"Canada's major cities have faced the humanitarian disaster of homelessness for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare a massive deficit in social programs and widespread inattention to human rights. Are municipal public services designed to essentially produce displacement? Or can we do something to end the growing problem of urban homelessness in Canada? In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe illuminate this infrastructure of displacement through prose, poetry, and photography. Contributors to the book, including those with lived experience of homelessness in Toronto, report on the realities of the situation and how people responded: by providing disaster-relief supplies and tiny shelters for encampments, by advocating for shelter-hotels where people could physically distance, by taking the city to court, and by rising up against encampment evictions. The book provides particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic. This collection of first-hand accounts shows how people are fighting back for homes. It also mourns the hundreds of preventable deaths that resulted from an unjust shelter system and the lack of a national housing program. Offering rich stories of care, mutual aid, and solidarity, Displacement City provides a vivid account of a national tragedy."--
What can we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating effects on the homeless population in Toronto? Displacement City shares the stories of frontline workers, advocates, and people living without homes during this unprecedented crisis.
In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe present the stories of frontline workers, advocates, and people living without homes during the pandemic. The book uses prose, poetry, and photography to document lived experiences of homelessness, responses to the housing crisis, efforts to fight back for homes, and possible solutions to move Toronto forward. Contributors provide particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic. Offering rich stories of care, mutual aid, and solidarity, Displacement City provides a vivid account of a humanitarian disaster.
Arvustused
"Anyone who visited downtown Toronto during the pandemic knows the devastating and powerful impact it had on the citys homeless. Outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe have a deep knowledge of the people behind the statistics and the headlines, and here create a better understanding of how policies affect people. In this powerful book, they have collected poetry, photography, essays that tell the stories of front-line workers, advocates, people who are unhoused. These include experiences living in the shelter system, displacement, the legacy of residential schools and the experience of the Indigenous population. A unique and powerful account."
- Deborah Dundas (Toronto Star)
Muu info
Winner of 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Social Justice awarded by Foreword Reviews 2023 (United States).
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
Cathy Crowe and Greg Cook
Part I: We Are [ Not] in This Together
1. "Displaced Again and Again and Again"
Nikki Sutherland
2. The Housing Crisis and the Indian Residential School Legacy
Blue Sky, Leaders from the Houseless Community, Sandra Campbell, and Leigh
Kern
3. Inconvenient Bodies and Torontos History of Displacement
Lorraine Lam and Greg Cook
4. Displaced There, Displaced Here
Jenn McIntyre and Steve Meagher
5. Dystopian Realities
Michael Eschbach
Part II: Fighting Back
6. Responsibility Downloaded: How Drop-in Centres Stepped Up and Pushed Back
during the Pandemic
Diana McNally
7. Surviving COVID-19 in the Shelter System
Brian Cleary
8. Social Murder: We Need More than Band Aids
Roxie Danielson
9. Slipped through the Fingertips of the System?
Greg Cook and Dredzz
10. The Toronto Encampment Support Network Fights Back
Simone Schmidt with Photos by Jeff Bierk
11. Wish You Were Here
Zoe Dodd
12. Fighting Ableism
Jennifer Jewell
Poem: Our Wilderness
Zachary Grant
13. Palliative Care in a Pandemic
Trevor McNally and Naheed Dosani
Profile: Building Tiny Homeless Shelters
Canadian Human Rights Commission
Poem: Lord We Pray
Zachary Grant
Graphic by Michael D.
Part III: COVID-19 in the Courts
14. In the Parks and in the Courts: The Legal Fight against Encampment
Evictions
A.J. Withers and Derrick Black
15. COVID-Life
Sarah White
16. Two Metres
Doug Johnson Hatlem, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, and Geetha Philipupillai
17. Homelessness, Housing, and Human Rights Accountability
Leilani Farha
Poem: There Is a Development Proposed for This Site
Zachary Grant
Afterword
Author Bios
Greg Cook is an outreach worker at Sanctuary Toronto. He partners with many community groups to advocate for a more just society. He is on the steering committee of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network and volunteers for the Toronto Homeless Memorial. He has worked on two documentaries: Bursting at the Seams, about the shelter crisis, and What World Do You Live In, about police brutality.
Cathy Crowe is a recipient of the Order of Canada and a pioneer of street nursing. She is currently a public affiliate in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. She has fostered numerous coalitions and advocacy initiatives that have achieved significant public policy victories, including the 1998 Disaster Declaration. She is the author of A Knapsack Full of Dreams and Dying for a Home and producer of the Home Safe documentary series. Her work is the subject of the documentary Street Nurse, by filmmaker Shelley Saywell.
Robyn Maynard is an assistant professor of Black feminisms in Canada in the Historical and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Fernwood, 2017) and the co-author of Rehearsals for Living (Knopf/Haymarket, 2022).
Shawn Micallef is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness (McClelland & Steward, 2016), Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Coach House, 2010), and The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure (Coach House, 2014). He is a weekly columnist at the Toronto Star and a senior editor and co-owner of the independent, Jane Jacobs Prize-winning magazine Spacing. Shawn teaches at the University of Toronto and was a 201112 Canadian Journalism Fellow at Massey College. In 2002, while a resident at the Canadian Film Centres Media Lab, he co-founded [ murmur], the location-based mobile phone documentary project that spread to over twenty-five cities globally.
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