It seems to us that this connection—or better perhaps, confusion—between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations to one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything.
In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow challenge us to rethink humanity’s story as more than a one-way march toward hierarchy and centralized authority. They remind us that human history is a tapestry of choices, where societies chose to cooperate or control. Power and care have always coexisted, the balance we strike between them shapes how communities nurture or oppress their people.
Through countless examples, Graeber and Wengrow show how societies have organized themselves around cooperation and mutual aid, illustrating that control and care often coexist in varying proportions. These dynamics influence how communities protect, nurture, and govern themselves.
This tension between care and domination surfaces starkly in modern urban planning, where decisions made in the name of “care” frequently mask harmful intentions. At the core of this harm is zoning—a tool originally designed to “serve the public good” but now often functioning as a means of exclusion, demolition, and segregation.
Zoning’s origins lie in early efforts to separate residential, commercial, and industrial areas to improve public health and environmental safety. Over time, however, zoning morphed into a tool to divide communities along racial and economic lines. Under the guise of “improvement,” it has been used to demolish long-established neighborhoods and displace vulnerable communities, creating barriers rather than bridges.
Metro Vancouver is just one of many cities scarred by the meat ax of harmful zoning practices. The construction of the Georgia Viaduct erased Hogan’s Alley, a once-thriving Black neighborhood, under the pretext of urban renewal. In West Vancouver, zoning laws once barred people of African or Asian descent from living there unless employed as domestic workers. These policies—framed as progress—left deep wounds on the city’s social fabric.
Mid-20th-century urban renewal programs carried a brutal legacy. Entire communities were uprooted and displaced under promises of revitalization. Families lost homes. Social networks were shattered. Thriving neighborhoods were replaced by highways and sterile developments. Instead of renewal, these actions created cycles of instability and displacement that haunt cities to this day.
Although many believe these episodes to as blips in the steady progress of urban planning towards more just ends, Graeber and Wengrow remind us that the myth of care persists. We continue to see the same insidious language plaguing our City Halls, supporting initiatives of violence and destruction.
Today, affordable housing projects supported by “pro-development” groups often carry a language of compassion but conceal violent impacts. In a pattern thousands of years old. What is framed as care—providing much-needed housing for those in need—slips into the opposite.
New developments that claim to provide affordable options frequently come hand-in-hand with displacing existing residents and pricing out the very people they are supposed to support. These projects may satisfy a checklist of affordable housing requirements and “unit counts,” but they often fail to account for the deep-rooted needs of the communities they disrupt.
The actions of former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and California State Sen. Scott Wiener are emblematic of this broader North American trend in North American. In partnership with the real estate industry and Yes-In-My-Backyard (YIMBY) groups—they pushed deregulation, market-driven housing policies, and destructive “trickle-down” narratives, under the guise of solving the housing crisis.
As Patrick McDonald details in Selling Off California, this opened the door to squeeze as much profit as possible out of California renters, sacrificing protections for middle- and working-class residents, and contributing to soaring rents, mass gentrification, and displacement. Their promise that market developments would eventually reduce rents across the market proved disastrous.
Does any of this sound familiar?
It should.
The same “trickle-down” and market-driven narratives come out of the mouths of many locals—from Council members to the seemingly innocent propagandists like Uytae Lee—who conveniently omit or gloss over examples that clearly show the harms done by these same arguments.
As such, McDonald’s story is not just about California. It is a cautionary tale for all cities that tout the same market-based solutions to solve affordability issues. It becomes even more problematic within the context of the environmental impacts of these massive rebuilding efforts.
Simply put: zoning, wielded thoughtlessly or with profit-oriented motives, becomes a force of structural violence rather than one of care, protection, or empowerment. It turns the intent to help into a mechanism for harm—of humans and non-humans, alike—amplifying inequality under the guise of “protection” and “love.”
We must displace you, destroy your neighbourhoods, shatter ecological systems, and devastate social bonds because we care about you.
This is the message. Violence and care are entangled. Confused. Violence is planning. Planning is violence.
In Vancouver and across cities in North America, today’s planning conversations ring with the same hollow promises. The Province’s Transit-Oriented Planning mandates, Vancouver’s Broadway Plan, and countless other similar initiatives tout ideas of care, promising improved housing and transit access. Yet these initiatives are leading to displaced communities under the guise of renewal.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s call to “hospice modernity”—to confront the harmful systems and mindsets underpinning destructive practices like these—reminds us that the colonialism, capitalism, and anthropocentrism that feed our top-down systems of planning have devastating consequences and need to be guided to a dignified end of life
Graeber and Wengrow describe how, in the past, people faced with violent systems often chose exodus, moving to neighbouring communities that embraced different, more egalitarian ways of life—a process called “schismogenesis.” Yet today, as we live within a global capitalist system, there is often no escape. The dominant model of top-down, profit-oriented planning creates a trap, leaving people “stuck” and overwhelmed by forces outside their control.
Alternatives, however, are still possible. Rather than rigid zoning that seeks to overrule the public, we could embrace more flexible, mixed-use neighborhoods that support social and economic diversity. Community land trusts and collectively owned land, done right, can offer solutions that keep residents rooted while incorporating new development.
Planners could look to create community resilience by investing in social infrastructure—parks, libraries, and community centers that connect and empower neighborhoods. These elements, conspicuously absent from Provincial and local transit-oriented plans, are fundamental for creating neighborhoods where people feel a true sense of belonging.
Social infrastructure is more than a list of amenities. Research shows that communities with strong social bonds experience lower crime rates, as residents share a sense of responsibility and mutual care. By fostering social cohesion, communities can face challenges together, solving problems without relying on external controls. When residents feel invested in their neighbourhoods, the need for coercive planning interventions diminishes.
In terms of housing, we must consider alternatives to mass destruction and construction. As architect Jeanne Gang highlights, we face an urgent need to do “much more while using less.” She rightfully asks: “When you need to build, what should be done when the best answer might not need to build at all?”
Building simply for the sake of building is no longer sustainable. Gang recommends prioritizing the “art of architectural grafting”—maintaining healthy building fabric wherever possible and integrating affordable housing into thriving communities without uprooting them. Planning must support transformation in ways that respect the working urban fabric and existing social structures, rather than violently replacing them under the guise of “affordable housing”. Environmentally, we have no other choice.
Graeber and Wengrow’s insights teach us that societies organized around shared decision-making tend to foster more ‘egalitarian’ communities. Their thoughts on community autonomy echo the potential need for more participatory urban planning. Allowing residents to participate directly in shaping their neighbourhoods through methods like participatory budgeting and community-led design fosters agency, ownership and gives communities a real voice. This offers an antidote to the increasingly authoritarian style of planning that has become common, as “care” is used to sideline true community input.
When people feel they have a hand in shaping their surroundings, they are more likely to work toward shared goals. Instead of seeing urban planning as a way to “manage” populations—and providing affordable housing as simply counting units—we must approach it as a tool for empowering resilience, equity, and connection. Achieving this requires an honest look at how zoning and redevelopment have perpetuated violence in the past and continue to do so.
We must decouple violence from planning to build cities that help people thrive.
We must shift practices to prioritize stability and equity over financial gain, particularly zoning. True care in urban planning centers on the human and ecological well-being of communities, respecting the needs of both current and future residents. By aligning planning with values of cooperation, adaptability, and solidarity, we can begin to move from a model of domination to one of genuine care.
Only then can cities become places where people feel truly at home, where safety, belonging, and hope are woven into the urban landscape. Planning should not be an act of control but a commitment to nurture, foster, and respect the communities it touches.
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Addendum
I was listening to the video of the City of Vancouver’s November 14th public hearing while putting the final touches on When Care Becomes Control. Just before voting against strong and reasoned community arguments, Councillor Brian Montague offered the following statement:
I just wanted to say that a lot of speakers came out the other night but just to remind everyone that these are quasi-judicial hearings. This is where Council has to put on their land regulator hats and make decisions that are based on certain criteria, and what is in the best interest of the city, and not necessarily on emotion. You know, we have to judge the merit of the project, does it align with City policies. You know, the fact that the City’s been in a 40-year drought on purpose-built rental, density around transit, all these sorts of things…the fact that the City has a less than 1% vacancy rate. So, I just wanted to remind all the speakers and let them know that there’s a lot of things that go into the decision of Council.
Councillor Montague’s remarks exemplify the message of When Care Becomes Control. His troubling dismissal of community voices as “emotional” reflects a broader, historically entrenched pattern of those in power devaluing the lived experiences of the people they claim to represent—again, under the guise of care. This framing perpetuates a false dichotomy between emotion and rational decision-making, ignoring the essential role emotional intelligence plays in ethical governance.
Labeling community concerns as mere “emotion” reflects a failure to recognize that emotions are not in opposition to rationality—they are often deeply rooted in lived realities, historical injustices, and the tangible impacts of policy decisions. To dismiss them as irrelevant is to undermine the democratic process and erode public trust in leadership.
Furthermore, framing the public hearing as a “quasi-judicial” process is problematic and dangerous when used to stifle community input. While technical criteria and policy alignment are essential, they must not overshadow the voices of those directly affected.
Councillor Montague failed to cite any specific criteria in his justification, demonstrating a lack of understanding that policies themselves are not neutral; they are shaped by values and priorities. By dismissing public testimony, he effectively elevated bureaucratic expediency over justice.
The Councillor’s reference to the 40-year “drought” on purpose-built rental housing and a less than 1% vacancy rate underscores the gravity of Vancouver’s housing crisis. Yet, dismissing residents’ perspectives as mere “emotion” undermines potential solutions. This crisis cannot be resolved by undermining the perspectives of citizens.
It is precisely the community’s “emotional” testimony that often sheds light on the unintended consequences of top-down planning decisions—consequences that data alone cannot fully capture.
History is rife with cautionary tales of leaders who prioritized technocratic solutions over community voices, resulting in destructive urban policies. From the displacements of mid-20th century urban renewal to modern struggles with gentrification, many examples illustrate the perils of sidelining lived experience in favor of technocratic efficiency.
If Council truly aims to serve the city’s “best interests,” it must embrace emotional intelligence and recognize community feedback as a vital compass for equitable decision-making. Far from being a nuisance, public testimony offers a lens into the real-world consequences of policy choices.
In the spirit of adhering to specific criteria, Councillor Montague’s statement falls short of the Oath of Office principles he swore to uphold, specifically the commitments to “respect others” and demonstrate “leadership and collaboration.” This disregard for community voices highlights a deficit in both integrity and accountability to the people he was elected to serve.
Equally troubling is the apparent consensus among his colleagues, as none expressed any surprise at his remarks, suggesting this sentiment is widely shared.
True leadership demands humility, empathy, and a willingness to learn from the wisdom embedded in community voices. Anything less is not governance; it is paternalism disguised as professionalism.
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Erick Villagomez is the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver and teaches at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning.
