Housing in c\a\n\a\d\a is characterized by unaffordability, disrepair, under-housing, precarity, and homelessness. This is housing alienation—the condition of being separated from our fundamental connections to home. It separates us from the land we inhabit, the social world that supports us, and our full creative lives. We are Architects Against Housing Alienation and we believe the current housing system in c\a\n\a\d\a must be abolished!
The transformation of land and homes into profit-generating commodities has caused alienation. This condition began with colonial land dispossession. When European settlers arrived in c\a\n\a\d\a, they began a process that not only violently took land away from Indigenous peoples, but also attacked Indigenous ways of knowing and doing. Through this encounter, land became conceptualized as private property, reserved for the exclusive use of its owner and yet easily exchanged, throwing something as rooted as land into circulation. We use Simoogit Saa Bax Patrick Stewart’s backslashes in c\a\n\a\d\a to refer to these originating land divisions and separations. c\a\n\a\d\a is divided by property lines and separated by the drive for profit over the connection to place.
Today, homes are designed to be exchangeable assets. They follow the rules of real estate speculation so that they can store wealth and be easily traded for profit, resulting in environments that are racist, sexist, and classist. Housing alienation disproportionately robs the working class, women, and racialized people of their power to determine for themselves the means of their survival and flourishing. Profit-driven housing production depends on exploitative labour practices and the degradation of the environment through unsustainable construction and resource extraction.
We seek to end housing alienation by rebuilding connections to land, to community, and to creative self-determination. As activists, advocates, and architects, we are working collaboratively to create the political will, economic and policy frameworks, and designs for housing that are socially, ecologically, and creatively empowering for all.
How did we get here? The Atlas of Housing Alienation, a collaboration with film producer and editor Marie-Espérance Cerda, is an original documentary film that introduces viewers to the history of housing alienation in c\a\n\a\d\a. In the short film, historical film footage is clipped and organized into a series of thematic chapters that place a critical lens on the history of land, colonization, capitalism, and housing in the place now known as c\a\n\a\d\a. It begins by evoking the pre-contact days of Turtle Island’s stewardship by Indigenous peoples, then explores the construction of new notions of property ownership resulting from European settler and Indigenous people’s contact through later eras of westward settler colonial “progress,” industrialization, and inequalities around race and gender experienced in connection to housing, as well as current conditions of financialization and houselessness. To counterbalance the sometimes deeply propagandistic source material—selling the Canadian frontier to white settlers—the film uses montage, narration, and a chapter structure that complicates the received story of the nation state to raise important questions and expose the complexity of this history.
We are Architects Against Housing Alienation and we believe the current housing system in c\a\n\a\d\a must be abolished!