of the book, but also sort of occur throughout the book. Sadie designed a website, and actually all of the photos are on the website as well, so people can look at those, and they’re sort of a very, in some ways, very banal, kind of every day. Like, it’s just the same spot, the same photo, it’s the same path and the same lamp post, but they accumulate. They accumulate over the course of the year and it’s totally fascinating to see that. And Sadie did a series of interview — many of whom with people we know from the neighbourhood who we have, sort of, longstanding neighbourly relations with, some of whom we don’t know as well but are in the park a lot, and so she just went out into the park and interacted with people and just offered to them ‘We’re working on a book about this park, would you be interested in talking about it?’ And Matt, you can remember — what were the kind of questions she was asking? Like, it was kind of asking them how they...what do they think about the park? What’s their relation with the park? What do they… you know, those kinds of things.
Am Johal 14:48
Are you an on-leash or off-leash kind of person?
Matt Hern 14:51
Well, it was incredibly volatile. What’s interesting — she [Sadie] and I definitely went into the park and kind of hung out with and met people — but it was actually, I would say, more directed than that. Like she actually found a whole variety of different kinds of users from different kinds of perspectives who used the park for a whole bunch of different reasons. And one of the things — and then I would say that we also wrote the introduction, all four of us wrote the introduction together — but one of the things that Sadie found, and she would speak to this more fully and more articulate than I will, but one of the themes that run through that park and all parks is disputes about drinking. And one of the things, of course, you find when you’re hanging out with your kids in a circumstance like this is you find moments when you are prouder than you might’ve expected of them, which is super condescending and awful of me to say, and I apologize in advance to Sadie and Daisy. But there’s times when both of us are like, listening to what they said and editing pieces with them and talking and then you’re like “Nicely done kid, way to go!” And one of the things I think Sadie — yeah, I know! It’s true! It’s true though! (laughing) One of, I think Sadie’s best and most poignant observations that runs through all those interviews, is that every single person she interviewed complained about drinking in the park. And every single person she interviewed admitted to drinking in the park. And so, drinking in fact is a proxy for something else. That everybody likes — you know, some guy says ‘Well I like to have a glass of white wine and walk around the park when the moon’s out or something, but I don’t like all those people, you know, all those people under the trees drinking or whatever or there.’ Including people who drink in the park every day, because there’s a couple drinkers in the park, they complain about the drinkers themselves, and the drinking becomes a proxy for all kinds of other conversations, and so I think the interviews tease that out in a really interesting way and in a way that I think most people who are interviewed will be interested in but also a little bit chagrined about in some ways. Because taken in total, you can see the degree to which people presume that the park is theirs, which then uncovers in a really interesting way to me all kinds of these notions of sovereignty and about who owns a park and what are parks for.
Am Johal 17:02
Maria Cecilia Saba, who’ve been recording this interview, you’ve experienced parks but coming from Peru, where they’re utilized in a different way. In terms of what it feels like to be in Vancouver and how people inhabit park space, I wonder if you have any questions for Matt and Selena.
Maria Cecilia Saba 17:18
Well it’s definitely a different experience being in the parks here. For starters, the parks are very well kept. I see a lot of people enjoying and using the parks, there really seems to be a culture of using the parks and common areas and public spaces, which is not always the case in Lima at least. I feel that in Lima, people’s relationship with the parks changes greatly depending on what district they’re in. Like in some neighbourhoods, using the park can be considered somewhat dangerous, while in other areas people feel safer using the parks. It also happens that, because there aren’t many other public spaces available, people turn to the parks to do different collective activities, like — I don’t know, for example, drum circles, sports, open air workshops, or even celebrate patron saints. So the regulation of the parks can be very arbitrary and it’s not enforced equally in all the parks. So you may find parks that are very regulated and other parks that are less regulated and where everything can happen until a neighbour complains about it, and that will depend on who’s inhabiting the vicinity of the park and how they expect people to use those spaces. So it was interesting for me to see how the parks here have so many regulations and how one can use them so that everyone is happy, but at the same time, if you wanted to do spontaneous collective activity like a free outdoor screening or a party, you have to plan ahead and follow a specific protocol. So I feel that that kinda makes the parks lose a bit of their potential as a community building space.
Am Johal 18:55
Yeah, this repressed, over regulation piece seems to be a recurring theme around here.
Matt Hern 19:00
Right, and what’s interesting about that, is the Parks Board, the Vancouver Parks Board — I’m gonna get it wrong — but it’s something like, on their mission statement, they say they ‘try to provide enjoyment and recreation for all people at all times’ or something ridiculous like that, when it’s like, there’s literally 30 pages of very dense regulation about what you can and can’t do in the park. And those things are not random, like the Parks Board would like to present themselves, and parks people in general, like to try and present themselves as trying to become a public or be a common. And my argument, even though a park looks public, is highly not public. In fact it’s extraordinarily prescribed, and Indigenous people around the world are the most, and have been on top of this and the most articulate about this for a very long time. So for example, a provincial park or a national park, it’s highly encouraged for people to canoe, to hike, to camp, but if you’d like to hunt, or to trap, or to set up a fish line, absolutely not! And that of course is replicated at the park level. There’s some kinds of activity that are highly encouraged and are considered to be, oh that’s a good thing to do in public, go for a brisk walk, you know? Go and recreate yourself in Bocce Ball Park. But there are many other things that are absolutely not allowed, and so what appears to be public is a highly prescribed, highly regulated environment that encourages certain kinds of behaviours, in certain kinds of ways, in certain times, under very specific conditions. And that’s not public at all.
Selena Couture 20:41
As much as that is all gone over deeply in the book to a great extent, there’s also an interesting opportunity with parks that does happen because parks, particularly in Vancouver, which is such a place of intense capital and investment in land, and lack of access to land and then the speculation on land which has been part of the city since the very beginning part of it being a city, that parks are a place that are actually not a part of the market. So they are, there’s an idealized idea that parks are these commons that everybody has access to, and obviously that’s not true, there’s a way to critique that, but there’s also really, really important, that parks are not bought and sold in that same kind of way — there’s a different relationship to the land of parks. And I think it makes it possible, and I think the City of Vancouver’s Parks Board has actually doing incredible work on this, that it might be possible to create different relations with land in parks because they aren’t in that sense. And they have things like they’re complicated and they’re still being in process — the Stein Valley Park, which is now the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park, right, it is co-managed by the Nlaka’pamux people and the province, and there’s a number of park lands around that are in the process, I think, of being dismantled from some of those assumptions. Including the news today that the City of Quesnel have just returned the land to the Lhtako Dene people, like a park land in their city, and it will be an Indigenous cultural centre built there and a performance space. So there’s a part of, at least my chapter of the book is also trying to think that through, like yes we have this heritage that we all live with now in the system currently exists, but there’s an opportunity in parks that is really, really interesting.
Matt Hern 22:47
I would say that’s why we wrote the book, to think through that there actually are places in parks where you can get glimpses of a way to think through about alternative kinds of sovereignty, right? Other ways we can think through how to share land, and in many ways parks are so important that way, because the sovereignties are malleable and they’re participatory. There’s so many people that think that that park, even that little park, like all parks, is theirs and that they should be able to do what they wanna do in there. And so, there’s all this kind of intersection, this permeability and this malleability that is not available, say, in my backyard. My backyard is my backyard, and that’s mine — well, I don’t own it, the landlord owns it — and that’s it. There’s fixed certainties and fixed edges of sovereignty, where parks it becomes possible. I would say though that I think — and while you’re correct, I think to say on this, Selena — that there really is a lot of important work being done, the idea that parks are not part of the market, I think is...you and I should argue about that (laughs) Because of parks are part of the market, they are highly…
Selena Couture 23:47
Oh absolutely. They influence market and pricing and all that, of course.
Matt Hern 23:51
They’re leveraged like in the most deepest way, and parks are integral to gentrifying marketplaces. But I do agree with you on that that there is a plausibility for a market and there is some kind of genuflection towards commonness and parks that I think opens up possibilities, which is I think the central theme of the book or whatever, which is actually there’s an opportunity here to do something interesting. And clearly, the news from Quesnel is super interesting and there is some stuff that’s being done, say, in the City of Vancouver that I think we’re correct to be suspicious about because of the history of the Vancouver Parks Board and the history of parks in Canada, but also correct to be optimistic about as well, too in some ways. Or as least hopeful about.
Am Johal 24:33
How’s the noise level in the park these days?
Selena Couture 24:36
Same as always.
Matt Hern 24:37
Better.
Selena Couture 24:37
Depends what room you’re in in our house.
Matt Hern 24:39
Well, you’ve been to Bocce Ball Park! I mean, you got there in the summer time and there’ll be 15 groups of people drinking in the park. During the day there will be all kinds of really interesting activity happening and I think generally pieceable. But I also do think that the park is subject to the same kind of gentrification as Commercial Drive is, which is to say there are more cops there, that there are more homeowners now — for the first time in the last couple years in our entire life, I’ve seen nannies pushing babies, which is absurd. The park is subject to the same kinds of pressures and the same flows of capital that anywhere else is, so...and like Commercial Drive and East Vancouver, there’s still lots to love about it, and a lot to be chagrined about.
Am Johal 25:17
Selena, you’ve been teaching at the University of Alberta now and Matt, you’ve been doing a lot of work out in Surrey developing co-ops with refugees and newcomers. Wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.
Selena Couture 25:30
Sure, I’m teaching in the drama department at the University of Alberta. I was hired as the Canadian theatre specialist, and so I teach grad courses and undergrad courses in theatre history, theory, and then because my specialty is about Indigenous performance, land and language, I also teach some grad courses in that. And it’s actually been a really incredible opportunity. Before I was hired at U of A, I didn’t really think of myself as a Canadian theatre specialist, although I am a 11th generation descendent of French settlers to this land, and my family has been here since the 1600s, so yes, the Canadian-ness is a huge part of my existence, right? So definitely I would have to say I’m an expert in that (laughs) But it also gives me a great opportunity because my specialty has been to focus on Indigenous performance and land and the constructions of whiteness, that that’s how I work to teach and think about Canadian theatre and sort of ideas of cultural hegemony and the ways that theatre has been a piece of that nation building process, particularly in the last 50 years, and then also really trying to bring into conversation as a — like, the courses I’m teaching right now is a course that is looking at theatrical works in the last 50 years, but kind of cycling through Francophone, Indigenous, and Anglophone works and trying to get them to be in conversation with each other. So it’s great, it’s a incredible university, the fact they have Native studies there is huge and growing and so powerful, it’s a pretty amazing opportunity to be on Treaty 6 land, Metis homelands, Amiskwacîwâskahikan, and like — after spending so much time learning here what does it mean to be unceded territory, the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish nations, and then moving to a place that’s the plains, it’s dry, it’s flat. There’s a river — the river, is really, really important. I walk in the river valley all the time — and it’s a place of Treaty, and like understanding what does it mean to have signed a treaty and to have those agreements broken, and to live in responsible relations to the treaty that exists. It's like a really, quite an amazing learning experience all around.
Am Johal 28:00
Matt, what’s this work that you’re doing south of the Fraser.
Matt Hern 28:08
(laughs) You had it right, I start co-ops with kids. What else do you want?
Am Johal 28:13
What kind of stuff are you doing? Maven’s Media is one of them.
Selena Couture 28:19
Promo opportunity!
Matt Hern 28:23
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right (laughs) Thank you, fine. About 7 years ago, an old man who you and I are both acquainted with, who had appointed himself my occasional mentor, looked at me and said, “Matt, the East Vancouver you think you’re working with is not in East Vancouver anymore.” He said, “East Vancouver is in Surrey now.” And I didn’t want that to be true and I knew he was correct. And so I started going out to Surrey, about 6 or 7 years ago I started going out to Surrey, maybe even longer than that, because I knew he was right. I knew, in his indelicate words, that East Vancouver had always been the dumping ground for the city, and that Surrey was now serving that role. That working class families, that poor families, immigrants, refugees, migrants, newcomers of all kinds are settling in Surrey first and foremost because the housing market is so hostile and so unamenable for people without tremendous amounts of wealth. That Surrey is becoming the, an incredibly vibrant place that very few people know much about, and certainly that included me. I had lived in Vancouver for 25 years and probably been in Surrey twice, and never stopped and knew nothing about Surrey. So I started doing research there, about 6 or 7 years ago, and started gathering some colleagues and friends, including friends Josiane and Aklilu and Isaac and started doing as much investigation as we could and tried to figure out a way that we could contribute to the landscape of Surrey. And we settled on a project called the, that we’d been building out of the last 3 or 4 years, called Solid State Community Industries, and we take small groups of newcomer kids, link them with mentors, and build workers’ cooperatives with them. And we’ve launched three so far and we have a whole series of other ones en route coming.
Am Johal 30:15
Cool. Well thank you both for joining us, and once again for everyone, the book is called On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land and it’s by Daisy, Sadie, and Selena Couture and Matt Hern.
Matt Hern 30:27
Thanks for having us you guys.
Selena Couture 30:28
Thanks very much!
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Rachel Wong 30:37
Thanks for listening. That was our conversation with Matt Hern and Selena Couture. You can read more about the book and order it online on the Fernwood Publishing website. We’ve also linked to it in the episode description. Thank you Matt and Selena for joining us, and thanks to our production team, and of course thanks to you for tuning in. We’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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