Cultural Space as Resistance: Racialized and Immigrant Communities’ Artistic Practices and the Political Economy of Urban Development in Canadian Cities

Introduction

Canada is a settler colonial state that promotes its multicultural diversity for political and economic reasons.¹ An understanding of the history of cultural erasure and resistance within the context of Canada’s political economy is rooted in recognizing Canada as a settler colonial state. As described by Lorenzo Veracini, “whereas colonialism reinforces the distinction between colony and metropole, settler colonialism erases it.”² Therefore, erasure is a significant part of settler colonialism, as is the resistance to this erasure. In terms of my own positionality, I identify as a settler in relation to Indigenous communities, and belong to a racialized minority community in relation to the majority communities in Canada. The context of Canada as a settler colonial state has shaped the waves of settlers and immigrants who were initially of European origin, and are now non-European immigrants. Through the process of colonization, the earlier European immigrants have accumulated a critical mass of political and economic capital to become the dominant culture, and original Indigenous communities and subsequent non-European immigrants have been subordinated in terms of cultural equity. The demographic difference in waves of immigrants consequently affects the establishment of cultural spaces, based on the dominant culture that has accumulated greater generational political and economic resources, and its changing relationship with other subordinated cultures that have had deliberately limited opportunities to build political and economic resources. To maintain the established social hierarchy, the dominant culture needs to exclude subordinated cultures from accumulating resources, including permanent physical cultural spaces, to maintain a structural equilibrium in political economy dynamics.³ At the same time whenever there is a structural hegemony, there is a simultaneous resistance,⁴ and this article focuses on highlighting this resistance to the exclusion of subordinated cultures from permanent cultural spaces. As explained by Doreen Massey, “space is by its very nature full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and co-operation.”⁵

The dynamic struggle over space described by Massey is underscored in this article through examining the continuity of different cultures as having an intrinsic connection to occupation of physical space by racialized communities in Canada. The article introduces the topic of conflict over cultural space by highlighting Canada as a settler colonial state, where the initial cultural erasure has been an essential column in the process of colonization.⁶ One of the primary objectives of settler colonialism is the acquisition of land by settlers from Indigenous communities. This occupation of land by settlers is continuously resisted by Indigenous communities, from reserves designated as Indigenous space by different governments in Canada⁷ to the reclamation of Indigenous space in urban centres by developing Indigenous cultural organizations and related physical spaces for Indigenous culture.⁸ The settlement of land in Canada required the simultaneous project of erasure of Indigenous culture,⁹ since strong Indigenous cultures are more effective at resisting the assimilation of their lands. The colonial settlement of land, ongoing resistance to this process, reconciliation and revitalization of Indigenous culture has always been a political economic endeavour.¹⁰ 

Reconciliation between settler and Indigenous communities in Canada requires both restoration of land-based treaty rights while simultaneously strengthening and enabling land-based cultural activities¹¹ towards realising healthy Indigenous communities, where culture is an essential element of overall health and long-term well-being.¹² The process of establishing Eurocentric culture as central while positioning Indigenous culture as peripheral requires settler colonialism to be an ongoing structure rather than a historical event. As explained by Patrick Wolfe, “It is both as complex social formation and as continuity through time that I term settler colonization a structure rather than an event, and it is on this basis that I shall consider its relationship to genocide.”¹³ Two aspects of settler colonialism based on Wolfe are relevant to this article. First, settler colonialism is an ongoing structure rather than a historical event, and second, there are different forms of genocide, including cultural genocide.¹⁴ Therefore, cultural erasure and resistance in Canada exist in this context of Indigenous cultural genocide. In this article, cultural erasure and resistance are described as an extension of the three pillars of white supremacy described by Andrea Smith,¹⁵ one of the few authors describing the impacts simultaneously connecting Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities. The first pillar is genocide/colonialism targeted towards Indigenous communities, the second pillar is slavery/capitalism targeted towards Black communities, and the third pillar is Orientalism/war targeted towards Asian, particularly Muslim communities. There are a number of debates on Smith’s three pillars of white supremacy. Indigenous scholars Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill offer a Native feminist perspective on Smith’s theory by further emphasizing the role of heteropatriarchy.¹⁶ Indigenous scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt provides a more in-depth critique of Smith’s theory of white supremacy by arguing that it is speciesist and does not substantially include our relations to animals.¹⁷ Other scholars engaging directly with Smith, such as Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, provide a more nuanced critique of nation as described by Smith, versus the nation state.¹⁸ While acknowledging these critiques provide useful directions for further research, this article focuses on Smith’s three pillars of white supremacy as a useful framing for the examples utilized to illuminate pivotal connections.

By centering culture as a critical dimension of urban political economy, this article examines how artistic and cultural expressions function as acts of resistance against racial capitalism and gentrification.¹⁹ Drawing on case studies of grassroots art initiatives, community-based cultural hubs, and public art projects in the GTA, it highlights how racialized and immigrant artists reclaim space by transforming neglected or contested urban areas into platforms for cultural continuity and social critique. These artistic interventions not only preserve cultural heritage but also offer alternative imaginaries of urban belonging, resisting the homogenizing forces of commercial development.²⁰ The materials cited in this article includes not only peer reviewed journal articles, but purposefully includes news articles and blog posts. In the following sections, this article provides specific examples of illustrative cultural geographies to be explored in future research rather than a substantive examination of each of them.

Indigenous Round Dances and the Idle No More Movement

The central argument of this article is that cultural erasure and resistance are simultaneously related to the occupation of physical space, and this occupation is contingent on a country’s political economy through domination of and resistance by subordinate groups. In the context of this article, the political economy in Canada is an essential context for the allocation of cultural physical space. In agreement with Ronald Niezen, cultural justice is connected to land and, in this specific article, to cultural occupation of space.²¹ For example, during the height of the Idle No More movement, Indigenous communities in Canada utilized the Round Dance as one of the means of occupying public spaces and raising awareness of local and national issues.²² The Round Dance as an expression of resistance for the Idle No More Movement had a number of symbolic significances. First, with the intention of suppressing Indigenous culture, the Canadian government had historically banned cultural practices such as Round Dances and potlatches.²³ Therefore, bringing the Round Dance back as a form of cultural resistance is a reassertion of this previously banned cultural practice. Second, the Round Dances as part of the Idle No More movement were performed in public spaces, such as main road intersections and in shopping malls, therefore reinforcing visible Indigenous presence on traditional land.²⁴ Third, the Round Dances were performed as a method of inclusion, which welcomed everyone, including non-Indigenous allies, to participate, therefore involving everyone in an act of cultural resistance.²⁵ In agreement with Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s analysis of dance as document,²⁶ Indigenous dance is a form of cultural memory that has been retained by Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, and has more recently been reasserted with increasing frequency in more public spaces. As a form of public resistance through cultural expression, Round Dances are no longer performed only in Indigenous communities in rural areas, or within the walls of Indigenous community organizations in urban areas, but are performed in public spaces as a reassertion of political and cultural rights across all land in Canada as Indigenous land.

Anti-Black Racism Cultural Erasure and Resistance

As described by Indigenous scholars Jeff Corntassel and Cheryl Bryce, understanding the connection between land, place, and culture is essential for addressing cultural harm.²⁷ Corntassel and Bryce argue that an ongoing structural form of cultural harm by the dominant culture is to deny space for cultural activities by subordinated cultures. In the framework described by Smith, the three pillars of white supremacy work together and require each other to be in operation. Therefore, the cultural genocide as part of colonialism experienced by Indigenous communities in North America works in combination with the legacy of slavery targeted towards Black communities, which in combination enables Orientalism. The historical erasure of the primarily Black community of Africville in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada, illustrates this dependency among the three pillars. Africville was a part of the city of Halifax, which itself was created through the colonization of Indigenous Mi’kmaq communities.²⁸ Africville was a settlement of Black families adjacent to the port of Halifax, including early Black settlers, Maroons, and those escaping slavery in the United States to then British Canada.²⁹ Despite being part of the city of Halifax, the city did not provide Africville residents municipal services such as drinkable water or paved roads, but instead located a prison and the city garbage dump in the area. Africville was described as a slum fostering criminal activity,³⁰ unjustly enabling erasure of the entire physical community, including its cultural institutions, such as churches. In contrast, Africville was a community where its Black residents had built homes, businesses, and churches, and therefore was a space with significant social, economic, and cultural capital. In the context of the local political economy, the inhabitants of Africville did not have sufficient political capital to block the eviction of residents in relation to other areas of Halifax.³¹ The physical space where Africville stood was eventually expropriated for building a bridge, and much of the space was turned into a public park, re-emphasizing that the purpose of the eviction of 400 people from eighty families in the Black community of Africville was to dismantle their economic, political, and cultural autonomy. In this case, there was a formal apology in 2010, fifty years after the eviction and a settlement, including building a replica of the cultural centre of Africville, the Seaview United Baptist Church,³² highlighting the importance of recognizing and reestablishing historical cultural space for the survivors and descendants of the inhabitants of Africville. There is a historical pattern of erasure of Black communities from physical space in Canada to suppress the formation of a critical mass of political, economic and cultural capital, with an additional example being Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver.³³ The physical site of Hogan’s Alley, a historical Black community in Vancouver is not only a site of historical erasure, but as emphasized by this article, a site of resistance and cultural revitalization including contemporary plans for a land trust that will provide culturally appropriate housing and a Black cultural center.³⁴

In the Greater Toronto Area, Black communities have faced a number of barriers with establishing permanent economic and cultural spaces. A particular disadvantage faced by Black communities in major Canadian cities such as Toronto is over policing.³⁵ Criminality was utilized as a pretence for erasing whole physical communities such as Africville in Nova Scotia, Canada. In cities where the established Black communities have sufficient political capital to resist eviction, over policing becomes a form of surveillance and control.³⁶ The resistance by the Black community in Canada against over policing takes various forms, including protest within cultural celebrations. One of the more effective protests by Black Lives Matter was intervening and stopping the Toronto Pride Parade in 2016, which itself is a celebration of LGBTQIA+ identity and culture in the form of an annual parade occupying public spaces.³⁷ Although much of the press attention was on the BLM demand for removing police floats from the parade due to the experience of over policing and police violence by the Black community, the majority of demands were related to spaces for cultural expression by intersectional identities within the LGBTQIA+ movement.³⁸ The development of cultural spaces for Black communities, therefore, exists in the historical and ongoing structural context of surveillance and restrictions on mobility in public spaces.³⁹ As described by Chris Richardson,⁴⁰ one of the areas of Toronto known as Jane and Finch, which is also a primarily immigrant and Black community, is othered through stereotyping as a high crime community, in a parallel with stereotyping the community of Africville. In terms of economic capital, Black communities and charities, including cultural organizations in Canada, receive a much lower share of funding from philanthropic sources than their proportion of the population would suggest,⁴¹ thereby limiting the ability to invest economic capital in permanent cultural spaces. One of the strategies used by equity-seeking communities to resist inequities in resource distribution is utilizing political capital to advocate for holistic resources as part of large-scale infrastructure projects through Community Benefits Agreements.⁴² These agreements include economic, social, environmental, and cultural benefits, otherwise known as the quadruple bottom line benefits.⁴³ 

Quadruple Bottom Lines as Part of Infrastructure Projects

Quadruple bottom line theory, including economic, social, environmental, and cultural bottom lines, is a recognition of the importance of the cultural bottom line⁴⁴ that was missing from the original formation of the previously established triple bottom line.⁴⁵ The struggle for equitable distribution of capital across multiple bottom lines, including that of culture, can be explained through an example of the Toronto Community Benefits Network (TCBN) and the Finch West Light Rapid Transit (LRT) Project. In this case of the Finch LRT Project, a major public transit infrastructure project, the TCBN, a Black, community-led organization, negotiated a Community Benefits Agreement that included quadruple bottom line elements.⁴⁶ The first bottom line is economic, in terms of access to faster public transit and local business opportunities. The second bottom line is social, i.e., training opportunities for youth from underrepresented groups in trades professions required for the project. The third bottom line is environmental in terms of light rapid transit benefits of reduced greenhouse gases. And the fourth bottom line is cultural, in the form of a Jane-Finch Community Hub and Arts Centre, which will provide multipurpose program space for seniors, youth, and other community members. The requirement for a Community Hub and Arts Centre highlights the importance of cultural space to the community that has been marginalized⁴⁷ and oppressed across multiple dimensions.⁴⁸ Canadian Community Benefit Agreements have a genealogy in Impact and Benefit Agreements between resource development companies and Indigenous communities that have not received adequate government funding for services, including cultural services.⁴⁹ There is much to be learned from the history of Impact Benefit Agreements and the cultural benefits Indigenous communities have been able to negotiate through these agreements.

A large infrastructure project such as an LRT provides a generational opportunity to local communities for negotiating funding for programs and projects—including economic and cultural activities—that have been historically underfunded by different levels of government.⁵⁰ TCBN, a Black community-led organization that has previously advocated for local distribution of benefits from large infrastructure projects, advocated for more holistic quadruple bottom line benefits for the Finch West LRT project. The specific benefits have included local jobs and apprenticeships for historically disadvantaged communities and equity-seeking groups, and contracts for social enterprise, diverse suppliers, and local businesses led by women and underrepresented groups through social procurement policies. As described in the previous paragraphs, as part of the Eglinton LRT project, TCBN advocated for cultural benefits in the form of a new Jane-Finch Community Hub and Arts Centre.⁵¹ Metrolinx, the government agency responsible for the implementation of the LRT project, initially included a community centre in its plans, but with subsequent project delays and cost overruns, it removed the community centre from the overall project plan as a cost and schedule reduction item. TCBN and the Jane and Finch community advocated strongly and publicly for the re-inclusion of the Jane-Finch Community Hub and Arts Centre, and subsequently was granted land by the city of Toronto and the province of Ontario for the Community Hub and Arts Centre.⁵² This is an example of the cultural bottom line as an integral benefit to communities impacted by infrastructure projects, in addition to economic, social, and environmental bottom lines. This is also an example of an attempted erasure of a cultural benefit in the form of a community and arts center ostensibly due to fiscal responsibility reasons, and the community resisting and reasserting their political economy rights to have that cultural benefit embodied as a demand for physical space.

Islamophobia and Establishing Cultural Space

The third pillar of white supremacy as described by Smith is Orientalism, which is often enacted in the form of Islamophobia in the Canadian context. In Canada there have been mass shootings of Muslims in their cultural place of worship,⁵³ families have been killed since they were recognizably Muslim from their race and wearing traditional cultural clothing,⁵⁴ and Muslims face hate crimes across many major Canadian cities.⁵⁵ Islamophobia faced by Muslim communities across Canada impacts access to cultural space. Religious institutions in Canada, including Muslim organizations, are registered as charities, which enables fundraising and favorable tax treatment. Research indicates that over a certain time period, Muslim charities were deregistered at a higher rate than other types of charities in Canada.⁵⁶ The deregistration of Muslim charities is a form of limitation of building economic, political and cultural capital, with substantial parallels to the process of eviction of Black residents of Africville, and the historical banning of cultural practices enacted on Indigenous communities. The deregistration of Muslim charities additionally limits the community’s ability to raise sufficient funds to develop physical cultural spaces. An example of the struggle by the Somali community in Canada to develop a physical community center provides an example highlighting intersectional issues of Islamophobia and anti-Black racism.

The Somali Centre for Culture and Recreation (SCCR) was approved by the city of Toronto to be located at the site of a city-owned public park in 2024. At the same time, it faced objections from local residents who purportedly did not want to lose green space and other amenities the park provided.⁵⁷ The local residents objecting to the development of the SCCR had the political capital to enlist support from powerful political allies, including the Premier of Ontario, in temporarily halting the development of the SCCR.⁵⁸ Although the Somali community had been advocating for a physical space where culturally appropriate services can be provided to community members for forty years, Toronto City Council further deferred decisions due to local resident opposition.⁵⁹ Local community groups can therefore weaponize local zoning bylaws to exclude racialized and religious communities from establishing culturally appropriate physical spaces.⁶⁰ The Somali community advocated through available political channels, but entrepreneurially exhibited the story of this struggle at an appropriate street art cultural festival called Nuit Blanche.⁶¹ Therefore, cultural and artistic expression in the form of a temporary intervention was used as a form of resistance to the intersectional oppression of anti-Black racism and Islamophobia. As a result of resistance and advocacy, the federal government of Canada stepped in to provide funding for the SCCR, although in a different location.⁶² Decades long advocacy by the Somali community for a community center, where culturally appropriate programming for the community can take place, is one step closer to reality at the time of writing of this article.⁶³ This example of the Somali community is but one of many similar experiences by racialized and religious communities in Canada.

Ismaili Muslims and the Aga Khan Museum of Toronto

A discussion of the Muslim experience in Canada in relation to cultural erasure and revitalization through physical space is incomplete without describing the experience of the Ismaili community in Canada.⁶⁴ The majority of Ismailis immigrating to Canada came as refugees escaping race and religion based persecution in Uganda, Africa by dictator Idi Amin, therefore escaping culture erasure or a form of ethnic cleansing. Although Ismailis are a diverse group in terms of language,⁶⁵ many members of the Ismaili community have immigrated with a high level of education and skills required by the Canadian economy, and therefore have been able to form sufficient social, political, and economic capital to build a number of cultural institutions and spaces.⁶⁶ The most prominent physical and spatial expression of Ismaili culture is the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto with an adjacent place of religious worship, a Jamatkhana. The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto is a physical space for the celebration of Islamic art, architecture, and culture,⁶⁷ and in the context of this article, it is a cultural space of resistance to the negative stereotyping, violence, and Orientalism against Muslim communities in Canada. The original planned location for the Aga Khan museum was in the heart of the city London,⁶⁸ which was rejected due to Islamophobia among multiple expressed reasons, which resulted in the museum relocating to Toronto.⁶⁹ The Aga Khan Museum is an example of an equity-seeking community that faced political economy challenges in the UK but was able to revitalize the plans for permanent physical cultural space through political capital: political connections to the Prime Minister of Canada,⁷⁰ the financial resources of a global community to build local physical institutions,⁷¹ and the social capital that enabled an appropriate fit within Canada’s multicultural immigration policies.⁷² Together, these enabled the establishment of iconic spaces of cultural expression and resistance to hegemonic and dominant cultures.

Conclusion

The exclusion of racialized and immigrant communities from permanent cultural spaces in Canadian cities is not accidental; it is a structural outcome of settler colonialism, the three pillars of white supremacy as described by Smith, and neoliberal urban planning. This article has shown how cultural erasure is enacted not only through historical acts of dispossession, like the destruction of Africville or the banning of Indigenous ceremonies, but also through contemporary practices such as zoning discrimination, over policing, deregistration of charities, and the commodification of art. Yet, alongside these political economy-based forces of exclusion, racialized communities continue to resist through creative, political, and economic strategies that reclaim space and assert cultural sovereignty. Whether through Indigenous Round Dances in public intersections, advocacy for cultural hubs in infrastructure projects, or public art that reclaims narratives, these acts of resistance make visible the right to culture, space, and belonging. The future of truly inclusive urban development in Canada requires more than symbolic recognition; it demands investment in and protection of the cultural infrastructures that sustain community memory and political voice. A political economy that privileges dominant cultures and suppresses subordinate cultures must be critically examined through the lens of the spatial expression of culture. As this article has demonstrated, through an examination of theory, connecting to examples specific to the city of Toronto in the broader context of the settler colonial state of Canada, cultural space is not merely a site of artistic expression, but a battleground of cultural and social justice, resilience, and reimagination.