four - Conservation Officers, Dispersal and Urban Frontiers

Summary

Introduction

A large body of scholarship (Eick, 2003, 2006; von Mahs, 2005; Herbert and Beckett, 2006) has revealed how socio-spatial regulation of homeless people operates in the urban core. Other writings in legal geography have focused on regulation in parks (Hermer, 1997; Mawani, 2003; Blomley, 2004; Beckett and Herbert, 2010). Public police often force homeless people away from city centres; the effects of gentrification create fewer habitable street spaces in the urban frontier (Smith, 1996) and undermine people's rights to the city (Mitchell, 2003). Yet as DeVerteuil (2006) argues, previous research has focused overly on municipal public police instead of networks of public and private agencies, and has neglected spatial regulation in peripheral urban frontiers such as alleyways, riverbanks and tree-covered ravines adjacent to urban parks. These urban frontiers are spaces where different uses of the city are possible, and conservation officers are deployed to enforce a specific version of order.

This chapter explores how National Capital Commission (NCC) conservation officers regulate homeless people in Ottawa, Canada's capital city of one million people, located several hundred kilometres north-east of Toronto, Ontario. Ottawa is one of several Canadian cities where conservation officers regulate conduct within city limits. Historically, the NCC in Ottawa had a mandate of ‘beautification’ through land development (Gordon, 1998; Besmier, 2003). Architects and planners took to beautifying Ottawa in the late 1890s, seeking to make its lands reflect the ‘diversity’ of Canada. As a 1965 NCC document put it, ‘the capital of a country … becomes a symbol of nationalism and in miniature represents the spirit and life of its people’ (National Capital Commission, 1965). This goal of creating a vision of Canada in Ottawa's parks is pursued by uniformed and plain-clothed NCC conservation officers. At the same time, downtown Ottawa is built on unceded Indigenous territory. The land that the NCC administers, including Parliament Hill, is the subject of an Indigenous land claim in Ontario's Superior Court (Canadian Press, 2016).

Like other capital cities, such as Washington, DC and London, UK, Ottawa's downtown area displays monuments and national symbols meant for public consumption. Capital cities are planned as ceremonial spaces (Liebowitz and Simon, 2002) ready for parades and tours, but also for shopping and weekly mass public events.