VIEWPOINTS
The Third Space
— Tiffany Creyke
Healing the bodies of our city
Boundaries drawn in the landscape have historically been put forth to communicate what we want to be true, even when they are not. The urban landscape is a statement of discounting other realities beneath the surface of perceived objectivity. Canada was created through policies that marginalized and disenfranchised Indigenous people from their land and identity. Cities are structures of this history that continues to this day, making visible what and who gets represented and who does the representing. The third space calls into question our ingrained acceptance of this particular spatializing citizenship by creating spaces of healing that challenge social-inequality within the built environment through bringing the land's memory back into existence. As Indigenous people, we have to fight for our sovereignty to thrive, as our bodies are the land and the land is our body.
Before the Indigenous body was colonized, it moved freely. Before foreign codes and structures could contain it, the Indigenous body exercised freedom through many faculties: identity, imagination, and co-evolution. Before imported and imposed values of efficiency were inflicted on the landscape, human relationships to one another and to the land governed. But while these values of hyper-productivity are at the core of today’s urban environments, the Indigenous body is still present and resilient, holding within it a vast memory of the land beneath the concrete. And concrete cannot erase the body's memory.
Because memory is held in the body through generations passed, how does this influence the trauma of displacement suffered by the Indigenous body? How can we reconcile the dark truths of today’s built environments, especially now that the systematic restrictions placed upon our ancestors are in plain sight? At the undercurrent of our cities is an institutionalised discrimination that the collective public is slowly waking up to. People are starting to realize the immensity of the work that needs to be done and the pain that needs to be healed. This healing cannot be properly summarized in a single health clinic or social service: the city as a collective needs healing.
Reparations in the built environment should dismantle the idea of who is allowed to heal and how healing takes place. We need to take the same approach to decolonizing our shared ideas of health, which means to re-integrate ancestral practices and to imagine a system of spaces and services for collective healing, rather than focusing solely on the individual. To do this, we can reference the third space of memory, body, and community in our design approach and openly tell the stories of those who have been silenced.
The third space is a sense of belonging shaping the future we wish to move towards while giving voice to our past. Post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha describes the third space as a space that arises through the colliding of cultures. Today we are born into the third space whether we like it or not as Indigenous bodies in a globalized, capital economy that our environment is built around. Since we cannot go backwards, we must reshape our understanding of how to exist freely in spaces that can accept you just as equally as they can reject you.
We get to choose how we want to create new opportunities in our present reality of inhabiting a double-consciousness in the third space where we can give voice back to our ancestors whose resilience we have cloned in our bones and flooded in our blood. Everything we see around us was birthed from the imagination of their bodies. We are survivors through them. The third space is a realm of activism that pushes against the attempted erasure of our bodies. It is a space where we can show our innate innovation that the built environment tried to eradicate.
The Third Space is a tool used to maneuver our bodies through the heaviness of displacement.
The Third Space is self-love through carrying our ancestors with us wherever we go.
The Third Space is the visibility of oral history through Indigenous futurisms.
The Third Space is non-linear.
The Third Space is the occupation of space > transforming the walls of the city into safer spaces.
The Third Space is an innovative decolonial practice.
The Third Space is resilience.
Our resilience will always supersede any effort to remove our memory from our bodies. We will prevail because we can find pride in this fact, and pride is not an emotion, it is something you must build. And our love for the land is older than the settler state. As we work towards building cities and environments that are not only safe and welcoming, but actively healthy for us, we can find strength in the generations of knowledge and resilience that stays alive in our veins.
By making cities that are not only beautiful and inclusive, but also honest about their past and the dark truths that have led to their success and survival, we can make a step forward in challenging the system oppression of marginalized people and decolonize the built environment through design. These are the steps we can all begin to take together:
1. That we need to expand our definition of healing spaces beyond places like hospitals and clinics. That healing spaces that are outside of western medicine, like therapy/counseling, highlight social inequality, because they are only accessible to a small, privileged percentage.
2. That healing spaces need to be more inclusive and accessible. That hierarchical law is an illusion and delusion to assume you are bigger than the body of natural law.
3. That we need to approach the design of all parts of the city this way: for this type of social transformation to work through design requires that we recenter the community and connect to our ancestral ways of healing outside of the public spaces that are designed to keep everyone in the structure by fear.
Tiffany Creyke is a planning and design consultant from the Tāłtān Nation invested in decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty. She has exhibited these conversations through public space installations, exhibitions and fashion weeks. Creyke holds a BA and PBD from Simon Fraser University, and a MCRP from the University of British Columbia.
Guest Editor: Tiffany Shaw-Collinge