“Ongoing harm under a prettier,brighter umbrella”: A critical analysis of reconciliation talk in Canadian settler philanthropy

Engagement with the concept of reconciliation, broadly understood as the process or goal of transforming relations among Canada's Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, became commonplace in the philanthropic sector after the 2015 release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Institutional responses to the TRC (e.g., by universities, businesses, healthcare institutions, governments, etc.) have been widely discussed in the academic literature—lauded by some as pivotal to the transformation of Indigenous/settler relations, and critiqued by many as no more than a shift in rhetoric covering over ongoing racialized colonial violence. Through a critical analysis of reconciliation talk as articulated through blog posts, press articles, conference recordings, webinars, and professional development resources produced by and for progressive settler philanthropy from 2012 to 2020, this essay analyses the hearty uptake of reconciliation in the sector. I bring these texts into dialog with the larger body of critiques of reconciliation, with the aim of interrogating settler philanthropy's place and roles in Canada's settler colonial order, past, and present. I focus on common terms and concepts that appear in conjunction with reconciliation talk such as diversity and inclusion; community-engagement and relationship building; learning and listening. I also explore instances of obfuscation and renaming, such as a scarcity of explicit references to race and racism, colonialism and white supremacy and a tendency to relegate colonialism to the past in texts produced by non-Indigenous authors. The themes I identify across these texts resemble those apparent in other institutional contexts. Reconciliation talk has potential to transform how settler philanthropy engages with Indigenous communities. Yet, many of the most urgent critiques raised in other fields apply to this context. Ultimately, I conclude, reconciliation talk may elevate and uphold—and indeed conceal—the white supremacist, colonial status quo in settler philanthropy and in Canada more broadly. Occlusions and renaming common to settler philanthropy's reconciliation talk contribute to what Vimalassery et al. describe as “colonial unknowing” and what Tuck and Yang call “settler moves to innocence.” In these ways, reconciliation serves a mystifying function for settler philanthropy, masking ongoing coloniality, absolving settler guilt, and avoiding more radical, transformative possibilities.     

URBAN REGENERATION IN SEOUL: Alternative Urbanism or the Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism?

Park Won-soon, the former mayor of Seoul, put forward a new vision of Seoul as a progressive city, and one of his signatures was the promotion of a new urban regeneration policy called the Seoul-type Urban Regeneration Model (SUR). It was first presented as a solution to compressed and profit-oriented urban redevelopment but evolved into an alternative model which conveyed the worlding desire of the Seoul Metropolitan Government to redefine Asian urbanism beyond developmentalism or neoliberalism. In this article, we argue that the SUR demonstrates a mixture of post-developmentalist features and the lingering impact of neoliberal rationalities. Specifically, we problematize SUR's hybrid aspirations for urban competitiveness, improved quality of life and participatory governance by articulating how the pursuit of a globally competitive city conflicts with and overrides other values and how citizen-centered governance was exploited as an efficient mechanism of neoliberal urbanism.     

城市中心区的街道设计策略

城市郊区化和街道荒漠化是当前城市建设所面临的重要问题.为了避免城市中心区的衰退,建设富有活力的街道空间,提高城市公共空间品质,需要调整现行的技术主义的街道交通设计策略,实施城市主义的街道设计策略,使得街道空间真正成为能够结构社区的市民生活空间.     

On the dynamics of fluidity and open-endedness of strategy process toward a strategy-as-practicing conceptualization

The paper aims to contribute to the advancement of our understanding of how strategy practice processually unfolds. It directs attention to temporal relationality, accounting for a philosophical contextualization of practice in the application of the lived experience perspective. As pointed out, practitioners entwine with activities that constitute a nonlinear fluid and open strategy process. It accords to future-oriented movements a dimension of a past, and a dimension of a future to past-oriented movements. What is crucial are not linearity, event, cause, and an entity that moves but present future-oriented and present past-oriented movements, chiseled out by nouns and verbs and their interlinks. Present–future and present–past orientations also account for the iterational, projective and practical-evaluative dimensions of temporal relationality.     

What Role for Social Science in the ‘Urban Age'?

There is growing recognition of a new human ascendancy: ‘the urban age’. Rising interest in urbanism is evident in popular literature, the media and major global institutions. And yet, as with another great issue of the age, global warming, there is evidence that social science is being sidelined from a rapidly enlarging field of human concern. New urban knowledges are forwarded from the physical sciences and from popular commentary that are characterized by naturalism and its kindred tendencies, especially determinism. In this essay I consider why social scientific urbanism seems increasingly marginal to an ever broadening urban discussion. The regressive consequences for human knowledge and prospect are essayed. The essay's final part is prospectus: for a revivified social scientific urbanism that draws from Sayer's recent argument for renewal of critical human knowledge.     

新城市主义与现代住区规划

我国当前城市住区规划建设中存在着一系列突出问题,这些问题违背了我国现代住区建设的目标要求.分析了国外新城市主义的规划设计思想和理念,指出其具有多方面的积极价值,可以为我国的住区规划建设提供有益启示.     

Neoliberal Urbanism Redux?

Neoliberalization processes have been reshaping the landscapes of urban development for more than three decades, but their forms and consequences continue to evolve through an eclectic blend of failure and crisis, regulatory experimentation, and policy transfer across places, territories and scales. The proliferation of familiar neoliberal discourses and policy formulations in the aftermath of the 2007‐09 world financial crisis masks evidence of more deeply rooted transformations of policies, institutions and spaces that continue to combatively remake terrains of urban development. Accordingly, the critical intellectual project of deciphering the problematic of neoliberal urbanism must continue to evolve. This essay outlines some of the methodological and political challenges associated with (re)constructing a ′moving map′ of post‐crisis neoliberalization processes. We affirm a form of critical urban theory that adopts a restlessly antagonistic stance towards orthodox urban formations and their dominant ideologies, institutional arrangements and societal effects, tracking their endemic policy failures and crisis tendencies while at the same time demarcating potential terrains for heterodox, radical and/or insurgent theories and practices of emancipatory social change.     

基于“新都市主义”的混合社区:城市郊区化的一个新思路

在中国诸多大中城市郊区化进程中,一个非常显著的现象是:高档和低档住宅的二元分立,从而破坏了人们居住空间的复合性及和谐性.造成这一现象的根本原因并非人们的"阶层"意识,而是城市郊区化的潜在思路:仅仅关照人们的居住,却没有关照人们的生活,人们的完整生活在郊区化过程中被割裂了.解决这一问题的出路是构建混合式社区,而其理论基础是新都市主义.     

后现代的新城市主义与中国城市规划

讨论了现代主义、后现代主义与新城市主义在城市规划领域的思想核心和主要观点,结合中国城市规划的特点,从城市规划各个方面探讨了新城市主义对中国城市规划的启示,并论述了新城市主义在中国应用的实际与前景.