Michael Simpson on Terminal City

Michael Simpson on Terminal City

We welcome Dr Michael Simpson from the University of St Andrews for his new book on Vancouver's infrastructure in settler colonialism and racialized exploitation.

Vancouver, Canada, has long been held up as an environmentally conscious coastal refuge and model of progressive urban planning. Unpacking the troubling complexities that lie beneath the city's otherwise tidy self-image, Terminal City reveals the long, recurring patterns of racialized violence and Indigenous dispossession crucial to its formation.

Examining the histories of Vancouver's infrastructures, including railways, ports, the freeway system, fossil-fuel pipelines, and property, Michael Simpson details the various spatial manifestations of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that constitute the city's urban environment-using it as a case study to reveal such tendencies around the world.

At a time when massive upheavals to urban infrastructure are taking place in the hopes of establishing greater sustainability, Terminal City raises important questions about how this moment of transition might be harnessed to bring about decolonial abolitionist futures that redefine what a city can become.

Michael Simpson is senior lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is coauthor, with Rueben George, of the award-winning book It Stops Here: Standing Up for Our Lands, Our Waters, and Our People.