Settler-Colonial Urbanisms: Convergences, Divergences, Limits

Presenting author: Elora Raymond (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Land acquisition is a core concern of colonial interests, and transformation of property relations a core tactic. However, contemporary logics of financialisation differ in their aims and techniques from prior instances of global capitalism (Bhandar, 2018); moreso than in the past, processes of displacement and dispossession proceeds through financialisation.

In this research, I describe the work of O le Siosiomaga and IDI in Samoa to contest a series of Asian Development Bank (ADB) customary land reforms. I describe the particular logics of financialisation applied to transnational, kinship based forms of land ownership, and the engagement of the diaspora in contesting these reforms. I show how ADB reforms like the Accountability process can be used as a tool for community power, but also to further financialisation goals.

The ADB reforms emphasise the land's ability to provide security, not to the industrious laborer, but to the investor. Reform under financialization does not require individualization of tenure, instead consolidating control through legal processes and dispossessing diasporic land owners of ancillary property rights to facilitate the circulation of land as collateral for assets in financial markets.

Presenting author: Nathan McClintock (Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS))

Other authors: (David Hugill, Carleton University), Stephane Guimont Marceau (INRS)

Panelists: Natchee Blu Barnd (Oregon State University), Naama Blatman (University of Sydney), Tina Grandinetti (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Lara Kramer (choreographer), Naomie Leonard (INRS), Kyle Mays, (Universtiy if California, Los Angeles), James Oscar (INRS), Libby Porter (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Michael Simpson (University of St Andrews), Julie Tomiak (Carleton University)

A growing body of scholarship has focused on the intersections of settler-colonialism and the production of urban space, demonstrating how urbanisation and settler colonisation have been and continue to be co-constitutive processes, both undergirding and undergirded by territorial theft, racial regimes of property and capitalist accumulation, and the attempted erasure of Indigenous lifeworlds and sovereignties.

Rather than collapsing settler-colonial urbanism into a singular narrative, however, we are interested in understanding how processes of settler-urbanisation unfold in a variety of geographic contexts and how it is unsettled. Bringing together voices from a range of settler-colonial societies, the goal of this series of two panels is to reflect on the convergences and divergences of settler-colonial production of urban space, as well as on settler urbanism's limits and possibilities, both as an analytical lens and as a means of re-imagining cities as sovereign Indigenous spaces.