Terminal City Infrastructures of Racial Colonial Capitalism in Vancouver

"In this extraordinary book, Michael Simpson reveals the city as a dense web of infrastructures shaped by violence, dispossession, and displacement. Yet it is also alive with Indigenous, Black, Chinese, and workers' struggles over roads, rail, ports, pipelines, and property, pushing toward a just and decolonized future. With unflinching analysis, Simpson traces infrastructures alive with possibility and a different city to come." -Deborah Cowen, author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade

"Terminal City masterfully demonstrates the violence of colonial dispossession and the remaking and resistance of s lilw ta (Tsleil-Waututh), S wx wú7mesh (Squamish), and x m thk y m (Musqueam) forms of life, land, and community in the reproduction of both settler colonial capital and space in Vancouver. A must-read." -Glen Sean Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

"Terminal City provides a crucial correction to generations of hegemonic accounts of Canada's third largest metropole. Up to now, critical readers, activists, and citizens here have been forced to counter-interpolate ruling-class versions of Vancouver. We have had to sift through self-congratulation and solipsism to discern the actual power relations masked by distorted narratives of city building. In this powerful and clear-eyed work, Michael Simpson reveals the conflicts, contradictions, and complexities of race and class in a way that foregrounds them at last. Out of the ashes of the myth of Vancouver exceptionalism will come a greater truth. After Terminal City, there is no going back." -Wayde Compton, author of Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics