Bio-gentrification: vulnerability bio-value chains in gentrifying neighbourhoods^†

Intimate constraints: a feminist political economy analysis of biological reproduction and parenting in high-support housing in Ontario

“…Such research would be an especially timely contribution to scholarship exploring how public policies, especially those targeting children and women, are being designed to produce political subjectivities compatible with the current processes of capitalist accumulation (Smith, 2010;Murray, 2015).…”

“…However, the gendered, raced, classed and cisheteronormative hierarchy of human bodies, and a preoccupation about which bodies reproduce, what kinds of bodies are reproduced, and what social norms are cultivated through family structures and practices remains in place, mobilized in new ways with the (re)penetration of market rule in all aspects of life under neoliberalism (see, for e.g., Hubbard, 2006;Smith, 2010;Murray, 2015;Ignangi and Fudge Schormans, 2016). It is within the current conjuncture that the intimate constraints in high-support housing in Ontario can be located.…”

“We Don’t Belong There”: New Geographies of Homelessness, Addiction, and Social Control in Vancouver’s Inner City

“…As they were moved into supportive housing facilities like St. Mary’s, most felt increasingly trapped within downtown Vancouver’s “community of clients,” to borrow a phrase from Gordon Roe (2009/2010). They found themselves both increasingly “fixed in place” (Roe /, 75) and “fixed in time” (Murray , 293), in the sense of being unable to actualize futures outside of supportive housing and the other institutional settings in which they were enmeshed. In this context, relapses and drug binges were often articulated by youth as “just the way things are” for “people like them,” who consistently found themselves “going nowhere” in places like First Nations reserves, foster care homes, juvie, shelters, and supportive housing buildings.…”

“…This work has demonstrated how state‐sponsored processes of gentrification are often accompanied by the forcible removal of homeless people from areas of city that they previously inhabited, and their banishment to the margins of urban space (that is, until these skid rows, too, begin to undergo gentrification). However, it has been argued that this punitive frame can obscure the new geographies of homelessness, addiction, and social control that are emerging in response to neoliberal political and economic restructuring, including geographies of social mixing (DeVerteuil, May, and von Mahs ; Murray ). Indeed, in Vancouver the revitalization of the inner city has not meant the removal of the visibly destitute, homeless, and addicted from the downtown core.…”

“…Vancouver’s commitment to revitalization without displacement has resulted in the embedding of urban poverty within the prime real estate of the downtown core (Murray ). And yet, in this paper we argue that

the effect for many young people has been new forms of dislocation and disappearance in the city

…”