Housing Vancouver, 1972–2017: A personal urban geography and a professional response

The forum includes a research paper, preceded by a brief introduction and followed by five short responses from Pablo Mendez, Loretta Lees, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ilse Helbrecht, and Alison Mountz. Mountz's introduction sets the context for the paper and makes some framing remarks on David Ley's career. The main paper examines the housing question in Vancouver, in the period from 1972 to 2017. Re-examining a number of Ley's research projects over this period, three broader themes are explored: the continuity of the housing crisis, and its reconfiguration over the period under study; the contrast between innovative and interventionist housing policy in the 1970s, with the later withdrawal of the state from significant intervention while endorsing market solutions; and the new centrality of housing as an empirical and analytical category in current human geography. This period saw upscaling from the 1970s welfare state to neoliberal globalization, including wealth immigration and off-shore property investment that accelerated serious metropolitan affordability problems. Following this research paper, colleagues and former students respond to the paper and locate the contributions in David Ley's broader career. Their commentaries address Ley's key contributions to debates in human geography, including his work on gentrification, urbanism, urban activism, global migration, art, aesthetics, and ethnography.     

Female artistic identity in place: the studio

In this paper I examine the role of the studio as a central site of artistic identity construction and maintenance. Using ten case studies drawn from interviews with contemporary women visual artists from Toronto, Canada, I argue that women artists value studio space because it powerfully reinforces their sense of commitment and belonging to a predominantly male‐dominated profession. I consider how women cope with the demands of artistic practice when they are unable to establish a spatially separate workspace by addressing the experiences of artists who are parents. I demonstrate how women artists who are primary care‐givers are rarely adequately protected from the interruptions of daily life and have grown accustomed to working in fragments of time and space. While these women may appear willing to concede space to others, when space is crucial to their artistic practice, they have a remarkably strong influence on the form of their creative environment. I maintain, then, that the studio as a fixed physical space continues to be a very real necessity for women artists in all stages of their careers.     

“Let no man write my epitaph”: the contributions of Percy Shelley,Thomas Moore and Robert Southey to the memorialisation of Robert Emmet

For centuries elegy has been instrumental to Irish culture and its self-expression. This essay considers the elegies both by and about Robert Emmet written by Thomas Moore, Robert Southey and Percy Bysshe Shelley as well those written by anonymous balladeers. Central to this essay is the examination of the topoi of Irish elegiac verse and song shared by these poems and the way in which they contribute to the evolution of this genre and the radical nationalism associated with it. Their shared discourse is born out of Ireland's colonial experience and contributes to the establishment of Irish national identity, whilst their differing authors and audiences signal the complexities inherent within a colonial textual framework. In particular this essay draws attention to Shelley's neglected Irish poems which reflect the discomfort of a poet and idealist attempting to find his own voice whilst striving to escape the dominant ideology of his own culture.