Municipal Colonialism in Vancouver: City Planning and the Conflict over Indian Reserves, 1928–1950s

This article explores the entanglement of city planning with settler claims to Indian reserves in Vancouver. The Plan for the City of Vancouver, first published in 1928, devoted significant attention to the Kitsilano and Musqueam reserves. In the decades that followed, municipal officials drew upon the plan in their descriptions of the particular problems created by reserves in the city. Municipal officials came to think that the reserves harmed the rest of Vancouver and that modern urban areas presented a special case for dispossession. Marshalling the theories and methods of city planning in their attempts to control and acquire the reserves from the 1930s to the 1950s, city officials fashioned a distinctively municipal colonialism.