Displacement City

Canada's major cities have faced the humanitarian disaster of homelessness for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare a massive deficit in social programs and widespread inattention to human rights. Are municipal public services designed to essentially produce displacement? Or can we do something to end the growing problem of urban homelessness in Canada?

In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe illuminate this infrastructure of displacement through prose, poetry, and photography. Contributors to the book, including those with lived experience of homelessness in Toronto, report on the realities of the situation and how people responded: by providing disaster-relief supplies and tiny shelters for encampments, by advocating for shelter-hotels where people could physically distance, by taking the city to court, and by rising up against encampment evictions. The book provides particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic.

Greg Cook is an outreach worker at Sanctuary Toronto. He partners with many community groups to advocate for a more just society. He is on the steering committee of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network and volunteers for the Toronto Homeless Memorial. He has worked on two documentaries: Bursting at the Seams, about the shelter crisis, and What World Do You Live In, about police brutality.

Cathy Crowe is a recipient of the Order of Canada and a pioneer of street nursing. She is currently a public affiliate in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. She has fostered numerous coalitions and advocacy initiatives that have achieved significant public policy victories, including the 1998 Disaster Declaration. She is the author of A Knapsack Full of Dreams and Dying for a Home and producer of the "Home Safe" documentary series. Her work is the subject of the documentary Street Nurse, by filmmaker Shelley Saywell.

Robyn Maynard is a Vanier scholar, the winner of the SSHRC Talent Award, and holds a Faculty of Arts & Science Top Doctoral (FAST) fellowship at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present.

Shawn Micallef is a columnist at the Toronto Star, co-owner of Spacing magazine, and the author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and Full Frontal TO.