The Woodward’s Squat was an autonomous direct action housing initiatve that took place in Vancouver over 92 days in fall 2002.
Friends of the Woodward’s Squat is in the process of making primary documents available online. If you would like access to our archives please contact us at <archives@woodsquat.net>.
From a review of Direct Action, Reading the Riot Act, and Woodsquat published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 11:1 (Fall 2007).
The occupation of the Woodwards building, a prominent, if neglected, corporate landmark located on the cusp of Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, by an assortment of street people, punks, the working poor, activists, anarchists, students, adventurers, addicts, and people passing through town, began on September 14th, 2002, and lasted for exactly three months. Although the building had for decades been the focal point for housing struggles in the city, being passed back and forth between various provincial governments and developers until it was quietly left to the pigeons and rats by Gordon Campbell’s neo-liberal government in 2002, a full-scale occupation of the building was by all accounts not on the radar when the building was “popped” by three local residents. Once this group was inside, a small demo was held, during which ladders were raised to the second floor of the building (there were security dogs on the first floor), and people started to make their way inside. Some spent the night, and by the next day, local anti-poverty groups began referring to “the Woodwards squatters” and calling for support in the form of food, blankets, and mattresses.
Aaron Vidaver, the editor of this collection, is a trained archivist, and it shows. In addition to this expertise, he also produced during the squat a daily zine with news, statements, minutes from meetings, poems, safety tips, etc., unofficially assuming a role as the squat’s samizdat publisher. Thus, the material he includes in the collection reflects both his training and his position as a “witness-participant,” someone both inside and outside the occupation. In his collection, we find a multiplicity of competing perspectives on the occupation – those of local homeless people, of native squatters, of the activists who saw the squat primarily as a “tool,” the police who saw it as an affront to their clumsy “law and order” approach to the area’s problems, and, finally, of the municipal government who, tellingly, assigned the squat to their Sanitation Branch. These perspectives are documented in public statements and speeches by squatters and activists, individual testimony and interviews, photographs of the building and of support rallies, poems, flyers, comics, a wonderful series of portraits of the squatters taken by Vidaver, academic essays on gentrification and media coverage of the squat, and numerous documents obtained though freedom-of-information requests (some of which are censored), such as police surveillance reports, stills from police video footage taken during the first eviction, and internal memos prepared by city staff.
Taken together, these documents demonstrate better than any third-person analysis could the political composition of, and tensions within, the squat. Vidaver makes these tensions very clear by opening the collection with Theresa D. Gray’s piece “Canada is All Native Land: Non-Natives Are All Squatters: The Devil + Canada are One.” Indeed, the squat was never able to fully address the problem that it was, from a First Nations’ point of view, a kind of meta-occupation (an occupation of already occupied land), nor could it resolve the contradictions between its immediate use as “a self-managed poor people’s site of reclamation,” as Vidaver calls it in the introduction, and its more commodified or symbolic use as a bargaining chip in a campaign for state-controlled social housing.
For instance, in “Squatting as an Organizational Tool,” Lisa Wulwik describes squatting as an instrument deployed by renters and the poor in their struggle with the state over “effective rent controls” and “social housing.” “People squat,” she writes, “for various reasons: to live free of huge rent prices and overbearing slum lords, to live in occupant-controlled housing, to open community spaces and social centres, to publicize the need for social housing and to call attention to the number of vacant homes and buildings…[activists have] been very successful in using squatting as a political tool to demand social housing.” This perspective is echoed in another piece by Mike Krebs, titled “Demands.” Here, the author seems to be under the influence of Trotsky’s notion of “transitional demands” – short-term demands for concessions that can be achieved under capitalism, in the course of a long-term struggle for socialism – to explain why the Woodward’s squatters needed to “define the movement for housing.”
While this perspective – that the squat was primarily a means-to-an-ends, and that those ends were social housing – is very prominent in the collection (possibly because activists, due to the nature of their work and experience with the media, are often articulate and charismatic and good at securing air time), it frequently encounters challenges from other statements and perspectives that call for a break with the politics of demand. Lyn Tooley, for instance, in “We Need to be Left Alone,” describes how six months of homelessness – “of having to live [her] private life in public space” – amplified her need for “solitude” and “creativity.” Linking the Woodwards squat to autonomous movements in Europe and South America, Tooley argues that “we don’t need government interference to solve our problems. We need to be left alone, unmolested and unharassed be police brutality and government do-gooders….We are not asking the affluent sectors of society to give us charity…We are taking responsibility for our own needs using the only resources left available to us: waste spaces, garbage materials and our creativity.” T. Forsythe, also, suggests that the final neutralization of the squat was tied directly to its reification in the media as part of an activist “campaign” before it had a chance to develop autonomously: “[Leftists] seem to be attracted to media cameras like flies on shit. This phenomenon of self-policing leftists seems to be limited to North America…I remember one meeting where this womyn was telling people not to ‘spare change’ and not to use drugs because ‘it would look bad in the media.’ Come on, you don’t walk into the ghetto, straight out of the white middle class progressive leftist circus and start telling poor people they can’t use drugs or panhandle…it was people like this who sold out Woodwards in the end.”
Today, a “stylish and modern” 560 square foot condo in Woodwards – featuring “9 ft polished concrete ceilings, laminate floors, a Juliette balcony, customized doors, glass tiles & floor to ceiling windows” – starts for around $400,000, and local arts organizations are lining up to get their hands on some cheap office and gallery space.
Bruce Gongola, “Frances to Woody”, Woodsquat (2004): 206-207.
The first thing we did at the Frances Street Squats was tear down all the fences between the houses. The first thing I did at Woodsquat was climb the ladder. At Frances it was more individualized while at Woodsquat the lights never went off. Everybody was always doing something with somebody. Frances Street was more of a homey kind of thing while Woodsquat was more like bubbling, shitting revolution. It didn’t know where it was going or what it was about but 25 hours a day, 8 days a week. It just never ended. It was always happening. Somebody might go to bed but 40 people at least might be up. At Frances Street people were comfortable with the people they lived with. They knew who they were. They knew who they could trust. Woodsquatters didn’t have a fucking clue who they were with, who they could trust, or if they could even trust themselves. You know what I mean? I don’t want to call it anarchy. But it functioned as chaos. Frances Street was anarchy in action but Woodsquat was total chaos. Woodsquat was different from Frances in that it was a street scene with people who never had a place to live. People that never had a sense of political power or never had some sense of community love or organization. Woodsquat was like the gases in a solar system. Energy that takes a long time to come together, to form a planet. That energy was Woodsquat. The Frances Street Squats were like stars. Frances Street had a coalition. Woodsquat was the gases of the universe, spiraling and whirling around, not worried if it was gonna happen or not. Frances Street functioned politically while Woodsquat was manipulated. For all the manipulation I think people really enjoyed themselves and learned a lot. For all the manipulation that happened on all the levels, it didn’t make a goddamn bit of difference. If it wasn’t for Oka, Frances Street would kind of just have petered along. Oka gave it a hard definition. Woodsquat was primordial energy. It didn’t matter what happens. Something was happening. It was all new. It was all heavy, heavy, heavy power. Even though it had manipulation to it, on a political level, it didn’t even fuckin matter. Because it was the people and the energy that was pulsating. It was more people than politics. There was no spokesperson at Frances Street. We all had respect for each other. There was no Jimmy Leyden. There was no PHS in the background. There are some examples of squatters camps in Vancouver but this Woodsquat thing was unique. It was a page of history that stands on its own even though it was manipulated and used by Jim and Jim and Campbell and Campbell. That’s fine. As a people’s action the Woodsquat goes down in history on its own. It was not the electoral politics, the PR, but the people who were living it. That’s what I was impressed with. I have no qualm with Larry Campbell. But I have no love for the other Campbell. He’ll get elected one more time. Then he’ll get unelected because they don’t want to pick up the pieces. They may knock that goddamn building down. Whatever happens, the struggle goes on. The struggle is about our land. It is not about a particular building or a particular way to live. It is about the changing nature of capitalism and poverty, so that people have a happy life and that everybody is well fed. We’ve got to make life more fun and be creative enough to not only survive but prosper and not get taken down in their power game. At the end of Frances, Ian woke up and they were taking his socks to the street. We took everything out of the houses to the barricade because we didn’t want a little sweet ending. Squeege rips her mask off and she starts crying. The movie is beautiful. At Woodsquat PHS hired some VANDU people and ex-squatter types to take it down. At 7:30am I woke up and they were there. It was a sweet and sour ending. The sauce was too thin. No substance. No meat on the bone. No bone. No dog. And at the end of both squats there were the same false statements issued in the press about weapons being there. After Frances some of us went into a shared house on Adanac Street then the Broadway Squats started. After Woodsquat some of us went into the Dominion Hotel and all of a sudden everything was behind closed doors. That was a drag. It broke people up even more. There were no kitchen facilities. For a while I talked about taking all the doors off. But I’ll save that story for another occasion.
Published in Citizenship Studies 12:2 (April 2008): 143-156.
Link to article (pdf).
Summary: “The common conception of citizenship is that of belonging to a political community, with the ensuing rights and responsibilities of membership. This community tends to be naturalized as the nation-state. However, this location of citizenship needs to be decentred in order to investigate current modes of democratic participation. This paper investigates current sites and practices of citizenship through reflection on a tactical housing squat of an empty department store staged by an urban social movement in Vancouver in 2002, known as ‘Woodsquat’. It uses a social movement perspective to look at citizenship, emphasizing the identities, practices, and locations of democratic engagement over the collective question of how we will live together in these places. From this point of view Woodsquat shows current limits of national citizenship, conceptually and practically, and suggests alternative possibilities for future citizenship practices located in multiple identifications with (political) communities. Moving from this analysis of political participation at Woodsquat attention is brought to the importance of spaces of democratic communication for possibilities of citizenship, where there seems to be a reinforcing relationship between public spheres, social movements, and democracy. Ultimately, then, actions at Woodsquat are argued to be a form of citizenship that emerged within a democratic public.”
Published in Canadian Dimension 38:5 (September-October 2004).
Excerpt: “The occupation of the building’s interior ended quickly, but the squat continued outside for three months, with an estimated 200 people camped around the perimeter. Squatters maintained political pressure through organization and mutual support. ‘We had our own infrastructure,’ says Jewel, one of the participants. ‘We had our own soup kitchens set up. We had volunteers ready to run it, control it, keep it working. We had our own security team running.’ No matter which questions I asked during our interview, almost everyone wanted to talk about the community they had at the squat, and about ways to get it back. As a result of the protest, the new city council, dominated by the Coalition of Progressive Electors, bought the building from the provincial government in March, 2003, with promises to use the space to support the interests of Downtown Eastside residents. [...] COPE, composed in part by community advocates and activists, promised a radically different approach to the Canada’s most-talked-about neighbourhood. The COPE solution put the squatters into two Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels in the area. The notorious SROs are rooming houses with tiny units and shared bathrooms. Many involved with the Woodward’s squat believe this was an intentional move to disrupt the bonds and solidarity created during the protest. Intentional or not, that is what happened. Once a force powerful enough to wrest a vacant city block from the hands of the provincial government, those I spoke to say the community of the Woodward’s squat is scattered geographically and fragmented. Jewel wants to start a new squat, giving up the meagre housing she has, to resurrect the solidarity of the Woodward’s squat.”
