Pushing the limits of urban research: Urbanization,pipelines and counter-colonial politics

Abstract

This article confronts debates about extended and concentrated urbanization with Indigenous claims to time and space. It does so in part by discussing the degree to which notions of extended and concentrated urbanization allow us to understand the dynamics of pipeline politics in Canada, notably Indigenous claims leveled at infrastructure projects. It argues that Lefebvre-inspired research is both promising and insufficient in this regard. Their promises can only be realized provided one considers urban research as mediation (between everyday life and the social order), contextualize urbanization as a product of non-linear histories through which ‘city’ and ‘non-city’ are transformed or reinstituted as socio-spatial forms, and take seriously imaginaries that may not only contest but also refuse the expansion of the urban field. Meeting these conditions is not possible without resorting to other, non-Lefebvrean approaches that help us understand the settler-colonial aspects of Canadian urban history and grasp the inter-national dimensions of Indigenous politics. Finally, opening up Lefebvre scholarship to considerations of settler colonialism is impossible without the distinct relational theories of time and space that inform radical Indigenous theories (and some pipeline struggles). Indigenous claims in or against urbanization thus represent a limit case of urban research.

Keywords

Extended and concentrated urbanization ‘city’ and ‘non-city’pipelines settler colonialism Indigenous politics and theory Canadian political economy

In North America today, geographically extensive infrastructure is politicized. The main reason: Indigenous-led opposition to mining operations, pipelines, and ports. The most publicized recent anti-pipeline protest was the struggle of Indigenous peoples and their allies against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. Standing Rock highlighted what one can also learn from similar forms of resistance on the continent, past and present (see Cultural Anthropology, 2016). First, while these struggles articulate a range of concerns, they gravitate around the problem of Indigenous self-determination in the face of the U.S. American and Canadian settler states. According to the Standing Rock Sioux, they are all about ‘nation-to-nation relationships’ (2016). Second, these struggles expose a strategic Achilles heel of capitalism. As Pasternak and Dafnos (2017) pointed out with respect to the Canadian side of the continent, they indicate how the capillaries of capital (pipelines, waterways, roads, railways) are vulnerable to disruption. Third, these struggles are geographically complex, linking the most central places of mobilization (in this case, Standing Rock) to other sites resistance. Place-based, translocal, and international, they show that Indigenous struggles escape the divide between city and non-city that is inscribed in layered histories of settler urbanization.

Despite the obvious parallels between praxis of resistance against infrastructure projects and neo-Lefebvrean research on operational landscapes, this is not a conventional paper exploring an empirical subject (pipeline development) through an airtight framework (planetary urbanization, say). Such a paper would require a more systematic investigation not only of the relationship between infrastructural projects and resistance but also of the ways in which this relationship is situated within dynamics of accumulation, strategies of territorial organization, and modalities of rule and regulation (Cowen, 2014; Labban 2008; Pasternak, 2016; Zalik, 2016). Here, pipelines are a window through which to establish links between Marxist-influenced urban research (including planetary urbanization) and Indigenous theories (including those shaping current research on settler urbanism, Indigenous politics and the geographies of Canadian political economy).

I consider such links necessary for biographical, political and intellectual reasons. The place where I learn and research, York University, is not only similar morphologically and socially to the University of Nanterre, the postwar expansion campus in suburban Paris where Henri Lefebvre held his lectures in the 1960s. It is also located on Indigenous land and situated just one hundred meters north of Line 9, the pipeline that runs from Sarnia to Montreal and that faced years of resistance against the plans of energy company Enbridge to link the Alberta tar sands to Eastern oil refineries by reversing the flow of the pipeline. Struggles around Line 9 and other pipelines have been part of a broader political and intellectual Indigenous resurgence, including the recent Idle No More movement. This resurgence has left more traces even than the standoff between the Mohawk of Kanesatake and the Canadian army in 1990, which took place exactly at the time when I first learned in detail about the centrality of Indigenous questions in North America shortly after landing in Toronto in 1989. Needless to say, the struggles in and beyond Idle No More, alongside Black Lives Matter, have also shaped my workplace, from student politics and affirmative action claims to the classroom. Given that many of my students also grapple with urban planning (the institutional form of which faces challenges to its colonial foundations (Walker et al., 2013), linking historical materialism and Indigenous theory is more pertinent to me than ever.

Sustaining such links requires work but is not impossible, not least because of the rounds of engagements between autonomously defined Indigenous approaches and non-Indigenous critical traditions that define cutting-edge native studies (see Simpson and Smith, 2014). My paper builds thus not only upon past and current arguments about the importance of Indigenous liberation in historical materialism (Mariátegui, 1971; Webber, 2011), but also, crucially, Indigenous conversations with Marxist and other counter-colonial traditions (Balthaser, 2016; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). In today’s ‘Canadian’ context, Yellowknife Dene scholar Glen Coulthard is the most-well known contemporary Indigenous communist. Following in the footsteps of Lee Maracle and Howard Adams, he supplements Indigenous radicalism with Marxist and non-Indigenous anti-colonial approaches. His most important current Indigenous references are the works of Leanne Simpson, Taiaiake Alfred, and Audra Simpson, who have helped define ‘Indigenous resurgence’: projects to articulate Indigenous art and scholarship, on the one hand, and land-based practices and struggles for self-determination, on the other. Coulthard urges the non-Indigenous left (to which I belong) to take Indigenous resurgence seriously (2017).

In historical context, Coulthard’s work renews with Dene struggles in the 1970s. Directed against the Mackenzie Valley pipeline and oriented toward an Indigenous socialism in conversation with Third World struggles, these struggles informed a then young field (the ‘new’ Canadian political economy) even though this influence has often been ignored (Coburn, 2016a, 2016b). Constituting the other non-Lefebvrean reference point for this paper, strands of this field link up with a growing body of work in history, geography and political economy on settler urbanization, colonial state-Indigenous relations, and Indigenous movements (Barman, 2007; Blomley, 2004; Edwards, 2010; Freeman, 2010; Harris, 2002; Harris, 2004, Hugill, 2017; Stranger-Ross, 2008; Tomiak, 2011, 2016, 2017). Needless to say, work in this field, while variegated, has foregrounded the contemporary and material (also land-related), not past and only-metaphorical character of colonialism in Canada (Tuck and Yang, 2012). While marginal to this body, Lefebvrean themes are not foreign to it (Tomiak, 2011) and may, as I will suggest cautiously, resonate with all those in this growing field who have situated Indigenous claims to the settler city within broader geographies or Indigenous theories of time-space.

As a contributor to debates on planetary urbanization (and other neo-Lefebvrean research, Kipfer, 2014), I also take the position that Lefebvre-inspired work must – and can – be stretched to link up with counter-colonial, also Indigenous concerns. The point of this paper is thus not to incorporate Indigenous theory into a ready-made theory but to push neo-Lefebvrean work to the point where lines of connection to considerations of settler urbanism and Indigenous politics are intelligible. In a spirit of immanent critique close to the one that informs Kanishka Goonewardena’s contribution (2018), I propose that stretching Lefebvre is possible. While I agree with those critics (Hart, 2016; Khatam and Haas, Ruddick et al., both this Issue) that problematics of struggle, centrality, comparison and the social textures of everyday life are underdeveloped in existing formulations on planetary urbanization, they are not absent from these (or other research undertaken by contributors to debates on planetary urbanization). Provided one considers it multipronged and open-ended (Brenner, Goonewardena, Schmid, all this Issue), research on planetary urbanization can be recast to open up to these problematics, notably in relationship to colonial and neo-colonial dynamics.

In this paper, I will push ‘planetary urbanization’ in three ways. After a brief introduction on politics, centrality and comparison, I will begin by connecting research on planetary urbanization to wider Lefebvrean considerations, thereby proposing not only a partial conceptual shift from ‘city’ to urbanization but also a move to relate urban considerations to other levels of reality: everyday life and the ‘large’, state-bound social order. This multi-level contextualization makes it clear that urban research is exactly not everything (as Jazeel, 2018, also argues, from a different perspective). It allows me to establish, in the third and fourth section, connections to research on settler colonialism, settler urbanism and Indigenous politics, and thus tease out broader implications of pipeline struggles for Canadian capitalism, something that cannot be done with a Lefebvrean approach alone. I end this discussion with an invitation to consider how Indigenous struggles have sustained Indigenous theories of time-space that defy on their own terms the abstract space and linear time of colonial capitalism.

Politics, urbanization and the urban

For Henri Lefebvre, the (structural) ‘revolution’ of urbanization presents opportunities to reconsider the problematic of (political) revolution. While their recent work on planetary urbanization did not start with considerations of struggle (or political revolution), Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid do mention the role of collective struggle in generating urban questions. They observe:

…a wide range of new urban practices and discourses are being produced in diverse places, territories and landscapes, often in zones that are geographically removed from large cities, but where new forms of collective insurgency are emerging in response to the patterns of industrial restructuring, territorial enclosure, and landscape reorganization sketched above. From Nigeria, South Africa, India and China, new political strategies are being constructed by peasants, workers and Indigenous peoples and other displaced populations to oppose the infrastructuralization and enclosure of their established forms of livelihood […] The politics of anti-gentrification and resistance to corporate mega-projects in dense city cores can thereby be connected, both analytically and politically against land enclosures, large-scale infrastructures (dams, highways, pipelines, industrial corridors, mines) and displacement in seemingly ‘remote’ regions […]. Rather than rejecting urban life, such mobilizations are often demanding a more socially equitable, democratically managed and environmentally sane form of urbanization than that being imposed by the forces of neoliberal capitalism. (2015: 178)

In other words, there is strategic value in thinking world-wide urbanization as a contested interplay of extension and concentration.

The importance of broadening urban research from towns, cities, and conurbations to processes of extension is thus not only empirical. It is quite banal to say that dynamics of concentration – settlement and agglomeration – only constitute one side of the urban coin; the other being dynamics of spatial extension (the production of manifold networks and mobile geographies). But Lefebvreans also ask about the political implications of this insight. As Monte-Mór’s study of the Amazon (2004, 2014a: 265b: 119) shows, extended urbanization can yield new centralities, which result not just from structural dynamics (new spatial concentrations) but also a convergence of collective struggles. The dialectic of implosion and explosion can give rise to the urban (centrality/difference) in unexpected ways (Schmid, 2005, 2006).

Students of planetary urbanization have insisted that grasping the precise political significance of urbanization depends on a few assumptions. First, urbanization does not exhaust but mediate the open totality of the world. Insofar as the urban is a level of analysis, research on extended urbanization can highlight the links between the social order and everyday life, as Arboleda (2015) has shown in his analysis of operational landscapes in the Chilean Andes. Second, to understand the necessary specificities of urbanization (Schmid, 2015), one should see the relationship between comparative differences and larger processes not simply in terms of variation but co-constitution (Hart, 2016). The question is not only how meanings of ‘city’ and ‘country’ vary (if they exist at all as distinct material supports, spatial forms, or imaginaries), but also whether the relationship between city, country, and urbanization is one of transformation, reproduction or reinscription (Goonewardena, 2014; Kipfer, 2014). Third, such an understanding is impossible with linear-progressive conceptions of urbanization as a unilateral move from ‘country’ to ‘city’. Urbanization is not only spatially uneven; it is also temporally multiple. Even extended urbanization can yield encounters between multiple temporalities (Monte-Mór, 2004). In part, this is because urbanization is both staged and layered: each round of urbanization re-casts previous rounds of extension/concentration (Schmid, 2015; Sevilla-Buitrago, 2014). In part, it is because the imaginaries of urbanity and rurality that emerge in or against urbanization need not be temporally continuous with these.

In the third section, I will return to these issues through a brief discussion of a particular aspect of urbanization in Canada: pipelines. While contemporary contestations of oil and gas pipelines attest to the current role of extractive development in Canadian capitalism, pipeline politics also remind us of the central role the production of operational landscapes have played in Canadian urban history and the formation of the Canadian state. In fact, these landscapes bring into sharp relief a larger concern: the settler-colonial dimensions of urbanization in Canada and literatures that allow us to understand these dimensions. Indigenous challenges to pipelines remind us of the importance of researching urbanization without linear conceptions of history based on dichotomies of ‘city’ (civilization) and ‘non-city’/‘country’ (barbarism, terra nullius) (also Monte-Mór, 2004). Where infrastructure projects face what intellectuals of Indigenous resurgence call ‘generative refusal’ (Simpson, 2017), dialectical critics of urbanization meet theoretical limits that challenge them to consider other relational conceptions of space/time. To get there, a few more words on the Lefebvrean aspects of research on extended-concentrated urbanization are in order.

From the urban revolution to ‘planetary urbanization’

Research on ‘planetary urbanization’ has developed in definite relationships to Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis (2003) about complete urbanization: the formation of urban forcefields that engulf or supersede ‘city’ and ‘country’. Researchers have extended Lefebvre’s hypothesis to critique current urbanist ideologies (‘The urban age’) and develop epistemological and methodological criteria to avoid city- and state-centric assumptions in urban research (Brenner, 2014; Brenner and Katsikis, 2014; Brenner and Schmid, 2014, 2015; Schmid, 2006). They have worked to unearth the political promises of extended urbanization (Arboleda, 2016b; Merrifield, 2013; Monte-Mór, 2004) while linking extended urbanization to primary accumulation (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2014) and socio-natural metabolism (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2014; Arboleda, 2016a).

Given the ways in which researchers of planetary urbanization translate Lefebvre’s theory of the urban/urbanization, a quick return to the latter can be used to sharpen our sense of current debates (even though Lefebvre will not have the final word). I will thus proceed by raising key issues that in my view derive from Lefebvre’s Urban Revolution and other threads in his work. As in previous formulations (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013; Kipfer et al., 2008b), my point of departure is that Lefebvre’s Marxism defies dichotomies (between political economy and cultural studies, universality and particularity, class and other social relations) that shaped the reception of Lefebvre in the 1980s and 1990s and that some want to recast now, often in neo-Heideggerian terms, to classify urban theory in ways that counterpose Marxism to postcolonial considerations instead of articulating Marxist and countercolonial lineages.¹

On the discontinuous character of (the) urban revolution(s)

The image of the country and the city acquired its material force precisely in the will of actors who, being human, could be appealed to politically on the grounds of their inherited mythical and associative structures of meaning. (Brennan, 2015: 16)

Interpreting the Urban Revolution (UR) diachronically, many have pointed to the specific place UR occupies in Lefebvre’s ‘spatial’ work between the Right to the City and the Production of Space. I will not rehearse these arguments except to say that Lefebvre’s turn to ‘space’ in the latter work does not so much break with his urban considerations as redirect them (Stanek, 2011). More specifically, Lefebvre’s urban work from the late 1960s to the early 1970s – UR included – played an important role in moving Lefebvre from a metaphorical critique of everyday life as colonization (in the early 1960s) to an explicit engagement with theories of colonialism and imperialism (in some of his volumes on the state). This engagement does not make Lefebvre a sufficient source for research on matters imperial and colonial; it does however open up to counter-colonial traditions (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013).

In UR, the urban revolution refers not only to the (incomplete) process of urbanization; it also alludes to the political possibilities that may emerge from the amorphous ‘urban fields’ of spatial practices, imaginaries and knowledge forms. In 1970, Lefebvre’s UR moves beyond earlier Paris-specific arguments (that the 1871 Commune and May 1968 were ‘urban revolutions’) to paint a world-wide tableau of struggle: a constellation of centralities produced by ‘near’ and ‘far’ peripheries: French banlieues, Latin America barrios, African-American ghettos (2003: 110–111, 145–150). Lefebvre wrote as debates about urban guerilla movements (Marringhela, 2009 (1970); Oppenheimer, 1970) raised questions about the then dominant conception of revolution as peasant war (Wolf, 1969). His critique of Mao and Che urges us to revisit the spatial assumptions in theories of workers’ and peasant revolution. For him, the Soviet, Chinese or Cuban revolutions teach us that it will not do to base political strategy on static views of city and country (2003: 112–113, 147–150).

Like others in revolutionary traditions, Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon included, Lefebvre treats ‘city’ and ‘country’ as more than spatial forms and material supports of social relations. He also saw them as myths, ideologies and imaginaries – lived space (Lefebvre, 1991). These may be persistent enough to live beyond the times that produced them (Lefebvre, 2003: 103–104). Urbanization thus does not follow a linear-developmentalist trajectory. On the one hand, it represents ‘discontinuous transformations’ (2003: 2, original emphasis), a set of uneven processes (such as rural destructuring) through which urbanization can engulf historic city/country while recasting core-periphery relations (Lefebvre, 2003: 3–4). On the other hand, urban and rural myths ‘can come from a period other than the one in which they are reunited, reused or reworked’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 104). Urban myths can weigh in rural-agricultural societies (Lefebvre, 2003: 106) while non-urban imaginaries may surface in the urban field. In this sense, city and country can outlive their eras and relate to core-periphery relations variably. Not necessarily anachronistic, they continue to produce space, also through nationalism, reactionary or otherwise.

Lefebvre’s urban work is thus open to a multi-temporal conception of change where continuity and discontinuity relate to each other in tension. This is not surprising. Lefebvre’s urban turn followed years of rural sociological research, which, albeit centered on the Pyrénées, aimed at a global comparative understanding of rent, rurality and agriculture; this explains why some mobilize Lefebvre to study the land question beyond Europe (Hart, 2016).

Equally important, Lefebvre’s urban turn returns to everyday life. Insisting that everyday life in an urbanizing world is multi-temporal (as Lefebvre did in Rhythmanalysis, 1992), allows us to see modernity and urbanity not so much as sequential (in contrast to tradition) but as coeval (as comparatively distinct constellation of rhythms, linear or cyclical) (Harootunian, 2000). A comparative approach to urbanization needs to pick up on Lefebvre’s gestures and develop a multi-temporal as well as comparatively subtle, relational conception of city, country and urbanization. This lesson is particularly important when it comes to colonial and imperial aspects of urbanization, which Lefebvre himself analyzed insufficiently. These typically defy linear-developmentalist conceptions of space-time and have been contested through imaginaries that refract anti-imperial or anti-colonial histories in often unpredictable ways.

On levels of analysis

Synchronically, in the context of Lefebvre’s overall work, UR is an opening to an integral, non-specialist approach to urban questions. For Lefebvre, the ‘urban’ is not everything; it is an intermediate level of analysis (M), that of spatial relations, centrality/difference and periphery. As such, the urban mediates other levels: the general level (G) (macro political economies) and the ‘private’ level (P) (the level of everyday life, of routine and utopian imaginary, of reality and possibility). The urban is neither a mere scale nor the counterpoint to the ‘country’. Instead, the urban may emerge within the urban field, as a nodal point in multi-scalar core-periphery relations. Understanding the urban as level and form traversed and produced by processes helps us relate Lefebvre’s urban research (M) to other pillars of his work: theories of state (and, thus, capitalism and imperialism) (G), and reflections on everyday life (P) (Goonewardena, 2011; Kipfer, 2009; Schmid, 2005, chapter 5).

A multi-level approach to urban analysis has implications for the study of urbanization (also Arboleda, 2015). As to level M, understanding the urban question not only as process (as Brenner and Schmid tend to do, above all (2015: 165)) but also as form (centrality/difference) allows one to see most clearly the dialectical relationship between concentrated and extended urbanization, as well as the differential and political character of both. The formal problematic of centrality/difference alerts us to the content (including the comparatively distinct substantive processes) by which centralities may resurface, from above or from below, within the landscapes of urbanization (see Arboleda, 2016b; Monte-Mór, 2004, 2014a, 2014b). Centrality/difference here is not reducible to the central city, historic city types or other socio-physical concentrations; it can also be a product of an encounter, a convergence and mutual transformation of multiple mobilizations that may or may not leave a permanent imprint on urbanizing landscapes. Politics is at the heart of the urban problematic, both in agglomerations, and, as we will see with reference to pipeline struggles, along the extended tentacles of the urbanization process.

While everyday life appears both conceptually and empirically in the literature (Arboleda, 2015; Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 171–172), researchers on planetary urbanization have so far paid less attention to level P than to political economies of state, capital and formal knowledge (level G). Linking urban analysis to critiques of everyday life, as Lefebvre proposed, remains vital, however, for various reasons (see also Buckley and Strauss, 2016; Ruddick et al., 2018). For example, refusing to delink urban questions from everyday life is a precondition to understanding gendered relationships between the urban and the non-urban, particularly when these relationships are coterminous with private-public dichotomies and the neoliberalization of social reproduction (Mitchell et al., 2004) that has superseded the Fordist domestication of social life Lefebvre observed in the postwar era. Also, without proper attention to the contradictory ‘terrain’ of banality and possibility, routine and imaginary that is everyday life in Lefebvre’s conception, it is impossible to understand the relationship between uneven urbanization processes and symbolic claims to the ‘city’ (or the ‘non-city’). In the following sections, I emphasize the imagined side of daily life, the lived spaces articulated in ‘words spoken, attitudes adopted, physical actions performed’ and ‘memories elaborated’ by insurgents (Ross, 2015: 1, 92–93).

Much work on planetary urbanization has tied the urban question to the ‘far’ social order (level G). This is true for analyses of urban ideologies (‘the urban age’ thesis) and the role of neoliberal state, capital and formal knowledge in increasing the intensity and scope of extended urbanization. Despite the work of Monte-Mór, Arboleda and Sevilla-Buitrago, however, less work has been done about the relationship between current and past political economies of urbanization, particularly that which concerns the role of empire and (neo-) colonialism in shaping concentrated/extended urbanization. Yet a focus on such multi-layered historical forces is essential if the comparative specificities of urbanization are to be understood not only as variegations of contemporary processes (as Brenner and Schmid have argued) but also as transformations-reproductions of relationships between urbanization, city and non-city (Goonewardena, 2014; Kipfer, 2014). Such a deeper historical focus allows us to tie Lefebvre to comparative historical-materialist frameworks that insist that the meaning of city and countryside, their (non-) distinction and relationship is not just a variation of overarching processes but articulates distinct forms of social organization: modes of production (Southhall, 1998). I will return to this point with reference to settler colonial urbanization.

These comparative questions bring us back to an occasional Lefebvrean concern: the possibility that the ‘urban revolution’ opens up to a multi-polar, post-imperial world shaped intellectually by multiple sites of knowledge production (Kipfer et al., 2008a). This concern pushes us into a dialectical conception of the relationship between particularity and universality, concrete and abstract in comparative research (Hart, 2016; Schmid, 2018). My view is that visions of a multipolar world are related to (but not synonymous with) the demand that historical materialist approaches to urban matters remain open to dialogues with other approaches to time and space (see also Buckley and Strauss, 2016). As we will see with reference to Indigenous politics, such theoretical openness is vital for two reasons: in order to establish linkages between Lefebrean approaches and research on settler colonialism, and, in order to understand self-determined struggles and autonomously defined Indigenous approaches that may eschew the language(s) of urban Marxism(s).

Pipeline politics or: When urbanization faces ‘refusal’

Recent resistance against oil and gas pipelines across Canada and North America has come from environmentalists, neighborhood organizations, and Indigenous groups. While perspectives between and within Indigenous nations have varied significantly, it is undeniable that Indigenous militants have been on the forefront resisting projects designed to facilitate ‘resource’ extraction and urban sprawl (Kulchyski and Bernauer, 2014; Mulkewich and Oddie, 2009; Preston, 2015). On the strategic political importance of pipelines, Awâsís Sâkíhítowín, an organizer against the Enbridge Line 9 pipeline project says:

The neocolonial impacts of the tar sands disproportionately impact Indigenous communities, including the Aamjiwanaang, Mikisew Cree, Athabasca Chipewyan, Métis Nations, and more. The Enbridge terminal where the Line 9 reversal [in Sarnia, Ontario] would begin is on stolen land from Aamjiwnaang First Nation. The Mikisew Cree, Athabasca Chipewyan, and Métis Nations are some of the communities living amidst the tar sands themselves [in Alberta]. In Toronto, 60 percent of the communities living along Line 9 are recent immigrants, most of whom are racialized. Low-income urban communities of colour and rural Native communities are at risk and heavily affected by the tar sands and accompanying pipelines. (Awâsís et al., 2013: 55)

Resisting pipelines that link extraction sites to ports, metropoles and spaces in between offers the advantage of connecting multiple struggles. Thus interlinked, these effectively or intentionally, scale up the scope and visibility of each protest site. They bring into contact, if not conversation, various perspectives, from conservation to environmental justice and ecological socialism (East End against Line 9, n.d.; Thomas-Müller, n.d.).

Pipeline activism in Canada underscores the political salience of understanding extended and concentrated urbanization as two sides of a dynamic that produces new centralities and makes it possible to see these centralities as a geographically stretched constellation of struggle. It would be wrong, however, to reduce this political dynamic of concentration and extension to a contestation over the modalities of urbanization, a demand for ‘a more socially equitable, democratically managed, and environmentally sane form of urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 178) or a ‘new model of urbanization’ (Brenner, 2014: 28). While political orientations among Indigenous groups involved in pipeline politics vary, few would argue that they can be dissociated from issues of Indigenous self-determination and land control. These were taken up also by the Idle No More movement against efforts of the Canadian state (radicalized by the Harper regime) to threaten the livelihoods of Indigenous nations while assimilating them fully into capitalism, also with a private property regime for reserve lands (Barker, 2015; Hall, 2015; Idle No More, n.d.; Palmater, 2015; Pasternak, 2015).

While linked to urban questions in the Lefebvrean sense, pipeline activism is thus at the same time a question of inter-national relations: not only a struggle against capital and state as embedded in extended urbanization, but also a struggle to (re-)establish and negotiate nation-to-nation relations between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian settler state (Awâsís et al., 2013: 61). This is hardly surprising. Subcontinental infrastructures (railways, canals, ports, dams, roads, pipelines) were part of a passive revolution that built the Canadian colonial nation-state by rebuffing subaltern aspirations while linking original and expanded reproduction through a web of metropole-hinterland relationships (Ryerson, 1983: 254–257). These infrastructures were integral to forming the colonial relationship between settler state and Indigenous peoples. In the 1880s, for example, the transcontinental railway bundled the murderous forces that ‘cleared the plains’ for agrarian and industrial capitalism, Confederation, and colonial apartheid (Daschuk, 2013). Since the 1970s, various struggles, including the ones fought by the Dene over the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline(s) in the Northwest helped forge a partial but real shift toward recognition and marketization in the colonial relation between the Canadian state and Indigenous peoples (Altamarino-Jiménez, 2004; Coulthard, 2014: 51–78).

In the last decade, many Indigenous groups have insisted that operational landscapes like pipelines and the Alberta Tar Sands pose deep threats to their jurisdictions and modes of life (Adam, 2012; Indigenous Environmental Network, n.d.; McCreary and Milligan, 2014; Rossiter and Wood, 2015; Yinka Dene Alliance, n.d.). For some, like the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en in interior British Columbia, who occupied unceded off-reserve land against multiple multinational pipeline projects, resistance is a way of asserting political sovereignty and reenergizing modes of life (Huson and T’oghestíy, 2015; Unist’ot’en, n.d.). Such struggles – and Idle No More – have helped define an Indigenous politics of refusal (Simpson, 2017). While directed against settler colonialism, as well as the preference of some Indigenous leaders and nations to participate in colonial strategies of recognition/marketization and negotiate the extension of operational landscapes, refusal is meant to be ‘generative’ (Simpson, 2017: 243–245). It wants to rebuild the self-determined social relations that are vital for political autonomy and Indigenous daily practices (Alfred, 2009; Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2011, 2017). As we will see, such generative refusal challenges capitalist and colonial territorialities.

Settler-colonial urbanization in multi-level context

We don’t have to ‘go back to the land’. We never left it. (Maracle, 1996: 109)

There is no necessary mutual incompatibility between indigeneity and city. (Neigh, 2012: 71)

Indigenous peoples have always transgressed the boundaries imposed by the settler state. (Tomiak, 2011:177)

The division between reserve and city is an artificial colonial division. We are all related, and this is all Indigenous land. (Simpson, 2017: 81)

To understand Indigenous engagements with operational landscapes, claims to Indigenous resurgence included, we cannot isolate urbanization from the colonial-capitalist dynamics that permeate it and the Indigenous aspirations that challenge it from within and from without. Insisting on the mediating role of urban questions, we must place them in multi-level context and highlight the settler-colonial dimension that shape all levels, including the Canadian state (level G). Proceeding thus recognizes, in a distinct situation, what José Carlos Mariátegui said in the Peru of the 1920s: the Indigenous question in the Americas is not residual but central. Tied to questions of land and social relations, it highlights the complex and uneven tensions, interdependencies, and protracted transformations between modes of production that meet in colonial conquest, domination and struggle (1971: 22–76).

Historically, the Canadian social formation developed through multiple colonial processes. Disregarding for now the also formative British Conquest of New France, these include the colonization of Indigenous lands and peoples and the insertion of British North America into a privileged position within the British and American empires and their migration regimes, as well as the ramifications of both: complexly racialized forms of state and class formation (Abele and Stasiulis, 1987; Stasiulis and Jhappan, 1995). To understand even the first colonial process, one must insist, as Indigenous radicals have, on multi-temporal conceptions of time in order to properly historicize the settler colonial relation that still underpins the nation-state (Coulthard, 2014).² Canada did not simply evolve from feudalism to capitalism; it emerged from multi-dimensional, uneven and discontinuous changes in the relationship between Indigenous, mercantilist and full-fledged capitalist modes of life/production. These changes have been infused by class-based and gendered transformations in and between Indigenous and European societies (Adams, 1975, 1999: 145–148; Bourgeault, 1986, 1988; Daschuk, 2013; Lawrence, 2012; Wotherspoon and Satzewich, 2000). They are political, woven through shifting terrains of struggle between settler state and Indigenous peoples (Coulthard, 2014: 6, 77–78).

The colonial relation was transformed by and helped institute the shift from merchant capitalism and the fur trade to mass settlement between the late 18th and, in the Canadian North, the mid-20th-century.³ Long and uneven, this shift was crucial to the formation of the modern Canadian state as well as key aspects of colonial-capitalist space-time. Since the second half of the 19th-century, it propelled and was organized by the genocidal apartheid system that helped build the Canadian nation-state-in-formation: a network of reserves, pass controls and racist legal classification under the colonial administration codified by the first Indian Acts and organized through hierarchical territorial relations between Canadian governments and a dizzying array of aboriginal band councils that facilitate rule by divide and conquer.

Modern Canadian urban history – level M – has mediated the formation of colonial capitalism in general and colonial policies in particular, as we must know from researchers of settler colonial urbanism. Apartheid rule formalized and consolidated the displacement of Indigenous peoples from towns and cities to state-enforced spatial concentrations (reserves) and non-recognized, and less visible, dispersed informal settlements. This has been true for concentrated urbanization from Toronto to Ottawa, Winnipeg, Vancouver and Victoria (Barman, 2007; Blomley, 2004; Comack et al., 2013; DeVries, 2011; Edwards, 2010; Harris, 2003; Harris, 2004; Hugill, 2015; Stanger-Ross, 2008; Tomiak, 2011; Tomiak, 2016). Through operational landscapes like the railway, a colonial divide emerged between ‘city’ and ‘non-city’ (reserve) that both organized and cut across other layers of Canadian urban history.⁴

An urban focus helps reveal the contradictions of colonial policy, as Coulthard (2014) tells us, following Tobias (1991). The segregationist thrust of settler colonialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries relegated Indigenous peoples to ‘non-urban’ settlements and symbolically erased them from ‘urban civilization’, indeed, ‘history’ (Freeman, 2010, also Razack, 2002; Tomiak, 2011). Dispossessive, state-enforced private property regimes, urban planning and reserve-centered aboriginal administration did not eradicate but institute this separation between ‘cities’ and ‘native space’ (Harris, 2002, 2004). Enshrined in the Indian Acts between 1876 and 1985, this separation was gendered, built on a patriarchal, territorialized and racialized conception of Indian status. This conception (and the ulterior, also racialized legal distinction between First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) inverted typically matrilineal, territorially fluid, clan-based forms of belonging in Indigenous nations. Many Indigenous women and their offspring thus lost their legal status (Anderson, 2015; Bourgeault, 1986; Lawrence, 2003, 2004; Maracle, 1996; Simpson, 2014; Stevenson, 1999).

In turn, segregation has had to contend with its own effects – as well as with the other side of Canadian Indian policy: assimilation. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples from land and livelihood undermined their economic independence and pushed them, sometimes deliberately, into the margins of the capitalist labor market (Adams, 1975, 1999; Brownlie, 2008; High, 1996; Harris, 2004: 265–266; Knight, 1978). And assimilation intended to shrink and eliminate, physically or culturally, Indigenous societies (with disease, starvation, residential schools, and, later, enfranchisement and children’s aid societies) (Coulthard, 2014; Daschuk, 2013; Lawrence 2003; Tobias, 1991; Wolfe, 2006; Wotherspoon and Satzewich, 2000). As a result, Indigenous people often had to reach beyond the reserve to survive (Harris, 2004: 274–275, 286–288) or were forcibly ‘integrated’ into white society: stolen from their families, divested of their status, or coerced into the labor market. Despite segregation, Indigenous peoples were thus never absent from concentrated urban life. Their spatial practices have long defied the ‘city’ and ‘reserve’ divide (Johnson, 2013; Lawrence, 2004; Sanderson and Howard-Bobiwash, 1997).

Mediated by urbanization patterns, the contradictions of Canadian colonialism came to the fore in the postwar period. On the one hand, the ‘city’ – ‘reserve’ dualism continued to shape colonial geography despite growing reserve-city migration and a partial urbanization of Canadian aboriginal policy (see Tomiak, 2011). On the other, as a result of the expansionist dynamics of Fordist capitalism, central-city urban renewal, reserve-city migration, and the more permissive aspects of the 1951 Indian Act, it became clear that many Indigenous peoples led their lives in trans-local fashion, in and between reserves and off-reserve places of work, residence and activism. Together with an urban shift in Canadian aboriginal policy (Murray, 2011; Peters, 2002; Tomiak, 2011), these dynamics put the ‘urban aboriginal’ problematic on the agenda of researchers (Peters and Anderson, 2013). These have often studied the ‘urbanization’ of Indigenous lives with the typical ‘city-centric’ – and state-bound – statistical conceptions of the ‘urban’ (as settlements of at least 1000 inhabitants with a minimum population density of 400 per square kilometer) to highlight the growing Indigenous presence in towns and cities (Peters and Anderson, 2013). Yet, next to this emphasis on aboriginal presence in the ‘settler city’, they have also emphasized that Indigenous practices, experiences, and conceptions ‘transcend the classic rural/urban binaries’ established by colonial policy (Anderson and Peters, 2013: 382; Peters, 2002: 87–88).

Aspirations and imaginaries emerging from everyday struggle (level P) refract these levels of colonial historical geography. As Mariátegui (1971) pointed out with respect to the relationship between myth, Indigenous politics and communism in Peru, they do so in ways that defy linear historical accounts. In the North American context, the ways in which ‘city’ and ‘country’ (‘bush’, ‘land’, ‘reserve’) have been mobilized symbolically in big and small struggles against colonialism also subvert a linear conception of urbanization leading from country to city. Researchers and activists have emphasized repeatedly how the experience of concentrated urbanization has been shaped by Indigenous ways to ‘appropriate urban [city] space’ (Peters, 2013) in various ways, from protests, blockades and ‘urban’ land claims, to street renaming projects, Indigenous housing and community development initiatives, and the creation of ‘urban’ reserves (Comack et al., 2013: 146–158; Craig and Hamilton, 2015; Simpson, 2011: 11; Tomiak, 2011, 2017). The substantial and durable increase in Indigenous populations in towns and cities since the postwar period has thus given rise to Indigenous practices and institutions that made it easier to see – and say – that there is no inherent contradiction between (concentrated) urban life, indigeneity, and Indigenous self-determination (Bobiwash, 1997; Hoar, 2014; Neigh, 2012).

As Tomiak (2016) points out, Indigenous contestations of town and city space are part of multi-scalar and translocal geographies of resistance. Indigenous spatial practices in the 1960s and early 1970s also produced translocal imaginaries, for example, during the moment of Red Power. In off-reserve contexts like Vancouver, Red Power movements emerged from the networks that made it possible for young Indigenous people to ‘feel connected’ with each other as well as to other anti-colonial and left-wing radicals, as Lee Maracle put it in her Bobbi Lee – Indian Rebel (1990: 209). Situated in between Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Seattle, Visalia, Lake Labiche and Ashcroft, Bobbi Lee showed how inter-personal Indigenous relations were shaped by various manifestations of settler racism, the necessity for intermittent ‘shit work’, sometimes violent family relations, countercultural experimentation and new political horizons. In turn, networks between reserves and off-reserve spaces brought various political influences to Indigenous communities. Corroborating Maracle’s account, Adams (1975: 176) and Rick Monture (2014: 142) made similar points with reference to Métis Saskatchewan and the Haudnesaunee at Grand River, respectively.

Off and on reserves, the ‘unrest’ of the 1960s and 1970s condensed many lines of influence. It produced multiple, interconnected centralities in and across reserves, towns and big cities. Given this history, it makes eminent sense to hear Indigenous intellectuals today emphasize the need to build movements that straddle the inherited colonial divide between city and reserve. Bonita Lawrence (2004), Simpson (2017), and Coulthard (2014) argue that an effective geography of resistance against settler colonialism must build alliances between reserve-based Indigenous organizations and Indigenous people living in areas described as urban. The point of such alliances is not only practical, helping to ‘build movement’ (Simpson, 2017: 81) by developing organizational capacities, sharing expertise and memories of struggle (Coulthard, 2014: 176). Indigenous ‘reserve-city’ resistance networks may also help subvert the real and imagined boundaries of colonial settlement:

…the efficacy of Indigenous resurgence hinges on its ability to address the interrelated systems of dispossession that shape Indigenous peoples’ experiences in both reserve- and urban-based Indigenous communities to reconceptualize Indigenous identity and nationhood in a way that refuses to replicate the “colonial divisions” that contributed to the urban/reserve divide through racist and sexist policies like enfranchisment. (Coulthard, 2014: 176)

While Coulthard uses a city-centered conception of the urban here, he indicates that place-based but also translocal Indigenous movements raise fundamental questions about the meaning of ‘city’ and ‘non-city’ on this continent.

I would suggest that these arguments resonate with Lefebvrean sensibilities: they allow us to see that trans-local Indigenous spatial practices do not just ‘move’ between the racialized fixities of ‘city’ and ‘country’ (‘reserve’, ‘bush’). They are active, if subordinate forces the production of space and centrality. However, non-urban imaginaries remain crucial in Indigenous politics, for reasons that escape Lefebvre. As in other colonial contexts, they conjure up memories of the ‘dehumanizing process that urbanization in a racist society is for us [Indigenous people]’ (Maracle, 1990: 229). For some, permanent Indigenous moves to settler towns and urban regions raise the spectre of new levels of ‘cultural integration into oppressor society’ (Maracle, 1996: 105); for others, the ‘city’ can remain an alien place for other reasons. As Audra Simpson clarifies with respect to Indigenous women without status, the ‘city’ can be a site of expulsion (where one goes after being told, on the reserve, to ‘go back to the city’) and a site of exclusion (where one hears settlers yell: ‘go back to where you came from’) (2014: 164).

Skepticism toward the realities of urbanization does not necessarily yield anti-urbanism, however. Just as with Indigenous lives, Indigenous allegiances, too, do not stop at the edge of towns of cities; they cut across spatial divides of city and reserve or bush (Alfred, 2009: 173–174). As Maracle herself says, ‘we [Indigenous peoples] don’t have to “go back to the land”’ because ‘the cities we now inhabit’ also ‘exist on land’ that Indigenous people ‘never left’ (1996: 109–110). Projects to rebuild Indigenous modes of life materially, through place-sensitive, egalitarian, democratic and conservationist economies (that may involve a good measure of subsistence) may emerge in various landscapes. Whether such projects involve a defense of remaining not-just-capitalist modes of production (or ‘bush culture’, Kulchyski, 2013) or a reconstruction of non-capitalist ways of life, they can challenge instead of inverting colonial dichotomies of city and non-city. Cognizant of the challenges mass urbanization (concentrated and extended) pose to Indigenous land, livelihood and sovereignty, networked geographies of resistance and the ‘politics of refusal’ advanced by Indigenous resurgence target not cities per se but ‘colonial spatialities’ as a whole (Simpson, 2017: 194–198).

While Indigenous struggles embody various spatial imaginaries, some current mobilizations offer an overt challenge to colonial dichotomies of ‘city’/‘non-city’ or ‘reserve’. Reflecting on the Wet’suwet’en anti-pipeline blockade, which also claimed off-reserve lands, chief T’oghestíy thinks that

…a lot of First Nations people are… realizing that if they stay in their Indian reserves or urban centres and just exist in the system, nothing’s going to change. But if they get onto their ancestral lands, they’ll see exactly what’s happening to them… (Huson and T’oghestíy, 2015: 52)

Such a defiance of colonial territoriality reveals a clash between colonial-capitalist time-space and Indigenous conceptions of land and territory. This is the case also with the Carrier Sekani in interior British Columbia, who have mobilized dynamic and relational conceptions of time, space and territory against the forces of pipeline urbanization (McCreary and Milligan, 2014).

Current Indigenous struggles thus corroborate the salience of some of the theories of time-space that are discussed by Indigenous intellectuals, including advocates of Indigenous resurgence (Goeman, 2008: 300–301). Leanne Simpson (2011: 89–94) tells us that Nishnaabeg notions of space grasp the complex relationship between place-bound gathering and movement or mobility. They distinguish between spaces of movement, spaces of demographic density, and intermediary zones of transition. In Nishnabeek, the term ‘Oodena’ (the ‘place where the hearts gather’) captures the moment of socio-spatial concentration, the dense, ‘city-like’ nexus of broader territorial relationships (Simpson, 2011: 94). Audra Simpson, too, emphasizes that Mohawk, indeed Haudnesaunee, traditions of clan-based and confederate political and social organization are built upon non-homogenous, fluid, relatively unbound conceptions of territory. As their Nishnabeek counterparts, these Mohawk views of time and space can subtend subtle political strategies. They subvert the homogenizing, violently hierarchical and patriarchal, and territorially binding forms of abstract space and linear time that are entrenched, through colonial statecraft, in the dichotomy of ‘city’ and ‘reserve’ (2014: 18).

Conclusion

Contestations of pipeline projects show that research on extended and concentrated urbanization features limits. To realize its potential, it needs to be recast by establishing links to sources that are both internal and external to the traditions upon which it is built. First, this research must link urban questions to everyday life and the ‘large’ social order. In the Canadian case, such a broadening allows us to make connections to work on the settler-colonial dimensions of Canadian political economy, which, in turn, alerts us to the fact that struggles over extended urbanization raise (inter-)national questions that rest on Indigenous claims to self-determination. Second, and more specifically, current dynamics of urbanization should be contextualized in light of longer, non-linear, uneven and combined processes through which ‘city’ and ‘country’ have been transformed, modified or reinstituted as socio-spatial forms. Research on Canadian settler colonial geography has shown that since the 19th-century, capitalist and colonial urbanization did not replace city with country but created new distinctions between urban and non-urban social space. Third, paying attention to extended-concentrated urbanization requires ‘contextually specific and theoretically reflexive investigations’, yes, of ‘conditions within so-called “rural” or non-urban zones’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 174) but also into qualitative challenges to the expansion of the urban field and the imaginaries (urban or not) that come along with such challenges. Finally, historical-materialist approaches (Lefebvrean or not) must learn from Indigenous theories without swallowing these. In our case, the relational conceptions of time and space that inform some Indigenous theories (in and beyond pipeline struggles) hold key lessons for urban research. But they do stand on their own. Self-defined yet not autarchic, they help ensure that claims to Indigeneity are not drowned out by ‘stories of colonization’, even critical ones (Alfred and Corntassel, 2005: 601, cited in Hugill, 2017: 7).

My twin plea for theoretical openness suggests that urbanization, that medium of (neo-)colonial capitalism, must remain both contestable and questionable. In Canada, insisting on the open-ended character of urban research is vital if the Indigenous question is not to be shoehorned into hegemonizing urban strategies. Under pressure by Indigenous resistance and legal requirements to consult with First Nations, such strategies include measures of consultation (and sometimes resource sharing) with Indigenous peoples, at least to manage the ‘uncertainty’ of those planning infrastructure projects and extractive investments (Van Nostrand, 2014). While incorporating recognition and marketization into the state-bound apparatuses of urbanism, such visions leave no obvious room for autonomous Indigenous futures. In contrast, those Indigenous struggles that object to the expansion of the urban field and the resource frontier (as well as Indigenous ways of accommodating both) obstruct the expansion of Canadian capitalism. As some non-Indigenous intellectuals have learned since the 1960s (Kulchyski, 2016), such critical Indigenous claims to land, livelihood and sovereignty hold promise for other struggles against capitalism. More specifically, self-defined and resistant Indigenous praxis mounts welcome material and ideational pressures to reorganize already existing urban life along non-capitalist lines.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Stefan Kipfer teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies and the Departments of Geography and Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada.

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