EXPROPRIATION

Legally speaking, expropriation is the act of taking away property or assets for the benefit of public use, usually by the state. This process involves the transfer of ownership rights to someone else against the will of the original owners. In urban planning, expropriation is considered as a major instrument of land policy that implies people’s relocation. However, if we consider this concept in more abstract terms, then expropriation necessarily starts with exploration. Following this view, the human spirit finds nourishment in pursuing the unknown, either because of curiosity, ambition, or necessity. In this process, colonizing foreign lands has become a widespread practice, and a dominant doctrine in today’s world order. When exploration is not enough, the idea of discovery is used as a tool to claim the right to own a place, bodies, and ideas. However, claiming individual property rights to a plot of land inevitably involves multiple stakeholders, as well as their needs and interests. The mere presence of the other makes this process of claiming property rights highly complex. In these instances, expropriation is a tool that makes space for the ones claiming exclusive ownership and use of land, and erases others. To expropriate means that in a relationship between different groups of people, there is a group that is recognized as more important than the others.

In the North American context, the strategy used by European settlers to claim Indigenous land as their own was intended to break the bond between the Indigenous peoples and their territories through a series of assimilation policies and displacement tactics. The colonial dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas is one of the most extreme forms of expropriation that happened in the continent because it concerns thousands of Indigenous nations and spanned for several hundred years. Due to this long history of expropriations, Indigenous villages and heritage sites are rendered invisible compared to other non-Indigenous cultural groups. The expropriation of Indigenous people is a process of physical and symbolic removal because it involves taking peoples, identities, and cultures out of their physical and ideological spaces.

Expropriation is also a denial of someone’s presence in law, which dictates re-positioning, re-location in, and removal from space. The Canadian federal government’s attempt to deny Indigenous people’s inherent rights to the land as ancestral inhabitants in the Constitution and the Indian Act legislation of 1876 are examples of legal expropriation of certain communities that have real material consequences on their lives. For Indigenous people, it is a loss of a distinct connection to a space they inhabited for centuries, and a negation of distinct ways of knowing that emerged from that specific place on Earth. Therefore, the denial of the Indigeneity of First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples significantly alters the geographies of relationality and the identities that are attached to them. Other non-Indigenous communities who experienced displacement and discrimination as a result of government-mandated mega-projects and urban gentrification have also been denied this relationality, although through different mechanisms.

Furthermore, expropriation can be justified by certain governments and companies in the name of scientific advancements. Modern telescopes and radio stations have been built on unceded Indigenous lands to allow Euro-Canadian and American settlers to explore unknown territories, driven by a desire of knowing. Paradoxically, it is from these same unceded Indigenous territories that space stations and institutions are attempting to colonize outer space. Therefore, a sustainable practice of spatial exploration involves a recognition of the colonial nature of these institutions, while deconstructing the colonizing forces that continue on Earth and attempt to reach outer space.

Ultimately, expropriation follows a logic of imposing a vision on the land and physically enacting it, while purposefully ignoring the complexity of societal life. It is about deciding what matters the most: a short-lived but spectacular event like the Expo 67 world fair and an avant-gardiste mega-project like the Mirabel airport were considered more important than an urban working-class neighbourhood or a rural community (respectively). The argument in favour of these development projects was that they would put Montréal on the map, and that they would bring modernity and economic prosperity to the Quebec province. In the name of progress, government officials justified expropriation as a means towards making monetary profit. But for ordinary people, it meant losing their homes and a collective identity.

The concept of expropriation in this research allowed us to understand many things; that the rationale behind progress cannot embody a human dimension when only profit is considered as its driving force. It is necessary to enlarge the understanding of prosperity beyond a strictly monetary sense, where cultural diversity, environmental sustainability, and solidarity are also part of the equation. Just as the construction of knowledge is possible through sharing memories and understandings from different moments in time and different cosmovisions, progress needs to be understood as a collaborative process that involves different social groups working together in symbiosis.

Ultimately, what needs to be expropriated from our worldview is the idea that places and bodies can be owned and can be disposable. Evidence has shown that colonialism, capitalism, and gentrification take root in the same idea; that profit is more valuable than social equality and respect for human dignity, and that the exploitation of communities can be justified for economic gains. What this capitalist view fails to grasp is that space is nothing without people, and the expropriation of communities denaturalizes a space and renders it sterile overtime. It seeks to separate between entities that are, in essence, inseparable. The presence of so many unoccupied and abandoned sites in the city is, in fact, a living proof of that attempted separation by capitalist forces. Expropriation, therefore, invites us to pause and rethink how humans and space are indeed interconnected, when speculation on real estate, ownership rules, and private property mandates attempt to assert otherwise.