CITY PLANNING, DESIGN, AND PROGRAMMING FOR INDIGENOUS URBANISM AND ETHNOCULTURAL DIVERSITY IN WINNIPEG

Abstract

The production and programming of urban space and place have long been applied to eliminate Indigenous peoples from urban areas and minimise their cultural influence. This thesis investigates Indigenous inclusion in planning processes and placemaking practices in Winnipeg. In this regard, the thesis sought to address critical gaps in the academic literature on Indigenous urbanism and urban planning. Through the analysis of the perspectives gathered from participants, each principal chapter explores a primary objective of the thesis. First, the thesis illustrates that Indigenous inhabitants of Winnipeg feel high levels of social and spatial injustice and invisibility. While Indigenous communities are seeking to participate in urban life, the mechanisms that the municipal administration applies to engage with them are not transformative and reconciliatory. Second, the thesis examines how the design and programming of the built environment of settler cities have played a significant role in the dispossession of Indigenous urban inhabitants and how urban design could function as an empowerment practice. Third, the thesis problematises multiculturalism policies and the ways urban planning approaches ethnocultural diversity and difference. Findings of the study reveal that the fulfilment of the Indigenous right to urbanism would consist of the transformation of existing decision-making and planning processes and procedures on the basis of the recognition of original occupancy and the right to self-determination. Situating Indigenous planning methods as well as resurgent acts of planning and placemaking into pre-existing structures will help Indigenous communities to reterritorialise urban space and advance Indigenous urbanism. Additionally, placemaking has the transformative capacity of reversing the negative symbolic capital associated with Indigenous peoples. To transcend beyond tokenism, Indigenous cultural representation in the built form should not be bound to Eurocentric frameworks and subordinated by the settler mainstream narratives. Furthermore, findings illustrate that Indigenous and ethnocultural diversity groups have started their coexistence in Winnipeg. Foregrounding the broad discourse of diversity and difference helps to demonstrate how urban planning and design is lagging behind the emergent hyper-diversity in Canadian cities. Through increasing the level of literacy and competency in coping with ethnocultural diversity, Indigeneity, and difference, planners and municipal officials could play a better role in enhancing interculturalism.