Spatial dispossession and the destruction of Black communities

Across Canada, multiple Black communities experienced displacement, containment, or erasure through state action, revealing a national pattern extending far beyond any single case. Among the most well-known is Africville in Halifax, razed in the late 1960s under the guise of urban renewal. Residents were forcibly relocated, and the community’s cultural and institutional anchors were destroyed (Clairmont & Magill, 1999). In Vancouver, Hogan’s Alley, the city’s first and only concentrated Black neighbourhood, was demolished beginning in 1967 to construct the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, permanently dispersing its Black residents (Landau-Donnelly, 2023, 2024). In Montreal’s St. Antoine/Little Burgundy, mid-century urban renewal programs, deindustrialization, and highway construction fragmented a strong, culturally rich Black community, displacing long-standing institutions and weakening social networks that had historically mitigated exposure to harm (High, 2017). Amber Valley in Alberta, founded by African American homesteaders in the early 1900s, declined in the 1930s and 1940s under economic exclusion and racial hostility, pushing families into urban centres where they encountered discriminatory housing markets and over-policing. In the twenty-first century, large-scale evictions and redevelopment in Ottawa’s Heron Gate displaced hundreds of Black and racialized residents, dismantling protective social supports and echoing earlier renewal projects across North America (Crosby, 2023). Together, these cases illustrate a recurring pattern: Black communities across Canada have been subjected to spatial dispossession that fractures community life, reshapes risk environments, and continues to influence patterns of victimization, institutional trust, and survivorship today.