2024 Warren Gill Lecture: Belongings Matter with Nick Blomley

About Nick Blomley

Nicholas is a professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University and was awarded the 2023 Warren Gill Award for Community Impact. He has a long standing interest in legal geography, particularly in relation to property. He is interested in the spatiality of legal practices and relationships, and the worldmaking consequences of such legal geographies. 

Much of his empirical work concerns the often oppressive effects of legal relations on marginalized and oppressed people. Recent and current research projects, often in collaboration with others, include a) the analysis of ‘rental precarity’ in Greater Vancouver; b) the study of court-imposed ‘red zones’ imposed on street-involved people and protestors in Montreal and Vancouver; c) the dispossession of Japanese-Canadians in the 1940s; d) a community-based project creating tenant-led research into precarious housing conditions in Vancouver’s most vulnerable population and e) the governance of poor people’s possessions by private and public regulators in Canadian cities. 

He is also trying to unpack the relationship between territory and property, and is interested in the practice of urban commoning. Past research has focused on topic such as gentrification, panhandling, urban gardening, and indigenous-state treaties.

Connie Long

Connie Marie Long is an Indigenous advocate for vulnerable communities with lived experiences who does work in Chilliwack and Abbotsford. She has experience with addiction and she is passionate about what she does.

Alexandra Flynn

Professor Alexandra Flynn’s teaching and research focus on municipal law and governance, administrative law, and property law. She has published numerous peer-reviewed papers, public reports, media articles, and a book on how cities are legally understood in law and how they govern, including the overlapping geographies and governance of city spaces, and the formal and informal bodies that represent residents. She is the Director of the Housing Research Collaborative, which comprises CMHC and SSHRC-funded projects focused on Canada’s housing crisis: the Housing Assessment Resource Tools project, which helps communities to measure and address their housing need; and the Balanced Supply of Housing Node, which brings together academic and non-profit community organizations to research responsive land use practices and the financialization of housing. She is also working on several projects related to precariously housed people in Canadian cities, including the governance of personal property of precariously housed people, and human rights and tent encampments.

About the Annual Warren Gill Lecture Series

Before his passing in 2010, Warren Gill dedicated his 33-year career to helping build SFU’s definition of the university as an integral part of our community. Gill joined SFU ’s geography department in 1977 and quickly became a champion for the creation of a downtown Vancouver campus. He held a number of senior administrative positions, his last as vice-president, university relations. He was passionately engaged in the cities and neighbourhoods in which he lived and worked. He worked constantly to make life in the city more interesting and more inclusive. The intent of the Warren Gill lecture series in his honour is to continue his questioning, raise new ideas and invoke new ways of thinking about life in the urban context.