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Domicide
The Global Destruction of Home

“Their eyes see rubble, former exiles see home.”

Globe and Mail, 23 June 2000

Media reports describing the destruction of people’s homes, for reasons

ranging from ethnic persecution to the perceived need for a new airport
or highway, are all too familiar. The planned destruction of homes
affects millions of people globally; places destroyed range in scale from
single dwellings to entire homelands. Domicide tells how and why the
powerful destroy homes that happen to be in the way of corporate,
political, bureaucratic, and strategic projects. Too frequently, this
destruction is justified as being in the public interest.
Douglas Porteous and Sandra Smith begin their analysis by examin-
ing just how important home is to human life and community. Using a
multitude of case studies of displacement, they derive a theoretical
framework that addresses the motives for, methods, and effects of
domicide. Two case studies of resettlement resulting from hydro-
electric power development in British Columbia are used to test this
framework. Porteous and Smith assess the implications of loss of
home, evaluate current efforts at mitigation, suggest better policies to
alleviate the suffering of the dispossessed, and – as a last resort – urge
resistance against unacceptable projects.

j. douglas porteous is professor of geography at the University of

Victoria, British Columbia. He has published eleven books on urban
planning and the environment.
sandra e. smith is adjunct assistant professor of geography at the
University of Victoria, British Columbia, and works as a consultant in
water management and planning.
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Domicide
The Global Destruction of Home

J. Douglas Porteous
and
Sandra E. Smith

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca
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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001

isbn 0–7735–2257–3 (cloth)
isbn 0–7735–2258–1 (paper)

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2001

Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

This book has been published with the help of

a grant from the Humanities and Social
Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds
provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.

McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges

the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (bpidp) for its activities.
It also acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

We thank the following for their kind permission to

reproduce material: for lines from Robert Frost’s “The
Death of the Hired Man” from the poetry of robert
frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright
1969 by Henry Holt and Co.; James Fenton for lines
from “German Requiem,” in The Memory of War and
Children in Exile, Poems 1968–1983, Salamander Press
1982; Farrar, Straus and Giroux for lines from Elisabeth
Bishop’s “One Art” in Geography III, Farrar, Straus and
Giroux 1976; and Alice Hambleton for extracts from a
private letter to author Smith. Every effort has been
made to seek permission to reproduce copyright materi-
al. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made,
we invite copyright holders to inform us of the oversight.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Porteous, J. Douglas (John Douglas), 1943–

Domicide: the global destruction of home

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 0–7735–2257–3 (bound).—isbn 0–7735–2258–1 (pbk.)

1. Forced migration. 2. Relocation (Housing) 3. Home. I.

Smith, Sandra Eileen, 1942– II. Title.

hq518.p67 2001 304.8 c2001–900718–3

Typeset in 10/12 Sabon by True to Type

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For Gavin and Jeremy

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Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
1 Introducing Domicide 3
2 Home: A Landscape of the Heart 24
3 Extreme Domicide: Landscapes of Violence 64
4 Everyday Domicide: Landscapes of Cruelty 106
5 Drowning Home: The Columbia River Basin
in British Columbia 151
6 The Nature of Domicide 182
7 Ending Domicide? 210
Bibliography 243
Index 279
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viii contents
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Preface

Authority does not illtreat its subjects out of indifference, venality,

incompetence, or callousness, but for the common good. However arbitrary
and cruel it may seem in its actions, it is always benign at heart ...
What disabling misconceptions about human nature and society are
inspired by such lies!
Vizinczey (1986, 73)

This book is about how and why powerful people destroy the homes
of the less powerful, which happen to be in the way of corporate, polit-
ical, or bureaucratic projects. The places destroyed range in scale from
a single dwelling to an ethnic homeland (e.g., in Kosovo and East
Timor, 1999). The means of destruction range from warfare through
economic development and urban renewal to the creation of roads, air-
ports, dams, and national parks. Too frequently, the elimination of
home or homeland is justified as being in the public interest or for the
common good. Indeed, many of those unwillingly displaced from their
homes for such purposes may be considered “victims of the common
good.” Across the globe, at least thirty million people are such victims,
a number equivalent to the United Nations’ official total for cross-bor-
der refugees.
Currently, no word exists for the action of destroying peoples’
homes and/or expelling them from their homeland. We suggest the
neologism “domicide,” the deliberate destruction of home that causes
suffering to its inhabitants. A second term, “memoricide,” concerns
deliberate attempts to expunge human memory, chiefly through the
destruction of memory’s physical prop, the cultural landscape (e.g., in
Muslim Bosnia, 1990s). This book, then, is about domicide, and we
will demonstrate that it is not confined to military acts; indeed, it is
common and of frequent occurrence.
The difficulty of treating this neglected and complex phenomenon
requires us to explain in some detail our book’s method, structure,
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x preface

audience, and voice. In our attempt to create a new concept, we have

chosen to take a broadly humanistic, qualitative stance, with an
emphasis on the synthesis of materials from a wide range of disci-
plines. Our method is to gather a large number of case study examples
(approximately 200, from about seventy countries), search through
these data for commonalities and differences, and only then attempt
to create a conceptual framework or typology that captures the
essence of domicide. This, we believe, is the core of the inductive
approach to science.
This method structures the book. In the first chapter, we tentatively
state the concept. The second demonstrates that home is important and
that its loss may result in trauma and grief. Chapters 3 and 4 are sets
of case examples structured largely by motive and which suggest ten-
tative conclusions. These early conclusions are tested by two major
case studies in chapter 5. The accumulating conclusions of the latter
three chapters are then used to generate a typology of domicide. Final-
ly, we critique current modes of ameliorating the problem and suggest
more innovative methods.
Because the issue is clearly a practical as well as a scholarly one, we
aim for multiple audiences. We hope the book will be of value to schol-
ars in social science, planning, and administration, as well as to grad-
uate and senior undergraduate students – our future citizens, scholars,
and policy-makers. Further, we hope the book will be read also by both
policy-makers and by lay people, especially, among the latter, the vic-
tims of the common good.
The audience dictates the style used; it is multiplex. The book is co-
authored by Doug Porteous – an academic with an interest in planning
critique and a radical-humanist bent – and Sandra Smith – an acade-
mic and former civil servant with many years of experience in both
resource and urban policy-making. Our work, however, is not dual in
tone and voice. Indeed, we have adopted three stylistic voices: acade-
mic, policy-making, and one we term “informal”, which is common
in serious non-fiction. The chapters follow a pattern, which begins
with all three voices (Chapter 1), moving to academic (Chapter 2),
then informal/academic (Chapters 3 and 4), and academic/policy-
making (Chapters 5 and 6), and finally returning to all three blended
voices (Chapter 7). The academic style is the core style throughout.
These scholarly and stylistic approaches, we believe, are the most
appropriate means of telling the story.
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Acknowledgments xi

Acknowledgments

We’d like to acknowledge the assistance, insights, comments, and sup-

port of Judith Allen, anonymous reviewers, anonymous informants,
Ian Baird, Bizet, Susan Bullock, Nandan Divakaran, Shirley Embra,
Harry Foster, Katharina Ganz, Alice Hambleton, Georgina Hender-
son, Jill Jahansoozi (who also did much of the typing), Michael Jones
and Venka Olsen, Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones, Lisa Kadona-
ga, John Lennon, Maeve Lydon, Beryl-Anne Massey, Roselee Miller,
Catherine Milsum, Barbara Parker, Carol and Gavin Porteous, Lloyd
and Ruth Sharpe and Pamela Turyk, Peter and Jeremy Smith, Peter
Smith (University of Alberta), Neil Swainson, Jim Wilson, and Janet
Wood and Henry Wiseman, as well as the residents of Rapanui (East-
er Island) Chile, Howdendyke, East Yorkshire, and the Columbia Val-
ley, British Columbia. We are also grateful to the bc Government
Archives (Fran Gundry, Katherine Henderson), bc Hydro (Al Geissler,
Tim Newton), the Islands Trust Council and staff, the bc Ministry of
Environment, Lands and Parks and its Water Management Program
and the University of Victoria Archives (Chris Petter). We’ve also
learned much from the many students with whom we have discussed
our ideas. Finally, we thank the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada for research grants, Ron and Adrianna
Edwards of Focus Strategic Communications for editing, and Philip
Cercone, Joan McGilvray, and staff at McGill-Queen’s Press for bring-
ing our manuscript to fruition.
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xii preface
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DOMICIDE
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CHAPTER O NE

Introducing Domicide

Someone has to lose, said the stranger. That’s economics. The question is –
who loses? That’s progress.
Winifred Holtby (1936, 95)

“A man’s home is his castle,” runs the old sexist adage. Many of us act
out this aphorism on a daily basis as we leave home’s warm comfort
for the daily round. Then, at the end of the day, we gladly re-enter our
homes – places that are quiet refuges from the outside world; places in
which we can truly be ourselves and display and nurture our being;
places in which, above all, we may experience centredness, identity,
and security.
The security of our home, however, is never completely inviolable.
Moth and rust may corrupt benignly within, but when thieves break
through and steal, we often experience a feeling of violation. But
home invaders and burglars are only the most obvious threats to a
home’s peace and security. As yet, few of us are subject to official sur-
veillance or search warrants. A far more serious threat to the home is
the desire of governments or businesses to raze it and erect something
quite different on its site. Citizens may lose their dwellings through
expropriation – the power of compulsory purchase – for the common
good or in the public interest. Where the loved dwelling – or, more
likely, the cherished neighbourhood or landscape – once stood, there
is now a park, an airport, a highway, a reservoir, or perhaps a rubble-
strewn wasteland awaiting development. This deliberate destruction
of home against the will of the home dweller, we call domicide. Briefly
domicide is the murder of home. It is important, initially, to ascertain
whether domicide is meaningful and whether or not it is of common
occurrence.
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4 domicide

d o mi c i d e i s me a n i n g f u l

People are attached to places as they are attached to families and friends.
When these loyalties come together, one then has the most tenacious cement
possible for human society.
Lewis Mumford (1961, 287)

The meaningfulness of domicide resides in the probability that home is

central to our lives, and the likelihood that the forcible destruction of
it by powerful authorities will result in suffering on the part of the
home dweller. These possibilities are approached via both anecdote
and academic literature.
In July 1993, the inhabitants of Quesnel, British Columbia,
“watched in horror as the wooden house was smashed to pieces by a
bulldozer” (Victoria Times-Colonist, 1 September 1993). Estranged
from his common-law wife Mildred, Leon Hetu found the best way,
short of grievous bodily harm, to do her the greatest possible econom-
ic and psychological damage. After he had demolished her house,
neighbours were able to recover only some clothes, a few splintered
chairs, and a few photographs for the dazed Mildred. Had her family
photographs been destroyed as well, Leon would have had the satis-
faction of committing memoricide (Wilkes 1992). For his crime of
domicide, he was charged only with “mischief.”
A much-better-known case of wilful domicide is Graham Greene’s
short story The Destructors, a frightening tale of how a gang of boys
methodically tear apart a lovely period house that lies temporarily
vacant. Using hammers, chisels, and saws, the vandals rip out the fine
panelling, the parquet floors, and the handsome old staircase. When
the owner returns, the boys waylay him, lock him in an outhouse, and
continue their work until even the foundations of the house are weak-
ened beyond repair. Tying one of the few remaining supports to the
back of a nearby truck, the boys watch as the unsuspecting driver
pulls down the house, scattering rubble everywhere. When the unfor-
tunate owner is released and surveys the devastation, he weeps bro-
ken-heartedly as he tries to comprehend why anyone would ruin his
home so deliberately.
This story was more than just a work of fiction. The sardonic
Greene apparently wanted his readers to see a comic element in the
story. Yet on its publication in 1954, London’s Picture Post was over-
whelmed by thousands of letters from readers offended by the graphic
cruelty of this act of wanton domicide. But Greene had a deeper
motive. Legally separated from his wife, Vivien, he knew that she had
a strong sentimental attachment to their former home. Vivien was in
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Introducing Domicide 5

no doubt about the story’s meaning: “It was to me very cruel. It was as
if he enjoyed the destruction. I could recognise that it was my house,
our house” (Shelden 1994, 12). Ever the betrayer (Porteous 1990),
Greene was striking a blow that he could be sure his wife would feel
very deeply.
The wilful destruction of a loved home can thus be one of the deep-
est wounds to one’s identity and self-esteem, for both of these props to
sanity reside in part in objects and structures that we cherish. If the
house has been built or restored by the dweller and the surroundings
lovingly shaped, the pain will be much worse. But one’s house is much
more likely to fall victim to government fiat than to an angry lover.
And when this occurs, mental anguish is accompanied by bewilder-
ment, for we are invariably told that the destruction of our home is in
the public interest and that our loss is a contribution to the common
good.
In July 1991, such anguish took the form of a shootout, which was
shown on bbc television news. Albert Dryden fired into a crowd of
about twenty people who were standing outside the home he had built
himself in Bustfield, northern England. Symbolically, one of his bullets
killed Harry Collinson, the local director of planning. For three years,
Dryden had battled Collinson and the local planning authorities who
claimed that he had built his dwelling without planning permission.
His last legal appeal exhausted, he was moved to the act of violence at
the sight of local authority officials approaching his home with a bull-
dozer. His neighbours are equivocal about the now-jailed Dryden’s
extremism, but some regard him as a martyr regarding the rights of pri-
vate property and the sanctity of the home.
An even more chilling case of resistance to home destruction at a
much wider spatial level occurred a few years ago in Lesotho, a small
nation that is an enclave surrounded entirely by the Republic of South
Africa. Perennially short of water, South Africa looks to Lesotho’s
mountain valleys as an endless source of water and hydroelectric
power. The World Bank agreed to fund the Highlands Water Project,
which would involve the building of several dams and the flooding of
some of the few valleys containing Lesotho’s scarce agricultural land.
Although various groups battled the vision of Lesotho as a mere
resource adjunct to South Africa, one local diviner took a more tradi-
tional approach. A surveyor’s helper working on the hydro scheme
was found murdered in the hills; the body had been split from throat
to crotch, the entrails had been arranged in neat patterns on the grass,
the heart and genitalia had been removed for ritual purposes, and the
eyes had been removed and reinserted backwards (De Villiers and
Hirtle 1997, 114). We flinch in horror at such witchcraft, or would
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6 domicide

perhaps like to substitute a World Bank official as the sacrifice. On

reflection, however, we may come to see this action as a desperate tra-
ditionalist attempt to counter the overwhelming power of detribal-
ized, Western-educated government development “experts” who so
often pursue the national interest at the expense of local needs. More-
over, while we are appalled at the barbarity of this homicide, we often
fail to react to the far greater barbarity of destroying whole valleys,
homelands, and cultures.
The moral of these stories is that place is meaningful to people, and
that the place called home is the most meaningful of all. When it is
threatened, we are roused to defend it. We also learn that home is not
simply one’s dwelling, but can also be one’s homeland or native region.
It is one of the obvious facts of life, so often overlooked, that people
are not merely attached to other people but also to familiar objects,
structures, and environments that nurture the self, support the conti-
nuity of life, and act as props to memory and identity. The theme of
attachment is a common one in psychiatry; we have little trouble
understanding the human need to be connected to others. But the
theme of human attachment to place has received much less consider-
ation. Yet geographers have investigated this concept for generations
and more recently have been joined by environmental psychologists,
sociologists, architects, and planners in confirming the importance of
the human-environment connection (Porteous 1977). But so common
is our pragmatic, instrumentalist, economist’s dreary view of the
human-environment relationship that “intangibles” such as attach-
ment, aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality (Porteous 1996) are given
short shrift. They cannot, for example, be honestly incorporated into
the heartless cost-benefit analyses that so often determine what is to be
destroyed in the pursuit of “progress.”
Yet by the 1990s, the theme of human attachment to place – and
especially to home – had developed a considerable academic and
popular non-fictional literature. On the popular side, a British
anthology of prose and poetry, Home Is Where the Heart Is (Anony-
mous 1997), is matched by Gallagher’s The Power of Place: How
Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions and Actions
(1993) in which many American examples pay particular attention
to home. The very sensitive book by Nora Johnson (1982, 7) You
Can Go Home Again, demonstrates that “To Americans, the very
term home is intense and reverberating, thick with images and
dreams,” and that “we invest the places where we live with a lifetime
of images about home.”
In academia, geographers, anthropologists, designers, and planners
frequently get together in conferences about place attachment with
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Introducing Domicide 7

both theoretical and practical ends in view. I (Porteous) attended two

such conferences in 1992. One in Marmaras, Greece, considered
whether the “sense of place” in design had changed from a simple
how-to-do-it approach to an “imperative that offers making place” as
a universal nostrum for global anomie (Riley 1992). Another in Trond-
heim, Norway, discussed the commonalities between ancient homes
and modern internationalized homes and sought lessons from the past
for use in the present (Benjamin 1995).
At the theoretical level, geographers have suggested that people
acquire information about locations and store it efficiently in their
memories in a hierarchical structure. Central to this form of organiz-
ing space is the personal hierarchy: my home; home neighbourhood;
home city, home region, and home country (Lloyd et al. 1996). This
centredness of home is felt most keenly when home is lost: “To be
forcibly evicted from one’s home and neighbourhood is to be stripped
of a sheathing which in its familiarity protects the human being from
the outside world” (Tuan 1974, 99).
At the practical level, we might ponder the amount of local effort
taken to ensure the preservation of the tiny Norwegian neighbourhood
of Ilsvikøra close to the centre of Trondheim. Surrounded by factories
and docks, the community of twenty-seven wooden houses built
around 1860 is one of the few intact nineteenth-century working-class
environments left in Trondheim. Threatened with domicide by indus-
trial expansion, residents combined with local academics to mount an
exhibition of photographs and oral-history tape recordings and drew
up a rehabilitation plan in 1972. By 1980, the district had been saved,
and its success encouraged other projects such as the one at Footdee in
Aberdeen, Scotland (Jones and Olsen 1977). Ilsvikøra is now a pleas-
ant home neighbourhood, an unexpected joy for the observant visitor
to Trondheim’s dockland.

d o mi c i d e i s c o m m o n

It has been said that there is not one corner of the planet ... that has not been
considered by someone to be the most beautiful place on earth. That place is
their place, a place they call home. But for millions of people across the
globe, home is now a lost memory, or a dream. These are people who have
lost their place ... The dislocated, the displaced, the homeless.
Inter Pares, Bulletin (1994, 1)

This book is about the frequency of domicide. The following brief

account draws from literature, history, and international statistics. His-
torical accounts often pass over domicide, with all its attendant misery,
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8 domicide

in a single phrase: the town was burned; three hundred villages were
destroyed; the whole country was laid waste. Certain countries such as
Ireland and Scotland have a considerable literature on the “clearances”
by the English which had native Celt tenant farmers uprooted and
replaced by sheep. To take only one short period, the England of Henry
VIII has been called the “Age of Plunder” (Hoskins 1976). Accurately
depicted in Holbein’s famous portrait as a voracious, merciless, porcine
predator, Henry was a leader in the conspiracy of the rich to become
yet richer by dispossessing the poor of their homes and lands for lucra-
tive sheep farming. Like some “leaders” today, Henry was an efficient
kleptocrat, who put to death those who, like Sir Thomas More, object-
ed to this and other injustices.
Such landscapes of cruelty are to be found throughout history, and
in every part of the world today. In fact, the twentieth century has
been called the century of the “displaced person.” Eleven millions of
these, who the vicious victor General Patton dismissed as animals,
wandered through central Europe in 1945; this number was surpassed
two years later when fifteen million people were uprooted at the par-
tition of India. Like British eighteenth-century poetry at the time of
the “enclosures,” Third World novels are replete with images of domi-
cide. Even modern British comic novels, soap operas, and detective
stories use domicide as a theme. To take only a single example, in P.D.
James’s Innocent Blood (1989, 181), we find members of a London
neighbourhood whose “chief preoccupation was the rumour and
threat of a local authority development which would sweep their
world away.”
Nor can the world traveller escape encounters with cases of domi-
cide. Three recent guide books to Southeast Asia casually note a vari-
ety of incidents. In The Vietnam Guidebook (Cohen 1990, 352), the
section on Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) describes how the citizens of
the exurban area were removed via the Strategic Hamlet Program so
that American troops could bomb and strafe the Viet Cong’s Cu Chi
tunnel complex. Angry residents found themselves relocated to forti-
fied villages, while their former farmland was defoliated and resown
with “American grasses,” which could rapidly be burned off to
expose enemy positions. Some citizens were moved by this outrage to
join the guerillas, extend the tunnel system, and further prosecute the
war. The Cu Chi tunnels are now tourist attractions; here, former
American shell cases and bullets are fashioned into souvenirs and
sold to visitors.
The Philippines Handbook (Harper and Fullerton 1994, 181) notes
that the Cordillera Central of Northern Luzon is internationally
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Introducing Domicide 9

known for the “native opposition” to the proposed Chico River Dam
project, which was later suspended. And a regional handbook (Eliot
et al. 1993, 476) explains to visitors to the temple city of Pagan,
northern Burma, that “to create a pristine, peasant-free, historical
environment for tourists, and for ‘archaeological reasons,’ Pagan’s
6,000 residents were given one week’s notice and then forcibly relo-
cated to New Pagan, a soulless and treeless wilderness 5 km south of
the old city.” The residents were lent one government truck for one
week, had all utilities cut off, and were moved at gunpoint. Those who
objected were jailed. The new site is characterized by poor land, errat-
ic utilities, lack of community feeling, and no jobs. (One wonders if
the militarists who currently run Burma impound this tourist guide-
book at the airport.)
To count the numbers displaced across the world by similar pro-
jects in peace and war would be a difficult task especially because, as
yet, the concept of domicide is not widely accepted. The internation-
al statistics that most closely relate to domicide have been produced
by the United States Committee for Refugees, the un Secretariat on
Internally Displaced Persons, and the Worldwatch Institute. The for-
mer, which normally takes into consideration only international
cross-border cases, has now created a category of “invisible
refugees,” those made homeless within their own countries and thus
not included in official refugee figures (New Internationalist Septem-
ber 1991, 18). Their estimate for 1990 was more than thirty million
people, including over four million in each of the Sudan and South
Africa. No indication is given of the causes of these internal dis-
placements, but much will be due to war and famine. Similarly, un
representatives, writing in the journal Foreign Affairs (Cohen and
Deng 1998, 12), contended that “the newest global crisis” is “inter-
nal displacement” in which “tens of millions of people have been
forced from their homes during the past decade by armed conflict,
internal strife, and systematic violations of human rights, all the
while remaining within the borders of their countries.” However, in
its State of the World report for 1997 (Brown 1997, 125), the World-
watch Institute states that “over the past decade, as many as 90
million people may have lost their homes to dams, roads, and
other development projects.” Most of these will have experienced
domicide.
The numbers, then, are indeed large, but difficult to confirm and
likely to be inaccurate. Nevertheless, we expect that the amount of
people currently displaced from their homes by domicide will easily
exceed the twenty-five to thirty million “official” cross-border refugees
recognized by the United Nations in the 1990s.
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10 domicide

wh at i s d o m i c i d e ?

It’s fascinating how often the simplest observations are not made until
someone provides a conceptual framework.
R.M. Restak (1979, 205)

Domicide is very clearly a major global problem. It is often a devastat-

ing experience to its victims, although it is apparently of little concern
to its perpetrators. However, “domicide” as both a word and a concept
hardly yet exists. There are hundreds of anecdotes and academic stud-
ies of individual cases of domicide, but there seems to be a marked
reluctance to investigate similarities across cases and to construct gen-
eralizations. “Only connect,” cried E.M. Forster, a radical suggestion
currently ignored by specialists who devote their attentions to dam
building or slum clearance alone.
Very few attempts have been made to generalize about the deliber-
ate destruction of home. In his pioneering The Language of Cities,
Abrams (1971) comments on the negative effects upon poor families of
relocation and urban renewal. The book also has useful discussions on
the topics of condemnation, compulsory purchase, eminent domain,
eviction, and expropriation. The earliest coherent attempts were made
by Fried (1966) and Marris (1974), who placed the problems caused
by forced removal within the general category of “loss and change”
and likened the mourning behaviour of some relocatees to the grief
that follows bereavement. In concentrating on the effects of forced loss
of home, however, Marris explicitly chose to ignore the political and
economic causes of loss, an issue examined in this book.
A few years later, Gallaher and Padfield (1980) edited a collection of
essays entitled The Dying Community in which a number of causes
of community decline were discussed: the violent actions of nature or
of humans; the abandonment of a natural region as when a mine is
worked out; the decay of a socio-cultural system; and the global extinc-
tion of some form of association such as a trading system. After estab-
lishing the by-no-means accepted fact that settlements do die, the
authors demonstrate that small, isolated communities are especially
vulnerable to extinction and that the decision to kill such a place is
usually made by some distant authority in a corporate boardroom
or government office. The book also stresses the incompleteness of
decline; many small places experience “negative growth,” but few dis-
appear completely. There is persistence in the midst of decay. It is
because the authors concentrate on small, isolated settlements and fail
to adequately consider urban slum clearance or wilderness dambuild-
ing that they provide an inadequate account of the process and effects
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Introducing Domicide 11

of domicide. This book will hopefully demonstrate that many places

do not merely decline but are, in fact, killed and often disappear entire-
ly. Nevertheless, the Gallaher and Padfield book points the way to
domicide and accepts the notion that community decline may be a
source of personal grief.
Simultaneously, Coelho and Ahmed (1980) approached the prob-
lem, in Uprooting and Development, from the viewpoint of mental
health. In this large book that covers the problems of foreign students,
new settlers, immigrants, children, and adolescents, only Trimble’s
chapter on forced migration has direct relevance to the concept of
domicide. In a study of the coerced relocation of four indigenous
groups, Trimble shows how these groups were denied decision-making
power and how the goals of the agencies that perpetrated the removals
were incompatible with the goals of those forced from their homes.
Trimble (1980, 475) concludes that: “Planners should be more con-
cerned about the effects of abrupt social change on a community,” and
“forced relocation of culturally diverse groups is a topic that has
received far too little interest.” In the same volume, Marris (1980, 114)
notes that: “Again and again, actions, seemingly designed to help peo-
ple, frustrate and bewilder them by alienating them from the context
of their lives as they perceive it.” This is the crux of the domicide issue;
what is uprooted may be the very meaning of people’s lives.
This was certainly the case during the massive aerial bombardments
of World War II, researched in some detail by Hewitt (1983b). In a very
sympathetic consideration of these horrors, Hewitt suggests that just as
biologists have prepared “red books” of endangered species and ecol-
ogists have produced “green books” of threatened habitats, so we also
need “black books” of places destroyed or almost destroyed by human
violence. In the first attempt to create a neologism for this process,
Hewitt suggests “place annihilation.”
All of these views are partial ones. First, some concentrate on the
dying of places, whereas others insist that places can be killed. Second,
they each tend to consider only one or two terrains of destruction such
as inner cities, small rural settlements, or the island and forest habitats
of indigenous peoples. Third, each also concentrates on only a few
processes of destruction: corporate economic change, government
urban policies, and wartime bombing. What is needed is a comprehen-
sive, holistic framework that covers all processes of deliberate home
destruction in all types of landscape. That concept is domicide.
Domicide is a neologism that first appeared in a series of books, arti-
cles, and speeches by Porteous (1988, 1989). It is not yet found in dic-
tionaries, in which it may appear one day, very appropriately between
“domesticity” and “domicile.” The central concept is home (Latin:
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12 domicide

domus), and the issue is deliberate home destruction. The concept of

home is important and amazingly complex, taking up many pages in
the larger dictionaries. The suffix “-cide” indicates not merely death,
but deliberate killing, as in homicide and suicide. Briefly, then, domi-
cide is the deliberate killing of home.
Concepts relating to domicide include eviction, exile, expropria-
tion, displacement, dislocation, and relocation. In French, we would
consider déracinement (uprooting), which for the victims may lead to
dépaysement (a feeling of strangeness and disorientation) or even
déclassement (a relegation to lower status). All of these words are
problematic since most of them are partial and exclusive. It is signifi-
cant that in Stoett’s (1999) exploration of terminology related to
human and global security, he is able to conceptualize genocide,
ecocide, and globalization in single nouns that denote meaningful
process. However, a chapter that might well be labelled “domicide,”
is entitled “Population Displacement: Refugees,” is a neologism seems
necessary.
The first attempt at creating a suitable neologism was “topocide,”
the killing of place. But it was rejected because of its ungainly mixture
of Greek and Latin and because of the vagueness of meaning of the
word “place.” A second attempt generated both “topocide” and
“domicide” as a paired antinomy. The first was to denote the destruc-
tion of home from the point of view of the perpetrators – normally out-
siders – and would emphasize motive and process. The second term
would involve the reactions and responses of the victims – always
insiders – and thus would emphasize effects. Despite the neatness of
this system of juxtaposing the dichotomies of process-effect, outsider-
insider, and perpetrator-victim, the formulation was judged to be too
complex. Far better, then, to include all these components in the single
new term: “domicide,” the killing of home. More formally, domicide is
defined as the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pur-
suit of specified goals, which causes suffering to the victims. In addi-
tion, we specify that the human agency is usually external to the home
area, that some form of planning is often involved, and that the
rhetoric of public interest or common good is frequently used by the
perpetrators. It follows that home destruction perpetrated by or wel-
comed by the home dweller cannot be domicide; the notion of suffer-
ing is crucial.
As these are controversial terms, it is worthwhile to pursue the con-
cepts of “victim” and “common good” in some detail if only because
victimhood may be recognized but dismissed by project proponents
because of the immeasurably greater benefits they believe they are
bringing to the public at large. In seeking a modern definition of
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Introducing Domicide 13

victimhood, Weisstub (1986, 317) correctly points out the long histo-
ry of victimization beginning with the Garden of Eden and, we hope,
ending with the twentieth century’s victims of holocaust and genocide.
He also recognizes that scientific detachment was possible only with
the historical perspective and a focus on groups rather than individual
victims. Such freedom from bias becomes less easy and the definition
of victim correspondingly more difficult in contemporary times given
the realization that there are victims and aggressors in political, eco-
nomic, familial, and emotional life and given the modern media’s role
in exposing the “plight” of the victim and the “evil” of the aggressor.
Nevertheless, the definition of persons who lose their homes through
domicide as victims seems justifiable given Weisstub’s description of a
victim as “a person who has been unjustly treated”and whose “human
or economic power has been weakened.”
There is a connection between the notion of the domicide victim
and what may be the real aggressor in domicide, the oft-invoked con-
cept of the common good. The term common good is almost always
defined by the elite or the majority and is used interchangeably with
the term “public interest.” Raskin (1986, 38) suggests a long history
for the notion of common good – from Thomas Aquinas who
believed that profit making would benefit chiefly the powerful indi-
vidual or corporate organization, which would then act against soci-
ety itself, to well-founded beliefs that point out the contradictions
between capitalism and the pursuit of the common good. More
recently, Massam (1999, 347) has provided a good short introduction
to the similar notion of “the public good” and believes that “the
topic of the public good provides a challenge to the next generation.”
Yet while acknowledging that the public good is being undermined by
commodification, corporatism, and individualism, he does not signif-
icantly question the concept itself. Fortunately, Fagence (1977, 83)
provides an omnibus definition of public interest in relation to plan-
ning: “The public interest is promoted or protected if the communi-
ty is able to enjoy increased or improved facilities, amenities and ser-
vices; if the provisions are sufficient (quantity) and adequate
(quality); if they are convenient, efficient, compatible, not exclusive,
free of onerous restrictions; if minority interests are wholly recog-
nized and accommodated; if external (geo-political) relationships are
not prejudiced; and if most other individual rights and privileges are
not unduly constrained or denied.” In this book, in which loss of
home is a central theme, individual rights are of significant interest.
These individual rights include both the rights claimed by owners of
private property and the much-less-tangible rights associated with the
creation and enjoyment of a home. Thus, from the point of view of
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14 domicide

domicide, the common good concept is flawed, for it excludes the vic-
tims it creates.

wh at d o mi c i d e i s n o t

It is also useful to distinguish domicide from a number of related issues

that may shed light on some of the concepts inherent in domicide.
Domicide is a lesser horror than genocide. While domicide requires
that victims remain alive to suffer the loss of home and perhaps rebuild
their lives, genocide requires the deaths of the victims. Some of the ear-
liest accounts of genocide are to be found in the earlier sacred books
of Mesopotamians, Jews, and Christians. The commandment “Thou
shalt not kill” clearly did not apply to those already inhabiting the land
flowing with milk and honey; they were not only to be dispossessed but
also slaughtered. The Hebrews began by killing the men, women, and
children of the Midianites and the Amorites as well as the subjects of
Og, the king of Bashan (Numbers 31–2, Deuteronomy 1–3). Worse
was to befall the Canaanites; the book of Joshua is a record of geno-
cide committed upon over thirty small kingdoms. Not only were all the
people killed, but their animals were slaughtered and their towns
burned until only rubble remained. The feeble excuse for such geno-
cide, as given by biblical commentators, is that the issue is not edifica-
tion but obedience, and that good can come out of evil.
This brings us to the issue of who benefits from genocide and domi-
cide, and who loses. The Canaanites clearly suffered a great evil at the
hands of the Jews, who also tried to commit memoricide by casting
down the religious structures of Canaan. The Romans behaved slight-
ly better in ad 70 and 136, destroying Jerusalem but permitting most
of the Jews to seek exile – domicide rather than genocide. Hitler’s aim
was clearly genocide, and the surviving Jewish remnant that returned
to Poland in 1945–46 only to see their homes and city quarters razed
to the ground, suffered further deaths at the hands of Poles and Lithua-
nians. Little wonder that, memory intact after two millennia, Jews
flooded into Palestine after 1945 and committed domicide against
about one million Palestinians in 1948 and 1967.
Since the 1960s, we have been afflicted with a wave of neologisms
involving the suffix “-cide.” Some of these are exotic ecospeak includ-
ing the truly awful puns “countrycide,” “rivercide,” and “seacide.”
Nevertheless, these dreadful locutions do point to the fact that global
environmental ignorance and greed are beginning to destroy the plan-
et. We therefore accept the neologisms of “ecocide,” the killing of an
ecosystem (now routine in Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia) and “ter-
racide,” the killing of the planet. On a scale of horror, domicide pales
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Introducing Domicide 15

beside terracide and is often included in ecocide and genocide. But

domicide has a special trauma, because the victims are not killed but
must watch their homes being destroyed as they are wrenched forcibly
from them followed by an attempt to overcome relocation trauma and
to build a new life.
Those who escape such devastations are called homeless exiles, or
refugees. Domicide differs from all three of these vague concepts.
Homelessness, first, is generally conceived of as roofless people sleep-
ing on the streets (Kearns and Smith 1994). The victims of domicide
usually obtain a new roof; their issue is that they preferred the old one.
While homelessness in the Third World is rarely studied, a large litera-
ture is building up on it in the Western world. One reason for this is
that the West’s homeless are small in numbers but obvious in location.
Their cardboard shelters occupy the business and shopping districts of
city centres. Their bodies are living witnesses to the inadequacies of the
capitalists who make deals in the glittering office towers that rise above
them.
Nor are domicide victims to be confused with those suffering exile.
Since Ovid, exiles have been mostly political, often literary, intellectu-
als (Simpson 1995). They may choose their way of life, and, for many,
theirs is “a dream of glorious return” (Rushdie 1988, 505). If home is
destroyed, as in domicide, returning becomes problematic. And in gen-
eral, we may conclude that the exile is a rather privileged person; the
underprivileged are called refugees.
International refugees have much in common with the victims of
domicide particularly in terms of forced movement and relocation
(Rogge 1987, Black and Robinson 1993). Numbers are difficult to
assess, but sources such as the United States Committee on Refugees
and the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (unhcr) sug-
gest seventeen million in 1989, rising to twenty-seven million by 1995
(Van der Gaag 1996). Much of this rise has been due to political
changes in the former Soviet Union. According to the unhcr, more
than nine million people have abandoned their homes in the former
ussr since 1989 because of ethnic tensions or ecological disaster.
Almost all were forced migrants; 3.6 million fled from ethnic war
zones such as Chechnya and Azerbaijan; 1.2 million returned from
Stalin’s deportations of 1944; and 700,000 escaped from ecological
disasters such as Chernobyl, the nuclear testing zone of Semipalatinsk,
and the drying up of the Aral Sea. Such movements have recently been
termed “ecopolitical displacement” (Stoett 1999, 94).
Using data from the United States Department of State, Wood
(1994) considers “forced migration” only in terms of countries in
which over 100,000 people have been forcibly displaced and in which
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16 domicide

these numbers exceed 1 per cent of the country’s total population. Nev-
ertheless, the study estimates that thirty-three nations met these crite-
ria in the mid-1990s, accounting for a total of 17.6 million cross-bor-
der refugees. Most of the people involved were very poor, emanated
from countries in Africa and Asia, and had fled scenes of ethnic, reli-
gious, or tribal conflict.
There are two problems, at least, in considering domicide victims as
refugees. First, most refugees are fleeing warfare or environmental
degradation; only the former of these causes may be at all likely to
involve domicide. Second, only those displaced persons who actually
cross an international boundary can be registered as refugees by the
unhcr and thus receive un benefits. Most domicide victims, in con-
trast, will stay within their own country. Derived from the same thir-
ty-three countries as the refugee study, Wood’s figure for such “inter-
nally displaced persons,” albeit conjectural, is 20.9 million persons.
Only some of these will be victims of domicide.
Wood notes that among the myriad reasons for forced migration are
government-sponsored development schemes that relocate indigenous
groups, including 3.6 million blacks in apartheid South Africa. Such
“development” refugees are generally regarded as little more than a
nuisance by governments, which ignore the profoundly disruptive
changes that forced relocations cause (Oliver-Smith 1991) and usually
provide inadequate compensation or other remediation for loss (Par-
tridge 1989). Although the unhcr has become marginally involved in
the politically charged issue of protecting “internal refugees” in their
own countries (Goodwin-Gill 1993), efforts are seriously hampered by
sovereignty issues and funding problems (Cohen 1994). And, finally,
Wood (1994, 618) laments that “Apart from a few research projects
carried on by a few anthropologists, scholars have ignored people who
have been forcibly displaced by government projects.” It is the task of
this book to remedy this myopia by focusing upon people that are
internally as well as externally displaced by domicide and to look
directly at the roles of the government agencies and business corpora-
tions that perpetrate such injustices.
However, injustice is not a causal issue in other types of home loss.
Natural disasters such as severe weather, earthquakes, volcanic erup-
tions, landslides, floods, and droughts annually destroy significant
numbers of dwellings and even whole settlements. Planning for the
mitigation and relief of such natural disasters has received considerable
attention in geography, psychology and disaster planning since the
1960s, and an enormous literature exists (White 1961, Burton et al.
1978, Wright et al. 1979, Foster 1980, Rossi et al. 1982, Hewitt
1983a, Burton 1994, Hewitt 1995). But no such literature exists for
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Introducing Domicide 17

domicide. Yet according to Foster (1976), only at level XII, a cata-

strophic disaster, does abandonment of the site occur. Site destruction
and replacement are normal in domicide.
There are significant similarities and differences between domicide
and natural disasters and even perhaps some overlap since many so-
called natural disasters are in fact caused by humans burning, terrac-
ing, or deforesting, as in the arson of Borneo 1997–98. In particular,
severe emotional reactions follow the loss of home in both cases. After
a natural disaster, however, the victims can normally blame only nature
or God. Secondly, the situations are also different in that the reaction
to loss from natural disasters is immediate, and, therefore, commenta-
tors have had to rely mainly on observations made soon after the event
occurred. Thirdly, it appears to be endemic to our political system that
such losses are mitigated as rapidly as possible, unlike planned domi-
cide where compensation may not be given for years. Thus, recovery
from natural disasters is often rapid as persons rebuild their homes in
a safer way or in a more protected place.
Baum (1987) has undertaken an extensive review of the literature on
the effect of natural disasters, particularly the psychological effects,
which are similar to but often more severe than the results of planned
domicide. He indicates that such events are the cause of social disrup-
tion, disorganization, and massive migration as well as individual reac-
tions of trauma, fear, stress, and shock. Some studies suggest that
chronic stress occurs, while others state that although the immediate
psychological effect may be acute, it will also disappear rapidly. The
latter circumstances may result from the immediate desire on the part
of disaster victims to rebuild their homes, often supported by commu-
nities that respond with greater social cohesiveness after disasters.
Simpson-Housely and de Man (1987, 3) have also studied psycho-
logical reactions to disasters but from the perspective of how person-
ality traits such as sense of control and anxiety affect these reactions.
They confirm that knowledge of personality traits and response to nat-
ural hazards enhances understanding of the human appraisal of the
hazards concerned. Such findings could also contribute to an under-
standing of how to respond to those who lose their homes in other cir-
cumstances. For example, certain people might be expected to act as
leaders in planning a new future in which domicide must occur.
Accidental disasters, by definition, are not deliberate, but they are
similar in these and other respects to natural disasters. Generally
known as technological hazards, such disasters have been explored in
some detail by academics (Cutter 1993), and examples such as Nia-
gara’s Love Canal are well known (Gibbs 1998). Another example of
a disaster caused by technological failure is described in studies of the
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18 domicide

residents of Saunders, West Virginia, a few years after a dam failure on

Buffalo Creek wiped out all traces of their town. The residents exhib-
ited chronic symptoms of psychopathology comparable to “highly dis-
tressed” psychiatric patients (Gleser et al. 1981, 149). Their valley had
been completely changed, and there was no home to which they could
return. The dam failure was a human-induced error, and for those dis-
placed, “it is ... a form of shock – a gradual realization that the com-
munity no longer exists as a source of nurturance and a part of the self
has disappeared” (Erikson 1976, 302). The residents of Buffalo Creek
felt that they had been betrayed by those who they normally trusted
(Gleser et al.1981, 149). Only those who were able to rehabilitate still-
standing homes showed less anxiety.
Perhaps the loss of home caused by the Chernobyl disaster after 26
April 1986 best exemplifies home destruction that is unplanned but
also unnatural. Scherbak (1989, 4, 9) tells the story of how this short
moment in time changed Chernobyl from “a pleasant little provincial
Ukrainian town, swathed in green, full of cherry and apple trees”
where “the beauty of Polissia nature had blended astonishingly har-
moniously and inseparably with the four blocks of the power station,”
to an area in which devastation was totally hidden but in which the
“increased radiation level would show itself in mushrooms, peat bogs,
black currant bushes, and in villages at the corners of buildings where
the rainwater ran from the roofs.” But at first, this hidden danger was
not known, and people were simply evacuated. Not knowing they were
leaving their homes forever, they took with them only their summer
clothes and their most important possessions. The majority of the fall-
out occurred in Belarus, destroying 485 villages. One in five Belorus-
sians, amounting to over two million people, still live in contaminated
areas in which there are yearly increases in individuals suffering from
cancers, genetic mutations, and neuropsychological disorders
(Ignatenko 1998). Thus, lives were changed for many locally, while
elsewhere, an increased distrust of nuclear power plants emerged (Jour-
nal of Environmental Psychology, Special Issue 1990).
Much that has been written about this aftermath has focused on
finding fault and the effect on human health and ecology. However,
Marples (1988, 146–7) focuses on the social impact – on people who
returned to their homes and on those who did not. The first described
themselves as “the happiest people in the world” because they had
been allowed to regain their homes. Others, who were accommodated
in apparently pleasant, permanent housing elsewhere, continued to
long for their own homes. About 1,200 people, mostly retirees, even-
tually returned to their old homes despite the certain risk from radia-
tion: “these people are coming back of their own volition. It’s their
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Introducing Domicide 19

home”; “They survived the Nazis and fear nothing” (Dodds 1989, 6).
But for others, farmers and their families who had lived within 10 to
15 km of the exploded reactor, return was impossible, and their lives
were changed forever. As a mark of this change, Scherbak (1989, 167)
carries with him the memory of abandoned villages and particularly
the village cemeteries, “‘shadows of forgotten ancestors’ where the liv-
ing will no longer ever return.”
Unplanned disasters have some similarities to domicide. Significant
psychological effects are caused by the disaster event and the loss of
home and community. For some, such as the elderly residents of Cher-
nobyl and those who rebuild immediately after natural disasters, there
is only one home, and that is the place they must be. Recovery is also
quite rapid following a disaster event, which is not always the case for
domicide. And, most fundamentally, domicide differs from unplanned
disasters because the loss of home is deliberately engineered: some-
where, someone is to blame.
Great Planning Disasters (Hall 1980) is the last of the event cate-
gories which might be confused with domicide. Someone is clearly
responsible in these cases, but Hall is chiefly concerned with the issue
of uncertainty in planning and the economic costs entailed in poor
advance estimating, as with the 1,000 per cent budget overruns for the
Sydney Opera House and the Concorde. While uncertainty is a major
issue for the victims of domicide, their meagre economics are general-
ly lost within the costs of the development project as a whole. But
Hall’s interest in public participation in planning is directly relevant to
domicide as is his conception that the major actors involved in plan-
ning disasters are the bureaucracy, politicians, private enterprise, and
the local community. Bureaucrats seek aggrandizement and policy
maintenance, politicians strive to retain power and enhance status,
producers attempt to increase profits, and consumers try to “maximize
utility.” It is this unfortunate economistic phraseology that is so foreign
to our studies of domicide. People are not necessarily to be considered
as consumers, nor does the maximization of utility adequately capture
the pleasures gained from being able to stay unmolested in one’s cho-
sen home.
In sum, domicide is the planned, deliberate destruction of home
causing suffering to the dweller. Domicide victims are not normally
considered exiles or refugees; they rarely cross borders and thus remain
in the obscure, generally unrecognized category of the internally dis-
placed. Nor are they the homeless, for they generally find a roof. What
they have lost is their own loved home; what they have suffered is
forcible removal from it for the common good. Nor are domicide
victims found among those suffering from unplanned disasters. In
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20 domicide

domicide someone or some group is responsible for the suffering; we

cannot blame nature, God, or even “the system.” However, given the
hierarchical and self-protective nature of corporate and government
organizations, it may be difficult to find out who these people are and
more difficult still to confront them.
Domicide is not as important an issue as terracide, ecocide, and
genocide. Nevertheless, it is going on worldwide, every day, to people
such as ourselves. It is immediate and it is reported frequently in the
newspapers. And above all, domicide prevails where the heart is –
domicide begins at home.
The remainder of this book will explain how we look at domicide.

th e a r gum e n t

No other place You could find? Here only all the trouble, always? The
darkness, the flood, the fire, the fight? Why not Tata Palace? Why not
Governor’s mansion?
Rohinton Mistry (1993, 403)

Old Cavasji, in Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, is as usual berating God,

this time for the impending destruction of the wall between his apart-
ment block and the street. He is berating the wrong person, for it is just
those who do not suffer domicide – namely business and government
people – who perpetrate it. Tata Palace and the Governor’s mansion
are immune. This fact, we hope, has already emerged in our discussion.
To confirm that home is extremely meaningful to its inhabitants and
to stress just what is lost when domicide occurs, the concept of home
at several scales is considered in detail in chapter 2. Using a wide range
of social science and other literature, we conclude that home is a pos-
itive factor in people’s lives since it helps to confer both centredness
and identity upon both individual and group.
The following two chapters explore a multitude of cases of domi-
cide at scales ranging from a single house to entire homelands. The
information is presented in the form of many short, illustrative
descriptions intended to familiarize the reader with the means of,
motives for, processes, and effects of domicide. Wherever possible, the
questions where, when, at what scale, why, by whom, and to whom
are asked. In certain cases, which are particularly well documented
such as London’s Third Airport and apartheid removals, longer
accounts are provided. Over 200 examples, drawn from more than
seventy countries in five continents are given. They were chosen to
ensure the emergence of an adequate global picture of the motives for,
processes of, and results of domicide. Many of the stories remain
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Introducing Domicide 21

incomplete, for to bring each one up to date would be a very time-

consuming task. The information used is derived from a variety of
sources, chiefly research literature, but we have also relied on the
following: government reports; non-academic non-fiction; novels,
poems, and plays; travellers’ accounts and travel guidebooks; works
of investigative journalism; and personal research and observation.
No hard and fast categorization of domicide is initially attempted.
Indeed, many efforts to schematize domicide in diagrammatic form
came to grief before we decided on the simple dichotomy of “extreme
domicide” (generally infrequent, massive, abnormal) and “everyday
domicide” (frequent, smaller-scale, “normal”). These, again, are not
hermetic compartments; like acute and chronic pain, they interpene-
trate considerably. Domicide is a very nuanced concept.
A number of generalizations emerge from the myriad case studies of
chapters 3 and 4. To test the validity of these and to relate domicide to
the meanings of home elucidated in chapter 2, our fifth chapter pre-
sents two of our own lengthy case studies of the domicide involved in
hydro electric power development in British Columbia. These cases
were chosen because they were accessible to us; they could be brought
up to date with little difficulty; and because one author (Smith) was
involved in the planning process during the 1990s. Further, they are
examples of the drowning of home by reservoirs – that is, of domicide
that, although of the everyday variety, is irreversible. The reader seek-
ing a further in-depth study based on extensive fieldwork is referred to
Porteous’s Planned to Death (1989).
As we follow the route of inductive science, exploring a large num-
ber of examples of a putative phenomenon before attempting to gen-
erate a framework, typology, or theory, our generalizations on the
nature of domicide are to be found in chapter 6. Besides outlining
domicide’s essential characteristics, we pay particular attention to the
mental health outcomes of the victims as well as to the generally feeble
efforts of perpetrators to provide remediation and recompense.
Finally, having confirmed that domicide is a genuine phenomenon
and a major global issue in terms of both population numbers affected
and the degree of injustice, we provide in chapter 7 an innovative set
of approaches to its remediation, mitigation, or prevention. Those who
are already convinced that home is important to human lives or who
do not wish to pursue a detailed case study will find the essence of
our argument in chapters 6 and 7, with supporting detail in chapters 3
and 4.
We cannot close this introductory chapter without revealing our
aims and our biases. As geographers, we are aware that “geography
does not amount to a mere tool for knowing about the world; it is an
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22 domicide

instrument for action” (Gilbert 1989, 222). Further, geographers have

been urged to produce effective social knowledge; place an emphasis
on interdisciplinary co-operation; rethink research goals as contributo-
ry to the policy-making process; and adopt a reflective spirit open to
moral and human consequence (Steed 1988, 10–11). As academics,
we accept Wilson’s (1991, 25) urging that universities “rethink our
mission [and] organize the ‘scholarship of integration’ which involves
synthesizing results already obtained and making connections across
disciplines.” We also wish to counter Bok’s accusation that: “Armed
with the security of tenure and the time to study the world with care,
professors would appear to have a unique opportunity to act as soci-
ety’s scouts to signal impending problems ... Yet rarely have members
of the academy succeeded in discovering emerging issues and bringing
them vividly to the attention of the public.”
We wish, in the words of Orr (1994, 9), not to be professionals with
something to sell, as academics are increasingly becoming, but persons
with something to profess. In its synthesis of material from many dis-
ciplines and sources, in its moral dimension, and in its practical con-
clusions, this study strives to meet some of the goals set for both geo-
graphers in particular and universities in general.
We do not believe, as Orwell apparently did, that the landscapes we
love are being crushed by “the relentless movement of vast, unseen
historical forces” (Shelden 1991, 310). We prefer to believe with the
novelist Winifred Holtby (1936, v) that the forces of change are locat-
ed in human agency and are the work of powerful individuals or small
groups: “The complex tangle of motives prompting public decisions,
the unforseen consequences of their enactment on private lives
appeared to me as part of the unseen pattern of the English landscape
... What fascinated me was the discovery that apparently academic
and impersonal resolutions passed in a county council were daily rev-
olutionising the lives of those men and women they affected.” And
our reply to Holtby’s stranger (see the epigraph at the beginning of
this chapter) is that his cruel economics is an amoral, competitive
zero-sum game, with no possibility of a co-operative win-win situa-
tion, and further, that his conception of progress presupposes a com-
mon good rhetoric to which even the losers adhere. We do not believe
this is so.
Our bias is for the victims of domicide. We believe that domicide is
a moral evil. We do not agree that its victims should have their life
choices so constrained and their lives so disrupted without adequate
consultation or recompense as so often happens today. Many domicide
events are of their nature evil, casting aside the “people in the way”
in the pursuit of profit, progress, or plan. Almost all of them are
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Introducing Domicide 23

fundamentally undemocratic, and their perpetrators often contemptu-

ous of those they disempower in the public interest. As Castells (1989)
explains: “People live in places, power rules through flows.”
Political, bureaucratic, and business power continually flows across
landscapes and overwhelms the place called home. Throughout this
study, we have tried to provide the victims of domicide with a heroic
stature in order that they may also be recognized. In essence, we seek
to reveal the shadows that fall on the landscape when common human-
ity is lost in ignoring the rights and needs of others (Tuan 1993, 239)
and the light that prevails in enhancing the dignity of the victims of
such shadows.
CH02NEW.QXD 9/9/2001 10:32 AM Page 24

CHAP T E R T W O

Home:
A Landscape of the Heart

It’s my favourite place, here – down the new road through the iron gate. I
stand here and watch the seasons come and go. At night, the moonlight plays
on Hunder Beck ... and the waters sing a song to me ... I know this place
will always be loyal to me. If I have nothing in my pocket, I will always have
this. They cannot take it away from me, it’s mine, mine for the taking and
always will be ... even when I’m no longer here. Wherever I go ... and what-
ever I am ... this is me.
Hannah Hauxwell and B. Cockcroft,
Seasons of My Life, 1989

Everyone knows what “home” means. Yet, this apparently simple

concept has been the subject of countless studies, many stories, and
much art and poetry. Home has been a theme of research in disciplines
as varied as anthropology, environmental psychology, sociology,
gerontology, women’s studies, history, ethnoarchaeology, architecture,
education, planning, and geography. Indeed, home is one of the cen-
tral concepts of human geography. At the global scale, Carl Ritter’s
geography is “the study of the earth as the home of man.” At the meso
scale, Kniffen believed that mapping the types of houses in Louisiana
was an “attempt to get an areal expression of ideas regarding houses
– a groping toward a tangible hold on the geographic expression of
culture” (Hartshorne 1949, 230). At the micro scale, J.B. Jackson
urged that “the primary study of the human geographer must be the
dwelling ... as the microcosm, as the prime example of Man the Inhab-
itant’s effort to re-create Heaven on Earth” (Jackson 1952, 6). Each of
these examples, together spanning the century before 1960, focuses on
physical manifestations of home yet recognizes the greater depth of
meaning.
Since the 1960s, the geographic literature on home has flourished.
For example, Mackie (1981, 7), in reviewing the roots of the study of
home, lists the following concepts: lifeworld (Buttimer 1976, Ley 1977,
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Home 25

Seamon 1979); attachment (Tuan 1974, 1975a, b, 1977); dwelling

(Buttimer 1976, Relph 1970, Seamon 1979); rootedness (Godkin 1980,
Tuan 1980); existential insideness (Relph 1976); homeland (Tuan 1974,
1977); territoriality (Porteous 1976); and home in relation to journey
(Tuan 1971). To this array must be added the work of Hayward (1975,
1976) on home as an environmental and social concept and Gregson
and Lowe (1995) on home and ideology. Beyond geography, many valu-
able studies, both humanistic and empirical-behavioural, have appeared
in architectural psychology and environment and behaviour research
especially those that have sought to clarify the concept of home in order
to relate this concept to other variables (Rapoport 1992, 1).
The following sections contain material found primarily in the acade-
mic literature about home but augmented, on occasion, by references to
fiction or poetry. This material is presented in the form of general expla-
nations and in collections of quotations. “Concept is there ... but beyond
concept is the ‘concept brought into life by image’” (Brook in Bradshaw
2001, R1). The reader is invited to refer to the boxes throughout this
chapter to form images of home and its meanings.

d efi ni ng h o m e

My home is the house I live in, the village or town where I was born or
where I spend most of my time. My home is my family, the worlds of my
friends, the social and intellectual milieu in which I live, my profession, my
company, my workplace. My home, obviously, is also the country I live in,
the language I speak, and the intellectual and spiritual climate of my country
expressed in the language spoken there ... My home, of course, is not only
my Czechness, it is also my Czechoslovakness, which means my citizenship.
Ultimately my home is Europe ... and – finally – it is this planet and its pre-
sent civilization.
Havel (1991, 49)

The definition of home is an obvious starting place for a study of the

meaning of home. Tuan (1971, 189) believes that “perhaps no single
term in another language covers a significative field of comparable
scope.” Etymologically, the English word “home” can mean: “a
dwelling place or house, a village or town, a collection of dwellings (Old
and early Middle English); the place of one’s nurturing, with the feelings
which naturally and properly attach to it; a place, region, or state to
which one properly belongs, in which one’s affections centre, or where
one finds refuge and rest” (Hayward 1975, 3). However, home in
French, maison, refers to the physical structure, while the German heim
connotes refuge or asylum. To these may be added the Old Nordic heimr
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26 domicide

for homeland and world; the Gothic haims and the Greek kome both
translate as village.
Rybczynski (1986, 61) echoes this linguistic theme: “This wonderful
word, ‘home,’ which connotes a physical ‘place’ but also has the more
abstract sense of a ‘state of being,’ has no equivalent in the Latin or
Slavic European languages.” Sopher (1979, 130), analysing the mean-
ing of “home,” “neighbourhood,” and “place,” also examined these
words in different languages. He provided a new perspective by sug-
gesting that reference to home (town) and home (land) implies all of
the warmth, security, and intimacy associated with references to home
as a family dwelling.
To rely on one definition of the word “home” is misleading, and it
is tempting to follow Kim Dovey’s lead and suggest that “all of its uses
in everyday life constitute its meaning” or that “home is a notion uni-
versal to our species, not as a place, house, or city, but as a principle
for establishing a meaningful relationship with the environment”
(Dovey 1978, 27). Box 1 presents a series of meanings of the word
“home,” and even this brief sample points to disparate meanings, often
influenced by the perspective of the writer. The quotations in the fol-
lowing box are chosen for their attempt to provide a summary state-
ment about “home.” As such they suggest a common sense of refuge,
possession, attachment, affection, and personal freedom.

Meaning of the Word “Home”

• “Home” is a label applied voluntarily and selectively to one or more
environments to which a person feels some attachment (Hayward
1975, 3).
• Loewy and Snaith, following a study of consumers in the us housing
market, reported the central concepts of home as:
– a place to raise children/family
– a place to live/stay/spend your time
– a place to rest/relax/be comfortable in
– a place for love/warmth/understanding
– a place that I own/is my own/belongs to me
– a place for privacy/to be alone/get away
– a place you can always come home to
– a place to be independent/can do as I please/security
(Loewy and Snaith 1967, cited in Hayward 1975, 3)
• “Home” brought together meanings of house and household, of
dwelling and refuge, of ownership and of affection. “Home” meant
the house, but also everything that was in it and around it as well as
CH02NEW.QXD 9/9/2001 10:32 AM Page 27

Home 27

the people and the sense of satisfaction and contentment that all these
conveyed. You could walk out of the house, but you always returned
home (Rybczynski 1986, 61).
• Home is the place where one loves and is loved; it is a place where I
go to rest in which I feel secure enough to lower my guard and lie
down to sleep; home is where I keep my possessions; home is a place
of comfort where pleasant experiences take place (Shaw 1990, 230).
• “house”/“home” (place to live in). The distinction was once more clear-
cut than it now is. A “house” was a building for living in. A “home”
was a “house” (or flat or family residence) seen as not just a place to
live in but a place of domestic comfort and family happiness. Today the
two words are – at any rate in the jargon of real estate agents – one and
the same thing: “new show ‘homes’ for sale” ... In senses other than
‘house,’ however, ‘home’ remains a highly emotive word, as in ‘home-
land,’ ‘homesick,’ ‘home town,’ and even the ‘Home Guard’ (Room
1985, 122).

Another approach to understanding the notion of home would be a

brief description of the changing use of home as a physical structure or
social concept in its European–American context. In addition, a review
of trends in home decoration suggests that emphasis on comfort and
particular styles reflects the importance placed by society on the cre-
ation of “hominess.”
Homes, or, in this case, dwellings, were once more public; for exam-
ple, the medieval lord’s home had great halls full of servants and visi-
tors, while the homes of artisans included their workshops and shops.
In Home, a history of housing, technology, and social attitudes from
the Middle Ages to modern times, Rybczynski (1986) traces the devel-
opment of home as a concept. In the fourteenth century, townhouses
combined living space in an upper area of one single large chamber and
working space at the lower level. Beginning in the 1600s, homes, at
least the more affluent ones, contained “privacies,” rooms in which the
individual could be sheltered from public view. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, homes became the scene for domestic rather than
working life and comfort gained new importance.
Rybczynski believes that the evolution of home comforts was grad-
ual, encompassing the introduction of electricity, the disappearance of
servants, and reappearance of the small family home. But the empha-
sis on home comforts became much more prevalent after the Exposi-
tion Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in
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28 domicide

Paris in the summer of 1925. This extraordinary focus on the home

interior featured pavilions highlighting the glamour of elaborate deco-
ration and lighting and the Esprit Nouveau of the famous architect and
designer Le Corbusier. The scene was set for modern home decoration.
While the emphasis on home decoration continued throughout the
twentieth century, there have been changes in the general social atti-
tudes toward home. In the 1950s, Jackson (1952, 6) wrote that “the
modern American home, even the modern farm home, is fast becom-
ing little more than a place where members of the family (not all of
them, by any means) eat one or two meals a day, sleep, and enjoy occa-
sional sociability.” The late 1960s and 1970s in North America can be
seen as a period when self-fulfillment meant more than attachment to
anyone or anywhere, hippies and communes being the most obvious
example of the footloose lifestyle. But more recently, the baby boomer
generation has bought homes and there has emerged “a new aware-
ness, a slowing down, a search for roots, family ties, a passion for the
‘natural’ and for the land, that powerful symbol of connectedness”
(Johnson 1982, 9). This may be seen as a return to the pervading theme
of home as a central cultural value and a means to stabilize society
(Wright 1980, 294). The Communitarian Manifesto (Gwyn 1992, A5),
published in November 1991, seeks “an active citizenry concerned
about the moral direction of the community.” Clinton’s 1992 Ameri-
can presidential election campaign promoted “changing values” to
strengthen the family and community. This emphasis has translated
into concern about the family and social values of home. US sociolo-
gist Amitai Etzioni contrasts this movement with the environmental
movement: “We have had, and still have, and still need, an environ-
mental movement. What we need now is a social environment move-
ment to heal society in the same way we’re trying to heal nature”
(Gwyn 1992, A5).
Reflecting these values, home decoration for the privileged has
returned to more traditional themes. Designer Ralph Lauren mimics
various historical periods in his home fashions and is “not so much
interested in recalling the authentic appearance of a historical period as
he is in evoking the atmosphere of traditional hominess and solid
domesticity that is associated with the past ... a desire for custom and
routine in a world characterized by constant change and innovation”
(Rybczynski 1986, 9). The British designer Laura Ashley’s “whole phi-
losophy centred around the home, the family ... making products that
make people feel comfortable, cosy” (Markoutsas 1992, C1).
Yet a third approach, but a formidable task and thus beyond the
scope of this work, would be a review of people’s own histories of
home. The History Workshop movement has been responsible for the
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Home 29

development of a “people’s history,” often created by ordinary people

writing about themselves and frequently creating the only histories
available that describe the lives of women and children. Biographies,
while often telling of human relationships and social class, less fre-
quently discuss the meaning of home to their subject (Porteous 1989,
232). However, together with fictional accounts, these sources would
richly augment the study of the meaning of home. Similarly, the lives
of previous inhabitants can sometimes be traced through their homes
(see the box below).

Home as History of its Residents

• She is cordial as I leave, but she has told me she likes being alone. Of
course she isn’t alone at all. The place is filled with her predecessors
(Johnson 1982, 112).
• To dwell means to inhabit the traces left by one’s own living by which
one always retraces the lives of one’s ancestors (Illich 1985, 8).
• The corner to the right of the front door is the one that fifty years ago
held an umbrella stand and where my father ... deposited a dripping
wet umbrella; and where for twenty years hung a horseshoe found by
my uncle Corrado (Levi 1989, 25).

The approach taken here, however, has been to examine the com-
monalities in the works of several major commentators who have stud-
ied the concept of home most extensively. Yi-Fu Tuan (1971) pointed
out the complexity of the concept of home in terms of its etymological
roots, the antinomic relationship of “home” and “journey,” the sense
of rest and the nostalgia associated with home. Hayward (1975) devel-
oped an overview of the multiple meanings of home while studying it
as an environmental and social concept. Beginning with common dic-
tionary meanings and then through readings in history, myth, and lit-
erature, he found descriptions of physical structures that are primary
places of residence, descriptions of home as territory or a locus in
space, and descriptions of home as a place of self-identity or as a social
or cultural unit. In a later publication (1976), based on a study of a
small sample of young residents of Manhattan, Hayward identified
nine attributes of home:

• relationships with others

• relationship with community
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30 domicide

• self-identity
• privacy and refuge
• relationship with other sources of meaning about home
• personalized place
• base of activity
• relationship with parents and place of upbringing
• relationship with a structure or shelter

Depres (1991) has reviewed Hayward’s classifications and that of six

others to create a revised typology. This definition of home involves:

• security and control

• reflection of one’s ideas and values
• acting upon and modifying one’s dwelling
• permanence and continuity
• relationship with family and friends
• centre of activities
• refuge from the outside world
• indicator of personal status
• material structure in a particular location
• place to own

Rakoff (1977, 93–4) interviewed a panel of white, middle-income

people in Seattle and found the meanings of home to be a “multi-vocal
symbol” that included: physical shelter, commodity or investment
opportunity, place in which child rearing and family life occurs, indi-
cator of personal status and success and sense of permanence and
security.
Mackie (1981) defined two main themes of home within which sub-
themes were discussed: (1) home as centre included the relations
between home and identity, home and dreams, house and self, and
home and away; and (2) home as refuge, covering protective qualities
of the home and historical origins. Viewing home as a “principle for
establishing a meaningful relationship with the environment,” Dovey
(1978) saw home as a place to which a person is attached, as securi-
ty, as possessed territory, as the familiar, and as a base and starting
place. In a more recent article, Dovey (1985) expanded these consid-
erations to include among the properties of home the following: spa-
tial order, temporal orientation, socio-cultural order, spatial identity,
and temporal identity. He also identified the processes related to home
that are expressed as: the spatial dialectics of home and journey; insi-
deness and outsideness; order and chaos; and the social dialectics of
self/other, identity/community, and private/public. Additionally, he
CH02NEW.QXD 9/9/2001 10:32 AM Page 31

Home 31

contrasts bringing our meaning to our homes versus homes conferring

identity upon us.
Tognoli (1987, 657) explored six aspects of home: centrality, root-
edness, and place attachment; continuity, unity, and order; privacy,
refuge, security, and ownership; self-identity and gender differences;
social and family relationships; and socio-cultural context. Yet anoth-
er theoretical framework for the meaning of home is proposed by Six-
smith (1986), who used a multiple sorting task plus in-depth inter-
views to determine the different meanings that home holds for people.
She found twenty collective categories of which the six most fre-
quently mentioned, listed in order of frequency, are: belonging, hap-
piness, extent of services, self-expression, spatiality, and type of rela-
tionship. Watson and Austerberry (1986, 93–7) identified meanings of
home to include decent material conditions and standards, emotional
and physical well-being, loving and caring social relations, control
and privacy, and simply a living/sleeping place. Somerville’s (1992,
533) typology is based on a search for the meaning of home in order
to define homelessness. He finds key signifiers for home including
shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode, and paradise and con-
trasts these with those of homelessness: lack of shelter, lack of hearth,
heartlessness, lack of privacy, rootlessness, lack of a fixed abode and
purgatory.
Additionally, Rapoport (1992) analysed the term “home” in
both popular (folk) and professional use and recognized the follow-
ing aspects of it: affective core, security, control, being at ease,
relaxed, ownership, kinship, feeling comfortable, family, friendships,
laughter, contentment, personalization, and taking possession. Final-
ly, following interviews with people affected by a renewal project,
Wikström concluded that home should not be interpreted as a scien-
tific concept (1994, 318). He found home to mean subjective things
such as warmth, comfort, and safety. Home was also a point of
departure, a sense of autonomy, an opportunity to mutually create
space, a place filled with memories, a sequence of events, and a part
of a neighbourhood.
Together, these studies emphasize home and relationships – particu-
larly family and friends – as well as the belief that home creates and
supports identity, provides shelter, gives privacy and security, and is the
predominant centre of our lives. A lesser theme is found in the combi-
nation of personal and material status and ownership as these concepts
relate to home. The most recent works have focused upon home as the
source of emotional well-being, comfort, and happiness.
Our content analysis of all these sources suggests that three major
categories are salient in creating a typology of home, groupings that
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32 domicide

are more general and somewhat broader than the work of previous
commentators. These aspects of home are: the spatial and physical; the
symbolic meanings; and the psycho-social. Finally, we consider the
meaning of home to an exile or homeless. This latter category is an ini-
tial attempt to reflect upon what it means to lose one’s home, an issue
to be taken up more thoroughly later.

h o me as p l ac e

I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more

ample, more sturdy, and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me
unnatural to exchange them for mine.
Levi (1989, 25)

Home – Cluster of Meanings

• Home is the space/group/time entity in which individuals spend the
greater part of their lives. It is preferred space, and it provides a fixed
point of reference around which the individual may personally struc-
ture his or her spatial reality (Porteous 1976, 390).
• The concept of home is applicable across all scales from the individ-
ual psyche, the room, the house, the street, the neighbourhood, the
town to the nation and the globe. Home can refer to a physical enti-
ty such as a cave, a house, an orphanage. On an experiential level,
home can refer to the daily round of life in one’s habitual abode
(Mackie 1981, 2).

Spatial aspects of home are expressed as a cluster of meanings, as

illustrated in the box below. From this, several themes emerge: home
as a hierarchy of physical places, the dichotomy between private and
public space, home as the core node or centre of one’s activity space,
and the physical appearance of home. Generally, and despite the
American attempt to define home by what we carry around in our car
(Appleyard 1979, 18), the spatial concept of home is conceived as a
series of concentric zones ranging from one’s own room, to one’s
dwelling, neighbourhood, village, town, or city; region, nation or
country; and finally the whole world. Each of these levels of home
can be considered as a separate focus of attachment, with the levels
of dwelling and surrounding neighbourhood or landscape being the
most relevant to the concept of domicide. But whole regions can also
be affected:
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Home 33

Room: “My home is the room I live in for a time, the room I’ve grown
accustomed to, and which, in a manner of speaking, I have covered
with my own invisible lining” (Havel 1991, 49).
Dwelling: “As a home, the house is a creation having special proper-
ties accessible only to the people who made it their home. These
properties ... are difficult to portray from the outside. This is because
in its deepest sense, home is always something personal and private”
(Karjalainen 1993, 70).
Neighbourhood: “To be forcibly evicted from one’s home and neigh-
bourhood is to be stripped of a sheathing, which in its familiarity, pro-
tects human beings from the bewilderment of the outside world” (Tuan
1974, 99).
Village: “The villager who has never moved away ... retains the unique
mark of his particular village. If a man says that he comes from Aken-
field, he knows that he is telling someone from another part of the
neighbourhood a good deal more than this. Anything from his appear-
ance to his politics could be involved” (Blythe 1969, 18).
Landscape: “Pioneer records are rich in examples of settlers forming
unusually strong attachments to the familiar features in the landscape”
(Rees 1982, 1).
Region: “The commonest core lies in a widespread feeling of belong-
ing someplace, of being ‘at home’ in a region that extends out from but
well beyond the dwelling unit” (Fried and Gleicher 1961, quoted in
Hayward 1975, 6).
Nation: “O Canada! Our home and native land!” (Lavallée and
Routhier 1880).
Earth: “To be at home on the planet and welcome here, humanity must
understand and appreciate the primacy of that home, the Eden we have
never left, and the wild that is its emblem” (Rowe 1990, 34).

The concept of home as a hierarchy of places may also be seen as a

clustering at various spatial levels; for example, there is a link between
room and dwelling. The dwelling is then set in a neighbourhood and
the neighbourhood in a village, town, or city (or in the case of a rural
area, in a landscape). Finally, all of the above are found within region
or nation. Research in France suggests that humans are most attached
to the levels of the dwelling and the nation (Burgel 1992, 4). Thus, at
the subnational level, the dwelling and its immediate surroundings are
the chief focus of an individual’s spatial concept of home. This level,
which may include one’s neighbourhood, appears most relevant to the
concept of domicide to all except the world’s remaining nomads, mod-
ern-day gypsies, and New Age travellers whose lifestyle is ostensibly
free from such absolute constraints.
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34 domicide

Within those spaces that are recognized as home, private, semi-

private, and public spaces are recognized. Bollnow viewed the house as
the means by which “man carves out of the universal space a special
and to some extent private space and thus separates inner space from
outer space” (Bollnow 1960, 33). Greenbie (1981) sees the significance
of the single family dwelling as a transition in space between our own
bodies and the outside world, a transition that is assisted by the provi-
sion of windows, fences, and thresholds. This dichotomy of private
versus public space and the intervening thresholds (porches, steps,
front yards, backyards, driveways, sidewalks, and alleys) is also
explored by Taylor and Brower (1985), who conclude that these
spaces, emanating from the home, help to define the behaviour of the
immediate community.
The threshold of a home has particular significance because it is the
division between public place and private sanctity, and because thresh-
olds vary depending on the cultural norm. While Americans may have
open unfenced front yards, the English often have a fenced front gar-
den with a gate. Moslems, on the other hand, have high walls around
their compounds (Rapoport 1969). Cultural differences in the need for
privacy are expressed in this way.
Altman and Gauvain (1981) also discussed the role of thresholds as
well as that of windows in terms of the accessibility that these parts of
the home provide to residents. After studying victims of burglaries,
Korosec-Serfaty (1984) found that the boundaries between the inside
and the outside of the house are essential features of dwelling experi-
ence, the door providing the boundary between the outside and the
inner self. These commentators recognize the important transition that
occurs between the inside and the outside of homes, between private
and public spaces, and they emphasize the significance of the interior
of the home – the most intimate element of home.
Viewing home in the context of its larger setting, it can also be
described as a core node within a nexus of nodes which comprises the
individual’s activity space (Porteous 1977, 93) (see the box below).
Home is the place from which one starts out and to which one returns
after a day’s work – “a still point in an ever turning world” – an irre-
placeable centre of human significance and existence (Hayward 1975, 6;
Relph 1976, 39–40). This concept is of fundamental importance to any
study of domicide, for if home is the “centre of the world,” then losing
home is “undoing the meaning of the world” (Berger 1984, 56–7).
Discussions of home, the physical dwelling, often focus on outside
appearance in which both public/community and private/individual
values are reflected. At the community level, dwellings reflect certain
values through the use of materials and design, while at the individual
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Home 35

Home as Core Node/Centre

• Nothing can be done without a previous orientation, and any orienta-
tion implies acquiring a fixed point. For this reason, religious man has
always sought to fix his abode at ‘the centre of the world’ (Eliade
1957, 22).
• And lastly, in the name of fire, which controlled, is the greatest friend
of man and uncontrolled, his most relentless enemy; greatest of forces;
worshipped since the most ancient times; focusing point of mankind.
The family gathers about the fireplace; the Indian lights his tepee fire;
and where the pioneer far from civilization makes his tiny blaze, that
spot is home (W.D. Richardson in Engel 1983, viii).
• The creation of a centre of sanctity in a profane world is the beginning
of order in space. This centre is the germ of the home. The centre of
consciousness that is self is realized in the environment as the centre of
radiating binary pairs. Many characteristics of home previously
described radiate from this centre – familiarity in a strange world,
security within insecurity, certainty within doubt, sanctity within pro-
faneness, order within chaos, passive sanctuary in an active world
(Dovey 1978, 28).

level, specific details that reflect the inhabitants and their societal ties
become more evident, particularly within the home (Altman and
Chemers 1980; Altman and Gauvain 1981; Bothwell, Gindroz, and
Lang 1998). This situation is perhaps exemplified by Santa Fe, New
Mexico, where adobe is used as the building material throughout but
where the design details such as gates or courtyards of individual build-
ings create a constantly changing image.
Werner et al. (1989, 280) find a relationship between home appear-
ance, personalization and upkeep and ethnic identity, social class,
lifestyle preferences, and religious identification. By choosing to live in
a home having a certain external appearance, a person may also be
expressing how they wish to be seen; for example, certain housing
developments appear very ostentatious (Porteous 1976, 384), while
others communicate attitudes such as attachment, openness and neigh-
bourhood sociability. Werner et al. (1989) found, for example, that
strangers identified friendly home exteriors by the presence of Christ-
mas decorations.
When we are invited inside, we experience the wonderful variability
of home: the decoration, atmosphere, and meaning of its rooms. Weis-
ner and Weibel (1981) studied interior home environments and found
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36 domicide

four major distinguishing characteristics: disorder/functional complex-

ity, decorative complexity, warmth/child-orientedness, and the pres-
ence of books. Further, they found that values and cultural/lifestyle
choices rather than material conditions were the strongest predictors of
home-environment differences. This thought is echoed by Johnson
(1982, 5): “How they spoke, all these rooms, but how often they com-
municated things their owners never intended.” Exploring the more
difficult concept of atmosphere within the home, Pennartz (1986)
analysed the experience of pleasantness in rooms and found a correla-
tion with various spatial characteristics such as their size and shape.
Some rooms are found to be special places for the assertion of self-
identity. In a study by Korosec-Serfaty (1984, 303), the attic and cellar
were often identified as the secret spaces of the home. She found that
these spaces may have negative connotations for some, while for oth-
ers, they signify shelters, allowing accumulation and security.
Traditional societies enclosed sacred space within their homes,
which, like the hearth, helped to “unify natural, social, and supernat-
ural realms and to resolve symbolically the conflicts among them”
(Rakoff 1977, 86). Pastoral nomads orient temporary shelters and
body positions in relation to their fire as the centre of their geograph-
ic area (Dovey 1978, 28). For example, both Mongolian nomads and
scholars refer to the mandala, “The Yurt and the Universe,” which
shows the brazier at the centre, surrounded by the hearth square, and
then the domed skin tent, the yurt. This is bounded conceptually by a
box representing the four corners of the Earth and a circle represent-
ing the Earth (Faegre 1979, 93).
Home is not only the centre of our world but centre and whole. While
today needlework decorations of “Home Sweet Home” or “God Bless
This Home” over the hearth are fairly rare, the family still centres
around the electronic hearth or the dining table. Since home is the cen-
tre of life for most human groups, domicide involves loss of this centre.

h o me as sy m b o l

For most people, there is a transformation of the experience of space or a

piece of land into a culturally meaningful and shared symbol, that is, place.
The symbol (place) then evokes the transformed experience and reminds us
of its cultural meanings and social implications.
Low (1992, 286)

Just as place transforms to a symbol, so does home in most of its

manifestations. Westerners place individual, psychological symbolism
on their homes; for example, the Navajo Indians attach cultural or
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Home 37

collective symbolism to their round dwellings. In contrast, the former-

ly nomadic Basarwa of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana attach no sym-
bolism to their dwellings (Kent 1992, 3), but this is rare. The most
common array of symbolic meanings of home includes: home as a
memory of past experience, home as a source of nostalgia, and ideal-
ized or imagined conceptions of home. Home also carries an ideologi-
cal sense in terms of homeland or private property. For some people,
home may also mean the grave or God.
Memories of home frequently pervade our reminiscences about the
past or are revealed through psychoanalytic means. Tuan (1971, 190)
believes that the word “home” is more applicable to an accumulation
of past experiences than to the immediate reality of home. But home
is also a “memory machine,” causing us to relive our past experiences
through its contents (Douglas 1991, 294). Attempting to separate out
our memories of home in order to extract the essence of dwelling
places, Bachelard (1964, 29) concluded that home brings memories
and dreams together: “the house protects the dreamer [and] is one of
the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and
dreams of mankind.” This intertwining of memory and imagination is
also recognized by Tindall (1991, 221). She reminds us that in Jung’s
dream of a house, there were different floors sheltering different activ-
ities, and in the basement were old bones, memories hidden beneath
our consciousness. The theme of remembered home and all the
warmth and affection centred therein is further illustrated in the fol-
lowing box.

Home as Memory or Memorial

• Typically, the home is set in the past, in memories of childhood, as a
“recherche” for the “temps perdu,” the home of memory, which is the
only basis for a sense of identity which the exiled writer can maintain
(Gurr 1981,11).
• If the meaning of home lies in the accumulated memory of each past
day, it also lies in an expectation of future days. In our memory, home
is peaceful, reassuring, and comforting but as we experience each day,
home also holds darkness and sadness (Mackie 1981, 43-45).
• Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as
those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store
of dreams; we are never real historians but always near poets, and our
emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost
(Bachelard 1964, 29).
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38 domicide

• The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled

those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps,
and inglenooks, which, ignoring all space–time distinctions, commin-
gle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the
dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody (Nabokov in Tindall
1991, 221).
• We are all profoundly affected by the places we live, often without real-
izing it. Their problems and paradoxes become our own, changing us
and making us part of them. When we leave, the memories of their
rooms and streets stay in our minds like ghosts, or the voices of old
lovers (Johnson 1982, 6).
• Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point
for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written,
which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when
they would otherwise be forgotten. It is a fountain fitted to the nature
of social man from which supplies of affection, as pure as his heart was
intended for, are daily drawn (Wordsworth cited in Lucas 1988, 87).

Where home provides a lasting memory in the form of a memori-

al, a strong link between home and identity is found. In exploring the
meaning behind landscapes, Lucas (1988, 89) discusses Words-
worth’s poem Michael. He suggests that the destruction of the cottage
named The Evening Star and the land surrounding it strewn with
stones means an end to memories: “[the stones] tell of broken hopes,
of the destruction of continuity, of the obliteration of a family and
even of community, for they had been gathered for a sheepfold which
Michael had intended to build with and for his son, who was to have
been the inheritor of his land.” The land and buildings are thus
marked with a human significance that outweighs any value they may
have as picturesque objects. Similarly, for the poet Clare, “to change
the look of the land was to wound the lives of those who lived on and
through it ... altering the landscape obliterates ‘objects of memory’”
(Lucas, 89).
Memories of home often result in intense attacks of nostalgia.
According to Tuan (1971, 189), the word “nostalgia,” from the Greek
nosos (return to native land) and algos (pain or grief), was coined in
1688 by Johannes Hofer, a medical student who believed that this
“homesickness” deserved medical attention. Since the concept of home
is now writ large across popular magazines (for example, see
“Thoughts of Home” in the American publication House Beautiful), it
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Home 39

seems just possible that home is currently vying with nature as the
post-Romantic or postmodern replacement for God. Nostalgia is
indeed rampant (see the following box).

Home and Nostalgia

• We have more than the ever-persistent nostalgia ... for some simple and
quiet home where we can recapture long-lost values swept away by
social change (Johnson 1982, 7–9).
• They were returning to very diversely imagined paradises, [but] nostal-
gia was common to them all (Holt 1966, 131).
• Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home (Payne 1823).
• Home again, home again, jiggety jig (from nursery rhyme To Market,
To Market)
• You can’t go home again ... and for starters, let us admit right off that
Thomas Wolfe hit the Motherlode back in 1934. But wouldn’t Tom
have gone out of his tree had he had any notion of what that piece of
information would mean today; ’cause, why, “You Can’t Go Home
Again” has been squared and cubed and raised to the fourth power!
(Anonymous 1972, 131)
• I want to look for Ne-Hi Pop and Burma Shave signs and go to a ball
game and sit at a marble-topped soda fountain and drive through the
kind of small towns that Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney used to
live in in the movies. It’s time to go home (Bryson 1988, 43).
• I thought: as soon as all this is finished, we’ll go straight back to Brix-
ton. …We could have stayed out there, cut ourselves a nice little niche
out there, hit the high spots. But I was pining away for home – for the
whirr and rattle of the trams, the lights of Electric Avenue glowing like
bad fish through the good old London fog, longing for rain and weath-
er and bacon sandwiches, for the healthy chill of 49 Bard Road on a
frosty morning, for the smell of home, the damp, the cabbage, the tea,
the gin (Carter 1982, 142).
• Should we not think of the problem of home and peace … as only a bit
of nostalgia or a remnant of whispering from the past but finally melt-
ing away in the age of postmodernism? (Karjalainen 1993, 72).
• It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiment that makes the neces-
sary home (Bowen 1986, 140).

It is a common experience that a certain slanting of the light, or the

smell of a spice from our past will bring home flooding back to us
(Norris 1990, 239, Porteous 1990). Proust’s remembrance of his
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40 domicide

childhood in Combray on tasting and smelling petites madeleines is the

most famous literary example of such an experience. The past, even the
form of a remembered landscape, is essential in order to understand
what we are seeing: “Patterns in the landscape make sense to us
because we share a history with them” (Lowenthal 1975, 5). Buttimer
recognizes that nostalgia for place, and particularly for rural settings,
is often experienced by persons enveloped by urban surroundings. She
suggests that such feelings are strongest during periods of significant
change in either social or physical environment (Buttimer 1980, 166).
Indeed, social mobility in many countries has ensured that nostalgia
for home has become endemic (Hardyment 1990, 12).
Nostalgia frequently involves idealization. The specification of an
ideal home will, of course, vary depending on the individual. Thus,
Tuan contrasts the Alaskans’ liking for their “frozen landscapes” with
the Nuer’s for the swamps of the Sudan (Tuan 1974, 114). Homes can
also become the embodiment of fantasies (Johnson 1982, 4), the man-
ifestation of an ideal that is realistic or not and, as such, provide a
place of escape (see the following box). Felicité in La Fortune des
Rougon sits in a window gazing at the Place de la Sous-Préfecture,
which was a “small square, bare, neat, with nice light houses, [and]
seemed Eden to her” (Zola cited in Tindall 1991, 47).

Ideal/Images of Home
• Though I live by choice in the city, home is a rambling country house
in some place where there is snow on the ground. There are fireplaces
and many bookcases and deep carpeting everywhere. Though I can
scarcely sew on a button, my dream home is a showplace of handi-
crafts, all created by me (Johnson 1982, 2).
• We invest in places where we live with a lifetime of images about home
(Johnson 1982, 7).
• People have intellectual, imaginary, and symbolic conceptions of place
as well as personal and social associations (Buttimer 1980, 166).
• Home may also be idealized, a preconceived image of what home
should be (Cooper, 1974)
• Such idealized images give a false notion to reality of everyday experi-
ence of home. The experience of home is not bound to any one ideal
form but is as variable and as valid as there are individual life trajec-
tories (Mackie 1981, 28–9).
• It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of night; and it is not
dreamless. Does not your house dream? And dreaming, leave the city
for grove or hilltop (Gibran 1965, 31).
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Home 41

Homes sometimes take shape as a product of our imaginations.

While the widely-fantasized luxury of building one’s own home is less
frequent today, such a home must surely be the ultimate example of
our imaginings. Rybczynski (1989, 191) describes Carl Jung’s country
retreat, which was created over a period of thirty-two years in a style
intended to emulate the past. It was, in Jung’s words, “a kind of rep-
resentation in stone of my innermost thoughts.” Idealized visions of
home, frequently seen as a detached house in a rectangular yard, may
provide a false sense of reality, for home can vary from apartment to
park bench (Cramer 1960, 41; Porteous 1977, 65).
Beyond imagined or idealized visions of home, Bachelard (1964) has
influenced a whole generation of writers with his concept that the
house protects the dreamer. Like Rybczynski (1989, 190), many may
have first thought this an “obscure conceit,” but upon reflection, they
found it quite reasonable, for home is where “it is safe to let our minds
drift.” And dreams of home are not only of the built environment but
also of a favourite place where you go to dream, where “topophilia” is
manifest (Tuan 1961). Such dreams may soon extend to cyberspace in
which virtual reality permits the “morphing” of impossible dreams
and, for the artist: “Going home, feeling home, [will not be] as easy as
it once was. We’ve still got the instinct, but someone has thrown away
the map” (Creighton-Kelly 1992).
A more down-to-earth example of the idealized home is found in
the acquisition of a home in a suburban area. While the earliest sub-
urbs housed poorer segments of the population “outside the city
gates,” the richer elements of society also found a place for larger
mansions or summer homes. By the late 1700s, suburbs in England
had taken on a new air of respectability and, later still, improvements
to transportation heightened the trend for suburban living. Blythe
(1981, 22) acknowledged how suburbs in the twentieth century
became “part of a comfortable and preferred way of life of half of
Britain’s population.” The suburb is also home to half of the Ameri-
can population and to much of the population in Australia. As such,
it presents a mixed picture as an ideal. Comment about and criticism
of suburbs, urban sprawl, and the attendant problems abound and
have spilled over into fiction, from Orwell’s Coming Up for Air to
Bowen’s Attractive New Homes (Tindall 1991, 237). Nevertheless,
Blythe believes that the general preference for this type of home
should not be ignored.
Older suburbs have come to resemble inner cities with problems of
seniors and the homeless and with a decaying infrastructure, but new
suburban developments continually attempt to recreate new sorts of
idealized homes. Bearing names like Heartland or Green Valley, some
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42 domicide

recently constructed suburbs have been described as “a seamless facade

of interminable, well-manicured developments punctuated by golf
courses and an occasional shopping plaza done in stucco” (Guterson
1992, 55). The developments Guterson describes, which have sprung
up in the desert outside of Las Vegas, are not, however, without prob-
lems of crime (such as drug abuse, and gang violence) as well as the
intrusion of emissions from nearby heavy industry.
While achieving an ideal home may be impossible, understanding the
image of home that people hold becomes crucial in planning new
homes. The advantage of suburban-type homes may have been seen as
their provision of a “clearly evidenced universe” in their opportunity
for “authentic living” as defined by Bachelard who proposed that the
complete experience of home includes homes with cellars and attics,
snuggling into villages, or rising in the middle of fields (Marc 1972,
137; Korosec-Serfaty 1984, 305).
Ideals may, of course, become ideology. The ideological sense of
home is expressed in terms of home as a right, the sanctity of pri-
vate property, and the concept of homeland involving patriotism.
Berger (1990, 85) suggests that the word “home” has been taken
over by two kinds of moralists: the defenders of domestic morality
and property (including women), and those who defend the notion
of homeland.
Hollander (1991, 31) illustrates home as a right with reference to
Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Man:

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.’
‘I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’

Hollander also suggests that, while home may not be an earned right,
it may become so when home is one’s private property. When first
legally possessing a home, it does not immediately feel like your own,
for it takes some time to erase the signs of ownership of previous res-
idents (Lang 1985, 202). Even when a home becomes one’s own
property, there are still limits on its use, usually expressed in the form
of building codes and zoning bylaws. These limits have been
enshrined through numerous legal precedents including the common
law principle of “nuisance.” On what is perhaps a lighter note, the
us Supreme Court held that a man’s home is indeed his castle, but his
backyard is just the castle’s “curtilage” and enjoys much less privacy,
particularly when that curtilage is used for growing marijuana (Will
1986).
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Home 43

While the importance of home ownership may vary between coun-

tries and cultures (for example, it is less important in Switzerland than
it is in Australia, Canada, and the United States), Rakoff (1977, 94)
found that his sample of white, middle-income people in the Seattle
area continually returned to the assumption that ownership was nec-
essary for such things as permanence, security, control, status, refuge,
and family life. Rakoff also suggested that “for most people, home
ownership, current or imagined, is the single most important charac-
teristic of the house, in large part because ownership helps them to
resolve the conflicts and ambiguities that the private, home space is
heir to” (Rakoff 1977, 100). Authors specializing in this subject area
(Denman 1978, 2; Macpherson 1978, 179; Ryan 1987, 72) have pro-
vided broad descriptions of the concept of property as a social and
jurisdictional institution; a vehicle of power in human relationships; a
determinant of the occupation, possession, and ownership of land; a
provider of opportunities for freedom, self-expression and allegiance;
and the boundary between the individual and the state. Like “home,”
“property is not an object but rather a social relation that defines the
property holder with respect to something of value (the benefit stream)
against all others” (Bromley 1991, 2).
At some stage, homes often change from private property (the ulti-
mate bastion) to a product (the ultimate exchange commodity). Rakoff
(1977, 88) sees the house as a crucial commodity of the political econ-
omy as well as the scene of much of everyday life. This contradiction
is recognized by Heidegger (cited in Relph 1976, 40), who feels that
home is a perverted phenomenon when expressed in terms of monetary
value, and also by Raskin, who notes that, while “the idea of ‘Home’
tends to be relegated to sentimental songs and sayings ... the actuality
is a series of residences built, sold, and occupied as generally replace-
able commodities” (cited in Hayward 1975, 4). Hardyment (1990, 12)
also explores this theme and, in considering the effect that moving to
a new house may have on children, decries the way in which homes are
considered to be simply a financial investment. She says: “Isn’t it a
form of prostitution, this decking of houses in seemly shades of Dulux
and knicker-blinds from Laura Ashley, and putting them up for sale as
desirable residences?”
In an ideological sense, home may also mean homeland (see the
following box). Exploring this concept, Schama (1991) contrasts
the wartime visions of homeland by the British artist Frank New-
bould, which showed a stone-walled village nestling at the base of
undulating hills, with a German poster by Bergmann showing a
ploughman with a strong horse tilling fertile acres. Two quite differ-
ent versions of home are portrayed by these artists; they wished to
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44 domicide

take advantage of the notion that landscape and people are one,
therefore relating (and perhaps manipulating) their countries’ image
of what is important in wartime. Even today, the themes of art often
focus on ideals such as home, place, nationalism, refuge, and safe
spaces (Creighton-Kelly 1992). A particularly strong recognition of
a sense of home is also found in accounts of pioneers who chose a
particular place to settle because it reminded them of their homeland
(Rees 1982, 3).

Home/Homeland
• The claim that landscape and people are morphologically akin, con-
structed, as it were, from common clay, and that they constitute in
some primal cultural sense the nature of each other – that land and
homeland may be interchangeable – is now a familiar commonplace
(Mack 1991, 11).
• At a larger scale, America is experienced as home (Sopher 1979, 129).
• Human groups nearly everywhere tend to regard their own homeland
as the centre of the world (Tuan 1977, 136).
• Marta tells me of the violation of her house, of the door kicked in by
soldiers. And yet, although her house was destroyed, its very shelter-
ingness desecrated, she is quick to add that Guatemala, without poli-
tics, is paradise. How can this be – that we yearn for hell and call it
paradise? (Norris 1990, 238).
• ’Tis the star spangled banner, O, long may it wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.
(Key 1814).

A final ideological sense of the word “home” is its use to mean the
grave, heaven or God, although this is now less commonly used (see
the following box). Ecclesiastes 12.5 identified home as heaven and the
place of ultimate return (Hollander 1991, 33). Gurr (1981, 13) sug-
gests that Donne equated his need for God with his need for home. In
keeping with the previous discussion of home as ideal, Gurr believes
that today “the ideal of God as our home has tailed off into a pallid
cliché, an unconvincing assertion of wish fulfilment, the idea of getting
away from it all taken as far as it will go.” It is, perhaps, this loss of
the notion of heaven as providing the ultimate home which makes
clinging to the earthly home more poignant.
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Home 45

Home Meaning the Grave/ Heaven/God

• ... and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because
man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets ...
(Ecclesiastes 12.5)
• For though through many straits, and lands I roam,
I launch at paradise, and I sail toward home (Donne).
• “Turn up the lights,” he protested to the nurse, adding in a paraphrase
of the popular song of 1907, “I don’t want to go home in the dark.”
(Langford 1957, 245).
• If there was one of those tiny graveyards behind the house with its
cluster of family graves, my envy became awe. It was a sacred place as
well, their home. They had buried their ancestors on their land ...
home, according to Reynolds Price, is a religious place containing our
dead (Johnson 1982, 103).
• O God, our help in ages past, ... and our eternal home ( Watts 1930,
Hymn 662).
• No, I cannot believe that. I hold another creed, which no one ever
taught me, and which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to
which I cling, for it extends hope to all. It makes Eternity a rest – a
mighty home, not a terror and an abyss (Brontë 1971, 51).

h o me’s psych o s o c i a l m e a n i n g

Man is born homeless; and the search for home

Creates him and destroys him hour by hour.
Herbert Reed cited in Tindall (1991, 213)

The psychological and social aspects of home are explored now in

terms of the meaning of home at various stages in the life cycle: by role
or relationship (spouse, parent), by feelings toward home, and by the
relationship of place to self. In this context, home is where the heart is,
“an ideological construct created from people’s emotionally charged
experiences of where they happen to live” (Gurney cited in Som-
merville 1992, 529).
Traditionally, people were born at home and might also die there.
Indeed, the periods of childhood and old age predominate in discus-
sions of the psychosocial meaning of home (see the following box). For
the child, home provides the centre, the mould, the place where social-
ization and acculturation occur (Appleyard 1979, 6; Hobsbawm 1991,
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46 domicide

66; Porteous 1990, 157). Home is the place where the child first
“learns to understand his being-in-the world” (Norberg-Schulz in
Relph 1976, 42); later, it is where a person’s “looking-glass self” learns
to interpret how others react to home and thus to themselves (Gunn
n.d., 18). When students at the College of Environmental Design at
Berkeley were asked to design an ideal living environment, they fre-
quently included aspects of their childhood surroundings (Cooper
1974).

Stage in Life
Child
• Sarah and I often spent cold, rainy afternoons playing “In My Man-
sion” to escape our less than satisfactory childhoods (Johnson 1982,
1).
• It is from the home that we begin our journey into the world beyond
the immediate space of the house that we live in (Winning 1990, 246).
• In his text “The Homecomer,” Schutz (1971) describes home as “start-
ing point as well as terminus.” By this, I believe he means that our
journeys, in a broad sense of the word, begin and end in a specific
place (Shaw 1990, 227).
Old Age
• I’ve seen it here, elderly black people don’t fit in nursing homes here,
they get bitter and disillusioned, very miserable if they can’t return.
When you’re old, you should be among your own. You can’t let go of
your roots, they’re something to hold on to. With retirement and ill-
ness, it’s better to be there (Western 1992, 22).
• As one grows older, a man returns to his roots, so closing the circle of
his life (Vassilikos 1991, 310).
• It is the actual geography of boyhood and girlhood which the old long
for (Blythe 1980, 41).
• It is certainly emotionally consoling, to both parent and child, to con-
sider that the parental household is, in many ways, a home perma-
nently available to those who have been nurtured in it. “This will
always be your home; it is here whenever you need or want to come
here” is the traditional speech, so grating to whatever family the child
has acquired on his own (Martin 1984, 244).

Home is the centre that provides initial protection, and from which
forays for exploration and escape are made. Through direct obser-
vation of children in a New England town and through in-depth
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Home 47

interviews, Hart (1979) observed this ever-widening range from home.

Home may be a place of refuge for the child, but when home is less
than satisfactory, an imaginary home may be created as a place of
escape (Johnson 1982, 1). The environmental psychologist Mary Jan-
skoski believes that our childhood homes put a permanent imprint on
our neurological abilities: “You think it only translates into prefer-
ences, but it actually affects our nerves” (Kyriakos 1994, D9). Perhaps
it is here that the formation of the idealized home begins.
Children’s books often seem to involve a quest and return to home,
with a small “action space” to permit the return to home as quickly as
possible. In fact, for many of us, “home may well really mean our
childhood home” (Porteous 1990, 143). Home is also more central to
adults when children are at home (Appleyard 1979, 18), when, as par-
ents, they provide the centre of security for their children.
Chawla’s (1994, 1995) work on environmental autobiography
demonstrates how important their childhood memories of home may
be to adults, but it also finds that women have a far greater and usu-
ally more positive attachment to their childhood memories than do
men. Says Mrs. Boyle in Urquhart’s The Underpainter (1997, 101):
“I’m very fond of places … I always pray for my three most special
places … the farm in Kerry where I grew up, the farm we had to leave
to come here, and the little house we have now. I pray for them every
night.”
In old age, there is the desire, even when far from home, to return to
one’s home of origin (Western 1992). Both Rowles (1978) and Blythe
(1980), in their interviews with the elderly, recognize the significance
of childhood landscapes. For some, however, last days are spent in
euphemistic “homes”: homes with special names like old folks’ homes,
nursing homes, retirement homes, sunset homes, and mental homes.
“In the psychiatric wing, no one speaks of home,” and people lose their
identity (Porteous 1990, 186). Porteous (1976, 388) also emphasizes
the one-way nature of the journey to the old people’s home and the
consequent decline in health. This is similar to the effects caused by
relocation during urban renewal. For example, in Lieberman’s (1983)
study of 639 elderly people, half were either dead, physically impaired,
or had deteriorated psychologically one year after they had changed
their living arrangements. Those near death were withdrawn and pas-
sive, which was the only way they were able to cope with their cir-
cumstances. To make matters worse, some elderly people are moved
several times as they come to need different levels of care. How differ-
ent it would be if the elderly were permitted to participate in the design
of their future homes (Boschetti 1990) choosing the colour of walls or
where to place furniture or personal possessions.
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48 domicide

In the more central stages of the life cycle, feelings toward home vary
according to the role of individuals and their relationships to others.
Home is often inseparable from family, and it may be defined in terms
of the responsibilities of the husband or as the workplace for wives or
for women in general (see the following box). An examination of the
meaning of home to women, as seen through “people’s history,” is par-
ticularly interesting because, traditionally, women have spent more
time at home than men.

Home/Role or Relationship
• There is an infinite difference between the home we choose and the one
that is chosen for us. Women follow men to the places where they
work, and it falls to them to carve out a hollow in the new space and
make it work, and men, who choose the places, more often remain
apart from the life of the place where they live (Johnson 1982, 10–11).
• For me, home is inseparable from family. It is within the fold of the
familiar that I am allowed to be me. It is where I don’t need to explain
who I am (Norris 1990, 242).
• “Home” is some place where I could be happy, whether it’s here or
Barbados doesn’t matter. Where it’s happy, warm, you can have friends
come into, can do what you want, can have a laugh and a joke, and
play a few records or something. In many ways, this is more my home,
ours, we’ve worked, saved, got this place, made it what we want it to
be. The Barbados one was my parents’ “home” (Western 1992).

Rybczynski (1986, 160) suggests that feminization of the home

began in the seventeenth century in Holland and reached its peak in
nineteenth-century America in the work of Catherine Beecher and Har-
riet Beecher Stowe. In this work, it was recognized that “woman’s
place was in the home [but] that the home was not a particularly well-
thought-out place for her to be.” For some, this feminization of home
has negative connotations. McDowell and Massey (1984, 128–30)
compare the lifestyles of women in nineteenth-century County Durham
and modern Hackney. In the former, the women’s role of unpaid work
in the home, in which “working clothes had to be boiled in coppers
over the fire which had to heat all the hot water for washing clothes,
people, and floors,” supported the filthy and dangerous business of
mining. Modern women in Hackney provide another definition of the
“woman’s workhouse” as they are involved in piecework for the rag
trade in their own homes: “I used to get my work done in five hours,
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Home 49

now I work ten or twelve hours a day ... The kids say, mum, I don’t
know why you sit there all those hours. I tell them, I don’t do it for
love, I’ve got to feed and clothe us. I won’t work Sundays though. I
have to think about the noise ... I’m cooped up in a cupboard all day
– I keep my machine in the storage cupboard, its about three feet
square with no windows.” For these women from different eras, the
sense of confinement and entrapment is the same.
For others, particularly American middle-class women prior to
1940, home was viewed in a more positive light as the setting for
domestic arts. The transformation of house to home was a traditional
role in which “the atmosphere of home was seen as having an almost
mystical effect on its inhabitants, determining their moral standards,
happiness and success in the outside world” (Motz and Browne 1988).
Such an attitude to home is typified by the following:

A homekeeper am I: this is my task

To make one little spot all snug and warm,
Where those so bruised and beaten by the day
May find refuge from the night and storm.

Gladly I serve – love makes the serving sweet;

I feel no load – love makes the burden light;
A happy keeper I of home and hearts –
Serving I reign – a queen by love’s own right.
F.J. Hadley, The Mother’s Magazine
(cited in Davison 1980, 67).

In a discursive journey through women’s magazines, Davison

(1980), traces three generations of American women and their homes
and finds that women are now developing a more ambivalent attitude
to the pleasantries of domestication. However, this domesticity of
home may not be such a bad thing, for as Hardyment (1990, 12) points
out, “home as nest” may not be as smart as a “des. res. with all mod.
cons.,” but it may well be preferable.
Two studies have confirmed that this feminization of home is still
prevalent despite the growing number of women working outside of
the home. Ahrentzen et al. (1989) studied the use of space in homes by
538 family households in Toronto. They found that fully employed
married women spend more time in rooms with family members and
are more involved in housekeeping and child-care activities than their
spouses. Tognoli (1980) also found that more women than men were
involved with activities in the home. However, this circumstance may
be changing. Mui (1992) studied the arrangement and allocation of
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50 domicide

space within a house and finds that as societal attitudes and the status
of women and men change, the use of space within the home also
changes. For example, women often now require “a room of one’s
own” despite their continuing responsibilities for the care of all the
home.
Other studies have provided information about the physical arrange-
ments of home and how they reveal the relationships of those who live
there. Peled and Ayalon (1988) describe a therapy in which a couple
were made aware of how the meanings they invested in the spatial
organization of their ideal homes revealed the conflict in their rela-
tionship. Similarly, Irwin (1992) studied polygamous Mormon families
in Utah and found that environmental setting played an important role
both in the viability of relationships between the husband and each of
his wives and the relationships between the wives. As a result of these
analyses, more therapeutic spatial layouts were produced that assisted
in their therapies.
There is often a distinction between one’s own home or the family
home as a social unit and the home of parents, particularly when the
latter is in another country (Western 1992). The parental home is fre-
quently the site of traditions, and it can be oppressive to the individual
(Appleyard 1979, 4; Porteous 1976, 387). But new homes are estab-
lished and new traditions begin. When ten women and men who lived
alone were asked to describe their experiences after leaving their
parental homes, they outlined three phases: an initial phase of feeling
“not at home;” then an awareness of a need for home; and, finally, the
psychological and physical arrival at a place that felt like home
(Horowitz and Tognoli 1982). The authors interpret these findings to
suggest that home can have various environmental and psychological
dimensions over time and that the meaning of home does not neces-
sarily depend on traditional family structures.
Feelings toward home are most frequently expressed as affection (see
the following box). Feelings of “at homeness,” “about home,” and
“being at home” form the connection or measure of quality between
person and home. We often choose to make homes the settings for
important rituals such as birthdays, weddings, or funerals (Saile 1985).
Metaphorically, we speak about being at home with people or with an
idea when we are comfortable with them.
The geographic literature about home is broadly contained within
this continuum that links place, home, and feelings about home, the
latter connecting people to place. Relph (1976, 1) asserts that “to be
human is to live in a world that is filled with significant places: to be
human is to have and to know your place.” Hay (1987, 1) describes
sense of place as resulting from both residence (in one place) and
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Home 51

Feelings Toward Home

• Home is where the heart is (attributed to Pliny, quoted in Hayward
1975, 2).
• Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our
hearts (O.W. Holmes, quoted in Hayward 1975, 2).
• Attachment to place is defined as “the symbolic relationship formed by
people giving culturally shared emotional/affective meanings to a par-
ticular space or piece of land that provides the basis for individual’s
and group’s understanding and relationship to the environment” (Low
1992, 286).
• Our house was not insentient matter – it had a heart and a soul, and
eyes to see with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies;
it was of us, and we were in its confidence and lived in its grace and
in the peace of its benedictions. We never came home from an absence
that its face did not light up and speak out in eloquent welcome – and
we could not enter it unmoved (Mark Twain cited in Rybczynski 1989,
171).
• For a man who prefers not to be happy, there is the attic where he can
listen till nightfall to the creakings and groanings of shipwrecks, or the
open road where the wind will blow his scarf against his mouth like a
sudden kiss that brings tears to the eyes. But for one who loves happi-
ness there is a house by the side of a muddy footpath, the house at La
Sablonnières, the door of which has just closed on my friend Meaulnes
and Yvonne de Galais, who became his wife at noon (Alain-Fournier
1966, 161).

awareness (of that place). He traced the study of sense of place through
various areas of geography. Much of the literature involving sense of
place is relevant to a discussion of the meaning of home as it links
human behaviour and habitat. However, that discussion is limited here
in order to focus on literature directly related to home. Beyond feelings
of affection for home, this literature has expressed other concepts
including psychological territoriality, rootedness, security, irrational
attachment, and refuge.
Hayward (1975, 5–6) developed clusters of meanings about home.
One cluster included home as territory, tying the physical space of
home and neighbourhood (home area, home range, hometown) to feel-
ings of familiarity, belongingness, and predictability, and acting as a
spatial framework for behaviour. Porteous (1976, 384) discussed the
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52 domicide

ethological concept of territoriality in relation to home and found that

home provides the individual and the family with a triad of satisfac-
tions: identity, security, and stimulation. The territorial imperative is
very strong where home is concerned. As Porteous suggests: “the aver-
age citizen appears to expend more effort personalizing and defending
the home than any other level of fixed physical space.”
Feelings toward home may involve a bonding that is so close as to
be described as rootedness or significant attachment. This sense of
rootedness may be the test for being authentically at home (Relph
1976, 41), or at least it “implies being at home in an unselfconscious
way ... [where] human personality merges with its milieu” (Tuan 1980,
4). “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized
need of the human soul” (Weil 1952, 43). Feelings about home may
also involve an almost irrational attachment, whereby people are so
attached to their homes that they are satisfied to remain within them,
virtual hermits, contenting themselves with diversions that come to
them (Johnson 1982, 145). This attachment is also found where peo-
ple have worked the land and built their homes. Writing about the
poem Michael, Lucas (1988, 87) provides a new construction on
Wordsworth’s words:

What makes the landscape where Michael lives cherishable has nothing to do
with its picturesque properties, as “you” are brought to realize ... it has to do
with endeavour, work, and all that is contained in the key terms: “occupa-
tion,” “abode,” “dwelling.” It is because of these things that the fields and
hills where Michael dwells:

... had laid

Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.

Home also provides a sense of security or refuge, feelings that relate

even to the most rudimentary form of shelter (see the following box).
This pleasure in the rituals of home – the importance of prized objects
and collections and their care, the sense of embeddedness and bonding
– is brought out in a number of studies (Csikszentmihalyi and
Rochberg-Halton 1981, Boschetti 1995). Cooper-Marcus (1995) sees
home and its objects as a mirror of the self. Little wonder that the
elderly hang on to their prized possessions. When his mother cleans out
his dead grandfather’s apartment and gets rid of all his possessions, it
is to the grandchild in Bygrave’s (1974, 107) novel “as if his grandfa-
ther had never lived.” Those who are not attached to their homes
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Home 53

discuss them in a manner that differs significantly from those who are
attached (Twigger-Ross and Uzell 1996).

Home as Refuge/Security
• Dunroamin came into its own when vast numbers of upper-working-
and lower-middle-class families from dreary Victorian terraces and
rural slums just managed to scrape their way into a situation which,
slump and war threats notwithstanding, gave them the feeling of secure
anchorage (Blythe 1981, 22).
• Home is one sure refuge for persons forced to frequently venture
beyond it. The “house as haven” is not a lifestyle confined to the lower
class (Porteous 1976, 386).
• Home is for me as yet a fortress from which to essay raid and foray, an
embattled position behind whose walls one may return to lick new
wounds and plan fresh journeys to further horizons (Maxwell 1963,
210).
• And now the house is immune from the outside world, of which the
only reminder is the scratching sound made against pane by the leaf-
less branch of a rose bush. Like passengers on a boat adrift, the lovers,
in the wintry gale, are enclosed in their own happiness (Alain-Fournier
1966, 167).
• For almost everyone, the notion of home is usually a positive one. It is
the known as opposed to the unknown; it is certainty as opposed to
uncertainty, security rather than insecurity, the knowledge that in the
final analysis, someone else, our parents, will make the necessary deci-
sions and will protect us from harm ... even where homes are inade-
quate, children may choose to stay because it is the only real experi-
ence of home and parent that they know. It is familiar and predictable
(Shaw 1990, 227).
• Home may become a defensive symbol protecting the family against
“the spectre of destitution,” and the bewildering outside world (App-
leyard 1979, 5).
• This is the true nature of home – the place of Peace; the shelter, not only
from injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division (Ruskin cited in
Welsh 1971).

Western homes provide a physical defence against threats, with par-

lours for meeting guests and windows for surveillance (Gunn n.d., 2).
Who will enter and what will take place inside can be controlled
(Dovey 1978, 27). The significance of such control is seen in modern
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54 domicide

day home-security arrangements. The cartoon character Calvin pon-

ders as he wakes to a slight 2:00 a.m. sound: “When someone breaks
into your home, it shatters your sense of security. If you’re not safe in
your own home, you’re not safe anywhere.” And then: “A man’s
home is his castle. But it shouldn’t have to be a fortress” (Waterson
1989, 10).
Several commentators have stressed the sense of security provided by
home. At home, you can “leave the world and be alone, safe from dan-
ger”(Marc 1977, 14). This is seen as particularly true for low-income
groups for whom home becomes haven (Gans 1967, 27; Willmott and
Young 1957, 269). By contrast, Vidich and Bensman (1960, 58) note
that for professionals and skilled workers, home is a different form of
security – an accumulation of equity. More significantly for this study,
Bollnow proposes an “anthropological function of the house” in which
the feeling of security provided is essential for self-identification (Egen-
ter 1992, 6). If home means security, it is all the more devastating when
home is invaded or destroyed.
Security may also lie in a strong sense of self-identity. Within the lit-
erature of home, there are frequent discussions of the meaning of home
to self – the way in which home shapes identity or in which homes are
shaped by the inhabitant (see the following box). This relationship is
argued in differing ways. Self is seen as the most important, among
other considerations, in the integration with home; being at home is
defined as being close to self. Home is a second body, which is seen as
a symbol of self and self-identity. Home shapes you and, in turn, is
shaped in your image. Home may change you against your will or
without your knowledge. Ironically, the strong sense of self created by
a strong sense of home may also be the factor that preserves you when
home is lost.

Place-identity/self-identity
• Don’t I, when I go into other people’s homes, draw the most sweeping
conclusions about them ... aren’t they offering it up for view, like a
road map of their very souls? (Johnson 1982, 2).
• No act of self-scrutiny can be complete if we don’t see ourselves in
relation to these outer shells and understand their influence on us ... I
have lived for varying periods in five widely disparate places since I
was a child. Because of the nature of each place, and because of what
I was when I lived in them, each changed me – usually against my will,
for I fought them all, probably for the same reason we fight intimacy,
the fearful yielding that might hurt (Johnson 1982, 12–13).
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Home 55

• It’s not even enough difference to make me a mongrel. I never really

noticed the difference until I went back there, again, and found how
different from home my home was. You don’t choose your own land-
scapes. They choose you (Carter 1982, 24–5).
• For even as you have homecomings in your twilight, so has the wan-
derer in you, the ever distant and alone. Your house is your larger body
(Gibran 1965, 31).
• In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its counsels
of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed
being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through
those of life. It is body and soul (Bachelard 1964, 29).
• To be at home, to dwell authentically, is to be incorporated into the
landscape of home, which is the place from which we have our sense
of who we are (Winning 1990, 257).
• While the motives for choosing a home are still instrumental (sufficient
space, good access, and various creature comforts), economic, and aes-
thetic, the symbolic role of the home as an expression or confirmation
of desired identity is increasingly important, though seldom discussed
except in critical terms (Appleyard 1979, 4).

Zonn (1983, 3) explores the place-identity/self-identity perspective

of home. For him, place-identity is the unique character of a place as
seen and interpreted by the individual, while self-identity is the way
persons see themselves as unique from other persons. When place-iden-
tity and self-identity are closely allied, a strong attachment may result,
but this does not necessarily result in a home. Zonn argues that home
involves the intersection of self, centre, rest, authenticity, and inside-
ness. Similarly, Dovey (1978, 28) suggests that to be “at home” or to
“make oneself at home” is to act naturally and come closer to one’s
self. Confirming the special, close relationship between home and self,
Lang (1985, 202) sees home as “the intimate hollow we have carved
out of the anonymous, the alien” – in fact our second body. The anal-
ogy of the house as body is echoed by Bachelard and Gibran (see the
preceding box). Based on studying literature, poetry, dreams, and con-
temporary architecture, Cooper (1974) found the home to be an
important symbol of self and self-identity.
Studying urban identities, Proshansky et al. (1983, 57–9) theo-
rized that there are a series of functions that connect place identity
and a sense of belonging. These functions seem to represent the var-
ious stages in the link between home and identity, with the final
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56 domicide

stage representing the most territorial aspect. The five stages com-
prise the following:

• recognition function, which provides an environmental past

against which the immediate physical setting can be measured
• meaning function, which suggests what should happen in places
and what is appropriate behaviour
• expressive requirement function, which is the expression of tastes
and preferences regarding the space
• mediating change function, in which change in a space is required
• anxiety defence function, which occurs when other people must be
involved in any change to a place

Appleyard (1979, 5) has also explored a number of ways in which

home and identity are linked. These include: the creation of our iden-
tities and traditions during the time we are resident in our first family
homes, the special bond that is created when people have the privilege
of building or designing their own home, and the way in which choice
of home may express identity. However, Appleyard cautions that any
discussion of the way in which home reflects identity must recognize
that “We can be, successively, the person we would like to be, the per-
son we wish we were not, and the person we think we know we are.”
This caution is echoed by Proshansky et al. (1983, 80), who note that
little attention has been paid to sex, class, ethnic, and other group dif-
ferences in considering the interactions between the person and the
physical setting. Finally, the identity created by home can also be lim-
iting. Concerned that designers who are captives of past residential sit-
uations could not develop innovative housing or housing for different
socio-economic or cultural groups, Ladd (1977) encouraged architec-
ture and planning students to reconstruct their residential histories and
thus break down these constraints.
Augmenting these academic sources are discussions of the relation-
ship between place and identity or self in what can only be a minimal
selection from poetry and prose. The intertwining of identity and home
in literature has roots at least as far back as the poet Horace, but it
reached its apogee in eighteenth-century verse and nineteenth-century
novel. Cowper, Crabbe (The Village), Goldsmith (The Deserted Vil-
lage), and Clare exemplify the former. In Clare’s “The Flitting” and
“To a Fallen Elm,” the subject is the interconnectedness of place and
identity and the loss that results from separating person from place
(Lucas 1988, 89); in the case of “The Flitting,” it is the loss of Clare’s
“home of homes” and the familiarity of his neighbourhood. From a
wide array of possibilities, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Emily
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Home 57

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre provide

good examples of the latter. Rootedness and identity are the essence of
Mr. Tulliver’s relationship with the mill; neither the dead Cathy nor the
living Joseph can easily relinquish Wuthering Heights; Mr. Rochester
suspects Jane Eyre is becoming attached to his house through the oper-
ation of “the organ of Adhesiveness.”
The relationship continues in twentieth-century literature. E.M.
Forster’s Mrs. Wilcox identifies passionately with Howards End, while
Margaret Schlegel detests a “civilization of luggage” and expects to
end her life “caring most for a place.” In Seasons of My Life, the story
of Hannah Hauxwell’s lone struggle to survive on a desolate farm in
the Yorkshire Dales, the theme of place-loyalty and identity is exem-
plified. She says of her farm: “ Wherever I go ... and whatever I am ...
this is me.”

h o me to th e exi l e o r h o m e l e ss

Just so, the migrant’s adopted home is never home, but the migrant is too
changed to be welcome in her own country. Only in dreams will she see the
skies of home. The ache of exile cannot be assuaged by travelling anywhere,
least of all by retracing old steps looking for houses that have been bulldozed
and landscapes that have disappeared under urban sprawl and motorway.
Greer (1993)

Home and journey have been offered as the fundamental dialectic of

human life (Tuan 1971; Porteous 1976), but for Porteous (1990, 107),
this dialectic is home and away. The ultimate expression of this antin-
omy may be home and non-home: exile or homelessness. There is a
major cultural assumption that home is not only who you are but
where you come from – your cultural milieu (Creighton-Kelly 1992,
18). Life away from home is considered inauthentic, despite the place
of exile being the new home. Winning (1991, 180) drew upon her
experience of teaching English as a second language to formulate her
ideas regarding home and away: “At home, people speak to each other
in a particular way; At home, there is more laughter; An accent comes
from somewhere else; When away from home, we hear the sound of
words; and The talk of home is different.”
The literature relating to exile (Simpson 1995) is sufficiently large to
be the subject of a separate book if studied from the perspective of
travel writing, fiction, and poetry; only a brief glimpse is offered here
in order to elicit the feelings about the meaning of home of those exiled
(see the following box). The feelings of some of these prodigals for
whom exile is self-imposed, for whom elsewhere is better, is not denied.
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58 domicide

Home – Exile and Homelessness

• There was probably no place on earth that can have seemed less like
home, no atoll or hill station or desert oasis that can have been less
sympathetic to the peculiar needs of the wandering Englishman and his
family. But, like the good colonist that he was, he did eventually man-
age to fashion the place into an approximation of Surrey-in-the-Sea
(Winchester 1985, 119).
• But the British who were out in Burma were not engaged in new ideas,
new books, or new ways of being men and women ... They imported
Life as They thought It Was, with confidence (Wiggins 1989, 25–7).
• The symbolic character of the notion of “home” is emotionally evoca-
tive and hard to describe ... home means one thing to the man who has
never left it, another thing to the man who lives far from it, and still
another to him who returns ... [it] is an expression of the highest
degree of familiarity and intimacy (Schutz 1971,107–8).
• The house had been lived in by strangers for a long time. I had not
thought it would hurt me to see it in other hands, but it did. I wanted
to tell them to trim their hedges, to repaint the window frames, to pay
heed to repairs. I had feared and fought the old man, yet he proclaimed
himself in my veins. But it was their house now, whoever they were,
not ours, not mine (Laurence 1989, 191).
• Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured,
and finally claimed him imperiously (Grahame 1908, 86).
• Children in India are greatly loved and indulged, and we never felt that
we were foreigners, not India’s own; we felt at home, safely held in her
large warm embrace, content as we never were to be content in our
own country (Godden 1966, 9).
• This sense of home is the goal of all voyages of self-discovery which
have become the characteristic shape of modern literature. In varying
degree, the normal role of the modern creative writer is to be an exile.
He is the lone traveller in the countries of the mind, always threatened
by hostile natives (Gurr 1981, 13).

For others, the longing for home while far away is quite intense. Such
feelings might well be similar to those of a person permanently exiled
from home by domicide.
It is suggested that writers begin with a sense of home as base and
source of identity. In exile, the writer’s loss of home provides a sense of
perspective and a point of comparison but may also anticipate for
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Home 59

others a loss of identity, history, and sense of home (Gurr 1981, 14).
Porteous (1990, 141), in a discussion of the work of Graham Greene,
suggests that Greene continuously points out the “inauthenticity of
existence away from home,” even though he found it necessary to
escape home. In fact, Greene entitled his autobiography Ways of
Escape. Gerard Manley Hopkins, who believed that he had been exiled
from family, friends, and homeland by prejudice against his religion,
constantly sought home in new places (Martin 1991). Jack Kerouac’s
whole life on the road was a search for home, and his writing record-
ed that yearning (Nicosia 1990, 19).
For exiles, home may be their country of origin, a former residence,
or both. Western (1992) interviewed thirty-four expatriates from Bar-
bados living in London. When asked, “When you use the word home,
what are you thinking about?” the largest single response was “Barba-
dos”; the second, “It depends upon the context”; and the third, “I’ve
got two homes, Britain and Barbados.”
Exiles who suffer homesickness often attempt to make their new
place of residence as much like home as possible. Schutz points out that
to live in a land of strangers is to live in a place in which their past and
ours do not cross, as if we have no history (cited in Norris 1990, 240).
The modern writer in exile, particularly in Britain and the United
States, often seeks home through the recreation of a past time and a
focus on cultural heritage (Buttimer 1980, 166; Gurr 1981, 14). The
desire to mimic homes of origin seems to have been particularly preva-
lent among colonial exiles (Winchester 1985, 119; Wiggins 1989,
25–7) and permitted the desired escape from the reality of the outpost.
According to Gurr (1981, 15), James Joyce, in exile, spent his literary
life trying to recreate his Dublin home in minute detail. In India, hill
stations such as Simla and Ootacamund mimicked the distant English
way of life. For Canadian pioneers, the feeling of homesickness fre-
quently passed when a place was found where the landscape looked
like home (Rees 1982, 1). In order to recreate home, Emily Carr’s
father cultivated an English garden in the nineteenth-century British
Columbia landscape (Carr 1942).
Returning home also has special meaning to an exile or frequent
traveller. Shaw (1990) speaks of the elaborate plans for a return home,
the unfulfilled expectations when things are not as they once were, and
the pleasure of a return to security. Some exiles, of course, are unable
to return home because their home has been destroyed; the home that
they have marked as authentic, that has formed a point of comparison,
and that has been the focus of memory is lost forever.
But homes may be lost without the trouble of exile, and homeless-
ness is becoming more prevalent. The United Nations International
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60 domicide

Year of Shelter for the Homeless (1987) broadly defined the homeless
to include those who have no homes, such as “street people” and dis-
aster victims, and those who are relatively homeless in terms of their
living standards (Charette 1987, 4). Writers on homelessness frequent-
ly define the subject on the basis of lack of control, inadequate priva-
cy, and poor material conditions but neglect more emotional issues
such as indifference, powerlessness, and anomie (Sommerville 1992,
530-33). Feelings about the absence of home create a counterpoint to
expressions regarding the positive qualities of home.
However, there is also another side to any discussion of homeless-
ness, which relates to the feelings held by the homeless about the sub-
standard conditions in which they have to live. For many people,
squatting allows them to have some sort of home when they would
otherwise be completely homeless. Their own home may no longer
exist for them because of eviction from their own or family land; they
may be unable to stay in that home or on their land due to economic
circumstances; or they may have left due to social or political pres-
sures. In general, the desire for a decent home, or any kind of home for
that matter, is behind squatting, and examples of it occur throughout
the world. As early as 1980, one-tenth of the global population were
classified as squatters, although there were many different names for it:
shantytowns in North America, bidonvilles in France, gourbevilles in
Tunisia, favelas in Brazil, and colonias paracaidistas in Mexico (Gim-
son 1980, 206). In 1987 in Papua New Guinea, squatters formed as
much as one-third to one-half of the population of the larger towns
(Mason and Hereniko 1987, 141,173). There is a form of squatting
that uses existing but empty houses, and over a quarter of a million
people in Britain took over housing that did not belong to them
between 1960 and 1980. As one individual declared: “I Peter Manzoni,
restorer...having noticed that the premises known as 29 Winchester
Road were open, unoccupied, and in an advanced stage of decay,
entered thereon with the express intention of creating a home”
(Ingham 1980, 166).
Homelessness is another subject that deserves a separate study. It is
simply observed here that, like exile, homelessness speaks of the loss
of identity experienced by those away from home and that squatter
communities demonstrate the desperate desire to regain some sem-
blance of home. When the former home has been destroyed, howev-
er, this is clearly impossible. Yet there have been few attempts to
study the destruction of home and place, including the motives for,
and process of, destruction and the human reactions to the loss of
home and place. The present study will attempt to remedy this
deficiency.
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Home 61

h o me and d o m i c i d e

Home is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon, a term voluntarily

applied to places of varying size. Home has been found to have sever-
al meanings that can coexist, without contradiction, within an individ-
ual. Each person’s experience relating to such an intimate subject as
“home” appears to significantly colour the interpretations of home’s
meaning: “home was something complicated, ‘irrational,’ and, at the
same time, very important” (Wikström 1994, 317). For example,
women have traditionally experienced a more intense process of home-
making, cultural differences may affect the expression of feelings about
home, home means different things to people of different ages or in dif-
ferent roles, and home may be important to a person only when it is
private property. Most important is the close relationship between per-
son and home, the emotional bonds that exist. More than anything
else, home is where the heart is, and while feelings and attachment to
home vary between individuals, all of these factors, when combined,
provide a rich description of the meaning of home.
Both humanistic-literary and empirical-behavioural research demon-
strate that all aspects of home interpenetrate, and that home has com-
plex, multiple, but interrelated meanings. Werner et al. (1985) believe
that home can be seen as only a “holistic transactional unity” in which
separate aspects (physical, symbolic, socio-psychological) are consid-
ered in an integrated manner.
Two focuses appear to perform this integrative task. The first, an
outward-lookingness, focuses upon home as centre – a place of refuge,
freedom, possession, shelter, and security. The second, an inward-look-
ingness, focuses upon home as identity – with themes of family, friends
and community, attachment, rootedness, memory, and nostalgia.
Home is thus a spatial, psychosocial centre in which at least a portion
of an individual’s or a group’s identity resides.
Having reached an acceptable, if contestable, definition of the
essence of home, it remains to consider those aspects of home that are
of significance when home is lost. To fully understand the chapters that
follow, it is important to summarize those aspects of home of particu-
lar interest in any consideration of the effect of domicide. These factors
are found within the general groupings of spatial, symbolic, and psy-
chosocial meanings of home.
Within the category of spatial meaning, it is found that home is pri-
marily the dwelling (shelter) we live in. But our sense of home is also
enriched by garden (or rural setting); neighbourhood; village, town, or
city; and country or nation. All these are called home, and there
appears to be no value to more narrowly defining the concept of home
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62 domicide

in its physical sense – certainly all can be subject to domicide. While

Burgel’s (1992, 4) research suggests that attachment is chiefly to
dwelling and nation, most of the literature portrays a primary attach-
ment to dwelling, the place where one lives. At the level of dwelling,
home is a special place – inner space as opposed to outer space (Boll-
now 1960, 31) – with definite connections to the outer world through
thresholds, doors, and windows. Within the home, placement of furni-
ture and decoration express comfort and identity, particularly if the
residents have lived there for a long time, say for more than one gen-
eration. Domicide, even when a new home is found, means that home
is never the same. Change is inevitable. Home has the sense of being
permanent – the core, the centre from which other characteristics of
home emerge, the home of identity, the place to return to. Destruction
of it implies “undoing the meaning of [this] world” (Berger 1984,
56–7). Together, homes define a community and its values. When
whole communities are permanently destroyed, quite obviously the
loss is all the more significant.
The symbolic meaning of home is epitomized by Hannah Hauxwell
as she gazes at the home she must leave (and which through her good
fortune will not be destroyed) and says: “they cannot take it away from
me, it’s mine, mine for the taking and always will be ... even when I’m
no longer there” (Hauxwell and Cockcroft 1989). Home is the “mem-
ory machine” (Douglas 1991, 294), and while memories may be good
or bad, in memories of home as with childbirth, the pain may be put
aside. Home is the place in which memories and dreams meet, and
identity is formed. Domicide erases the physical place of memory and
source of identity not by conscious choice, as when one changes
homes, but through the deliberate acts of others. It is suggested that the
loss is worst for those whose home has become a living memorial –
when they worked on the land or the structure of the home, and when
it is meant to be passed on to future generations.
Home in the context of nostalgia was discussed by Tuan (1971,
189). Since 1971, commentators on the subject of home have given this
concept less prominence, yet any review of current popular literature
will suggest that nostalgia for home is a predominant theme. Nostalgia
does not appear to be “melting away in this age of postmodernism”
(Karjalainen 1993, 72) despite the effect of shrinking physical distances
due to advances in transportation and communication technology. But
the postmodern period still retains the desire for economic expansion,
and, thus, homes and their settings are continually destroyed. For
some, nostalgia for home may be all that survives.
Home is portrayed in ideal, imagined ways, and for those whose
home is destroyed, this may be the only hope to which they can cling.
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Home 63

The possibility of finding and creating their ideal home is all that com-
forts them as they are forced to move on. Home is also considered a
basic right, and the concept of private property is sacrosanct, particu-
larly in North America and Europe. It is this factor that will set a sig-
nificant measuring point in requesting compensation for those who
lose their homes through domicide.
Psychosocial aspects of home have been defined in terms of the mean-
ing of home based on stages in the life cycle, role or relationship, feel-
ings toward home, and by the relationship of home to self. Home is
where the heart is, “the locking together of self and artifact” (Bordessa
1989, 34). Home is significant at all times in our lives, but particularly
when we are children. Home is the centre, the mould, to family and
friends; it is our place in the community and the place where accultur-
ation occurs. Feelings toward home include psychological territoriality,
rootedness, a sense of security, irrational attachment, and refuge. Given
these feelings, the invasion and/or destruction of home is likely to be all
the more devastating. As Bowen (1986) has written: “After internal
upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. These things
are what we mean when we speak of civilization: they remind us how
exceedingly seldom the unseemly or unforeseeable rears its head. In this
sense, the destruction of buildings and furniture is more palpably dread-
ful to the spirit than the destruction of human life.” The link between
home and identity is the subject of a large number of studies reviewed
above and is common in literary sources. The sense of identity created
by a sense of home may therefore be destroyed when home is destroyed.
Discussion of the meaning of home to the exile or the homeless pre-
sents a similar situation to that which arises when home is destroyed.
Predominant for the exile is the desire to seek or recreate home in new
places. Yet the exile may eventually be able to return home, while oth-
ers cannot because their homes no longer exist. The fact that their
“object of memory” has been obliterated forever is one of the central
problems of domicide.
Domicide, then, may result in: the destruction of a place of attach-
ment and refuge; loss of security and ownership; restrictions on free-
dom; partial loss of identity; and a radical de-centring from place, fam-
ily, and community. There may be a loss of historical connection; a
weakening of roots; and partial erasure of the sources of memory,
dreams, nostalgia, and ideals. If home has multiple, complex meanings
that are interwoven, then so does domicide. All the complexity that
defines the nature of home, when combined with the examples of
domicide that will be explored in the next three chapters, support the
belief that what is lost is not only the physical place, but the emotion-
al essence of home – aspects of personal self-identity.
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CHAP T E R THR E E

Extreme Domicide:
Landscapes of Violence

So I returned and considered all the oppressions

that are done under the sun:
and behold the tears of such as were oppressed,
and they had no comforter;
and on the side of the oppressors there was power;
but they had no comforter.
Wherefore I praised the dead which were already dead
more than the living which are yet alive.
Yea, better is he than both they,
who hath not seen the evil work
that is done under the sun. Ecclesiastes 4: 1-3

Extreme domicide involves major, planned operations that occur rather

sporadically in time but often affect large areas and change the lives of
considerable numbers of people. Such events are not everyday occur-
rences for most of us and are often regarded in personal life histories
or in collective memory as epoch-making episodes, which are orga-
nized not by us but by others for our benefit or detriment. Extreme
domicide, then, will be considered below in terms of war, colonial
geopiracy, and resettlement projects. These are not watertight com-
partments; there is considerable overlap. But running through almost
all categories of extreme domicide is a marked strain of physical vio-
lence, reduced in only some cases to the level of mere coercion.

war

Cities, armies, agriculture:

Humankind becoming its own vulture.
J. Douglas Porteous (1997, 33)

“War is hell,” declared General William Tecumseh Sherman, but

national leaders, military careerists, and major business corporations
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Extreme Domicide 65

often do very well as a result of it. Warfare has been with us since the
beginning of Western civilization in Mesopotamia about 10,000 years
ago when standing armies emerged along with cities, agriculture, liter-
acy, organized religion, and social class hierarchies. Toward the end of
the twentieth century, the world was spending almost $2 million per
minute on its military forces (Thomas 1995, 132), and about 85 per
cent of all war casualties were civilian. We are all targets now.
Goya’s arresting painting Tres de Mayo appals us because we so
readily perceive ourselves as the victims. Those about to be executed
have faces, and the faceless soldiers are just carrying out orders. This
is a universal idea; it is not just Madrid 1808, but Santiago de Chile
1973, Beijing 1989, and Grozny 2000. But we too often forget that
killing people is not the whole objective of war. For war also kills
places – witness Picasso’s Guernica – and without loved places (homes,
communities, landscapes, nations), a homeless person and faceless peo-
ple easily lose identity and raison d’être.
The destruction of homes, places, and even homelands is an
inevitable result of modern warfare. But it is domicide only if home
destruction is deliberately planned. This is often the case, and home
annihilation in war is pursued because of revenge, leverage against
enemy governments, and in an attempt to terrorize civilians so that
they lose faith in their own cause. Even public-interest rhetoric may be
used; it is difficult to forget the American army’s rationale for the anni-
hilation of a Vietnamese settlement: “We had to destroy the town to
save it” (Eliot et al. 1993, 542).
Domicide in war is discussed in terms of: scorched earth (the delib-
erate destruction of the physical, economic, and environmental bases
of localities), strategic bombing, strategic resettlement, and the
creation of military installations.

Scorched Earth

Modern total war, with its destruction of homes was prefigured by the
early military operations of the Mesopotamian city states of the third
millennium bc. Warfare in this era involved the complete destruction of
small cities, the demolition of their temples, the carrying off of their
inhabitants into captivity, and attempts at both memoricide and eco-
cide. The cultured antiquary and bibliophile Assurbanipal, for example,
reported, with relish: “I levelled the city and its houses ... I consumed
them with fire ... after I had destroyed Babylon ... and massacred its
population, I tore up its soil and cast it into the Euphrates” (Ragon
1981, 276). In 146 bc, a similar fate befell Carthage at the hands of the
Romans. Having razed the city to the ground, the Romans formally
cursed it and sowed the site with salt. Little moved or grew there for
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66 domicide

over one hundred years. And after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus
in 70 ad, that city sank to the level of an anonymous Roman garrison
town. Two thousand years later, the systematic devastation of enemy
territority had become a commonplace. “War is war,” platitudinized
General Sherman as he pursued his scorched earth march across Geor-
gia in 1864 (Dyer 1985, 79).
It was in Vietnam, however, that the scorched earth policy reached
its zenith. The United States’ attack on Vietnam was the first time that
military technology had been employed in an attempt to destroy the
environment of an entire nation. By the late 1960s, herbicides were
being dropped on nearly one million acres of forest and cropland each
year (Thomas 1995, 112). As if this were not enough, numerous
“coconut raids” wiped out whole villages, along with their animals,
fruit and coconut groves, paddy fields, and dykes. Twenty-ton bull-
dozers – known as “Rome plows,” an echo of Carthage – were
employed to systematically wreck villages and plow them under. Else-
where, coastal villages had their mangrove swamps drained and
burned. Cambodia and Laos fared no better. In Laos, the district of
Xepon, close to the Vietnamese border, was one of the most heavily
bombed. As one survivor recounts: “In our district there are two hun-
dred villages. The bombing destroyed 6,557 houses – every house in
the district. Five thousand buildings that were used to store rice were
also destroyed” (Sesser 1994, 79). Here, then, destruction reached an
intensity difficult for outsiders to imagine.
The Soviet Union committed similar atrocities in Afghanistan in the
1980s, while the 1990s began with the United States turning Iraqi
towns into rubble in Operation Desert Storm. Saddam Hussein likewise
mounted similar operations against his many minority peoples. In
northern Iraq, many Kurdish villages were sprayed with poison gas and
then bulldozed, as in the case of Halabja in 1988 (Hitchens 1992). After
Desert Storm, the Western allies simply stood by as Saddam Hussein
destroyed the whole environment of the “Marsh Arabs,” who had lived
on floating islands in the southern Iraqi swamps since Sumerian times.
Other domicidal atrocities committed against minorities by Saddam
Hussein include actions against Shi’ite Muslims, Assyrian Christians,
Turkomans, and even Sunni opponents. Between the spring of 1987 and
February 1988, the Iraqi government destroyed thirty-one Assyrian vil-
lages, including twenty-five monasteries and churches. In 1991, Saddam
crushed a post-Gulf War revolt by destroying much of two Shi’ite holy
cities. “Najaf and Kerbala were sacked as no Iraqi city has been sacked
since the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258” (Makiya 1994, 23, 219).
Also seeking to create an indelible object lesson for his dissident coun-
trymen, Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad destroyed much of the Syrian
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Extreme Domicide 67

city of Hama in February 1982. Between 10,000 and 40,000 people

were killed over a two-month period. Even after the clearing up process
the returned lived on in fear: “You don’t take photos, you don’t do any-
thing, you don’t even look at the destruction, because if you stand there
staring, they might arrest you. People in Hama were basically paralysed,
in a state of shock ... My first shock was the people, people more than
buildings because, you see, I was expecting to see physical destruction ...
The next shock was the buildings ... those beautiful old buildings that I
have such strong memories of ... People didn’t identify with their town
anymore” (Makiya 1994, 301–3). The returned exile goes on to describe
his shock in viewing a bald bare hill, where once had stood “a magnifi-
cent panorama of old, closely packed homes ... Kelenyia [had been] sur-
rounded by tanks and pounded into oblivion. Now they had tidied it up
into this earth mound, a bald hill out of which there rose a tower built
over the bones of all those dead people who are still there in the foun-
dations. The tower is a brand-new Meridian hotel.”

Strategic Bombing

The development of weaponry has increased the distance between the

killer and victim exponentially. Rather than twisting his bayonet in the
guts of his enemy, the modern warrior can annihilate thousands by
bombing from 30,000 feet or even from another continent by remote
control. Although modern land warfare can easily reduce villages and
small towns to rubble, aerial warfare readily extends this destructive
power to cities and regions. By the 1960s, a single B52 carrying a twen-
ty-ton bomb load could destroy an entire village in a single blow, and
a formation of B52s could obliterate a “box” over half a mile wide by
four miles long. It is commonly known that the United States dropped
three times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as
were used in the whole of the Second World War. Moving up the inten-
sity ladder, the same country dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in
1991 in a mere six weeks as were used in the entire Second World War
(Thomas 1995, 122).
The strategy known as carpet, area, saturation, or pattern bombing,
however, was brought to fruition during the Second World War. The
deliberate devastation of cities and their residential areas was seen as a
quick road to victory, costing money rather than allied lives. Based on
studies of German bombings of Hull, Coventry, and other British cities,
Lord Chartwell declared dispassionately in 1942: “Investigation seems
to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to
morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even
relatives killed” (Dyer 1985, 91).
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68 domicide

The Canadian geographer Hewitt (1983b, 1987, 1993, 1994a,

1994b) has made some interesting analyses of the effects of Second
World War bombing on Britain, Germany, and Japan. He concludes
the following: over 90 per cent of air-raid deaths were civilian; those
bombed out and forced to evacuate totalled 1.4 million in London, 1.9
million in Berlin, and 2.9 million in Tokyo; in Germany alone, 3.3 mil-
lion houses were destroyed; and the greatest losses occurred in the
inner, more congested areas of cities. In fact, these raids were known
unofficially as “slum raids,” their targets being the homes of working-
class women and children, the elderly, and the infirm. Significantly, not
only were inner-city houses destroyed, but also many buildings of his-
toric importance – ancient landmarks that were the symbols of identi-
ty and of the continuity of urban life and culture. Returning to mere
ruins, an evacuee from Hanover remarked: “I have the feeling that I am
a stranger in my hometown” (Hewitt 1994b, 20).
That the raids were vindictive there is no doubt. They caused the
greatest distress to those very people who were least able to influence
their home government’s policies. Two quotations garnered by Hewitt
(1994b, 2) demonstrate that the victims readily understood this point:
“I thought the objective of aerial bombardment was to destroy the
enemy’s war plants and shipping, and not hospitals and the homes of
the people” (male factory worker, Nagoya); and “Why did they bomb
us – women, children, residential sections? Our men were gone. They
were on the Front. Actually it was senseless ... There were no industries
here” (woman, Wellingsbüttel, Hamburg).
The senselessness advocated by Air Marshall Arthur “Bomber”
Harris and his ilk reached its climax in the raid on Dresden in 1945.
Known as “the Florence on the Elbe,” Dresden was a Baroque archi-
tectural marvel, a symphony of gracious streetscapes, with no signifi-
cant war industries. Yet on the night of Ash Wednesday in 1945, an
armada of 800 bombers caused a series of infernos, which in turn gen-
erated a firestorm. As the flames consumed the city’s oxygen, air from
outside was sucked in with the force of a hurricane, spreading the fire
and suffocating those who were not burned to ashes. Such was the
devastation that parts of Dresden’s centre still lay waste in the 1990s.
In 1995, embarrassed by their neo-Assyrian vengeance, the British
offered to pay for the gilded cross that was to top the reconstruction
of the destroyed Frauenkirche, once a Baroque masterpiece (Steele
1995).
The Americans targeted Tokyo in a similar way. Soon after Dresden,
General Curtis LeMay ordered the first low-level mass night raid on
the city, concentrating on an area 6.5 km by 5, with 30,000 inhabitants
per square km. Over one-quarter of Tokyo’s buildings were destroyed
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Extreme Domicide 69

in this one raid, and 1.008 million people were made homeless. This
was followed by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, a much cheaper alternative than fleets of aircraft using
conventional explosives. On August 6, 1945, Assurbanipal’s legacy of
violence reached its apogee: 70,000 people in Hiroshima were killed
in five minutes by one B29 aircraft carrying a single bomb. Colonel
Tibbetts, whose crew dropped the weapon, looked down at his work
and commented: “I couldn’t see any city down there, but what I saw
was a tremendous area covered by – the only way I could describe it
is – a boiling black mass” (Dyer 1985, 96). Of the 76,000 buildings
in the city, almost two-thirds were destroyed and the remainder seri-
ously damaged. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped
on Nagasaki.
Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have become many
times more potent, and the world lived under the imminent threat of
nuclear war until the early 1990s. Nuclear war, though less likely since
the end of the Cold War, would be the ultimate domicide – the annihi-
lation of the planet as the home of humankind (Fisher 1990, 123). If
sufficient bombs were detonated, the resulting pall of black smoke
would dwarf the one that resulted from the burning of Kuwait’s oil
fields in 1991. It would encircle the planet, block all sunlight, bring
photosynthesis to an end, and, with the coming of “nuclear winter,”
consequently bring to an end all life on earth. This, of course, is the
bang; the whimper of ecocide will take much longer.

Strategic Resettlement

Rural societies may escape bombing, but they experience domicide in

other ways. A frequent phenomenon of war or its supporting activities
is strategic resettlement from which, invariably, arises the loss of home.
The motives for such resettlement include the need to remove civilians
from battle zones or from the influence of opposing political ideolo-
gies. Uprooted villagers, forced into compounds, are demoralized by
the change and thus easier to control. Meanwhile, their former homes
are destroyed. During the latter half of the twentieth century, millions
of Third World peasants were forcibly resettled in wartime from
Afghanistan and Algeria to Vietnam and Zimbabwe.
The Algerian War of Independence from France lasted from 1954 to
1961, during the course of which several hundred thousand Algerians
were killed. But “of all the hardships to which Algerian rural society
was subjected between 1954 and 1961, none was more brutal than,
nor had such far-reaching consequences as, the massive regrouping of
the rural population by the French army partly to protect it but also to
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70 domicide

prevent it from actively assisting the guerillas” (Sutton and Lawless

1978, 332). Initially, the French army mounted a scorched earth poli-
cy, creating zones interdites (forbidden zones), which extended across
the whole country. The inhabitants were expelled from these areas,
which then became “free-fire zones.” Abandoned settlements were
destroyed by French troops, and no provision was made for rehousing
the evacuees. This period was soon followed by a more systematic
resettlement policy known as the Challe Plan (Talbott 1980, 186). By
1962, it was estimated that 3.525 million Algerians had been torn from
their homes, which amounted to half of Algeria’s rural population
(Cornaton 1967, 61). Another French commentator called the opera-
tion “among the most brutal known to history” (Bourdieu and Sayad
1964, 12). It is significant that French critics used the word deracine-
ment, which means uprooting. There was nothing civil in France’s mis-
sion civilatrice.
As in Algeria, scientific advisers to the United States Department of
Defense believed that “the solution in Vietnam” was to remove the
rural people who formed the political base for the Viet Cong guerrilla
forces (Ekberg et al. 1972, 110). Begun in the late 1960s, this “villag-
ization” policy resulted in the destruction of 3,000 hamlets and the
removal of their inhabitants to cities, camps, or “strategic villages”
under government control. As a result, Vietnamese relocatees suffered
effects ranging from psychological depression, apathy, and guilt to
increased death rates from cholera, typhoid, and plague. They became
“‘ghosts – both living and dead’ – wandering a land where everything
that once made sense of their lives had been destroyed forever” (Isaacs
1983, 20).
The same “solution” was tried in separatist Eritrea by Haile Selassie
of Ethiopia in the 1960s. Supervised by Israeli officers, Force 101
began in 1962 to repress the Muslims of the Eritrean lowlands. “At the
end of the year, about three hundred villages had been razed, six hun-
dred civilians massacred, and sixty thousand head of livestock slaugh-
tered. Twenty-five thousand lowlanders fled to Sudan, and a policy of
forced relocation was imposed on those who remained” (Harding
1993, 275). Things were no better under the dictator Mengistu in the
1980s, for hundreds of thousands of people, for war purposes, were
forcibly resettled in the Ethiopian highlands.
A similar but better-known destruction and resettlement at the
regional level occurred in Iraq in the 1980s. It is believed that about
3,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed and up to 500,000 persons relo-
cated in order to crush the Kurdish rebellion and create a security zone
along the Iraqi border with Iran. The Iraqi government denied that
these were forced removals, stating that the relocation was “only a
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Extreme Domicide 71

communal program aimed at uplifting economic and social standards

of villages” (Chicago Tribune 1989). But under the umbrella of the
“exclusion zone” created by the allies after the 1991 Gulf War, Kurds
began to return to their home areas, rebuilding their towns stone by
stone. In the words of one man: “I feel like I have just been born again
... Saddam, he even destroyed our dreams. Coming back is the only
way to defeat him” (Nordland 1991, 29). When asked, in Michael
Ignatieff’s (1993) film Blood and Belonging, why he had returned to
the ruins of the town of Halabja, an interviewee replied: “Our fathers
and grandfathers were here; in all the world, there is nowhere sweeter;
we have always lived here; it is beautiful, it is our place.”
War-related relocations, often extremely brutal, were still ongoing
in a number of countries as the twentieth century ended. Myanmar
(Burma) is one of the worst offenders, as is Angola, most modern
accounts of which use the word “displacement” with unpleasant fre-
quency (Harding 1993). In the Western Sahara, Morocco has built a
military Sand Wall over 1,000 km long across the country and driven
well over half the inhabitants eastwards beyond it. Here, in Algeria,
they are safe from napalm and phosphorus bombs, even if they have
lost both their homes and their homeland. Nevertheless, the motto of
the Saharan resistance is Koul el watan aou shahada (the whole
homeland or martyrdom) (Harding 1993, 109). Within the Sand
Wall, the Moroccan army and Moroccan settlers mine Western
Sahara’s resources, while indigenous towns like Tifariti stand bleak
and empty.
There are no reports that peoples’ lives have been significantly
improved by war-related resettlement policies. Indeed, many have suf-
fered both physically and psychologically, their situation made worse
by the often feeble efforts to provide them with alternative living and
working arrangements. At best, one may say that while their dwellings,
neighbourhoods, and landscapes were destroyed, the evacuees retained
at least their living bodies, though often with damaged minds.

The Creation of Military Installations

“If you wish for peace, prepare for war.” Twentieth-century industri-
al nations took this Roman adage to heart in the creation of global
networks of military bases, surveillance stations, and nuclear, chemi-
cal, and biological weapons-testing sites. The military’s appetite for
land is enormous; between 750,000 and 1.5 million square kilometres
of public land are controlled by the world’s armed forces. Often locat-
ed in what appear to city-based military planners as “empty” areas,
these installations actually occupy the ancient homelands of nomadic
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72 domicide

peoples such as Shoshones, Aleuts, Kazakhs, Uygurs, and Australian

Aborigines.
Although the military installations of most industrial nations have
been the generators of domicide, those of the United States provide some
of the most spectacular and accessible cases. Nuclear weapons testing,
for example, has not only devastated the homelands of desert nomads,
but it has also rendered uninhabitable a number of remote Pacific
islands. During the fifty years 1946–96, scores of nuclear bomb tests
were conducted on Pacific islands by the United States (1946–62 on Biki-
ni, Enewetak, Johnston, and Christmas), Britain (1957–68 on Christmas
and Malden), and France (1966–96 on Mururoa and Fangataufa).
Americans used Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands for the testing of
twenty-three atomic bombs between 1946 and 1958. Islanders were
told that the project “would benefit mankind” (Ellis and Blair 1986,
814). Yet, scientists at Bikini deliberately detonated their Bravo
“device” upwind of Rongelap and Utirik atolls, the worst exposure of
human beings to radiation since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The 166
Bikini islanders were evacuated in 1946, returned, removed from their
atoll again in 1956, then sent back in 1971 when United States author-
ities deemed the islands to be safe. Seven years later, the same govern-
ment declared the atoll “uninhabitable,” and again removed 167
Bikinians. The 142 people of Enewetak were similarly treated. Its level
of radioactivity was so high that Runit Island, Enewetak, was com-
pletely cemented over with a concrete cap. It was meant to contain the
lethal radioactivity for 50,000 years, but is already cracking. So
contaminated were the atolls of Rongelap and Utirik that their whole
populations were removed. Returning later, the Rongelap people found
their island too contaminated, and they were again evacuated in 1985
by Greenpeace activists.
Deprived of their homelands, islanders who were relocated else-
where became demoralized and apathetic, suffering not only from radi-
ation-induced illness but also a variety of psychiatric disorders and
social problems such as family disintegration and loss of cultural skills.
Having totally lost their land-based economic independence, the
islanders of the four “radiation atolls” have been reduced to a life of
food-aid welfare. They have received nearly $100 million in compen-
sation, but that has not eased the spiritual pain caused by loss of home-
land. Moreover, their radical change in diet has led to numerous
medical problems. But mere numbers, which are small, cannot tell the
whole story; Marshall Islanders call the American lists of statistics
“people with the tears wiped away.”
Also in the Marshall Islands, the atoll of Kwajalein was chosen to be
the bull’s eye for testing long-range ballistic missiles launched from
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Extreme Domicide 73

Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Establishing a typical Amer-

ican base on the atoll, the military authorities felt the need to forcibly
remove over 8,000 Kwajalein islanders to the nearby island of Ebeye.
Formerly inhabited by a few fishermen living in thatched huts, the
sixty-six acres of Ebeye were soon covered with rows of cinder-block
apartments into which 6,000 Micronesians were crowded, with up to
thirty to forty people per apartment, sleeping and eating in shifts. A
further 2,000 islanders were compelled to live in shacks on the beach.
By the 1990s, over 9,000 people were crammed onto the island, which
was supported by water and sewage systems designed for 3,000. The
new inhabitants of Ebeye have been called “compensation junkies,
greedy, irresponsible, weak-livered, money-grabbing parasites”
(Nakano 1983, 175). Ebeye’s vegetation has disappeared, the pristine
lagoon is now a cesspool, diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and
dysentery are rampant, and islanders who recently were self-sufficient
must now import 98 per cent of their food. The health and homes of
the islanders have clearly been sacrificed to us military aims. Mean-
while, across the strait, American forces personnel clock missiles that
roar in, then go off to play golf in a country-club setting.
Such island histories are encapsulated in the haunting novel Green-
voe in which George Mackay Brown describes what happens when an
Orkney island is taken over by a secret military installation known as
Black Star. Public interest rhetoric is evident; Black Star is utterly essen-
tial to the security of the Western world. It does not matter whether the
inhabitants comply or try to resist: “The houses of the village went
down, one after the other ... they collapsed before clashing jaws and
blank battering foreheads” (Brown 1972, 217). Once removed from
the island, the former inhabitants’ only means of resistance is to creep
onshore in the dark of night to enact place-based harvest rituals going
back to prehistory.
But going back is impossible when people are removed hundreds of
kilometres from their island. The fate of the islanders of the Chagos
Archipelago (Diego Garcia) in the Indian Ocean is not well known if
only because many attempts have been made to suppress this knowl-
edge. The need for a strategic outpost in the Indian Ocean is a major
component of Western military strategy. In 1965, the colony of Mauri-
tius declared its right to become independent. The British agreed but
only on condition that Mauritius gave up its claims to the Chagos Arch-
ipelago, 1,800 km north, in perpetuity (Alladin 1993). This island
group then became a new colony – the British Indian Ocean Territory
(BIOT). Britain then signed an agreement leasing BIOT to the United
States for seventy years without payment. In return, the British were
allowed to purchase Polaris nuclear missiles at discount rates. The
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74 domicide

British government had assured Mauritius that Diego Garcia, the south-
ernmost island of the Chagos group, would not be used as a military
base.
Whereupon the United States Navy took over Diego Garcia and
emblazoned a water tower near the harbour entrance with the slogan
“Welcome to the Footprint of Freedom,” an allusion to the island’s
shape. Only there was little freedom, because BIOT then became the
only British colony that cannot be visited legally by ordinary British
civilians (Winchester 1985, 39). When BIOT was formally established,
the Chagos Archipelago had 2,000 islanders who worked for a French-
run coconut oil factory. They lived a pleasant, relaxed, and moderate-
ly prosperous life in a series of attractive villages. They were British cit-
izens entitled to the protection of Her Majesty’s government.
None was given (Madeley 1985). The us Navy insisted that the
whole area should be made “sterile,” that even islands 150 kms north
of Diego Garcia should be “swept clean.” The British replied that the
islands contained only some “rotating contract personnel” who would
soon be resettled. To speed up the process, the British government
killed the local economy by buying up the coconut oil factory and clos-
ing it down. Islanders’ jobs vanished at a stroke, the money economy
collapsed, and boats ceased to call. Slowly, the “small migratory pop-
ulation” was cleared and dumped in Mauritius, in a slum near the Port
Louis docks.
Paul Moulinie, entrusted by the British government with the
unpleasant task of winding down the copra industry and evicting the
islanders, said: “We told them we had orders from BIOT ... we are
closing up. They didn’t object. But they were very unhappy about it.
And I can understand this: I’m talking about five generations of
islanders who were born on Chagos and lived there. It was their
home.” An islander responded: “We were assembled in front of the
manager’s house and informed that we could no longer stay on the
island because the Americans were coming for good. We didn’t want to
go. We were born there. So were our fathers and forefathers who were
buried in that land” (Winchester 1985, 41). The islanders, of course,
were not consulted. No compensation was offered until the story
became known worldwide. Resigned, without resistance, these conta-
minants of a pristine defence environment took their meagre compen-
sation and tried to fit into the alien life of Mauritius. According to the
Mauritian government, in 1981, 77 per cent of the Ilois wanted to
return to Diego Garcia (Instituto del Tercer Mundo 1997, 388).
Even in 2000, more than a generation after their removal, many Ilois
still wished to return to Diego Garcia. Although they are now citizens
of Mauritius, they retain their distinctive “Chagosien” culture and in
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Extreme Domicide 75

1998, succeeded in being recognized by the United Nations as an

“indigenous community” with a special relationship to the islands of
the Chagos archipelago. Unfortunately, the American military shows
no signs of abandoning Diego Garcia. In the Atlas of Mauritius (Sad-
dul 1996, 28), the island’s western half shows three settlements: the
“us Military Base,” being accompanied, ironically, by Splendidville
and Eclipse Point. The three settlements of the eastern half of the island
are designated “ruins.”
Fortunately, after thirty years of pressure, the islanders may be about
to return. In November 2000 a London High Court ruling declared
that the Ilois were unlawfully evicted by British diplomats, who
had referred to them as “a few Tarzans or Men Fridays” (MacAskill
2000, 1). Anticipating the recommendations of chapter 7 of this book,
the Ilois leader declared: “We ... insist that we are consulted during
the process leading to our return. We must never again rely on gov-
ernments to tell us what we should or should not have” (Bancoult
2000, 18).
For cynicism, cruelty, mendacity, and inhumanity, the saga of war-
related domicide is difficult to surpass. It is a bleak picture of callous
insensitivity on the part of the powerful toward those considered
expendable or “in the way” of their grand projects. Whether battles
are won, territory controlled, or strategic plans realized, the benefits
accrue only to the perpetrators.
Fortunately, wars come to an end, and bases are relinquished. One
of the most characteristic features of war-related domicide is that the
victims generally try to return home as soon as possible in order to
reconstruct their dwellings and their lives. Even Hiroshima and Dres-
den have been reconstructed, and in terms of the restitution of identi-
ty, it is remarkable how much effort has been made to reconstruct tra-
ditional town centres in loving detail, the best-known example being
the old town of Warsaw destroyed by the Nazis in 1944. In this way,
the “lasting wounds on the human meaning that has been accumulat-
ed over centuries” (Violich 1993, 11) may in part be treated. Thus, we
learn that: “Except in brief moments of crisis, human survival is never
just individual biological persistence, but the need to have a communal
place or to re-establish the continuity of past places ... Somehow, in
extremity, one discovers that the intersubjective reality of place has a
more general and fundamental human significance than objective form
and function or measures of the material setting” (Hewitt 1983b, 277).
Ironically, those who suffered most generally have the least say in the
reconstruction efforts. Enemy bombing provided a free slum clearance
service, creating space for politicians and planners to realize their
dreams.
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76 domicide

co lo ni al ge o p i r acy

“Imperialism” means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a

dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory; “colonialism,”
which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting
of settlements on distant territory.
Edward Said (1993, 9)

The year 1492 saw the beginning of a European imperialist project that
forever changed the face of the globe. Imperialism is “an act of geo-
graphical violence” through which virtually all the world’s spaces have
been explored, mapped, and brought under control (Said 1993, 225).
The colonizer’s model of the world (Blaut 1993) sees the whole globe
as open to conquest. By 1914, about 85 per cent of the earth’s surface
was under the domination of European powers.
The history of the Old World was a story of endless clashes
between nomads and settled people, between the steppe and the
sown. When agrarian Europeans invaded the New Worlds of the
Americas and Australasia they found what they regarded as terra nul-
lius (empty lands) sparsely inhabited mostly by nomadic peoples.
They regarded nomads as inferior, as being at a lower stage in the
development of civilization. To take the land of the nomads, to settle
them in reserves, to “civilize” them, and to turn steppe into sown
land was to the European invaders not merely a satisfaction of their
land greed, but also part of the great “civilizing mission” that they
had taken upon themselves as the “white man’s burden.” They ratio-
nalized that the ways of the natives were being changed for their own
good. Thus, from 1492 until the twentieth century, common good
rhetoric aided and abetted the theft of three continents. Essentially,
similar processes of dispossession took place in the Old World – on
the Russified and Sinicised fringes of the Russian and Chinese
empires in Siberia, Mongolia, and Central Asia. Africa, too, endured
a phase of white settlement, most notably in Algeria, Kenya, South
Africa, and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.
Such colonization can be called geopiracy, the forcible theft of the
territory of others. It does not necessarily involve warfare, for bland-
ishments and guile might be sufficient to wrest land “title” from
indigenous people who typically knew no such concept. Typically, abo-
riginal populations were first decimated by disease and thoroughly
demoralized by missionaries. Those who remained were forcibly
rounded up and confined to reserves, often on inferior land with few
resources. In this way, their homelands were actually rendered empty,
to be immediately filled by waves of immigrant settlers.
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Extreme Domicide 77

Two rather obscure cases from the mid-nineteenth century can be

regarded as typical. The indigenous Ainu of northern Japan were
severely encroached by the Japanese settlement frontier moved north-
ward in Hokkaido. By means of laws enacted by the Japanese, the Ainu
were deprived of much of their land, which at that time was a bounti-
ful forest. Japanese agriculturalists took over land suitable for crops,
while the forests were cut down “for the profit of ‘the nation of Japan’
and the corporate giants” (Kayano 1994, 9). Deprived of their land
base, the Ainu lost their traditional crafts and rituals as well as their
hunting and fishing way of life. They were then subjected to “Ainu
hunting,” whereby Japanese labour recruiters forcibly took the people
of Nibutani and other villages to work in factories in distant towns.
The Ainu story is one of “prejudice and discrimination, dislocation and
lost lands, forced labour, increased illness and death, and environmen-
tal destruction” (Cybriwsky 1995, 230). Of the 300,000 Ainu of 1800,
less than 25,000 now remain in Hokkaido; other estimates are even
lower (Rudnicki and Dyck 1986).
Geopiracy on Easter Island had a much worse result (Porteous 1981).
By the early 1860s, a combination of slave raids, disease, and evacua-
tion encouraged by missionaries and entrepreneurs had reduced the
Rapanui population from several thousand to a mere 110. Armed with
“land titles” on which some natives had been induced to make their
marks, the buccaneering Jean-Baptiste Onexime Doutrou-Bornier soon
took control of the whole island. Doutrou-Bornier and the missionaries
succeeded in rounding up all the remaining islanders and confining
them to the single village of Hangaroa. The rest of the island became a
sheep ranch. The island was then formally declared a res nullius (unin-
habited zone), by Chile, which annexed Easter Island in 1888. At the
end of the twentieth century, the settlement pattern had changed very
little, though the Rapanui population now exceeds 3,000.
Decimation, roundup, confinement, and use as labour when required
– this is the fate of indigenous peoples the world over. The result is loss
of homeland and the disintegration of identity. Some of the most
throughly documented cases of geopiracy occurred in the Americas.
Although usually regarded as empty lands by Europeans, the Americas
actually contained one hundred million native Americans in 1492 –
about a fifth of the human race. Ronald Wright’s Stolen Continents
(1992) sums up the colonization process in the title’s two emotive words.

United States

The story of the aboriginal peoples of what became the United States
is one of an appalling loss of homelands. Aboriginal people were
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78 domicide

driven off their land and treated as foreign nations, subjects, or wards
(Jackson 1993, 2). The process began in earnest in the eighteenth cen-
tury with a blaze of self-justificatory rhetoric. In 1792, George Wash-
ington, the president of the United States, addressed the hostile
Delaware nation, among others, in this manner: “Brethren: the Presi-
dent of the United States entertains the opinion that the war which
exists is an error and mistake on your parts. That you believe the Unit-
ed States wants to deprive you of your lands and drive you out of the
country. Be assured that this is not so; on the contrary, that we should
be greatly gratified of imparting to you all the blessings of civilized life;
of teaching you to cultivate the earth, and raise corn; to raise oxen,
sheep, and other domestic animals; to build comfortable houses; and
to educate your children so as to ever dwell upon the land ... Remem-
ber that no additional lands will be required of you, or any other tribe,
to those that have been ceded by former treaties” (Jackson 1993, 40).
The Indians were urged to abandon their cultures, assimilate European
ways, and to make a peace “founded on the principles of justice and
humanity.”
Justice and humanity, apparently, did not include the right of abo-
riginals to remain on lands they had used ancestrally. City-bred notions
of “the noble savage” were anathema to settlers and business people
who saw the Indians’ low-density use of vast areas of land as an imped-
iment to their conceptions of progress and profit. From the mid-
eighteenth century, a great wave of European settlement rolled west-
ward from the eastern seaboard, uprooting Indian nations and driving
them ever west and south into steppe lands and deserts.
The Delaware, for example, who received the glad tidings of justice
and humanity noted above, were compelled in 1817–18 to cede title to
their lands. By the 1830s much of the land northeast of the Mississip-
pi had been cleared of Indians. Significantly, it was the secretary of war
who congratulated his countrymen in 1833 on the fact that “the coun-
try north of the Ohio, east of the Mississippi, including the States of
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the Territory of Michigan [had been]
cleared of the embarrassment of Indian relations.” To which the com-
missioner of Indian Affairs added that it was “grateful to notice” how
well the Indians’ condition had been ameliorated under the policy of
removal; for they were now “dwelling on lands distinctly and perma-
nently established as their own” (Jackson 1993, 49).
Further south, the Cherokee suffered a fate that, like Hiroshima, is
too well-known to rehearse here (Wright 1992, 207). “Build a fire
under them,” advised President Andrew Jackson. “When it gets hot
enough, they’ll move” (Carter 1976, 83). In 1838, the United States
Army rounded up the Georgia Cherokee and kept them for several
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Extreme Domicide 79

months in disease-ridden camps. Then they forced them to trek, at bay-

onet point, throughout the whole winter across 1500 km of rough ter-
ritory to Oklahoma. One-quarter of the 15,000 Cherokees died along
this Trail of Tears. John Burnett, a soldier involved in this forced
removal, later reflected: “School children of today do not know that
we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at bayonet
point to satisfy the white man’s greed” (King and Evans 1978, 180;
King 1979). Such is memoricide. The Cherokee nation addressed the
United States Congress as follows: “You abolished our government,
annihilated our laws, took away our lands, turned us out of our hous-
es, denied us the rights of men, made us outcasts and outlaws in our
own land, plunging us at the same time into an abyss of moral degra-
dation, which was hurling our people to swift destruction” (Reed
1979, 158)
By 1893, much of their Oklahoma land was opened up to white set-
tlers. Even before this outrageous final solution, Helen Hunt Jackson
had published her best-selling A Century of Dishonor in 1881. But per-
haps the words of Sioux chief Sitting Bull best sum up the motives of
the whites: “The love of possession is a disease with them” (Turner
1974, 255).
As the settlement frontier moved west, nation after indigenous
nation was forced to move westwards before it or be packed into east-
ern reservations that were infinitesimally small. And removal policies
were just as readily applied on the western side of the Mississippi, as
the fate of the Pawnee attests. The Pawnee nation had evolved an envi-
ronmentally sound way of life in the Great Plains based on horticulture
and the hunting of bison. After 1830, great pressure was placed upon
them to renounce their culture in favour of Euro-American concepts of
civilization. Like the Cherokee, they were expected to become yeoman
farmers and suddenly develop a sense of private property. Settlers
pushed the Pawnee from their lands, and the Indians fought back by
raiding farms and making off with livestock. By 1856, settler attitudes
had become very blunt: “Pawnee Indians are in possession of some of
the most valuable government land in the Territory [of Nebraska]. The
region of the country about the junction of the Salt Creek and the Plat-
te is very attractive, and there would immediately grow up a thriving
settlement were it not for the Pawnees. It is the duty of Uncle Sam to
remove the Pawnee population” (Wishart 1979, 392). Uncle Sam
responded with alacrity.
The Pawnee were stripped of their land and provided with a small
reservation, annuities, farm equipment, and promises of protection.
This was merely a palliative, for they were again engulfed by the tide of
settlement. Within the reservation, conditions soon proved intolerable,
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80 domicide

and the structure of Pawnee society broke down. Settlers invaded

the reservation for timber, and the district court in Omaha ruled in
1872 that no redress was possible because the United States had no
jurisdiction over crimes committed on Indian reservations.
Even at this late date, the Pawnee wished to stay in Nebraska, reluc-
tant “to sever the bond with the homeland that contained their sacred
places and the graves of their ancestors, and which was the setting for
their traditions and world view” (Wishart 1979, 399). Their attach-
ment to the land was broken only when the Pawnee realized that their
traditional way of life could not be maintained on such a small reser-
vation. Taking an enormous gamble, they decided to move south to
new lands, ahead of the settlers, in order to preserve their culture. Yet,
on their new reservation in Indian Territory, their population declined
rapidly, and they soon regretted their decision to migrate. Yearning for
their lost homeland, the Pawnee all but disappeared as a distinct
group.
Other nations fared little better. In 1863, over 8,000 Navajo were
rounded up and led on an exhausting 750 km trek to what is now New
Mexico. Ironically, in 1974, over 6,000 Navajo were evicted from this
new reservation because of a dispute with the Hopi (Scudder 1982, ix).
Unlike the Pawnee, however, the Navajo nation has survived rather
well.
In 1881, Jackson provided a summary statement of the fate of Indi-
ans in the United States, which remains valid after yet a second centu-
ry of dishonour: “It has come to be such an accepted thing in the his-
tory and fate of the Indian that he is to be always pushed on, always
in advance of what is called the march of civilization, that to the aver-
age mind, statement of these repeated removals comes with no startling
force and suggests no vivid picture of details, only a sort of reassertion
of an abstract general principle. But pausing to consider for a moment
what such statements actually mean and involve; imagining such
processes applied to some particular town or village that we happen to
be intimately acquainted with, we can soon come to a new realization
of ... such uprooting, such perplexity, such loss, such confusion, and
uncertainty” (Jackson 1993, 64). Some see this as attempted genocide;
it was certainly domicide achieved on a grand scale.

Canada

In contrast to her execration of us policies, Helen Jackson extolled

Canada’s relationship with its indigenous peoples, which rarely
involved American-style Indian wars, so “needless and wicked.” Euro-
Canadians, she believed, “seldom remove Indians” (1993, ix). British
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Extreme Domicide 81

policy was certainly more pro-native than in the United States. Indeed,
there was much less contempt, less overt cruelty, and few long-distance
trails of tears in Canada. Yet it is probably true to say that all of Cana-
da’s Indian groups have been compelled or encouraged to either relo-
cate or to abandon their wide ranges for squalid concentrations around
a fort, trading post, or missionary station.
Canada’s late nineteenth-century settlement of the huge tract of
prairie and forest land between the Great Lakes and the Rockies was
quite different from the prairie conquests of the United States. In the
1870s, the United States was spending $20 million a year on Indian
wars alone, while Ottawa’s entire budget was only $19 million.
Smugly, the Canadian government negotiated treaties in advance of
white settlement. Native peoples were induced to sign these treaties
by missionary pressures, as a result of fear of what was happening
south of the border, and because of the rapid depletion of their sta-
ple, the bison herds. “Behind the eagerness of some Indian leaders to
negotiate lay a recognition that their way of life was collapsing”
(Miller 1989, 164).
Across the country, the Canadian native population dwindled
because of loss of culture, health problems, poor diet, inadequate hous-
ing, low incomes, and white hostility. Only in the 1930s was there evi-
dence that the population of status Indians had begun to climb again.
Gathering strength after the Second World War, Canada’s First Nations
began to organize against unfair treaties, racial discrimination, and
unjust treatment. A rallying call came with the federal government
White Paper of 1969, which, ignoring the long history of white inhu-
manity, claimed that the Indians’ chief problem was their legal distinc-
tiveness. The policy recommended the abolition of Indians’ special sta-
tus and their assimilation into the Canadian mosaic.
Since that time, Canadian native peoples have chosen to assert their
distinctiveness and have fought against the exploitation of their
remaining lands for industrial resources. They were especially incensed
to discover that South African officials had studied Canadian Indian
reserves as a model for the policy of apartheid. Existing aboriginal
rights were not entrenched by constitutional amendments until 1982.
Elsewhere, in large areas in which the land was never surrendered by
treaty – much of Labrador, Quebec, British Columbia, the Yukon, and
the Northwest Territories – Indian nations began to dispute the white
assumption that Indians had no title whatsoever to lands they had used
from time immemorial.
In British Columbia, to take a single example, the Nisga’a were
expelled from their homeland in the Nass Valley from 1883 onward to
make way for white miners, loggers, and commercial fishermen.
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82 domicide

Despoiled of their original territory of about 24,860 square km, and

having signed no treaty, they took their case to Ottawa and then to Lon-
don in 1906 and 1909. In 1915, they were rewarded with a token land
grant of 76 square km, about 0.3 per cent of their former territory
(Raunet 1984, York 1990). The contemporary provincial government’s
case was put forward in a series of platitudes by its agent, a Mr. Plan-
ta, who told the Nisga’a that all their land was now crown land and
that it would hand over to the federal government “such tracts of land
as may be deemed reasonably sufficient for all the purposes of the Indi-
ans. The sole project of the Government being to protect the Indians in
their purposes and property” (Raunet 1984, 89). On hearing such casu-
istry, an old, blind Indian leapt to his feet and cried: “Who is the chief
that gave this land to the Queen? Give us his name, we have never heard
it.”
The descendants of the dispossessed Nisga’a continued to fight their
case by legal means, and they were encouraged in 1991 when the
British Columbia provincial government at last recognized that abo-
riginal rights in bc had not, in fact, been extinguished. Negotiations
ensued, but they were delayed by corporate interventions. In an open
letter to the people of British Columbia, Joseph Gosnell Senior, presi-
dent of the Nisga’a Tribal Council, declared:

We have been sitting at the negotiating table for nearly two decades. A gener-
ation of Nisga’a men and women has grown old at that table. And suddenly,
at a critical stage in our negotiations, when an agreement-in-principle is with-
in reach, the backlash has begun. In this campaign, we see the hand prints of
powerful vested interests. We believe they are trying to derail the talks which
threaten to interrupt their unfettered plunder of our territory’s precious
resources. They have one goal: to intimidate politicians into scuttling Nisga’a
and other aboriginal negotiations. It would be a mistake to confuse these vest-
ed interests with the common good. While they have systematically stripped
Nisga’a lands of our fish and forests – at handsome profits – the Nisga’a have
received little or no benefit. First Nations are growing tired of trying to edu-
cate and explain – again and again – the history of our brutal treatment at the
hands of explorers, colonizers, and, now, the faceless number crunchers at big
corporations (Gosnell 1994, A5).

On February 15 1996, the governments of Canada and British Colum-

bia signed an agreement in principle with the Nisga’a, and the ratifica-
tion process for the treaty was completed and given Royal Assent on
April 13, 2000. The Nisga’as are to receive about $200 million, own-
ership over 1,930 square km of land, and the right to self-government
at a quasi-municipal level. The wheels of justice grind very slowly
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Extreme Domicide 83

indeed. In North American terms, the Nisga’a may be regarded as quite

successful; after 110 years, they at last have gained jurisdiction over
almost 8 per cent of their ancestral homeland.
But others were not so lucky, and dispossessions have not ceased.
The Lubicon Cree in Alberta, for example, never signed a teaty and so
were never assigned a reserve. Their traditional lands were in the mid-
dle of Alberta’s oil patch and were invaded by roads to facilitate oil and
gas extraction. Large-scale logging is completing the ruin of the Lubi-
con homeland. In 1989, the United Nations Human Rights Committee
found that it was impossible for the Lubicon to gain redress through
the Canadian legal system. In fact, the 500 remaining Lubicon have
been told that it would be better for them to move and amalgamate
with other Cree bands elsewhere. Such administrative removal and
band amalgamation is quite common in Canada. In 1955, the Ojibway
of White Dog, Ontario, were joined by two other bands. That from
One Man Lake had been moved because its homes and burial grounds
had been flooded by a hydroelectric project. The Swan Lake band was
moved because the government refused to build a school for only a
handful of families. Forty years later, the White Dog still resent the dis-
ruption forced upon them in negotiations between chiefs who spoke no
English and an Indian agent who spoke no Ojibway. The chief of the
former One Man Lake band expresses the problem thus: “Because we
were forced here and exiled from our own lands, there was never real-
ly acceptance to the community. There was a feeling of intrusion. We
had no choice in the matter. We had no choice but to move here” (Gray
1997, A6). Refusal of the government to build a school also forced the
people of Yuquot on Vancouver Island to move to a site provided at
Gold River in 1967. This site was adjacent to a pulp mill, which caused
so many health problems that the band was moved again, in 1996, to
a healthier spot. Such administrative removals still continue, causing
hardship and misery.
Perhaps the most controversial case of the 1990s was that of the
Innu, who inhabit a vast area of Labrador and adjacent parts of Que-
bec. The Innu are hunters and require large tracts of land to support
their way of life. Until about 1950, their culture remained intact: they
spent winters in coastal villages but moved out annually from these
into nutshimit (the country), where they lived in tents and ate the ani-
mals they hunted.
From the 1950s, however, both missionary and government pres-
sures compelled the Innu to gather into permanent coastal villages.
Once children were in school – organized insensitively according to a
southern timetable – the traditional culture collapsed, for the long
school year rendered it no longer possible to make the annual trek into
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84 domicide

the wildlife-rich barrens. Children became alienated from their parents,

and the Innu in general were encouraged to think that their culture was
worthless. Like all indigenous cultures, Innu culture could not be
taught in school; it could only be lived (Wadden 1996).
The Innu came to the world’s attention in several ways. First, in
1965, several hundred Innu were moved twice before they were per-
suaded by missionaries and the Newfoundland government to form a
permanent village on an offshore island known as Davis Inlet. Signifi-
cantly, they named the village Utshimassit (the Place of the Boss).
Although they were promised heated houses, running water, and a
sewage system, none of these emerged. Because permanent settlement
reduced both the spatial range of, and the time available for hunting,
the Innu deteriorated. Alcoholism, family breakdown, and high
teenage suicide rates became endemic, the latter becoming a media
issue in 1993. Shamed in the international press, the Newfoundland
and federal governments included Innu leaders in the planning of a
$180 million new village at Sango Bay on the mainland. With better
fishing and ready access to the caribou herds, Sango Bay should have
been chosen in the first place.
The sedentarization of the Innu, however, enabled the Newfound-
land government to claim that the interior of Labrador, mostly crown
land, was essentially empty. By 1995, a frenzy of speculation had
resulted in 280,000 mineral rights claims staked throughout over half
of the Innu nation’s territory (Hildebrand 1997). As Daniel Ashini
explains: “Mining companies and other industrial interests occupy our
land as if we don’t exist” (1996, vii).
To add injury to injury, the third assault on the Innu came as a
takeover of the airspace of their homeland. Centred on the Canadian
Air Force base at Goose Bay, over 100,000 square km of Labrador air-
space has been reserved for military use (Thomas 1995, 63). In this
area, nato jets fly up to 40,000 sorties per year. Many of these are low-
level training flights flown at supersonic speeds. The deafening sonic
booms cause waterfowl to desert their nests, mink and foxes to devour
their young, and caribou to stampede. In other words, the unbearable
noise, which the United States Air Force typically calls “the sound of
freedom,” destroys the material basis of Innu culture.
Driven from their homeland by the military, missionaries, mining
companies, and politicians, the Innu clearly see that without a large
land base on which to hunt, their culture is doomed: “If the land is
gone, there is no culture” (Wadden 1996, 162). As Innu Roxie Gre-
goire states: “The government that invaded our country now thinks we
are weak enough to bury alive. The one thing that has stopped our
complete breakdown as a people has been the months we still live away
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Extreme Domicide 85

from the village in our tents in the country.” Her sister Tshaukuesh,
thrown in jail for protesting the takeover of her country, asks of Cana-
dian politicians: “What kind of a people are they? They have no heart”
(Wadden 1996, 162).
In his examination of the relocations of Indians in Manitoba and
Saskatchewan, Dickman (1973, 169) suggests two rather obvious but
usually ignored conditions for any relocation. First, no relocation
should occur unless those to be relocated accept the change as a desir-
able move. Second, adequate resources must be made available so that
a successful change can occur. As a former Indian Affairs minister is
quoted as saying: “Many of our imposed solutions of the past have not
been successful, to put it mildly” (Bronskill 1993). A spate of recent
books provides details of many more cases of white duplicity in the
theft of Indian lands in Canada. Their very titles form a significant
processual sequence: Without Surrender, Without Consent (Raunet
1984); The Dispossessed (York 1990); Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens
(Miller 1989); and Maps and Dreams (Brody 1988).

International Implications

Whether in Canada, Australia, or the United States in the nineteenth

century, or in the tropical forests of South America, Africa, and South-
east Asia today, colonization and economic exploitation result in
geopiratic domicide – large-scale removals, disempowered victims, loss
of identity, and often a common good rhetoric as justification. The
motives are economic and political, and the winners are Western and
Asian commercial interests. Raunet has summarized the dilemma of
the Nisga’a, and all such dilemmas, as follows: “The Native fight is the
fight of all those trying to regain a sense of owning their own lives,
those who are threatened by the ‘machine’: land-deprived peasants of
the Third World, citizens of the industrial heartlands refusing atomic
plants or nuclear weapons on their doorsteps, fishermen against pollu-
tion and the asphyxiation of the sea, workers victimized by inhuman
production and investment plans – opponents of all the madness of the
present age” (1984, 236). Hugh and Karmel McCallum (1975, 2) have
also expressed the meaning of loss of the land that is home to native
peoples: “The closest definition we can come to is that, for Natives,
land is for use; it is like a Mother. It is a breadbasket, protector, and
friend. It is something you live with easily, you don’t fight. It is
something you cherish and return to when you are sick, frightened, or
lonely. It has always been there, and it always will be there. And out of
it comes your being, the reason for your existence, the only power you
have in a white man’s world. If you lose it or sell it or have it taken
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86 domicide

away from you, then you are dead or, at best, a second class white
man” (1975, 2).
Since the 1970s, these ideas have at last gained some credence in
white societies, and some weak attempts are being made to reverse
colonial geopiracy in Hawaii, New Caledonia (Kanaky), and notably
in New Zealand. In 1863, the New Zealand Settlements Act confiscat-
ed three million acres of Maori lands; an agreement signed in 1995
returned 2 per cent of this land (60,000 acres) to them. And only in
1992 did the Mabo judgement force the Australian national govern-
ment to abandon its stand that Australia was terra nullius (empty
lands) when the first Europeans landed, thus opening up the issue of
Aboriginal rights to negotiation.
Those of us prospering in the “white colonies” today are benefit-
ing from land theft on a massive scale. Were acts that occurred less
than a century ago being enacted today, we would rightly charge the
perpetrators with crimes against humanity. But such crimes are still
being committed in the forests and steppe lands of the Third World
by modernizing Third World elites that hold attitudes typical of white
settlers in the nineteenth century: natives are a different order of
beings; that they and their cultures are inferior to the majority cul-
ture, which is city-based; they stand in the way of progress, which
means profits for the elite; and, it would be in their best interests to
be stripped of their culture and land and be modernized. The peoples
affected are the world’s remaining hunters, gatherers, shifting culti-
vators, and herders.
The sedentarization of nomadic herders has been attempted world-
wide, with equivocal results. In the 1920s, totalitarian states were
particularly interested in taming nomads. In a cruel war in their
Libyan colony, the Italians attempted to take grazing land for their
own settlers by cementing up wells to discourage Bedouin flocks from
using them and to deprive them of food. Forced collectivization of
herds in Mongolia and Kazakhstan caused some herders to flee to
other countries. The forced sedentarization of nomads in Iran by
Reza Shah in the 1920s stored up trouble for his descendants in the
revolutionary 1970s. Post-Second World War attempts to form graz-
ing co-operatives in Somalia, Kenya, and elsewhere led to many fail-
ures because of nomad resistance to being organized by external
authorities. Attempts to turn nomads into agriculturalists are usually
misguided, although Ebrahim (1984) reports Saudi Arabia’s consid-
erable success in convincing nomads to become industrial operatives.
He notes that whereas voluntary sedentarization usually works well,
induced settlement is not appreciated, and forced settlement is usual-
ly catastrophic. The Tuareg, for example, have resisted such attempts,
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resorting to armed rebellion during the 1980s in Mauritania, Mali,

Niger, and Chad.
Thus, while the Western world’s native peoples are fixed in space, or
even expanding their territorial control, the developing world’s remain-
ing nomads are threatened on all sides. Nomads do not fit easily into
national boundaries, and they look and behave very differently from
majority populations. Modernizing elites see nomads as unmodern,
unproductive, wasteful of land, unsubmissive, difficult to enumerate,
and as an embarrassment to the developing state. Vast areas of land
have therefore been taken from nomads by regimes as various as Kenya
(capitalist), Tanzania (socialist), and China (communist). The rationale
is heartbreakingly familiar. The Sudanese Arab government, keen to
sedentarize black nomads in the south of the country, declared:
“Sedentarization ... is a means of improving the economic and social
conditions of those communities ... to integrate them into the life of the
nation, and to enable them to contribute fully to national progress”
(Ellwood 1995, 8). The Israeli excuse for sedentarizing their Bedouin
is depressingly similar: “We want, as a democratic government, to give
all citizens the modern services that a state should give its citizens” (Ell-
wood 1995, 9).
The chief crimes committed by nomads in the modern state are that
they are difficult to control and that they take up space that could be
put to uses favoured by central governments wedded to large-scale
agriculture, forestry, and mining. Given current pressures, nomads will
be largely wiped out or sedentarized early in the twenty-first century,
though small numbers may be retained in “environmental zoos” as
tourist attractions. It is the goal of Survival International (Hanbury-
Tenison 1991), Cultural Survival, the Minority Rights Group, the
World Council of Indigenous Peoples, and similar organizations to pre-
vent this process.
In 1998 the World Conservation Union released its Red Book of
endangered plant species, product of a 20-year study. One in eight of
existing plant species are in danger of extinction, mainly because of
“loss of habitat” and “competition with nonnative species.” The anal-
ogy with indigenous peoples could not be more clear.
Although Third World governments habitually ill-treat their indige-
nous peoples, in the Western world, the situation in the 1990s is that
the legal concept of terra nullius (empty lands), the dubious basis of
white dispossessions, has been widely rejected. Concepts of ethnic
assimilation have given way to multiculturalism. Connection to the
land is sought by white society, which now looks to native peoples for
environmental wisdom. Both cause and consequence of this change in
viewpoint is the massive resurgence of Aboriginal land claims, which
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88 domicide

currently cover almost the entire land surfaces of Canada, the United
States, Australia, and parts of Africa, notably South Africa (Cant et al.
1993, Christopher 1994). These claims will be strongly resisted, and
thus the potential for future conflict remains acute.

r es ettlement p ro j e c t s

Landscape ... may be conceived as the outcome of a struggle among

conflicting interest groups seeking domination over an immediate
environment.
Ghazi Falah (1996, 256)

The struggle to establish mastery over territory is often waged in terms

of ideology, whereby ideologies become manifestations of authority
(Baker and Biger 1992). It is impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line
between strategic resettlement in war, discussed earlier, and ideologi-
cally driven resettlement plans that occur in both war and peace. In
general, however, we may distinguish two broad resettlement cate-
gories: ethnic cleansing – often based on racial, cultural, or religious
grounds, and which may involve warfare; and settlement rationaliza-
tion – which usually occurs in peacetime and of which the motives are
political and administrative. While the motives for ethnic cleansing
may be clear to all concerned, people relocated politically or adminis-
tratively often do not understand the reasons for their resettlement.
And in both cases, the victims of resettlement often disagree violently
with both rationale and process.

Ethnic Cleansing

Although the term is of recent coin, the process is as old as civilization.

The essence of ethnic cleansing is the targeting of specific population
groups for elimination or expulsion from a particular site or region
(Bell-Fialkoff 1993). In Rwanda, Burundi, and East Timor in the
1990s, for example, elimination and expulsion went hand in hand. The
ultimate aim is to “purify” space of those regarded as aliens or impure.
In some cases, as in South Africa and Guatemala, those to be eliminat-
ed, expelled, or subdued form the majority of the nation’s population.
Defenceless civilians are prime targets, and atrocities such as massacre
and mass rape are not uncommon. Those left alive are deported, los-
ing their homes, neighbourhoods and homelands. In some cases, the
victims’ dwellings are taken over by the perpetrators; in others, they
are destroyed. Colonial geopiracy could well be regarded as a form of
ethnic cleansing.
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Ethnic cleansing was extremely common in the twentieth century,

especially in the Middle East and Africa. The Armenians of eastern
Turkey were either exterminated or exiled in 1915. Today, the Turks
are extending this policy to the Kurds and Suriani Christians (Dalrym-
ple 1997, 113), while Armenians, now with a country of their own,
practise ethnic cleansing on the Azeris of Nagorno Karabach. In the
early 1920s, Turkey and Greece forcibly exchanged large numbers of
people. Famed Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis has dramatized the
plight of those Greeks forced to leave Turkey and, in doing so, draws
attention to the importance of lost land and ancestors: “Uproot your-
selves! The strong of the earth command. Go! The Greeks to Greece,
the Turks to Turkey. A lament rose throughout the village; the people
ran back and forth in confusion, bidding farewell to the walls, the
looms, the village spring, the wells. They went down to the seashore ...
and chanted dirges. It is difficult ... for the soul to tear itself away from
familiar soil and familiar waters” (Kazantzakis 1974, 12–16). At the
cemetery, the oustees took leave of their graves: “They ... kissed the
earth. They had lived here for thousands of years ... this earth was
made up of their ashes, of their sweat and blood. They kissed the soil,
dug their nails into it, took handfuls and hid it in their clothing”
(Kazantzakis 1974, 16). Here, a landscape is fully equated with com-
munal identity.
The process of ethnic cleansing reached its low point in the 1930s
and 1940s under Nazi Germany. The extermination of six million
European Jews is one of the most devastating attempted genocides in
history but it is often seen as different from other genocides because
the Jews of Europe had no homeland at that time. However, they did
have dwellings and often lived a “happy and secure middle-class exis-
tence [which was] interrupted by a lightning bolt of terror and fol-
lowed by unspeakable agonies” (Deak 1989, 64). Deak also acknowl-
edges that as the survivors become older, they can view their former
“homeland” with some longing, despite the tragedies that occurred
there.
On trying to re-establish their ancient homeland in Palestine, Jews
were placed in the position of themselves perpetrating ethnic cleansing.
The 1948 Israeli–Palestinian war is Israel’s “War of Independence,”
but to the Arabs it is al-Nakba (the Catastrophe). It resulted in the
expulsion of almost 800,000 Palestinians to refugee camps in adjacent
countries (Har-Shefi 1980). Although Israel’s official interpretation is
that the Palestinians fled on Arab orders, both Israeli (Morris 1987)
and Palestinian (Falah 1996) scholars attest to the existence of formal
expulsion plans. Some of these plans – code-named “Broom” and
“Passover Clean-up” – strongly suggest deliberate ethnic cleansing.
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90 domicide

Yigal Allon, commander of the Jewish forces in the Galilee, specifical-

ly spoke of “cleansing” (Dalrymple 1997, 364).
Falah’s (1996) work on Palestinian village annihilation, complete
with six subcategories of destruction from “partial destruction” to
“complete obliteration,” suggests that of 863 Palestinian villages in
what was to become the State of Israel, as many as 418 were totally
depopulated. Of these, one-third suffered “complete destruction,” with
no walls left standing, while a further 19 per cent were utterly
destroyed. In the case of “complete obliteration,” village sites were lev-
elled and physically annihilated by new forms of land use. Thus, Pales-
tinian identity was obliterated from a “Judaicized” landscape cleansed
of Palestinian markers.
Securing a salient from the Mediterranean coast to Jerusalem was a
primary Israeli goal in 1948. This involved the destruction, on the
western fringes of Jerusalem, of a series of Arab villages, the best
known of which is Deir Yassin. Any captured Arab villages in the
Jerusalem corridor were levelled to the ground. As Zablodorsky,
Hagannah commander in Jerusalem, announced to Ben-Gurion: “The
eviction of Arab Romema has eased the traffic situation” (Gilbert
1996, 188).
It was at this time that the Israelis began in earnest one of the cru-
ellest punishments inflicted on a rebellious community: the dynamiting
of family homes. At first, this policy was to encourage the Arabs to
evacuate their villages. On arrival in Jerusalem, the Israelis used bull-
dozers to knock down and clear away Arab houses immediately to the
west of the Wailing Wall. Later, the house-dynamiting policy was
extended as punishment to the homes of “terrorists” or any house in
which a Palestinian “freedom fighter” was thought to have spent even
a single night. Within fifteen months of the beginning of the intifada in
1987, the Israeli army had destroyed or sealed nearly 200 Palestinian
houses (Frankel 1989, 19). Although Yitzhak Rabin announced an end
to this policy in 1992, his statement was immediately followed by the
development of a new method of destroying homes using anti-tank
missiles. In 2001, asking an Israeli soldier why her home was being
destroyed, a Palestinian woman was told “revenge” (MacAskill 2001,
13). Several nations, included the United States, have condemned home
destruction as contrary to international law, but the Israel High Court
of Justice believes it is legal. Such practices only create more resistance.
The army does not remove the rubble, but neither do the Palestinians,
who contend that such sites serve as monuments to their cause.
The long road toward an Arab–Israeli peace settlement has also
caused the evacuation of Israelis, both Jewish and Arab. Kliot (1983,
173–86) has provided a comprehensive analysis of loss of place
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Extreme Domicide 91

associated with the need to resettle Israelis from the Sinai region as part
of the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty in the late 1970s. In this case, the
Israeli settlement had special meaning because it represented ideologi-
cal principles: settlements contributed to security of the boundaries of
Israel; settling the land was a sacred mission; and the challenge to
“make the desert bloom” was a mission of the state. It is therefore not
surprising that the need to uproot these settlements was the cause for
confusion and dismay. Displaced settlers referred to this action as a
“holocaust” and to themselves as “refugees,” “uprooted,” and “evac-
uees.” People immediately reacted with nostalgia, “walking to differ-
ent spots and examining their feeling of attachment to those spots,” or
outrage: “Your shock is caused by the fact that your home is totally
ruined. One moment you are with your roots deeply in the land and in
another you are uprooted” (Kliot 1983, 173–86).
Another group of people was also affected by the displacement of
the Israeli Jews from Sinai. When the Israelis were removed from
Northern Sinai, there was a need to establish new military bases. Land
for one of these bases was expropriated from an area inhabited by
about 8,000 Negev Bedouin. There was no appeal against the Negev
Land Acquisition Bill which became law in July 1980, and no negoti-
ations were held with the Bedouin who had lived in this area for 130
years. According to Maddrell (1990, 11), when “a few [persons with
political influence] saw the law as racist in victimizing a powerless
minority,” some land that was to be taken for the military base was
returned for use by the Bedouin. However, compensation given the dis-
placed Bedouin was only 2 to 15 per cent of that given the Sinai set-
tlers. For many years, there were families who still lingered outside the
air bases and others who would accept no compensation.
According to Israeli anthropologist Clinton Bailey (1994, A15), the
roundup of the Negev Bedouin began as early as 1948 and was mere-
ly accelerated after the Sinai withdrawal. The Israeli government used
the old argument that the resettled Bedouin would now have a better
access to schools and medical care: “Dwelling in tents is uncomfortable
and passé; life under a roof will bring them happiness and ease.” As
Bailey continues: “The cynicism is clear. No one asks whether Hasidic
Jews are ready for the twenty-first century, so why ask it about the
Bedouins? Jewish communities are not told to make way for the army,
so why are the Bedouins? And why must 80,000 Bedouins, used to
wide-open spaces, be limited to seven townships, when the 280,000
Jews in the Negev live in 114 villages and towns?” Many Bedouin
regret their loss of the desert life (Meir 1997), and although they may
have beautiful new houses, they continue to pitch their traditional
black tents alongside them.
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92 domicide

Perhaps the most controversial of all of Israel’s colonizations is the

one of the West Bank, an ancestral Palestinian population zone that
was occupied by Israeli troops in 1967. In defiance of international
law, Israelis have indulged in extensive geopiracy, forcibly taking over
50 per cent of Arab land in the occupied territories of the West Bank
and Gaza (Said 1994, xxvii, 417) and creating therein extensive mili-
tarized zones and many towns and villages filled with hardline settlers.
About 150 exclusively Jewish settlements have been built in occupied
territory, with about 130,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and another
150,000 spread across land in what is one day to become the Pales-
tinian Authority. To take a single example, the Palestinian village of
Biddya, near Ramalah, is now overlooked by the fortified new town
of Ariel, in which houses are available only to Jewish settlers. Begin-
ning with only 8,000 Israelis, Ariel is projected to grow to ten times
that number, which will mean the annexation of most of Biddya’s agri-
cultural land. Speaking of Ariel, a Palestinian remarked: “That was
my grandfather’s land. It has belonged to this village since the time of
the Canaanites. But the Israelis took it in 1977. We’ve never received
any compensation” (Dalrymple 1997, 345). Resistance by the inhabi-
tants of Biddya has led to the destruction of village houses and the cut-
ting down of its olive groves. Since most of the village income came
from olive oil, its economy has been destroyed. In Arab Biddya,
indoor plumbing is a luxury. In sharp contrast, Ariel’s residents, some
of them recent immigrants from Canada and the United States, bask
in a us-style suburban environment with malls and swimming pools.
After five years, such residents feel able to say: “It’s home. It’s impos-
sible to put into words,” while maintaining an armed militia that
harasses Palestinians who have lived in the area for centuries (Fried-
mann 1989). When Dalrymple visited Ariel, a Canadian-Israeli, fear-
ful that an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord could lead to the evacua-
tion of her town, told him with no intended irony: “We’re talking
people’s homes. You know what that means? People’s homes” (Dal-
rymple 1997, 354).
Meanwhile, several million Palestinians languish in refugee camps in
neighbouring countries. Even after fifty years, most have refused to be
“resettled” permanently in Jordan or elsewhere. This refusal is keenly
based on their sense of home, which, for Palestinians means an ances-
tral village in what is now Israel (Parmenter 1994). Several Arabic
words can be translated as “home”: while dar implies a structure, the
commonly used watan refers to a land area or territory and has now
come to mean homeland. It includes village, private crop and grazing
land, common land, religious structures, and both natural and man-
made landmarks. Women’s traditional costumes vary from village to
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village, and Palestinian poetry and song often celebrates personal

attachments to “Mother’s house,” “Father’s orchard,” and “beloved
soil” (Taylor 1987).
If an Israeli – Palestinian Authority peace is ever finally implement-
ed, we may look forward to yet another round of relocations. Bedouins
may elect to reoccupy the desert, and thousands of Israeli Jews may be
forced to leave the dwellings they have built in occupied Arab territo-
ry. Most difficult of all, refugee Palestinian Arabs, clutching copies of
Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains (1992), may try to return to the sites
of their 418 lost villages. “It is a very sensitive issue ... this business of
lost homes” (Grossman 1993, 37).
When Palestinians were relocated to the peripheries of their territo-
ry, in Gaza and the West Bank, they became “the nomad industrial
reserve army in the socio-economic space of modern Israel” (Portugali
1989, 207). A similar situation existed in South Africa until the 1990s,
whereby blacks removed to the peripheries of South Africa were used
as a voteless labour force compelled to bus long distances every day to
their work. Forced removals in South Africa, then, resulted in “forced
busing” (Lelyveld 1985).
Although racial segregation had long existed in the country, the
South African National Party’s goal of social and political separation
between whites and non-whites crystallized in 1948 into the policy
known as “apartheid.” Essentially, this policy involved: black develop-
ment in separate states known as “Bantu homelands”; the establish-
ment of white-owned industries on the edges of these Bantustans; and
the clearance of blacks from “black spots” in designated white areas,
with the relocation of these people to the Bantustans (Desmond 1971,
21). The ultimate result of this policy was to “purify” the South
African state, with 3.5 million whites in control of 86 per cent of the
land surface. Fifteen million blacks – 73 per cent of the country’s pop-
ulation – would have to crowd onto a mere 13 per cent of its land. The
policy was extended to Namibia in 1967. Dugard sees this project as
the attempted implementation of white fantasies: “Pretoria has set in
motion the implementation of its ultimate fantasy – a South Africa in
which there are no black South African nationals or citizens; a South
Africa that cannot be accused of denying civil political rights to its
black nationals for the simple reason that there will be no black South
Africans, only millions of migrant workers (or guest workers, as the
fantasy sees them) linked by nationality to a collection of unrecog-
nized, economically dependent mini-states on the periphery of South
Africa” (in Platsky and Walker 1985, 16).
To deal with racially mixed urban areas, the Group Areas Act
was promulgated in 1950. “An instrument for institutionalizing the
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94 domicide

disadvantage of those not in power” (Western 1981, 234), the act not
only required that millions of blacks be uprooted from the cities and
decanted into dubious homelands, but also provided for the setting up
of separate areas in every city and town for each of the racial groups
identified in the Population Registration Act. Besides the usual cate-
gories of white, black, coloured, and Asian (mostly Indians), an
attempt was also made to concentrate the scattered Chinese as well as
the Cape Malays. The creation of this “tidy racial geography” (Smith
1978, 87) had by 1975 resulted in the resettlement of 305,739
coloureds, 153,756 Asians, and 5,898 whites. The ultimate aim was to
relocate one in six of the coloured population, one in 3.5 of the Indi-
ans, and one in 642 of the whites. By 1984, this ludicrous game of
musical chairs had succeeded in displacing over 83,000 coloured,
40,000 Asian, and as many as 2,428 white families (Rogerson and
Parnell 1989, Christopher 1991).
But the relocation of blacks was on a much larger scale altogether;
over one million had been moved as early as 1975 (Smith 1978, 87).
They proved easier to remove, however, as they had been segregated
since the mid-nineteenth century, were not entitled to own land out-
side proclaimed rural reserves, and were legally regarded only as
“temporary sojourners” in South African towns (Christopher 1991,
241). Further, they had no vote, were not consulted, and most had lit-
tle understanding of what was happening to them other than that
their land was needed by the government (Platzsky and Walker 1985,
46).
Government rhetoric sought to soften the blow. When the word
“apartheid” became unacceptable, it was replaced by the less offensive
“separate development,” and later with “multinational development”
and “plural democracy.” Many hundreds of thousands were moved
into new villages under the rubric of “betterment planning.” In rela-
tion to the cleansing of blacks from towns, J.J.G. Wenzel, deputy min-
ister of Development and Land Affairs, told the Drifontein Communi-
ty Board in 1981: “The removal and relocation of so-called black spots
is carried out in accordance with a policy which has as its goal the
improvement of the standard of life of all people of South Africa. You
will therefore appreciate that it sometimes becomes necessary for peo-
ple to be encouraged to move for their own good” (Platzky and Walk-
er 1985, 171).
Desmond (1971, 3), who saw the population of the “black spots” in
Dundee, South Africa removed to an area called Limehill, described a
pattern that was to become familiar. An official of the Department of
Bantu Administration and Development (with the unfortunate
acronym bad) arrived in 1965 to tell the tenants of the South African
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Extreme Domicide 95

Mission that they were to be moved the following summer. In 1967,

another man came and painted numbers on the doors of the black
homes in the Mission. Later that year, the Bantu commissioner himself
arrived to tell people that they would be moved in May 1968 but that
they would have the opportunity to build new houses and schools and
that other facilities would be ready. Finally, a letter announced that the
Mission was to be cleared on January 20, 1968.
Unsuccessful attempts at resistance were made by nearby white res-
idents, including representatives of many churches, but the black
Africans were given no say in their future. Their reaction was: “We are
suffering. We have been thrown away. We have nothing. But what can
we do?” (Desmond 1971, 7). Apparently with little protest, people
were removed to Limehill where they found nothing but the bare veld
(open country) and a pile of folded tents. When questioned in the
House of Assembly, the minister of bad said that the removals were
voluntary and had been effected humanely.
To forcibly relocate the inhabitants of major cities was a formidable
task. In this connection, the experience of Cape Town has been exten-
sively studied. The least-segregated South African city in 1950, Cape
Town had become by 1985 the most racially divided because of the
severity with which the Group Areas Act was applied. One of the goals
was to preserve the city’s central area as a symbol of white history,
although a small Malay quarter was also preserved. It was particular-
ly important to rid the inner city of mixed-race neighbourhoods. Thus,
the square kilometre of District Six was levelled to the ground and all
the coloured, Malay and Indian residents of the Loader area were
expelled. This expulsion was particularly bitter for the coloured peo-
ple, who may not have taken a special pride in being coloured, but who
certainly took pride in being from Cape Town: “Place of origin – home
– has become an essential element of self-definition for Coloured peo-
ple” (Western 1981, 149).
In a detailed study, Western (1981, 218ff) interviewed many of the
former residents of the district of Mowbray who lost their homes. One
old man, a veteran of two wars, said: “You make a place of your own,
you make it comfortable for your old age, then they come and tell you
you’ve got to go. And you can’t start again, time’s against you – you
remember those people who committed suicide in Tramways Road, Sea
Point? They gave me a month’s grace to build on my son-in-law’s land
... I don’t think they gave us a true value for our house.” And another
commented: “A lot of people died after they left Mowbray. It was
heartbreaking for the old people. My husband was poorly, and he used
to just sit and look out the window. Then before he died, he said, ‘You
must dress me and take me to Mowbray. My mum and dad are
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96 domicide

looking for me, and they can’t find me [except in] Mowbray.’ Yes, a lot
of old people died of broken hearts.”
Squatter settlements were also targeted. In 1983, the building of the
new town of Khayelitsha on the outskirts of Cape Town was
announced. About 100,000 local blacks with rights to live in the west-
ern Cape would be relocated there, while another 100,000 “illegal”
blacks would be “repatriated” to distant homelands. The aim was to
cleanse the Cape peninsula of black squatter settlements, perhaps the
best known of which is Crossroads: “During the period 17 May to 12
June 1986, Cape Town and the international community witnessed
the most brutal destruction and forced removal of squatter communi-
ties in this country’s history. In a period of less than four weeks, an
estimated 70,000 squatters ... became refugees in their own land”
(Cole 1987, 131). One year later, on 25 June 1987, this author (Por-
teous) witnessed a subsequent raid on the remains of the settlement of
KTC, a terrifying affair involving thirty armoured troop carriers full
of soldiers in combat gear, with the operation directed from a heli-
copter clattering overhead.
In 1991, the Land Act, which had reserved 86 per cent of the land
for whites, was repealed. In order to provide an orderly change to a
new system, communal tenure was proposed, but this system ignores
the importance of land to the African people (Mallaby 1992). It also
ignored the massive post-1993 demands for a return to former homes
and lands, legacy of “the massive imbalance of power ... between those
who remove and those who are removed” (Platzsky and Walker 1985,
176). Afrikaaners may now face domicide in their turn. The democra-
tization of the Republic of South Africa in 1993 has inevitably led to
problems as the “homelands” lose their status and people try to return
to their former homes.
Similar returns are being attempted in ethnically cleansed areas of
the 1990s in both the former Yugoslavia and the countries of Rwan-
da and Burundi. “Ethnic cleansing” became a common phrase during
the war between Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Bosnians which killed as
many as 200,000 people between 1991 and 1995 and later when
much of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo was driven out by
Yugoslavia in 1998–9. The atrocities that took place then were, in
fact, merely a revival of activities that took place during the Second
World War, when the pro-Nazi Ustache party stated that of the
600,000 Serbs living in Croatia, a third would have to convert from
Orthodoxy to Catholicism, “a third expatiate themselves, and a third
die” (Hartmann 1992, 18). The ethnic cleansing of the 1990s is said
to be the idea of sixteen members of the Belgrade Academy of Sciences
and Arts who circulated a secret memorandum in 1986 calling for
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proper treatment for the Serb nation and the Serbianization of terri-
tories to which they laid claim. These policies have awakened long-
standing desires for revenge.
Resulting from these hostilities, the destruction of the cities of Sara-
jevo and Mostar caused an outpouring of Bosnian emotion at the
deliberate annihilation of national libraries, museums, cemeteries,
mosques, and archives: “The history of our homeland is gone” (Man-
chester Guardian Weekly 1992, 7). Here the destruction becomes
memoricide and the losses are irreparable: the university’s holdings; the
national archive of newspapers and periodicals; a collection of oriental
manuscripts; the historical archives of Hercegovina before the
Ottoman conquered the region in the fifteenth century; a library of cal-
ligraphic and illuminated manuscripts dating from the twelfth century;
and, ironically, an anthropological collection that included records of
Serbian civilization. The toll on the human population was indeed
heavy. As old people die or are killed, and the physical structures and
records of villages are destroyed, the very remembrance of these vil-
lages and their homes is expunged (Wilkes 1992, 22–25).
But memory persists. White racist mobs burned down the Tulsa,
Oklahoma black neighbourhood of Greenwood in 1921 and com-
pletely destroyed the small black township of Rosewood, Florida, in
1923, forcing residents to relocate. Not until sixty-one years later did
the state of Florida compensate Rosewood’s survivors, while the fight
for compensation in the Oklahoma legislature was still going on in
2000 (Washington Post 1993, Calhoun 1997, Yardley 2000). Domi-
cide is not difficult; memoricide proves a much more arduous task.

Settlement Rationalization

Ethnic cleansing generally involves a contest between groups over

which will occupy a particular place, having “purified” it of the other.
Settlement rationalization is frequently a contest between administra-
tors who wish to abandon certain settlements and regroup their former
inhabitants according to a new master plan and those residents who
would prefer to remain in their time-honoured communities. The
implementation of political theory or the search for administrative con-
venience are motives for settlement rationalization.
Two cases from adjacent countries, Mozambique and Rhodesia/
Zimbabwe, point out the differences in motive but similarities in result,
which characterize ethnic cleansing and settlement rationalization. In
Rhodesia, the 1931 Land Apportionment Act granted twenty million
hectares of land to 50,000 white persons, while one million black
Africans were confined to nine million hectares. This act was also to
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98 domicide

serve as the main vehicle for segregation policies for the next forty-six
years (Meredith 1979, 21). As a result, there was a massive relocation
of black people who had both spiritual and economic ties to their land
(Sylvester 1991, 35). In 1982, faced with the results of a major
drought, resettlement was again instigated as the new country of Zim-
babwe strove to deal with victims of past land appropriation policies
by redistributing land and improving rural conditions. By 1987,
35,000 people were again resettled, perhaps foreshadowing events to
occur later in South Africa.
In contrast, in Mozambique, the new social and economic order
embracing Marxist-Leninist principles brought in by the Frelimo Party
(Frente Libertação de Moçambique – the Mozambique Liberation
Front) in 1977, was based on the creation of communal villages, state
farms, and collectives. A similar system of Ujamaa cooperative villages
had been instituted earlier in Tanzania. Much of Mozambique’s rural
population, estimated at ten million persons, had lived in individual
homesteads or small villages. The communal villages were intended to
provide for a better level of services such as health and education as
well as a nexus for the new social and political order. Much success has
been attributed to the formation of these villages in terms of the pop-
ulation attracted, the new participation by women in the political
processes, and the ending of certain social practices such as initiation
rites, child marriage, polygamy, and marriage payments.
However, Hanlon (1984, 129) provides an example of villagers who,
in 1981, were given just two weeks to move from their homes into the
new village of Garuzo. While the Frelimo Party was said to understand
that people do not easily give up their old homes and that in such cases
they should be allowed to remain, local administrators frequently
forced people to leave their homes. In addition, the process was slow
since little assistance was given to the program. Of more than 1,000
villages built since independence in 1975, only 200 reached a full stage
of development in the first eight years. Most villages were created in
places in which war or natural disasters had destroyed homes or to
which people were otherwise forced to move. As Job Chambal,
National Director of Communal Villages, stated: “When it is said that
we are forcing people into communal villages, it is true. Because if we
don’t, then the enemy will use these people to destroy their own future.
These people are being liberated” (Hanlon 1984, 128). In fact,
Mozambique’s post-independence problems were worse than the chal-
lenge of getting rid of the Portuguese (Harding 1993, 14). The apathy
of the peasant population regarding the Frelimo reforms played into
the hands of the rebel movement, the Renamo, which was initially
formed by Rhodesian officers and also disaffected Mozambican
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guerrillas. Indeed, the villagization plan proved so disastrous that it

had been largely abandoned when this author (Porteous) visited
Mozambique in 1989. It has been described as “une violence
culturelle” (Newitt 1995, 549).
Political theory, of course, has been the background to numerous
population shifts in the socialist world, the most horrendous being the
Khmer Rouge’s evacuation of all Cambodian cities in Year Zero
(1975), their inhabitants then being worked to death in rural killing
fields. A more accessible case studied by Porteous (1972) concerns the
desire of Chilean governments in the early 1970s – both Christian
Democrat under Eduardo Frei and Socialist under Salvador Allende –
to lessen their country’s symbolic dependence on the United States. In
1970, having nationalized the copper industry, then Chile’s greatest
export earner, the next goal became to reintegrate the Chilean popula-
tions of American-built company towns at mine sites into the main-
stream of Chilean life. Although some residents were indeed moved,
the coup by General Pinochet in 1973 put paid to these politically
motivated relocations.
Equally controversial and also ending in a coup were the grandiose
projects of Romania in the 1980s. While Romania’s leader at the time,
Nicolae Ceausescu, may have begun with a desire to improve social
conditions in his country, this desire was supplanted by ideology and
megalomania. A document from the twelfth congress of the Romanian
Communist Party speaks of progress and civilization, and the creation
of “the new man” through “the new humanism.” It declared that eth-
nic differences would be resolved by “liquidating inequalities and dis-
criminations,” called for “increasing homogenization,” and mentioned
that one means of achieving these goals would be a “program of urban
and rural systematization” (Malcolmson 1994, 5).
What systematization meant in practice during the 1980s was the
destruction of forty towns, the historic buildings of which were lev-
elled. Ceausescu’s next plan was to raze one-half of Romania’s villages
by the year 2000 and eliminate smaller communities as rapidly as pos-
sible. The justification for this action was the need to gain more arable
land and make modern facilities such as schools available to rural com-
munities. The Hungarian and German ethnic communities were most
severely affected before Ceausescu’s reign was halted. One example of
this destruction is the following: “Vladiceasca, once a thriving little
rural community of about 80 houses, vanished in the summer of 1987.
It fell victim to Nicolaie Ceausescu’s manic dream of ‘systemization,’
his plan to wipe out thousands of Romanian villages and move the
inhabitants to concrete blocks where they would be more controllable
... Most peasants were already so intimidated by decades of oppression
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100 domicide

that they obliged ... [one of these] Mr. Nastase says, ‘I would have
become 100 years old in my own house.’ He shows a small painting of
it. ‘Now I just want to die’” (Elmendorp 1990). While this resettlement
began with a motive of socio-economic improvement, the real motive
behind the destruction of Vladiceasca is seen to be linked to a totali-
tarian ideology. When Communist Party members sought to restrain
Ceausescu’s megalomania in a letter of March 1989, they stated their
complaint as follows: “Romania is and remains a European country ...
You have begun to change the geography of the rural areas, but you
cannot move Romania into Africa” (Malcolmson 1994, 59). Ceauses-
cu was arrested and then executed on Christmas Day, 1989, but not
before he had created chaos and misery through thousands of forced
removals.
A somewhat more benign ideology of administrative, social, and
political convenience led to a spate of settlement rationalization in sub-
polar regions after the Second World War. This involved the abandon-
ment of small outports and the regrouping of their inhabitants in larg-
er, more accessible towns in Norway, Canada, and Greenland. In the
1940s, one-half of Newfoundland’s rapidly growing population lived
in 1,200 settlements, each of less than 500 people, scattered along a
lengthy coastline. Provincial governments attempted to find solutions
to the social and economic problems of such communities by initiating
a move away from primary industries, such as the declining inshore
fishery, while simultaneously regrouping existing industries. As early as
1954, with the first Centralization Program, 115 communities were
evacuated, totalling over 1,500 families and 7,500 persons. In 1965,
the Canadian federal government began to play a major role, and the
Federal–Provincial Newfoundland Resettlement Program was
launched via the Resettlement Act. Under this act, a further 137 iso-
lated outports scattered along the coast of Newfoundland were aban-
doned by 1972. Like all government programs, this one developed a
language of its own in which people were moved from “designated
outports” to “approved land assembly areas” or “major fishery
growth areas.” Copes (1972, 128) acknowledges that “many resettle-
ment officials, under the influence of their own commitment to, and
enthusiasm for, resettlement, used their powers of persuasion to con-
vince many outporters they ought to move” and then a “moving fever”
took over as those who were reluctant to leave did not want to be left
behind.
For the residents of the outports, the future was uncertain whether
they moved or stayed. Were they to stay, their small communities would
provide but a few months of hard labour at fishing followed by a long
period of unemployment and welfare. Yet, should they move to a more
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centralized community, they would not have the job skills to compete in
the urban environment (Matthews 1976, 2). The National Film Board
of Canada produced a bittersweet memory of outport life in the short
film Children of Fogo Island (1962), which captured forever the activi-
ties of children – a ramshackle shed as a playhouse, stilts, and small
wooden boats – all against a harsh backdrop of sea and rocks. Yet,
somehow it appears an idyllic place for children to call home, and, in
fact, many residents have clung to “the Rock” (Maclean’s 1993, 22).
Gordon Pinsent, the noted actor and writer from Newfoundland,
demonstrated the pain associated with being forced to leave one of
these communities in John and the Missus (1977), a film that he wrote,
directed, and starred in. Clearly depicted were the slick government
agents who encouraged people to leave, buying off some in order that
others would follow, threatening the laggards with being left behind.
To quote the slightly mad postmaster who found acceptance in this
community: “They’re dancin’ with all of us.” The character John,
played by Pinsent, eloquently sums up the plight of the resettled: “Pack
up the town – home – next thing I know they’ll say there was no one
here at all – no names. How do you resettle? It might be all right for
you fellows, but we made up our minds ... we’re all ready settled ... Go
back and say you can’t find us. We were too small to see with the
naked eye. Who am I going to know alongside me when they put me
there? Not a blessed one. You’re telling me we’re going to die.”
General information on the reaction of persons who lost their homes
or communities in Newfoundland is available from a survey conducted
by Matthews (1970, 311). He found that 50 per cent of those he inter-
viewed wanted to move, while another 33 per cent felt they had no
choice. According to Copes (1972, 123), older people found it difficult
to move but had little choice when the whole settlement was leaving.
The new locations were not without problems. There was often signif-
icant unemployment, and a resettlement welfare ghetto emerged in the
new location. The resettled frequently suffered a loss of self-esteem, and
there was considerable deterioration of the social environment.
Matthews also examined the communities of Small Harbour, Moun-
tain Cove, and Grand Terre which the inhabitants refused to leave. In
the case of Small Harbour, the community inadvertently found out that
it was destined for resettlement, which enabled community leaders to
organize against government policy. In the case of Mountain Cove, the
community simply ignored the threat of being moved as they saw no
reason to leave. Grand Terre survived due to the efforts of one woman
who challenged rumours that a mass exodus was expected from the
community. The resistance of its residents is shown in the following
quotations: “The way it is here, they’re now putting concrete pillars
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under their houses. They’re going to stay here until they got no other
remedy,” and “Right now, I’m so far back in age, in education, so I
might as well stay with what I got here ... I’ve got a half decent home”
(Matthews 1976, 43, 102).
There are differing views about the success of these resettlement pro-
grams, and hindsight provides an even crueller judge when seen in the
light of the serious problems of Newfoundland’s fishing industry today.
Copes (1972, 107) suggests that the programs are “too readily seen as
a bribe to induce households to move against their better interests and
instincts” rather than in the context of the massive assistance given to
inshore fisheries, which alone made life supportable in the outports.
He suggests that simply closing off these services would have been
inhumane and impractical and that people would not have been able
to move themselves. Further, he believes that a “welfare mentality”
existed already, and that most fishermen wanted improved schooling
and medical facilities and a better future for their children. He quotes
two surveys in which 62 per cent of those surveyed indicated a will-
ingness to move. In sharp contrast, Goulding (1982) identifies the
Canadian state, acting in the name of corporate capitalism, as respon-
sible for the crisis in Newfoundland. He contends that the state gives
huge grants of money and land to major capitalist investors, creates
laws that prevent others from using this property, and moves people
from fishing communities to supply cheap labour for heavy industry. In
the eyes of the then premier of Newfoundland, Joey Smallwood, this
was progress.
Unfortunately, with the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery in the
early 1990s, many of the remaining Newfoundland villages were again
threatened with extinction. By 1993, there were new calls for resettle-
ment, led by the economist Parzival Copes, who supported the earlier
resettlement program (Bailey 1993). But resettlement remains “a four-
letter word” to many Newfoundlanders, who believe that another top-
down settlement rationalization program is both economically infeasi-
ble and socially undesirable.
Similar beliefs that a better living could be provided elsewhere
caused the uprooting of some native Inuit persons in Northern Cana-
da. In August 1953, the Canadian federal government forced seven
families from Inukjuk, Northern Quebec, and three from Pond Inlet on
the northern tip of Baffin Island (a total of eighty-seven people), to
move to Grise Fiord on the southern tip of Ellesmere Island. This
action, described as an “experiment” in one 1953 memorandum, was
justified by the federal government on the basis of poor hunting in
northern Quebec and the belief that the Inuit should be assisted to
return to their original lifestyles.
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In sharp contrast, the Inuit believed that the federal government was
moving them for political reasons so that their new settlements would
assert Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic Archipelago in the face of
American pressure to have the region declared international waters. As
a result of the move, these people were exposed to horrific conditions
in their first year: “When we finally landed [at Grise Fiord], it was as
if we had landed on the moon, it was so bare and desolate,” says one
now-elderly exile (Ackerly 1993). “There was no food and no shelter”
(Williams 1993, 85). Other survivors speak of relatives who “died of a
broken heart” within a year of arrival.
In their book Tammarniit (Mistakes), Tester and Kulchyski have
provided a fascinating analysis of the Inuit’s relocation in which they
see the state as a totalizing influence and suggest that “much of what
is observed ... closely parallels present day attempts to bring indige-
nous and local cultures around the world into a web of international
capitalist relations” (1994, 5). They point to the fact that the Canadi-
an government was entering a period of welfare state reform in 1953,
and this converged with the state’s concern for territorial integrity dur-
ing the first wave of post-war government expansion in the north. Yet,
the “High Arctic Exiles,” as they are now called, somehow managed to
survive. When pressured in 1989, the government paid for the return
of forty Inuit people to their former homes, causing a breakup of fam-
ilies along generational lines. For the Inuit, the High Arctic settlements
have become “an icon of pain, endurance, and betrayal,” but those
who stay, stay by choice and are “fiercely committed” to their new
home (Williams 1993, 85).
In 1994, a royal commission set up to enquire into the affair,
reported its findings. Throughout the controversy, conflicting evi-
dence was given. While the Inuit continued to claim that they had
been forcibly moved, officials countered that the Inuit moved volun-
tarily (Ackerley 1993). Bent Sivertz, who was in charge of the 1953
relocation, suggested that many witnesses had refashioned their sto-
ries in order to claim compensation, and he believed the relocation to
be “a heart-warming success” (Murphy 1995, A14). Nevertheless,
the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples report recommended
that the Inuit should be compensated for their pain and suffering, and
a $10 million High Arctic Trust was set up to provide economic, cul-
tural, social, and educational benefits to the surviving relocatees and
their descendants.
Like the Canadian Inuit, their counterparts in Greenland across the
Davis Strait were subjected to insensitive relocation organized by
whites from faraway cities. After the Second World War, the Danish
government decided that if its colony was to be economically viable
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and its people to enjoy a full range of modern services, the Inuit would
have to abandon their tiny isolated settlements, and the population had
to be centralized. All the planning was done by “well-meaning but
arrogant” Danes (Hall 1987, 127), and the victims were not consult-
ed. In a massive development program, scattered Inuit hunters were
moved to four towns of between 3,000 and 4,000 people located on
the ice-free southwest coast of Greenland. Fishing was encouraged
here, but in the hinterland, investment was withdrawn from “unprof-
itable” villages and schools and stores were closed.
Planning long-distance from Copenhagen, the Danes completely
changed the character of Nuuk (formerly Godthab), the Greenland
capital, erecting massive six-storey apartment blocks into which the
former nomadic hunters were crowded. This ludicrous plan demon-
strates just how far the governing whites were from understanding the
Inuit and how determined they were to modernize their colony come
what may. As might have been expected, the imprisoned Inuit degen-
erated through psychological problems, despair, broken families, alco-
holism, crime, and suicide.
Nuttal lived with the Greenland Inuit and, as a prelude to his dis-
cussion of kinship and community, explains how, as in Canada, these
people had initially been encouraged to gather into their “unprof-
itable” isolated settlements by missionaries and traders. The subse-
quent move to the towns typically caused “fragmentization of the kin-
based groups that characterized village life. Incomers to the towns
suffered from economic isolation, marginality, and discrimination”
(1992, 19). Ethnic conflict with Danish transient workers became
common.
The coming of Home Rule in 1979 encouraged the creation of a
national character, but even in the 1990s, urban Inuit still identified
themselves with special localities elsewhere, the “last outposts of real
Greenlandic culture” (Nuttal 1992, 21). Unfortunately, further cen-
tralization is planned, ringing the death knell of many of the remain-
ing settlements of the north and east of the island. Further, European
anti-sealing campaigns have destroyed the economic base of many
Aboriginal hunters in polar regions. “The seal hunter is a disappearing
species” (Hall 1987, 137).
This whole sorry episode of domicide and cultural genocide is
summed up by Philip Lauritzen, a Danish spokesman for the Home
Rule government: “I think we could experience a very sad thing here
in twenty years, when European anthropologists come up here to inter-
view hunters in apartment blocks, wanting to know why they left their
settlements. Then, everyone in Europe will ask, ‘who could ever
destroy that kind of culture?’ That, sadly, is actually the situation that
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Extreme Domicide 105

Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund, and many others have cre-
ated” (Hall 1987, 137).

c o nclu si o n

This extremely wide-ranging discussion of extreme domicide via war,

colonization, and resettlement suggests some tentative conclusions,
which will be fleshed out in chapter 6. First, domicide is usually
planned by powerful leaders – whether war chiefs, top-level bureau-
crats, or even intellectuals such as those that generated the idea of
apartheid or the proposal for the ethnic cleansing of greater Serbia.
Only occasionally does the concept become one of mass or sectoral
popularity, as with white settlers during the geopiracy of indigenous
lands in North America. Second, domicidal plans are often enshrined
in, and legitimized by, legalities, manifested in bureaucratic decrees
such as a resettlement act or the Negev Land Acquisition Bill. Third,
those who actually carry out the most violent domicidal plans, having
no good choices, turn to national interest and self-preservation to jus-
tify their actions. Ultimate motives vary from vengeance and profit to
administrative tidymindedness and “efficiency.”
Those responsible for domicide do not communicate effectively with
those who are to be moved. Because the latter are not included in the
decision (hardly possible, of course, in war), they inevitably become
victims whose loss of home, at whatever spatial level, is likely to result
in stress and trauma. As Colson has pointed out, some people may wel-
come change even in extreme circumstances, but most “probably like
variety only so long as it is an embroidery upon the reassuring famil-
iarity of customary routines, well known paths and scenes, and the
ease of accustomed relationships” (1971, 1). As we have shown above,
however, accustomed relationships, even those of the family, readily
break down with the experience of extreme domicide. The relocated
are frequently disempowered and suffer socially and economically.
It remains to be seen whether any of these characteristics of domi-
cide are apparent when we move from war, geopiracy, and major reset-
tlement projects to the everyday loss of home through urban develop-
ment and the building of public infrastructures. Paradoxically, extreme
domicide appears to be both avoidable and reversible, whereas with
everyday domicide, homes may be lost forever under the grinding jug-
gernaut of “progress.”
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CHAP T E R F O UR

Everyday Domicide:
Landscapes of Cruelty

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster ...

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I missed them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art,”
Geography III, 1976

Extreme domicide tends to happen infrequently and usually to people

unlikely to be reading this book. In contrast, everyday domicide occurs
continuously all over the world and can affect everyone except the
wealthy and those who are its perpetrators. Unlike extreme domicide,
the everyday variety comes about because of the normal, mundane
operations of the world’s political economy. It is brought about, first, by
inequalities based on the division of the world into rich and poor, colo-
nizer and colonized, city and countryside – factors recognized alike by
the fourteenth-century Islamic writer Ibn Khaldun, the fifteeenth-centu-
ry Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli, the nineteenth-century’s Karl Marx,
and the early twentieth-century’s Vladimir Ilich Lenin. It was the latter
who so rightly endorsed Hilferding’s assertion that “Finance capital
does not want liberty, it wants domination” (Lenin 1977, 32). Anyone
living in the capitalist world – which is, for all intents and purposes, the
whole world at the turn of the twentieth century – is aware that large
corporations, transnationals, and banks can alter landscapes and lives
almost at will. This is a world of power that brooks little opposition.
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Everyday Domicide 107

Domicide is brought about, secondly, by the willing co-operation of

the majority of the populations of industrialized states and of the
elites in Third World countries. Nations composed less of citizens than
of consumers (the word has an ugly edge to it) rapidly turn luxuries
into necessities and wants into needs. For the consuming desires of the
urban masses, airports and highways must be built, city centres rede-
veloped, and resource extraction extended yet further into remote hin-
terlands. Urban Disneylands are matched by wilderness national
parks.
Encouraged by bureaucratic thinking, dwellings are regarded as
“shelter” or “housing.” Encouraged by capitalist thinking, dwellings
become commodities to be traded. In an increasingly mobile world,
loyalties to neighbourhoods, regions, or even countries are discarded.
In a world in which no one invested love or memories in physical struc-
tures or landscapes, and in which compensation for relocation was
adequate, domicide would no longer occur. Happily, the power eco-
nomics of globalization have not yet reduced all of us to the status of
rootless consumers, eager only for the next technological fix. Loyalty
to place remains strong, and while it persists, forced relocations for
power, profit, and pleasure will continue to involve domicide and, one
hopes, resistance. In a less pitiless world, perhaps, the art of losing
would not need to be mastered.

ur ba n and e c o n o m i c
d evelo p m e n t

Never before have so many people been uprooted. Industrialization ...

requires ... a new kind of violence.
John Berger (1984, 55)

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the late eighteenth cen-

tury and spawned mass urbanism in the following century. From the
late nineteenth century, the wholesale relocation of populations from
countryside to city has proceeded at an unparalleled rate, first in the
industrialized world, and after the Second World War, in the Third
World. Students of urbanism are often able to apply their first-hand
experience or that of their recent forebears to this latest of several fun-
damental changes in the human condition.
Whereas in the early 1970s only one continuously urbanized area
exceeded fifteen million inhabitants (New York / Northeast New Jer-
sey), a number of cities had reached this level by 2000, and cities of
one million are now commonplace. More significantly, the propor-
tion of the world’s population living in urban environments has
increased rapidly, and early in the twenty-first century, urban living
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108 domicide

will be the normal way of life for a majority of the population of the
globe.
The problems of cities are legion and have generated an enormous
literature in the social and planning sciences. From the point of view of
potential domicide, the relentless growth of cities outward across agri-
cultural land and upward in their centres in a frenzy of redevelopment
is cause for concern.

Urban Redevelopment

As one millennium gives way to another, half the world’s population

inhabits urban environments. During the twentieth century, the transi-
tion from rural to urban to suburban life has been rapid. Industrial
countries reached maximum urban populations of 70 to 90 per cent of
the total often before 1940; Third World nations began to follow suit
after 1950. Today, cities are “property machines” (Ambrose and
Colenutt 1975); each is a “Manipulated City” (Gale and Moore 1975)
subject to the operations of powerful economic and political institu-
tions.
It was such a combination that produced the American federal pro-
gram known as “urban renewal,” which began in 1949 and continued
into the late 1960s. This program provided city renewal agencies with
federal funds and the powers of eminent domain “to condemn slum
neighborhoods, tear down the buildings, and resell the cleared land to
private developers at a reduced price. In addition to relocating the slum
dwellers in ‘decent, safe, and sanitary housing,’ the program was
intended to stimulate large-scale private rebuilding, add new tax rev-
enues to the dwindling coffers of the cities, revitalize their downtown
areas, and halt the exodus of middle-class whites to the suburbs”
(Gans 1965, 29). Similar projects, often more honestly called “slum
clearance,” were in operation in Britain and across Europe. Soviet-
influenced nations also pursued this course, with appropriate modifi-
cations. The result was that by the 1970s, it became, at first sight, dif-
ficult to tell the difference between the low-income tower block regions
at the edges of cities in North America, Europe, or the ussr.
It is generally agreed that the results of these programs were equiv-
ocal at best, and that socially, a great deal of individual and communal
misery was caused (Porteous 1977). In the United States, it was found
that many renewal sites were chosen not because they were the slums
most in need of renewal, but because they offered the best sites for lux-
ury housing. Indeed, far from helping the poor to rehouse on-site, pro-
jects typically provided cleared inner-city land for the expansion of
government offices, public institutions and even shopping areas. A
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Everyday Domicide 109

1961 study of renewal projects in forty-one American cities found that

60 per cent of dispossessed tenants were merely relocated to other slum
areas (Gans 1965, 30). Concern for uplifting the conditions of the poor
was merely a smokescreen to produce cheap land for the property
machine; between 1949 and 1964, the proportion of federal urban
renewal expenditures devoted to the relocation of families and indi-
viduals was only 0.5 per cent.
Because the chief effect of urban renewal was to destroy low-rent
housing, and because renewal pulled down more houses than it built,
it was strongly criticized (Jacobs 1961, Wallace 1968, Sayegh 1972,
Porteous 1977). In sum, by attacking the physical expressions of
poverty, notably substandard housing, The Federal Bulldozer (Ander-
son 1964) of urban renewal became a vicious tool dedicated to the per-
petuation of poverty.
Although “urban renewal” and “slum clearance” projects declined
remarkably in the 1970s, large-scale displacements continue in many
cities. Canary Wharf in London is a recent example. Further, the
process of gentrification, whereby the middle classes usurp the inner-
city neighbourhoods of low-income people, leads if not to eviction,
then to “encouraged” resettlement (Smith 1996). Rohe and Mouw
(1991, 57) note that in 1987 alone, 12,000 households were directly
displaced by Housing and Urban Development and Department of
Transport projects in the United States. They suggest that while the
economic impacts of such displacement are now better mitigated, seri-
ous social impacts still continue. It is to these that we now turn.
The development programs of several decades ago are of interest
here because they stimulated the first detailed studies of domicide. By
1960, urban renewal projects in 200 American cities had displaced
about 85,000 families, their relocation having “provided only margin-
ally better housing, in very similar neighbourhoods, at higher rents,”
and having “done as much to worsen as to solve the social problems
of the families displaced” (Marris 1969, 123).
The most thoroughly studied project, from the point of view of
domicide, was Boston’s West End. A thriving multi-ethnic inner-city
neighbourhood – mainly Italian, Jewish, and Polish – the area occupied
forty-eight acres of the seventy-two-acre working-class district of
downtown Boston. Mainly consisting of five-storey walk-up apartment
blocks, the area housed 12,000 residents in 1950 and still had 7,500
(in about 2,800 households) when the city took the land for redevel-
opment via eminent domain in May 1958. With a lively street life, local
traditions, and a high level of both tolerance and informal social con-
trol, the area did not “satisfy the social criteria which would make it a
slum” (Gans 1972, 193).
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110 domicide

We are fortunate that a number of ethnographers, sociologists,

health workers, and persons working in the realm of community stud-
ies chose to perform detailed research on the effects of the forced relo-
cation on the West Enders. Ryan (1969), for example, discovered that
the West End had a distinctive local culture. Whereas occupation is
important in the middle-class configuration of identity, in the West
End, the most salient feature was friendship – and local friendship at
that. Ninety per cent of the residents identified themselves specifically
as West Enders, perceived a sharp boundary between the West End and
the rest of Boston, and formed a distinct socio-cultural system. To
“marry outside” the area, for example, was to risk losing the benefits
of this neighbourhood-level home. A battery of psychological tests
indicated that West Enders differed in several ways from the dominant
contemporary American pattern. In particular, they emphasized “inte-
gration” and “ethnic harmony” as important values, while their
“expressiveness” involved setting a high value on human relationships,
including “helping others.” Personal striving toward social power,
wealth, and high-status occupations was acknowledged, but with the
rider that the achievement of such goals would involve the sacrifice of
personal contentment and social relationships. In other words, the
dominant, striving society destroyed the West End neighbourhood,
which had a different non-striving but vibrant, functional subculture
with a strong geographical base – something we soon came to call an
“urban village” (Gans 1962).
The loss of such close-knit ties upon redevelopment and forced
removal is likely to cause both social disruption and personal trauma.
Residents could not be moved en bloc, nor could their particular urban
environment be reproduced. Moreover, they could not stay in place
because the area – adjacent to downtown, the high-income area of Bea-
con Hill, and the Charles River – was a prime target for replacement
by a high-rent complex of offices, government centres, luxury apart-
ments, and extensions of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Only 15
per cent of the displaced found replacement housing through the aid of
renewal officials. Most had to disperse to other areas of Boston with
the same high density and mixed land use environment as the West End
(Hartman 1966). Such replacements of so-called slum housing have
been condemned as mere slum relocation, or as “land grabs aided by
government subsidies and the powerful privilege of eminent domain”
(Higbee 1960, 86). Among blacks, urban renewal was wryly renamed
“negro removal.”
Above all, forced relocation results in identifiable social and person-
al effects. Several reports on the West End agree that many of its inhab-
itants had strong attachments to the area and did not wish to leave.
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Everyday Domicide 111

Forced relocation from this supportive environment proved disrupting

and disturbing for many. The loss of close spatial links with friends and
relatives and the loss of a feeling of enclosure and safety were very
apparent. Hartman (1966) found that 76 per cent of West Enders had
unreservedly positive feelings about the area and reported potential
relocatees as saying: “I love it. I was born and brought up here. I like
the conveniences, the people, I feel safe ... I’m going to miss it terribly”
and “I loved it very much. It was home to me. I was very happy. Every-
one was very nice. All my relatives lived there.” Gans (1962, 43) also
described the feelings of persons about to be relocated: “It isn’t right to
scatter the community to the four winds. It pulls the heart out of a guy
to lose all his friends” and “I wish the world would end tonight. I’m
going to be lost without the West End. Where the hell can I go?” In
what became a classic study, Marc Fried first indicated that many
sources of satisfaction could be obtained in an “urban slum” (Fried
and Gleicher 1961) and then sought to tap the feelings of people who
had been forced to move. In “Grieving for a Lost Home,” Fried (1966)
asked his respondents questions such as: “How did you feel when you
saw or heard that the building you had lived in was torn down?” as
well as several related questions on relocating and settling into a new
area.
For the majority, it seemed “quite precise to speak of their reactions
as expressions of grief” (Fried 1966, 359). At their most extreme, these
grief reactions were intense, deeply felt, and sometimes overwhelming.
After moving, people reacted with statements such as: “I felt as though
I had lost everything;” “something of me went with the West End;” “I
felt like my heart was taken out of me;” “I had a nervous breakdown;”
and “I felt like taking the gas pipe.” Of those who had previously
reported to have liked living in the West End “very much,” 73 per cent
showed evidence of extreme grief. Even 34 per cent of those who were
ambivalent or negative about the West End grieved severely for their
lost home area. The grief syndrome identified by Fried included vom-
iting, intestinal disorders, crying spells, nausea, and general sadness,
depression. In Fried’s cool words (1966, 359), expressions of grief “are
manifest in the feelings of painful loss, the continued longing, the
general depressive tone, frequent symptoms of psychological or social
or somatic distress, the active work required in adapting to the altered
situation, the sense of helplessness, the occasional expressions of both
direct and displaced anger, and tendencies to idealize the lost place.”
Those symptoms spell bereavement, an issue that will be taken up in
chapter 6.
While some relocatees may have welcomed the move, after two years,
46 per cent of the women interviewed still experienced a grief reaction.
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112 domicide

This was often renewed when people were told that their former home
had finally been demolished. Fried acknowledged the significance of
relocation losses as they affect routines, relationships, and expecta-
tions. He found that grief associated with loss of place was closely
linked to both loss of social network and of the physical structure and
context of the dwelling. This grief proved strongest among those who
had liked living in the West End, who were familiar with the greatest
area within the neighbourhood, and who had lived there longest. In
their grief, some families strengthened kinship ties, but many tried to
remain close to the area they knew even though the personal relation-
ships they had formerly enjoyed no longer existed.
Since the pioneering studies of Boston’s West End, relocation
pathologies have been reported from many countries under many types
of political regimes. A study of four cities in the former Czechoslova-
kia found that 40 to 60 per cent of the residents were quite satisfied
with what planners regarded as blighted housing (Musil 1972). When
told that relocation was inevitable, only 17 per cent wanted their new
dwelling to be located outside the neighbourhood. In Britain, extensive
studies confirmed and extended Fried’s work. In Hackney, for exam-
ple, the community lost its sense of identity during redevelopment
(Young et al. 1981, 61), and after Covent Garden was redesigned, peo-
ple were also reported to have lost their sense of belonging (Anson
1981, 236). A series of studies of those resettled from inner cities to the
sprawling low-income suburbs of Britain’s larger cities confirm that the
much-loved community feeling of the past could not be reconstituted
in the new environment (Porteous 1977).
When residents are powerless, redevelopment projects ignore them
or provide unsuitable mitigation. Clairmont and Magill (1987) show
how the poverty of the Canadian blacks of Africville in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, allowed them to be taken advantage of. Victims of the “liberal-
welfare rhetoric of progress” of the 1960s, Africville’s 400 residents
were relocated between 1964 and 1967. The twenty-five-acre site is
now occupied by Seaview Memorial Park, which overlooks Bedford
Basin in central Halifax.
Africville people used kinship ties, race, community history, and
their church as symbolic boundaries to distinguish their community
from others around them. After being moved, they lost their commu-
nity’s historical ties to place, and were unable to accommodate extend-
ed families in the new residential environment. Feelings of powerless-
ness and apathy, perhaps akin to the fatalistic destino espoused by
some West End residents, prevented effective resistance. In the long
run, the city of Halifax felt that the relocation was not a success. For
the evictees, it was a disaster. As Mrs. Hattie Carvery laments: “They
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Everyday Domicide 113

took our homes ... the city moved us out of Africville in city garbage
trucks ... they put us right down in the slums, a lot of us ... it was our
settlement, our community. It was everything to us ... They offered us
a wee little miserable bit of money for our homes, and then we were
held with the threat over our heads that if we didn’t oblige the city, they
were going to bulldoze over us anyway.” More profoundly: “The white
people shamed Africville so much that ... a good many of the young
people ... don’t want to own their own heritage ... They made them
ashamed. We weren’t ashamed. We were proud” (Hartnett 1970).
The process continues. The rise of the “entrepreneurial city” (Har-
vey 1989) and the operation of the city as a “growth machine”
demand constant redevelopment on an ever-larger scale. In societies
without well-developed protection for citizens, urban redevelopment
frequently involves violence, such as the mysterious fires that coinci-
dentally burned down those sections of Singapore that the country’s
authoritarian government wished to redevelop for industry. In the
1990s, Singapore continued to dispossess its population from their
homes (this time for hotels), leading, at last, to courageous protest
movements. In Romania, Ceausescu’s rural domicide policies, out-
lined in chapter 3, were matched by the wholesale demolition in the
country’s capital. Central Bucharest was virtually destroyed to create
the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism, leading to a People’s Palace
worthy of the Pharaohs. Even after the dictator’s death in 1989,
Bucharest’s chief architect stated that he would complete the plans in
an effort “to improve our image, and break with the mirage of the
past” (Malcolmson 1994, 4). The psychiatrist Anthony Daniels asked
Romanians about “the nature of an authority that could direct the
efforts of an entire nation not only to the construction of something
entirely without merit, but to the destruction of everything worth-
while from the past,” and he answered his own question by divining
that the demolition and rebuilding of central Bucharest was “intend-
ed as an advertisement, not of a product, but of men’s individual
insignificance in comparison with the power of the state” (Daniels
1991, 84–5). Similarly, the newly independent country (1991) of
Turkmenistan has stripped the whole centre of the capital city Ashga-
bat of its housing, leaving only ministries, palaces, hotels, and build-
ing sites (Shihab 1997). And from totalitarian China, there were news
reports in 1994 that told of boatloads of Chinese landing in Australia
because urban redevelopment had destroyed their homes, only to be
repatriated because “urban renewal and destruction of home is not a
legitimate reason for getting refugee status” (Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation 1994). It goes without saying, then, that urban squatters
are given very little consideration when government and business
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114 domicide

decide to develop the land they are occupying (Hollsteiner 1977, Perl-
man 1982). In his novel The Dreams of General Jerusalem, Peter Mar-
ris (1989) dramatizes his experiences as a planner in an African city.
Many of the significant characteristics of domicide are evident in this
story of idealism thwarted by greed and ambition. As Marris notes
elsewhere, slum clearance appears to be a form of social engineering,
“not the replacement of dilapidated, insanitary, overcrowded houses,
but the reformation of a way of life” deemed unsuitable by the elites
(Marris 1974, 53).
Even in well-mannered Sweden, renewal projects are seen as a
threat to a calm and safe life, and residents expected to move perma-
nently experience a great sense of loss (Wikström 1994, 316–7). This
being the case, it comes as no surprise that considerable resistance to
urban redevelopment occurs across the globe, that opponents of “the
politics of exclusion” refuse to consider housing as merely a com-
modity (Ransom 1996), and that the United Nations Habitat ii con-
ference, held in Istanbul in 1996, included a major debate between
nations that see adequate housing as a laudable goal (India, the Unit-
ed States) and those that regard it as a human right (Japan, South
Korea, and others).
Finally, it is no surprise either that urban redevelopment has been the
subject of a considerable imaginative literature. The above-mentioned
novel by Peter Marris (1989) shows how in Third World situations,
planners, politicians, and aid agencies co-operate to violently oust poor
squatters from their homes. André Brink fictionalized the evictions of
District Six in Cape Town: “Dey turning Distric’ Six into a smart place
now, fo’ de Gov’ment’s White boys. We Coloureds getta kick inne arse
en’ it’s out we go” (1974, 197). The story of Penelope Lively’s City of
the Mind is set against a background of London relocations “assisted”
by extreme harassment of tenants by property owners who appear to
lack certain emotions, “fiddly stuff like compunction, and vicarious
distress, and compassion, and moral outrage” (1991, 64). The Hun-
garian novelist George Konrad “zeroes in on one of the uglier aspects
of modern warfare, the undeclared war of city planners against city
dwellers: the war of the manipulators of life against the livers of life”
(Fuentes 1987). And when Samuel Becket was looking for strong
expletives for Waiting for Godot, he resurrected, but finally rejected,
the nineteenth-century Brussels curse: “architecte” (Bair 1978, 426).

Economic Development and Restructuring

Commercial and industrial changes, especially on city fringes or in

non-urban areas, can result in significant loss of home. Again, land use
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Everyday Domicide 115

changes brook least opposition in authoritarian countries such as

China (Woon 1994), Turkey (Brazier 1996), and India. The displace-
ment of people in India’s Orissa state by coal mining, irrigation pro-
jects, and industrial expansion has been exposed in the tellingly titled
Depriving the Underprivileged for Development (Pandey 1998).
Such economic change can bring domicide to whole regions. In
Britain, many villages disappeared in the Tudor period as landlords
converted tilled land to sheep pasture and extended their grand estates
(Beresford 1955, Allison 1970). Four thousand enclosure acts reorga-
nized six million rural acres between 1750 and 1880, increasing rents
and forcing thousands of rural people into industrial cities (Chambers
and Mingay 1966). The effects of such enclosures on the English poet
John Clare is well known, for these drastic changes in his home land-
scape caused him mental agony and eventual insanity. Later still, the
industrialization of family farmland made the Brangwens in D.H.
Lawrence’s The Rainbow feel like “strangers in their own place”
(Pocock 1980, 345).
In Scotland, the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries saw Scots chiefs also convert their land from arable
cropland to sheep pasture, with little thought for the families made
homeless. Indeed, the Clearances were in some cases particularly bru-
tal, justified by the perpetrators on the grounds that they were, “upon
the whole, advantageous to the nation at large” (Prebble 1969, 106).
Whole islands in the Hebrides were cleared of people, the houses
burned, and the former inhabitants clubbed, fettered, and thrust onto
emigrant ships. Similar regional depopulation took place in Ireland
(Orme 1970), where the English engaged in large-scale geopiracy.
Deportees were said to live “more pleasantly abroad than at home”
(Strauss 1954, 149), the usual justification for slum clearances and
evictions. Irish evictions figure prominently in novels (Uris 1976). In
remote areas of the Celtic Fringe, landlord power remains strong. In
the early 1990s, a Swiss creditor bank foreclosed on the absentee
owner of the Scottish island of Gigha, but prospective buyers were not
informed of the 140 people for whom they would have semi-feudal
responsibility (Hancox 1992, 23).
Similar “clearances” are going on today as economic demands lure
corporate timber, oil, uranium, gold, and other interests into the
world’s once-remote deserts, tundras, and forests. Such developments
are especially detrimental to indigenous groups, which are strongly
attached not to a type of terrain, but to a particular place or set of
places. Trimble (1978) has studied a number of such cases, particular-
ly in Latin America, and concludes that relocation is invariably initiat-
ed by an agent, industrial and/or governmental, which is external to
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116 domicide

the group, and it is implemented for economic, political, and other rea-
sons. The programs are conducted in such a way as to give the appear-
ance that the external agent holds the cultural preservation of the relo-
cated group as a primary objective. However, the motive for the move
is actually the exploitation of the lands that the relocatees are forced to
leave, and little or no effort is exerted by the external agents to prevent
the deleterious psychophysiological and psychosocial effects generated
by the move. In a later study of four cases, Trimble (1980) adds that
they were all native, indigenous groups with cultural orientations and
lifeways quite different from those who forced them to resettle. They
were relocated so that their lands could be exploited for the common
good, to benefit a much larger population. None of the four groups
volunteered to resettle, and after the resettlement, none of the groups
benefited directly or indirectly from the development of their ancestral
lands. Each of the groups experienced hardship as a result of domicide
and resettlement.
Such conclusions are an overwhelming indictment of the way in
which metropolitan populations exploit and devastate indigenous peo-
ples. For, in some cases, as with the Kreen-Akrore of Brazil, domicide
means ethnocide, the death of a people and its unique culture. As Barn-
abas and Bartolomé (1973, 7) note of the resettled Mazatecs and Chi-
nantecs of southern Mexico, their culture vanished after removal. “For
others, the transfer meant death. At least 200 simply died of depression
(tristeza); the removal was especially hard on the aged, who grieved
upon leaving lands where ancestors were buried and their sacred
objects secure.”
Less traumatic, but still a potent source of domicide, is the creation
and closure of mining towns. Abdelrahman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt
(1987, 106) speaks of the changes wrought in Saudi Arabia by twenti-
eth-century oil exploitation. One character recalls “The long-ago days,
when a place called Wadi al-Uyoun used to exist ... and a brook, and
trees, and a community of people.” The former inhabitants felt that
their village was now “a cruel, wicked sight that resembled death.”
They were relocated, only to ask: “Can a man adapt to new things and
new places without losing a part of himself?” (Munif 1987, 134). The
experience of northeast England, where numerous coal-mining towns
lost their raison d’être because of changes in government policy after
the advent of Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates how rapidly whole
regions can be wrecked (Hudson 1989).
Most vulnerable of all are mining communities established in remote
locations in the hot and cold deserts of resource frontiers such as
northern Canada, Chile, and Australia. These “single-industry” or
“company towns” are indeed “communities on the edge” (Randall and
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Everyday Domicide 117

Ironside 1996), both geographically and economically, for once their

resource is no longer viable to mine, the raison d’être of the town dis-
appears, and closure must be considered. As there are approximately
700 resource-dependent towns in Canada, the problem has been
addressed most frequently in that country (Bowles 1981, 1982; Brook-
shire and D’Arge 1980).
Bradbury and St. Martin (1983) investigated the “winding down”
process in the town of Schefferville, Quebec, in which the iron mine
was closed down in 1982. Their analysis points to the parallel process-
es of decreasing corporate involvement (withdrawal from public ser-
vice provision and municipal affairs, and disinvestment) and commu-
nity winding down (emigration, instability, rumours, social
dislocation). The authors agree with Bluestone and Harrison (1980)
that large modern corporations, and especially conglomerates, feel no
compunction in closing down even profitable operations for a variety
of reasons relating to centralized management and control. They found
the prevailing atmosphere among the inhabitants of declining or dying
one-industry communities to be one of rumour, uncertainty, and anxi-
ety. This is often due to failure to communicate on the part of the com-
pany, an insensitivity toward labour which merely exacerbates “resi-
dents’ feelings of neglect, as well as their feelings of impotence in the
face of changing circumstances resulting from changes in the compa-
ny’s structure [and] the absence of local participation in decision-mak-
ing” (Bradbury and Sandbuehler 1988, Bray and Thompson 1992). In
Coping with Closure (Neil et al., 1992), comparisons are made
between Canada, Scandinavia, and Australia. Given that the life of an
ore body can be predicted, there is no reason that the complex process
of town closure cannot also be anticipated, with advance notice given,
relocation benefits anticipated, and counselling services provided. In
some cases, mine-site towns need not be built at all, for local indige-
nous labour could be employed, or fly in – fly out labour-commuting
programs established. Alternatively, state policies could work toward
retaining redundant towns via the long-term establishment of alterna-
tive sources of employment. With effective long-range planning, there
is no reason for the tragedy and trauma that so often accompanies the
closure of isolated company towns.
Remote Pacific islands have suffered much more tragically than min-
ing towns in industrialized countries. The cases of Nauru, Banaba, and
Bougainville, destroyed by economic exploitation, may well be com-
pared with the military annihilation of other Pacific islands recounted
in chapter 3.
The Republic of Nauru in Micronesia, is one the smallest nations in
the world with about 10,000 people living on a single island with an
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118 domicide

area of only 21 square km. In 1899, it was found to contain huge

deposits of guano phosphate, which were mined by a British, Aus-
tralian, and New Zealand consortium until the near-exhaustion of the
resource in the 1990s. The interior of the island became a scarred
landscape devoid of soil, a wasteland of steep coral pinnacles. Add to
that an almost exhausted phosphate resource, an ugly landscape
unlikely to attract tourists, the possibility of a barely profitable
coconut products industry, and the need to import most food and all
fuel, machinery and manufactured goods, and you have a rather
depressing scenario.
Yet, Nauruans rejected resettlement elsewhere. They were con-
cerned that relocating to Australia would cost them both their identi-
ty and their sovereignty over their abandoned island. Moreover, they
did not wish to relocate to the already-inhabited island they had been
offered, fearing resistance and possible racial disharmony. Finally,
they were well aware of the resettlement problems of the Banaban
people in Fiji (which we discuss further below). By the 1990s:
“Thanks to human avarice, greed, and shortsightedness, our island is
mostly a wasteland. Phosphate mining ... has reduced the island,
except for a coastal strip, to a desert of jagged coral pinnacles, unin-
habitable, unusable ... Our land was literally exported ... to fertilize
the fields of the industrialized world” (Clodumar 1994, 3). Despite
this unenviable situation, resettlement was rejected, leaving only the
option of landscape rehabilitation.
In 1993, Nauru successfully claimed compensation from the former
exploiting countries for the indiscriminate destruction of their island’s
land surface over a period of sixty years. Using royalties and the com-
pensation package, Nauru is proceeding with a twenty- to forty-year
rehabilitation of the island in three overlapping and interlocking steps:
physical, biological, and cultural. Asked if such a tremendous opera-
tion was worthwhile, a government spokesman said: “Islanders know,
better than anyone, land is both the basis of human life and also limit-
ed. Nauru is our home, our only home ... Nauruans do not emigrate.
Our people are devoted to the land even in its present sorry state” (Clo-
dumar 1994, 5).
Although their whole land base is ruined, Nauruans cling to their
island home. Nearby Banaba, also known as Ocean Island, suffered a
much worse fate. Against the Banabans’ wishes, the British Phosphate
Commission mined the island’s guano rock from 1902 to 1979 in “per-
haps the best example of a corporate/colonial rip-off in the history of
the Pacific Islands” (Stanley 1993, 25). In 1916, the island’s status was
changed from a protectorate to a British colony, so that islanders could
not withhold their land from mining. In 1928, Sir Arthur Grimble,
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Everyday Domicide 119

famous for his sentimental South Sea yarns, expropriated the whole
land surface. In 1942, the Phosphate Commission purchased the island
of Rabi in Fiji, 2,600 km away, planning to resettle all 2,000 Banabans
there. They were relocated to Fiji after 1945, and today, they have lost
most of their Micronesian culture. Only after twenty bitter years of
court battles were the Banabans able to obtain compensation from the
reluctant British government; some returned to their island, but their
claim to Banaba remains uncertain because the island is now part of
the Republic of Kiribati. With the usual disregard of industrial nations
for small islands, an Australian project in 1991 proposed to use the
mined-out island as a dump for liquid chemical wastes.
In the case of Bougainville Island, off the east coast of Papua New
Guinea (PNG), a major copper mine was opened in the early 1970s. To
accommodate the operation, several new towns were built and “old
villages” were relocated (Cummings 1972, 55). The mining company
was yet another subsidiary of the giant Rio Tinto Zinc conglomerate.
It provided 3,000 jobs, created an open pit six miles wide, and flushed
its tailings down the Jaba river to the sea. Royalties appear to have
benefited the PNG mainland more than Bougainville itself. By 1988,
active resistance to the mine and the PNG government had emerged,
fuelled by separatism, environmentalism, and liberation theology. In
1989, the Bougainville Revolutionary Army took over the island,
expelled the company, closed the mine, and attempted to destroy all
foreign physical structures, including schools, factories, power sta-
tions, houses, and plantations. Unlike Cambodia’s Year Zero, this
return to a past way of life was probably feasible, for the traditional
subsistence cultures had been disturbed for only two decades. PNG
government troops at once blockaded and then invaded the island
causing considerable loss of life. In 1997, the “security situation” was
still deemed “inappropriate” for extensive rehabilitation of the island
(Australian Agency for International Development 1997, 25), but some
rehabilitation had begun (Francis 1998).
The Melanesians of Indonesian Papua New Guinea (Irian Jaya) have
been equally badly treated by central governments and mining compa-
nies. In 1967, the Indonesian government authorised the New Orleans-
based Freeport Company to open a copper and gold mine at Ertsberg.
Local highland people were not consulted, but their huts were razed
and a village built for them on the hot malaria-infested coast. Keen to
assimilate Papua into the Indonesian economy, the Indonesian govern-
ment also obtained World Bank support for their Transmigration Pro-
gram, whereby people from densely-populated central Indonesia were
transferred to the “vacant lands” of Papua. Between 1984 and 1989,
about three million hectares of forest were opened up to Javanese
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120 domicide

settlers, forcing traditional Papuans from their homelands and thus

creating a pool of cheap, landless labour.
Papuan resistance began in the 1970s with the guerrilla operations
of the Oposisi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Movement). Such was the
Papuan opposition that when the Ok Tedi mine was begun in 1982, the
company was compelled to recognize indigenous land rights and the
Indonesian government forced to renegotiate local royalties from 5 to
20 per cent. The severe land degradation caused by Ok Tedi, however,
led Papuans to launch a lawsuit against Broken Hill Proprietary Ltd. in
its home town of Melbourne, Australia. Similarly, a suit against
Freeport was brought in New Orleans in 1996, alleging environmental
and cultural destruction, while the Bougainville islanders filed a claim
against Rio Tinto in California in 2000 (Pallister 2000). Thus, the
transnational reach of mining companies is now being matched not
only by environmental organizations, but also by villagers themselves.
In Papua, landowners have come to wield increasing power, extracting
compensation from both governments and companies, bringing some
operations to a standstill, and preventing others from beginning. Nev-
ertheless, even successful resistance radically changes traditional ways
of life.
While some Melanesians are clearly willing to take up arms to pre-
vent domicide, this response is less appropriate in the Western world.
Nevertheless, in industrialized countries, there are many cases in which
peoples’ homes are destroyed for industrial and commercial redevelop-
ment, and working-class people may be treated almost as badly as the
Micronesians of Nauru and Banaba.
In the book Planned to Death (1989) I (Porteous) describe the slow
murder of Howdendyke, East Yorkshire, the village in which I grew up.
Its demise was begun by Thatcherite restructuring, the creation of
unnecessary port installations to “discipline” the unionized port of
Goole nearby. Since 1969, port development has grown in several
phases, each one of them taking more land once occupied by houses.
Abandoned by planners and politicians as a “dying village,” How-
dendyke is not dying, but rather being slowly killed off by piecemeal
development. In 2001, after about thirty years of slow replacement, the
village is only one-third its original size, has lost much public access to
the river, is heavily polluted, and has seen the demolition of its pub,
shop, and village hall.
All this came about without consultation with, or opportunity to
comment by, the inhabitants. Business corporations, district politicians,
planners, and other officials co-operated in condemning village houses,
demolishing them, and removing their residents to a nearby town. Five
conditions operated to produce this stealthy death of a thousand cuts.
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Everyday Domicide 121

Land, housing, and employment were controlled by distant corpora-

tions with no interest in the village other than as an industrial site. Pre-
viously lulled into complacency by a paternalist regime, most of the vil-
lagers were tenants dependant on the companies for both housing and
employment. Furthermore, they were predominantly working class,
with no knowledge of planning and no experience of effective resis-
tance. Thus, it was not difficult for the district planning department to
ignore county planning guidelines and public participation require-
ments. Finally, district politicians opted to sacrifice Howdendyke in
favour of “wider interests,” such as increased regional employment.
Collective action came too late to save the village; by 1998, the river-
front was “swept clean” of houses, ready for future port development.
The range of emotions found by Fried (1966, 1982) in Boston was
much in evidence, however, both among those who were relocated and
those who remained in the village. Anger, resentment, sadness, grief,
and a sense of loss were widely felt. Blame was also assigned, albeit in
oblique ways (Porteous 1989, 188): “It seems that certain people in
high places are doing their utmost to drive us out;” “The village was
here before the factories. We wish to stay here, not to be hounded out
by the industries around us;” and “We feel we are being squashed out
of existence from the place we have lived in all our lives.” To which the
companies replied that “It is in the nature of businesses to grow,” while
both politicians and planners reminded villagers that the destruction of
their homes had been perfectly legal.
In such a sad scenario, one may be heartened by individual examples
of resistance. Living alone in one of only two occupied houses in a
partly derelict row of nine, widowed Mrs. Vera Arnold resisted all sug-
gestions that she move to a nice, clean, modern flat in a nearby town.
“This is my home,” she said. “We were happy here. All my memories
are here. I’d never want to move.” And, “ You see these houses flat-
tened and then for years brick rubble and the land left desolate and
nothing done. It’s a wicked shame, especially when people want to
stay.” Resisting to the last, Vera remained in her home until her death,
aged seventy-eight, in March 1998.

majo r pub li c fac i l i t i e s

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1941, 251)

There is a considerable literature in geography, planning, and engi-

neering on the location of public facilities and infrastructure. A good
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122 domicide

deal of this is summarized in Massam’s The Right Place (1993), which

seeks to integrate two rather distinct approaches: highly theoretical
location theory involving location-allocation modelling, and the rather
more humane preference-based decision analysis. The aim of the latter
is to invoke “shared responsibility” as an ideal in the creation of
“socially acceptable collective choice planning procedures, which
could be used to tackle controversial and complex public facility loca-
tion problems” (Massam 1993, xv). Ultimately, however, the final
choices are likely to be made by experts informed by highly complex
computer-assisted decision-making models and approved by politicians
seeking their own ends. Unfortunately, input into the decision models,
however technically perfect, is seriously compromised by the underly-
ing differences in values that separate conflicting interest groups (Ober-
meyer and Pinto 1994, Malczewski 1995).
Attempts to deal with this problem have included a Competing Val-
ues framework, which looks at critical perspectives as being consensu-
al (decisions must flow from full participation by all parties), rational
(solutions must be efficient), empirical (decisions are based on data and
thus accountable), and political (decisions must be legitimate). Not sur-
prisingly, the weight attached to such values varies greatly according to
the cultural context (Vari et al. 1994). In France, for example, public
participation is weak compared with its vigorous counterpart in Cana-
da (Massam 1995).
Our aim here is not to engage in a theoretical debate on public facil-
ity siting, but to muddy the waters still further by emphasizing the
claims to be heard of those who are so often disregarded – the people
whose homes and lands are taken from them in the public interest.
Even the most sophisticated technical and judicial inquiry systems may
falter before the homely voices of ordinary individuals who “chose our
home for a lifetime” or “laid every brick ourselves.”
Domicide in public facility location is discussed in terms of roads,
airports, national parks, and, most important of all, dams and
reservoirs.

Roads

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the richer countries of the industrial-
ized world carried out an enormous program of road building. It
was a boom period for land developers, oil companies, vehicle man-
ufacturers, concrete and asphalt makers, and their political friends.
It was the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, rather than common sense, that
finally slowed down the submergence of non-urban land beneath the
concrete glacier.
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Everyday Domicide 123

Transportation planners of the 1950s generated their plans almost

wholly in terms of material costs, engineering feasibility, and political
desirability. Unfortunately, at that time, the political process in plan-
ning allowed next to no involvement on the part of citizens, who some-
times would wake up one morning to find their homes expropriated
for a new inner-city expressway. Too often, new city highways were
planned to cut great swathes through working-class and ethnic dis-
tricts, though their benefits went mainly to outer suburban commuters.
In the 1960s, planners, politicians, and the public had to learn the hard
way the unwelcome truth that: “the planning and construction of
transportation facilities are far more than an engineer’s technical prob-
lems. [They present] important political decisions that affect, directly
and indirectly, the lives of millions of people, both users and persons
impacted upon by the construction” (Lupo et al. 1971, 171). In other
words, new highways generate not only new traffic that fills them
beyond capacity, but also domicide.
One of the problems for residents “in the way” of major highway
projects is the inordinate time it takes to move from approval of the
project, through compulsory purchase, to the demolition of dwellings,
to the actual construction of the new road. A report by the British
National Audit Office (Comptroller and Auditor General, U.K. 1994)
revealed that 60 per cent of dwellings purchased by the Department of
Transport for road schemes outside London were not needed, and that
one-quarter of all the houses bought up are left empty for years, thus
causing planning blight in the neighbourhood. The report had little to
say about the feelings of those whose homes were expropriated.
The renewed expansion of British road building in the 1980s, in
part to accommodate enormous European trucks, led to mass protests
on the part of those affected. The nimby (not in my backyard) syn-
drome makes good sense at the level of the individual homeowner or
small village: in 1983, the M42 plowed east-west across the “back-
yard” of the village of Curdworth, Warwickshire; ten years later, a
planned “relief road,” running north-south through the village’s
“front garden” was announced. Even elderly conservative ladies felt
the need to lie down in front of the bulldozers. Said one of them:
“We’ll be in the jaws of a nutcracker. We’re not going to let this hap-
pen again” (Brooker 1993, 11).
Those wishing to save their homes have formed alliances with envi-
ronmentalist groups with slogans not nimby but banana (build
absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone). Other groups, such as the
Council for the Protection of Rural England, ask how we may weigh
the convenience of the automobile against the destruction of irre-
placeable historic landscapes that are part and parcel of the national
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124 domicide

identity. Still others campaign against the destruction of habitat – the

homes – of rare birds and mammals. Throughout the 1990s, stop-the-
road battlegrounds erupted across Britain (Road Alert! 1998), but as
early as 1975 a popular comic novel based on a motorway construc-
tion scheme had appeared – Blott on the Landscape. Others might
well agree with one of its character’s assessments: “... when you have
been in the public service as long as I have, you will know that
Inquiries, Royal Commissions, and Boards of Arbitration are only set
up to make recommendations that concur with decisions already
taken by the experts” (Sharpe 1975, 226). The image of Arthur Dent
protecting his home by lying in front of a bulldozer at the beginning
of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams 1979) has become a
public icon.
Loss of home to highway construction is therefore a common experi-
ence. In New York, Berman, victim of an expressway, eloquently
mourns the loss of his home in the Bronx and seeks “to generate a dia-
logue with my own past, my own lost home, my own ghosts” (1982,
342). Such experience in the United States in the 1970s led to a consid-
erable understanding of the effect of relocation caused by highway con-
struction. Finsterbusch summarizes this and concludes that although
most people will adjust well, there are always some who suffer psycho-
logical stress in attempting to come to terms with all the “severely trau-
matic” changes, and some who will die (1980, pp. 112 ff.).
The examples outlined here confirm Finsterbusch’s findings since
they demonstrate that some people may adjust well and achieve a bet-
ter solution (higher cash settlement, stopping the project or creating a
better home for themselves) through effective protest, but for others,
the effect of domicide on their lives and their families will be signifi-
cant. Recently I (Smith) met Alice Hambleton, a musician. When I told
her of my work, she wrote me the following letter that illustrates the
means, motives, and effect of domicide from the perspective of some-
one who lost her home not to a highway, but to a parking lot at a ferry
terminal at the end of the longest highway in the world, the Trans-
Canada Highway (Hambleton 1994). As will be discussed in later
chapters, the expropriation process and achieving a fair price for prop-
erty rights has not always been supported by adequate legislation, pol-
icy, or process, and the system certainly left much to be desired in
Hambleton’s case. While there is no doubt that compensation value
was a serious matter for Hambleton’s parents, of greater importance
here is simply to listen to Hambleton speaking about the impact on her
family, and how they perceived the common good rationale that justi-
fied the construction of the parking lot, the lack of consultation, and
the behaviour of government agents.
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Everyday Domicide 125

In 1963, I was five years old. My family was living on Marine Drive, just above
Horseshoe Bay, in West Vancouver. My parents had a mortgage on a large,
three-storey duplex (which my dad had built), right down in Horseshoe Bay.
My parents had both sides of the duplex rented out to tenants.
Horseshoe Bay was a small picturesque village. The Bay was a fun place to
live in those days.
One evening, one of the renters from the duplex came to see my parents on
Marine Drive. He was angry because a government agent had knocked on his
door and told him that he would have to move soon. The agent said that the
government would be buying the duplex for the road. My parents were sur-
prised. This was the first they’d heard about it.
About two weeks later, the government agent came to my parents’ house on
Marine Drive and offered them a price for the purchase of their duplex. My
parents refused the offer. They didn’t want to sell the duplex. And so the gov-
ernment agent stormed out. My parents were left in a quandary. The tenants
moved out of the duplex and the duplex sat there empty with the next mort-
gage payment due. So, my parents decided to move us all into the duplex and
sold the house on Marine Drive.
So, for the next four-and-a-half years, my family lived in the duplex in
Horseshoe Bay. Meanwhile, all the houses around the duplex were sold and
destroyed. We were now the last house on the longest highway in the world.
And for four-and-a-half years, our house was the only thing that was in the
way of W.A.C. Bennett’s big Expanded Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal
dream.
The government agent never came back. But the government hired two
watchmen with guard dogs to patrol the properties that they’d bought around
us. They also did their best to intimidate and torment my family, to try to make
us move. Predictably, the watchman would only torment us kids and my mom.
He was too “chicken” to do something like that when my dad was around. So
this is what the government did to those citizens who wouldn’t cave in to its
unreasonable demands.
The government watchman constantly patrolled around our house with his
dog. He’d stand in our driveway for long periods of time and just watch us,
menacingly. At night, he’d park across the street in his car and watch us
through our windows. This went on for more than four years, until my dad
finally called the police and said that he was going to shoot the watchman if
he didn’t stop bothering our family.
A short time later ... about two weeks before Christmas 1967, my parents
received their eviction notice. We had to be out by the end of December, just a
few weeks away.
My parents went to a lawyer. He said that they couldn’t fight the govern-
ment. As a result, our family was expropriated, in the middle of winter, at
Christmas time. My parents only got 2,000 dollars more for their property
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126 domicide

than they had originally been offered. The government was supposed to only
evict property owners for a road, but our house and yard became the Horse-
shoe Bay pay parking lot, instead. My parents are still upset about this ... twen-
ty-five years later.
My mom thinks that if the government is going to expropriate property for
a road, they should at least offer fair compensation. They should settle it
through arbitration, until both parties are satisfied. Also, they should give
proper notice and should complete the process within a reasonable time peri-
od. The government has no right to torment or financially handicap families
who don’t want to sell their property. And something like this should never
drag on for five years. After all, when the government finally needed the prop-
erty, they just took it.
The expropriation of our house resulted in almost five years of tension
between my parents and the government. The tension affected our lives, and it
affected us kids. We all grew up mistrusting the government and feeling a gen-
eral contempt for “the system” and for “authority.” We all became “rebels.”
When I go to Horseshoe Bay now, I feel nostalgia for what was, and is now,
just a memory. I wish I could see my house and yard again and see Horseshoe
Bay the way it used to look. I also feel sad because the most beautiful place in
the world got turned into a major tourist terminus, where the biggest business
in town is parking. My whole family feels cheated. Our life in and around
Horseshoe Bay was taken away without our consent.

Unlike the previous example, one North American protest against

highway development that did make a difference involved the commu-
nity of Durham, North Carolina, in which a black neighbourhood
known as Crest Street was threatened by an expressway proposal in
the 1970s (Rohe and Mouw 1991, 60 ff.). The project was pushed by
a politically well-connected city councillor and the local business com-
munity, including both black and white business leaders, since it would
open up a route to the suburbs and to a research and manufacturing
park. During the first phase of the project, several neighbourhoods
were to be razed, the first being a black, low-income area called Hayti.
The second area to be demolished was Crest Street, which, due to its
imminent destruction, had been allowed to deteriorate.
The black community of Crest Street saw that people uprooted from
their homes in Hayti had been placed in housing conditions far worse
than their original homes. The community also found ready allies in
young white community activists who opposed the expressway because
it would come close to their homes. In studying the project area, it was
found that the average period of residency in the area was just over
thirty-six years, that 65 per cent of the community’s residents had rel-
atives in the immediate area, and that 90 per cent of the residents
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Everyday Domicide 127

believed the community to be a safe place to live. It was this informa-

tion that proved crucial to the neighbourhood’s opposition to the
expressway. In the end, although the community was relocated to an
adjoining area that was much improved, it moved on its own terms,
and, where possible, existing homes were moved to new locations. The
domicide that occurred to the community of Hayti was prevented in
Crest Street. Resistance proved effective. At times, it was also effective
when confronting proposed airport developments.

Airports

Airports, almost always located on the peripheries of cities, take up

large amounts of strategically located land. Whereas urban road pro-
jects can unhouse thousands of citizens, new airports usually discom-
mode only small numbers, but they nevertheless are sometimes capable
of fierce resistance. Two of the more interesting examples are those of
Narita Airport, near Tokyo, and the projected Third London Airport,
which as yet has failed to come to fruition.
Japan is known for a decision-making process involving consensus
rather than confrontation, but that cultural trait appears to have been
ignored by the authorities when plans for Narita airport, forty miles
from Tokyo, were announced in 1966. Assuming that Japanese farm-
ers would be proud and patriotic enough to sell their land without legal
expropriation measures, the government simply unveiled its blueprint
without consulting the 360 farming families affected.
Some farmers, however, were deeply attached to their land and
resisted government blandishments. Radical environmentalists and
other protesters came to their aid, and legal battles were matched by
physical battles with the authorities in which several people were
killed. Although the government forcibly expropriated the land of 350
households, who were uprooted after 1970, a handful of farmers
resisted. Holding on to strategic pieces of land and publicly challeng-
ing the authorities to destroy their crops, the farmers found public
sympathy through media exposure by appealing to positive Japanese
cultural attitudes about farmland. Although one runway was built,
they were successful in preventing the completion of a second. Thus,
the world’s sixth-busiest airport languishes with only a single runway,
although government plans to build two more are frequently revived.
After over thirty years of resistance, only four families were still hold-
ing out in 1997. They have resisted force, persuasion, temptation, and
harassment to keep their land. Koji Kitahara’s dream remains: “stop-
ping the airplanes, tearing down the buildings, and removing the run-
ways” (Wudunn 1997, A11).
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128 domicide

Encouraged by this long-running example, airport plans have been

questioned across the industrial world. The third Paris airport at Rois-
sy and the second airports in Montreal (Mirabel) and Toronto (Pick-
ering) in Canada also led to resistance. Perhaps most spectacular in
terms of tunnels and treehouses was the late 1990s direct action
against Manchester Airport’s second runway project. With the British
public both sensitized and sympathetic because of the fairly successful
anti-road campaigns of the previous decade, as well as the legitimiza-
tion of protest action on soap operas such as Coronation Street, con-
siderable support was given to the protesters, once again a motley
coalition of “small-town fuckwit Tories, the green welly brigade,
Guardian reader advertising types, village preservation sorts, and the
‘this is going to knock 30 per cent off the value of my house’ lot”
(Aitkenhead 1996, 5). Despite a package of environmental mitigation
promises, opponents stressed the point that what will be lost is a land-
scape of human identity, “the particular, the individual, the unique”
(Evans 1997, 24).
From the point of view of potential domicide successfully resisted,
the project for London’s third airport repays our attention. The pro-
posal for a third London airport was subject to the most elaborate of
inquiries, which lasted for over two years between 1969 and 1971, and
which cost £1.12 million. It is given detailed attention here because the
author (Smith) was involved in the inquiry and therefore has a greater
sense of the destruction the contemplated project would have meant.
The proposal was a product of its time, a period when an apparent
exponential growth in air traffic could easily be coupled with British
pride in the importance of having a world-class international airport.
To quote Justice Roskill, who led the inquiry: “The hostile jibe during
the second world war that this country was no more than an aircraft
carrier should in the last thirty years of the present century be a source
not only of pride but of economic and political strength” (Commission
on the Third London Airport 1971, 5).
To give the Roskill Commission its due, the siting of a third London
airport was an extremely difficult problem, and the inquiry was
thrown into the middle of a paradox of progress. Air travellers, and
those who provide air service, want a facility as close to major popu-
lation centres as possible. To do this normally means the destruction of
homes or, at the very least, significantly increased noise pollution. The
inquiry received evidence that by the year 2000, one hundred million
passengers would use a new airport. No one argued against the need
for a third London airport.
The commission decided to make use of cost-benefit analysis to aid
systematic decision making. It recognized that cost-benefit analysis
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could be criticized for avoiding the real issues around the sacrifice of
homes and peace and quiet but felt that this method ensured “that
decisions are taken on the basis of people’s individual values and choic-
es as revealed by their behaviour rather than on the decision-makers’
own preferences or standards or those of vociferous and politically
powerful groups” (Commission on the Third London Airport 1971,
12). Such reliance on rationality was seen by one critic as “the culmi-
nation of one of the dominant trends of the political sixties; the con-
viction that the rational and the efficient, rather than the picturesque
and the sentimental, must prevail” (McKie 1973, 15).
In studying the reaction of people who would have been affected by
the final choice of the commission, the resistance displayed by the
inhabitants of Cublington is exemplary. The choice of Cublington was,
in the eyes of local historian David Perman (1973, 13), “an attempted
rape of a section of English rural life that was repulsed with the stub-
born and inventive resistance that the English have traditionally shown
to foreign invaders.” The choice was made primarily in the belief that
Cublington made the best economic sense as an airport site. Had the
project come to fruition, it would have destroyed three villages –
Cublington, Stewkley, and Dunton – and possibly two others – Soul-
bury and Whitchurch. One thousand seven hundred people would
have lost their homes, and 10,000 people would have been affected in
other ways.
At the local hearings, 811 people sought leave to speak; there were
203 actual witnesses and 725 letters of protest. Excerpts from one letter
are a record of the hopes and fears of the people of the area: “I am 82
years of age, and I was born in North Bucks and I shall not leave here
until I am compelled to do. We chose our home for a lifetime. We like it.
We like the generous rooms and layout. We like the small enclosed gar-
den which is green and mature, with flowering shrubs and lilac hedges
... We are not affluent people. We paid £5,700 for our house, and the
rest has been achieved by sweat ... this is my home, and I won’t leave
here except by force” (Perman 1973, 100). Following a highly effective
local resistance, Cublington won its reprieve on April 26, 1971, mainly
because of the growing concern about conservation of the environment,
although the protest of those who might lose their homes must not be
forgotten. The dominant social class represented in the primary protest
group (Wing Airport Resistance Group) was lower middle-class, people
who simply could not afford to lose their homes (Perman 171). Further,
it is also clear that much of the environment lobby, so roundly criticized
by Pepper (1980) as “ecofascist,” was actually protesting against the loss
of landscapes that profoundly express the English identity. They are “an
organic part of the permanent heritage of England” (Pepper 1980, 178).
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130 domicide

During all this turmoil it was discovered that air traffic was not increas-
ing as rapidly as had been forecast. As Barfoot (1971, 33) remarks:
“What did the Roskill Commission produce, other than frustrating
delay, a wrong decision, and heartache for many in Buckinghamshire?”
With the third London airport idea scuttled, the British government
announced that Heathrow and Gatwick were favoured sites for a new
runway within the next twenty years (Harlow 1993, 9). If Heathrow
were chosen, over 3,000 houses would have to be demolished as well as
fifty-five community and recreation buildings, eleven public buildings,
and ten hotels. If Gatwick were chosen, one hundred homes around the
airport would be bulldozed, and the Tudor village of Charlwood would
be sandwiched between two runways (Elliott 1993). In planner Peter
Hall’s words: “The story of the third London airport is an extraordinary
history of policy reversals, last-minute abandonments, contradictions,
and inconsistencies in forecasts. It has all the ingredients of a great plan-
ning disaster”(Hall 1980,15). The story has now reached an ending of
sorts as Stansted in Essex, by quiet growth, has become the third Lon-
don airport.

National Parks

Unlike roads and airports, the advantages and disadvantages of which

are so obvious, the creation of national parks at first seems to be a
wholly benign policy. Such parks are developed to conserve landscapes
and ecologies, for aesthetic reasons (Porteous 1996), and for public
educational and recreational benefits. We are not likely to be aware
that at least one popular model of park planning can result in exten-
sive domicide.
Although the prevailing model for developing national parks is nine-
teenth century and American (Tripp 1998), the English had long expe-
rience of creating private parks before their national park model was
established in the twentieth century. Medieval royal hunting parks
were cleared of people to make way for deer, and in Tudor times, the
“emparking” of land became so widespread that the peasantry found
their lands, hamlets, and burial grounds disappearing behind the park
pale, and themselves left to wander the roads as homeless and landless
day labourers (Lasdun 1991). Henry viii set a fine example by razing
the whole village of Cuddington in Surrey to create a park for his
palace of Nonsuch. Between the years 1670 and 1720, more country
houses were built in some parts of England than in any other half cen-
tury, and each needed a park. Thereafter, park making became an aris-
tocratic English pastime until the early nineteenth century, and count-
less villages were destroyed and roads diverted.
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Although the literate generally applauded these “improvements,” we

hear little from the nameless victims they spawned. In contemporary
literature, however, we find considerable sympathy with the plight of
the dispossessed. Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, though senti-
mental, lays the blame for domicide squarely where it belongs: “The
man of wealth and pride/ Takes up a space that many poor supplied”
(1996, 11, original 1770). And Wordsworth’s early poetry, particular-
ly A Night on Salisbury Plain, is filled with images of home found and
lost. The nameless Traveller and the wandering Female of this poem
talk about “The loss and apparent irrecoverability of a permanent
local habitation” (Janowitz 1990, 96) in a world of political, econom-
ic, and social oppression. When the person from Porlock broke into
Coleridge’s reverie, he might have interrupted to some purpose had he
asked how many homes on the banks of the river Alph were destroyed
to create Kubla Khan’s Xanadu.
Nevertheless, it was this history of reverence for the English coun-
tryside that was translated, in the twentieth century, into the English
model of the national park. From being a landscape of power, the Eng-
lish countryside became a landscape of the empowered as town
dwellers fought for access and finally succeeded, after the Second
World War, in establishing a series of national parks in northern and
western England and Wales (Short 1991). Above all, it was an ideolo-
gy of national parks as living, working landscapes that triumphed in
Britain. Unlike the experience of earlier private parks, people were not
removed from twentieth-century national parks. Indeed, farmers in
particular were encouraged to remain and subsidized to continue tra-
ditional ways of life, which, in turn, preserved cultural landscapes con-
sidered essential to both regional and national identities.
Ideology proved very different in North America. Parallel with the
belief that the American wilderness had to be tamed and converted into
a fruitful garden was the paradoxical ideology of wilderness as Eden –
an Eden that must be preserved without change for its aesthetic, scien-
tific, religious, and national values (Short 1991, Porteous 1996). To
love, protect and even worship nature was a deistic goal worthy of
Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau (Graber 1976). Religion and
nationalism combined in the Yosemite Act, passed by Congress in
1890, which created Yosemite National Park, forerunner of the Amer-
ican national parks system.
This late nineteenth-century romantic American view of the nation-
al park emphasized “pristine beauty and wildness,” and although us
artist George Catlin in 1833 suggested that future national parks might
contain “man and beast” (Mitchell 1981), the us National Parks Ser-
vice soon reinterpreted this dictum in their clear preference for beasts
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132 domicide

over humans. Indeed, the prevailing twentieth-century model of the

national park soon came to mean a wild area as free as possible of res-
idents. While this notion proved quite practicable in much of western
North America, it was much more difficult to implement elsewhere.
Yet, internationally, the American wilderness model of the national
park has triumphed over the English cultural landscape model.
Clearly, any attempt to establish a human-free wilderness national
park in a populated area will inevitably lead to the need for population
removals. Like most Western concepts applied without cultural sensi-
tivity in the Third World, the wilderness park ideal has had serious
implications for the subsistence needs of existing populations of culti-
vators, herders, and hunter-gatherers who suddenly find themselves
within national park boundaries. Rao and Geisler (1988, 210) provide
a number of examples including the San, a group of hunter-gatherers in
Botswana who were resettled for the creation of the Gemsbok Nation-
al Park; the Masai, pastoralists who were removed from their lands by
the creation of the Nairobi National Park; and the Ik, a nomadic tribe
from the Kidepo Valley of Uganda. The latter case is horrific.
The Ik had been hunters and gatherers, living a nomadic existence
throughout the borderlands of Uganda, Sudan, and Kenya. Just before
the Second World War, they were encouraged to settle in northern
Uganda. These boundaries were hardened following designation of
Kidepo National Park. Prevented from hunting in the park and pun-
ished when found “poaching,” the Ik were compelled to learn to farm,
for which their mountainous country proved quite useless. The 2,000
Ik called themselves “the mountain people,” and their attachment to
their mountain homeland was so strong that they resisted all adminis-
trative attempts to relocate them. Obeying the law but passively won-
dering at the power that ordains that animals shall be preserved while
humans may perish, they preferred to die of starvation rather than
move.
The Western world was shocked when Turnbull’s The Mountain
People (1972) described what happened to Ik society under these des-
perate circumstances. Severe lack of food caused the collapse of tradi-
tional social relations and the utter disappearance of family love,
friendship, or neighbourly compassion and assistance. Even the essen-
tial nurturing relationship between mother and child attenuated; all
interests were focused on the individual stomach. “There is simply no
community of interest, familial or economic, social or spiritual,” wrote
Turnbull (1972, 157, 295) “The Ik are ... a people without life, with-
out passion, without humanity.”
Interestingly, well-known reviewers of the book, including Margaret
Mead, Ashley Montague, and Sir Julian Huxley, focused upon the
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Everyday Domicide 133

degradation of the Ik, an apparently monstrous people living fearful,

selfish lives, and dying out because of the abandonment of their
humanity. Much was made of the Ik as a possible forerunner of col-
lapse and social decay in our own selfish industrial society. Little was
said about the “needs” of Western tourists for game parks, and of the
Ugandan government for the consequent revenue, which had led
directly to the Ik’s predicament.
As Western, and now Asian, tourists travel farther afield, and with
the phenomenal growth of so-called ecotourism from the 1980s, the
Third World is being increasingly called upon to devote land to nation-
al parks. Such land dedications are much easier in lightly populated
countries like Namibia than in overcrowded ones like Rwanda. The
1992 Rio Earth Summit seems to have only exacerbated matters.
Across the Third World, numerous Rio-inspired park creation schemes
have been launched by the West with appalling consequences. In
Ethiopia, the European Union (eu) proposes to force 7,000 people out
of three national parks for conservation and tourism projects. Anoth-
er eu-funded project in Uganda led to the forcible eviction of 35,000
people from the Kibale forest region. “Over three terrifying days, local
people who resisted were shot or burnt alive in their homes, women
were raped, their homes and crops torched. They had nowhere to go”
(Harrison 1997, 23). I (Porteous) received anecdotal evidence about
the creation of a park in highland Nepal. The former inhabitants were
relocated to a lowland subtropical region to which they failed to adapt,
suffering illness and premature deaths.
In Thailand, which has wastefully destroyed its own forests and now
begun to work on those of Laos and Cambodia, the Royal Forestry
Department is keen to double the nation’s surface area of designated
“conservation forest wilderness.” This massive rezoning of forest land
may eventually cause up to 1,000 communities to be resettled. A pilot
project begun in 1994 attempted to resettle 2,357 people from the Doi
Pha Chang wildlife sanctuary, most of them from ethnic Hmong and
Mien hill tribes. Despite an array of land, housing, and monetary
incentives, villagers were reluctant to move (Phatkul 1994, A3). Unfor-
tunately they were up against not only the Royal Forestry Department
but also the Protected and Prohibited Areas Committee, which includes
the local governor, the provincial forestry officer, the district chief, and
representatives of the social welfare office, the land reform office, the
army, and the border police.
Less vulnerable than the Ik or the Hmong to the insistencies of prof-
itable but thoughtless conservation-and-tourism policies are the Masai
of East Africa. Unlike the Ik, they refuse to be consigned to extinction
so that wildlife may survive. Indeed, before the era of conservation and
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134 domicide

control, African nomads generally enjoyed a stable relationship with

non-human species. Traditional Masai migration routes cut across the
areas designated for parkland in the Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti
areas of Tanzania. Unable to enforce the exclusion of the Masai, park
planners were compelled to create a face-saving “conservation unit”
between the crater and Serengeti National Park, wherein Masai cattle
graze under the supposed supervision of conservation officers. The
Masai, who have proved to be an attraction for tourists, are permitted
to go no further than the lip of the crater from where they can see but
not enter traditional grasslands far below. “The African crater came to
an end when the Masai, who had enriched its life, were banished from
it. Now that has been succeeded by the European crater, empty of man
as an inhabitant, but seething with man as a day-tripper” (Marnham
1987, 30).
Lest we be tempted to deduce that most national park domicide
problems are to be found in the Third World, we address the case of
Canada. Since the establishment of Canada’s first national park at
Banff in 1885, the national park system has grown to thirty-nine parks,
representing 2 per cent of the country’s land mass. Various interest
groups have attempted to sway park management policies over the
years, and according to Dearden and Berg (1993), entrepreneurs dom-
inated decision making until about 1970, when environmentalists
enjoyed a brief period of dominance, themselves giving way to Abo-
riginal peoples in the late 1980s.
During the 1960s and 1970s, several national parks were created in
the Atlantic provinces of Canada: Kochibouquac in New Brunswick,
Kejimkujik and Cape Breton Highlands in Nova Scotia and Gros
Morne and Terra Nova in Newfoundland. While most of the Terra
Nova residents accepted resettlement, albeit reluctantly, park develop-
ment inevitably displaced rural homes and a subsistence economy
based on the natural resources of the area – hunting, trapping, collect-
ing wood, and land ownership. This raised the question of how this
loss of resources could be compensated in an equitable manner. Fre-
quently, people could not identify the amount of wood they would
need in the future because they had always cut wood as needed
throughout the year. Replacing an old house on several acres of land
with a new house and 1.5 acres of land may have appeared adequate,
but it resulted in a considerable reduction in potential use. Felt (1977,
74) concludes that those who benefit are certainly different from those
displaced, and to a large degree, benefit in the creation of parks is to a
public interest not including the rural worker who previously inhabit-
ed these areas. This often occurs because planners assume that “the
marginal rural worker does not particularly value his lifestyle, and that
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Everyday Domicide 135

he is not being replaced in the next generation.” In other words, the

rural lifestyle is being phased out.
An example of a community that might have been displaced but
escaped is Mountain Cove, Newfoundland. It was to have been reset-
tled due to the creation of the Gros Morne Park in 1970. Here, again,
there is evidence of an attachment to a way of life special to the home
area. One resident suggested that resettlement would be particularly
difficult for older people (Matthews 1976, 76–7): “On account people
have their own home here, their own land, and their own fishing gear.
You might say they have their own living here.” When the persuasive
government agents came to discuss resettlement, they were met with
reproach by one of the community leaders and a response they prob-
ably did not expect. “If we build a house for you in Stephenville like
you have here, would you move? I said, ‘Not if it was a golden house
would I move to Stephenville.’” According to Matthews, people did
not believe that they would be forced to move because they felt that
resettlement did not make sense. However expressed, their resistance
was effective, and Mountain Cove was excluded from the park
boundaries.
Aboriginal Canadians had not fared well against park establishment
until 1979, when a new national parks policy acknowledged that
future parks would be established only in conjunction with the settle-
ment of native land claims. Confronting entrepreneurs and environ-
mentalists alike, native peoples questioned the assumption that
humans had no rights in parks other than as visitors (Sadler 1989).
Regarding the land as ancestrally theirs, and perceiving themselves to
be part of nature rather than separate from it, both Indians and Inuit
began to take up an increasing role in park management, typically
negotiating for co-management agreements and hunting rights within
national parks.
Success has varied. Berg (1990) has investigated the relationship
between park managers and the Nuu-chah-nulth Aboriginal people,
who inhabit the area on the west coast of Vancouver Island where the
Pacific Rim National Park reserve was established. The Nuu-chah-
nulth people have been there for 4,000 years and the park for just
over thirty years, but the natives have little say in park planning or in
the management of traditional lands, their only concession being per-
mission to continue the subsistence harvesting of seafood. In con-
trast, the Haida Nation to the north on the Queen Charlottle Islands
are guaranteed access to the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve for
a host of traditional activities, including hunting, gathering, fishing,
the cutting of trees for ceremonial or artistic purposes, and a variety
of activities of traditional spiritual significance. Similar arrangements
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136 domicide

have been made with the Mingan Band regarding the Mingan Archi-
pelago National Park Reserve on the north shore of the Gulf of St.
Lawrence in Quebec. It is likely that future Canadian national park
designations will follow the Haida/Mingan model (Dearden and Berg
1993, 209).
In the 1980s, Canadian parks managers moved away from a view of
parks and protected areas as largely separate from other land uses to
one emphasizing coordination and integration on natural, social, eco-
nomic, and broadly human ecological grounds. Put another way,
Canadian native peoples have forced the national parks bureaucracy to
abandon the American “empty wilderness” model and move closer to
the European notion of national parks as cultural landscapes – some-
one’s home. This being so, there is no reason why non-native settle-
ments pursuing traditional rural lifeways should not be included in
future North American national parks. The alternative – “pristine”
wildernesses swept clean of human content, balanced by fake Disney-
lands such as Williamsburg, Virginia – is suitable only for those so
divorced from the authentic that they can no longer distinguish
between shadow and substance.

Dams and Reservoirs

One of the most heart-rending images of domicide was relayed to the

world in July 1995. As the thirty-two billion litres of the reservoir
known as Lake Vagil, in Tuscany, were drained for dam maintenance,
a ruined village emerged from the depths. The village of Fabbriche di
Careggine was drowned half a century ago as heartbroken villagers
wept, some refusing to leave until water began to pour into their
beloved homes. Fifty years later, the survivors, mostly white-haired
elderly women clad in black, picked their way through the mud-caked
streets, lamenting. The village was theirs for a few days, before, once
more, the waters rose and their village was again lost to them.
In a sense they were fortunate, for of all forms of domicide, the
flooding of valleys behind dams is the most irreversible. Home is lost
at several scales at once: dwelling, neighbourhood, village, land, and
landscape are obliterated. The case of Lake Vagil is rare; most often,
all physical props to memory are drowned beneath the surface of a per-
manent engineered lake.
The numbers involved in dam building are staggering. Swift (1995,
8) estimates that in the mid-1990s the world contained 36,000 large-
scale dams, increasing at the rate of 170 per year, and displacing about
one million “reservoir refugees” annually. Some of these are super-
dams, defined as having a height of 150 metres and a reservoir with the
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storage capacity of at least 25,000 x 106 cubic metres. Super-dams are

the largest structures ever built. They alter ecologies on an enormous
scale, creating whole new geographies. In their rush to irrigate, they
drown the most fertile lands, those at the valley bottoms.
Until the 1970s, the world’s most active dam builders were located
in the North – most notably the United States, the ussr, Canada, and
Japan. Dams were seen as symbols of progress; as with the railways of
the nineteenth century, folk songs were written about them. Except for
Canada’s James Bay project, large-scale dam building in the North
ground to a halt in the 1980s, partly because of the potent effect of
anti-dam activists, but also because there wasn’t much left to dam. By
1990, the industrialized world was planning only thirteen super-dams,
whereas in the South, at least eighty of them planned to tap the
immense but relatively unexploited hydroelectric potential of the val-
leys of the developing world. Learning from the North, Third World
leaders came to see large dams as symbols of progress, economic
development, and independence. Since the 1950s, about 180 super-
dams have been built in industrialized nations, but less than one hun-
dred in the developing world. In the early twenty-first century, this
imbalance may well be made up. The eighty super-dams on the draw-
ing board for the Third World in 1990 included: twelve for Brazil, ten
for Argentina, twelve for other parts of Latin America, ten for India,
twelve for China, eleven for tiny Nepal, eleven in other parts of Asia
and a mere three for Africa (currently the least dammed continent)
(Lewis 1991, 36).
One of the world’s least-dammed major rivers is the Mekong in
China and Indochina. Current plans involve fifteen super-dams on the
main stream and over 200 large dams on the tributaries. Not only
would this plan fundamentally alter the ecology of several nations and
threaten the livelihoods of sixty million people, but many valleys, with
their fertile land, towns, and villages, would simply vanish from the
map.
Further south, in Southeast Asia, the Kedung Ombo Dam in central
Java has flooded the homes and farms of 30,000 peasants. When the
floodgates closed in January 1989, hundreds of families living in the
twenty villages to be inundated refused to move, protesting that they
had not been consulted about the destruction of their property at any
stage of the development. These families preferred to remain and cul-
tivate the old flood plain as it re-emerged each year when water was
released for irrigation (Probe International 1995). Next door, in
Malaysian Sarawak, the Bakun Dam was begun in 1996. Ten thousand
people from five ethnic groups were involuntarily resettled to an area
thirty kilometres from the dam site (International Rivers Network
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138 domicide

2001). As is usual in Southeast Asia, the project was cloaked in secre-

cy, and no social impact study was done. Hong (1996), who has stud-
ied the indigenous peoples of Sarawak, estimates that these people,
mainly of the Penan, Kayan, and Kenyah groups, will lose their ances-
tral lands and probably their cultural identities. While the Asian cur-
rency crisis has caused deferment of the project, authorities are still
considering construction of the project to its original size.
The indigenes have formed the Bakun Region People’s Committee to
fight legal battles in the Malaysian courts. They are caught, however,
in the trap of the drive to development espoused by Malaysian elites,
who have little but contempt for the people of the forest. If conditions
in neighbouring Thailand are anything to go by, the indigenes will still
be asking for compensation twenty years after the fact, holding demon-
strations and being beaten and arrested by the police (The Nation
(Bangkok), 23 December 1994). Indeed, the Penan have been harassed
and imprisoned by Malaysia, and even Prince Charles has been roused
to defend them (Sesser 1994, 244).
India has long been a leader of the Third World. It is also, with
Brazil, one of the world’s foremost dam building states. Some 1,500
large dams have been built in India, which presupposes many thou-
sands of small ones; fourteen of this total are super-dams. Overall,
dams account for 14 per cent of India’s public expenditure. Yet, most
of these dams gradually lose their value because of siltation. A study of
fifty dams found that the average benefit accrued reached only 50 per
cent of projections (Lewis 1991, 38). India’s founding prime minister
Nehru believed that an orgy of dam building would enable developing
nations to catch up with the West, but this has proved to be in error.
Water supply remains one of India’s chief problems.
The domicidal effect of India’s dam building is equally large in
scale. It is estimated that at least eleven million (Lewis 1991, 38), but
possibly as many as sixteen million (Pearce 1991, 20), people have
been evicted in favour of reservoirs since the country was founded in
1947. Of these, at least half must still find new land to farm. Never-
theless, India has pressed ahead with the enormous Narmada River
Project (nrp), a basin-wide development scheme along the 1,300 km
Narmada River, which will harness it for irrigation, electricity gener-
ation, and domestic consumption through a series of construction
projects reputed to require an investment of over $10 billion. The nrp
involves building two super-dams, the Sardar Sarovar (ssp) toward the
mouth of the river in Gujarat state, and the Narmada Sagar (nsp)
complex upstream in Madhya Pradesh. In addition, thirty large dams,
130 medium ones, and 3,000 minor ones will be required. Such num-
bers are staggering.
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Lewis (1991, 35) estimates that 3,500 square km of forest and 600
square km of productive land will be drowned, and that 1.5 million
people will be displaced. Ruitenbeek and Cartier (1993, 13), consul-
tants working for the project, claim that “over one million people” will
be displaced. I (Porteous) was assured by an Indian official that it
would be only about one-quarter of a million. These are enormous
numbers of homes and livelihoods destroyed, and the potential for
trauma and tragedy is vast. Typically, dam economists speak only
about the budgetary requirements for compensation, which are esti-
mated as one-time requirements of $275 million for the ssp and $425
million for the nsp. Such budgets are entirely inadequate, for the eco-
nomic losses from displacement alone will be of the order of $100 –
$500 million per year (Ruitenbeek and Cartier 1993, 13).
While proponents of the scheme laud its potential to irrigate, supply
water, generate electricity, and fuel an industrial boom, opponents
claim that the nrp will be a catastrophe environmentally, socially, and
politically. In particular, the flooding of Narmada valley forests will
flush out and destroy a rich variety of tribal cultures that have ances-
trally predominated in the region – notably those of the Bhils, Bhilalas,
Korkars, Gonds, Pardhans, Bharias, Bhumias, and Kols. According to
Survival International, these people have nowhere else to go, and,
instead of recreating their cultures elsewhere, they will end up in
India’s urban squatter settlements as yet more refugees from man-made
disasters. This process has, in fact, already begun. Well-organized
protests, although causing some foreign lenders to back out of the pro-
ject, seem to have only caused nrp officials to harden in their determi-
nation to continue construction.
But the vast protest marches common in India are not permitted in
totalitarian China, another of the world’s major dam builders. In 1992,
the World Bank approved a $120-million loan for the Shuikou Dam in
eastern China, which is expected to displace 63,000 people. Of those
already moved, “forced resettlement has radically changed their lives,
resulting in loss of control and loss of face for the traditional farmers.
In despair, some old people have committed suicide” (Probe Interna-
tional 1993a). The Erlan Dam is expected to displace 30,000 people,
while the proposed Xiaolangdi Dam on the Yellow River will evict
190,000. “The resettlers are only being offered half the land they orig-
inally farmed, at a barren site, and without irrigation. If they want irri-
gation, they must dig their own channels; however, it is highly ques-
tionable whether they will be able to afford to do so” (Probe
International 1993b).
The “mother of all dam projects,” however, is the well-known Three
Gorges project, which involves building the largest single dam in the
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140 domicide

world on the Yangtze River. This project will take about two decades
to complete, will cost perhaps $40 billion, and will require the reset-
tlement of over 1.3 million people. The reservoir created will stretch
over 600 km up the Yangtze, submerging 320 villages and 140 towns
and cities and some of China’s most famous historic, cultural, and aes-
thetic landscapes. At least 1,200 historic sites will be drowned, and lit-
tle is being done to rescue them (Higgins 1997, 22).
Besides claiming to provide all the usual benefits of power genera-
tion, flood control, irrigation, navigation, and the like, the Three
Gorges dam is clearly a politically prestigious project. The current
leaders of the people who built the Great Wall and of the world’s most
populous nation see the project as a symbol of China’s bid for world
power status in the twenty-first century. At the ceremony to celebrate
the diversion of the Yangtze, held in November 1997, the Chinese Pres-
ident Jiang Zemin, himself an engineer, claimed that “only socialism
can concentrate forces to create such big projects,” while Premier Li
Peng, another engineer, was quoted as saying that the blockage of such
a great river “demonstrates to the world that the Chinese people have
the ability to build the biggest and most beneficial ... hydroelectric pro-
ject in the world ... It not only inspires people, but demonstrates the
greatness of China’s development” (Mickleburgh 1997, A8).
Criticism of the project was widespread before 1989, when the
Tiananmen Square massacre and the crackdown on dissent that
followed quickly silenced opposition. Such criticism is now severely
forbidden, and a book of critical essays edited by Dai Qing (1989, Eng-
lish edition 1994) was banned and pulped. Its information and opin-
ions are available only abroad. Another volume Damming the Three
Gorges, aptly subtitled What the Dam Builders Don’t Want You to
Know (Barber and Ryder 1990), condemns the project on a wide
variety of grounds.
In terms of resettlement, the plans call for a system known as “reset-
tlement with development,” which is based on consultation with the
affected population as well as popular acceptance by the “host popu-
lation” in the resettlement areas. Master planning would ensure that
those resettled would be provided either with adequate farmland or
jobs equivalent to those they were to lose. But the plans also contain
clauses that restrict the right to migrate to cities, while containing no
provision for the estimated 10 to 30 per cent of the drowned towns’
populations who are illegal migrants. This considerable floating popu-
lation is simply regarded as non-persons. By 1991, 50,000 people had
already been uprooted in pilot relocation experiments (Adams 1993,
19), but Fearnside (1993, 57) found little evidence that any of the local
people had been widely consulted. Further, there is simply no land
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Everyday Domicide 141

available that is equivalent in quality to the land lost. And, finally,

China’s previous resettlement projects have been plagued by “mis-
takes” such as waste, mismanagement, and inadequate funding.
China’s leaders still appear to have a Great Leap Forward mentality,
oblivious of the fact that thirty to forty million people died of famine
during that period. They are “afraid to lose face,” asserts one dissident
professor (in Higgins 1997, 22). Their moral bankruptcy is seen in
their pressure on the Hong Kong Film Festival in 1991 to withdraw the
film In Expectation, which deals with village extinguishment, with the
massive corruption that has dissipated resettlement funds (Mickle-
burgh 1998, A9), and with the subtext of the plan. This is part of the
move to further centralize power in Beijing (Sullivan 1995, 269; Zich
1997, 23).
Meanwhile, Western visitors bring back evidence of the anger of the
relocatees: “Are we going to have enough land to farm? No ... There
is no land to farm behind our village. When the time comes, I will
refuse to move out of my village. If they want me to leave, they will
have to use police to drag me away” (Mickleburgh 1998, A9). “No
good! I was born here. I built this house with my own hands. I’ll lose
my inn! For me, it’s terrible” (Zich 1997, 28). Other interviewees dis-
played the usual array of emotions in such situations – from anger and
sadness to resignation, acceptance, and even anticipation of a better
life. Few felt that anything could be done to oppose the process or even
to prevent the embezzlement of resettlement funds by officials: “I’m
only laobaixing [of the common people]. Officials don’t care about the
laobaixing” (Zich 1997, 23). Oblivious of this inhumanity, Western
tourists take scenic cruises along the Yangtze, having heeded the call,
“Go now before it’s too late!”
While it is impossible to fully judge the domicidal effects of the pro-
jects outlined above, most of which are currently in progress, a review
of several already completed projects may provide an indication of
what the twenty-first century has in store for Brazilians, Indians, Chi-
nese, and other likely victims of dam building. The Norris Basin of the
Tennessee Valley Authority, the Volta River Project (Ghana), the Kari-
ba Gorge Dam (Zambia), and the Aswan Dam (Egypt) all involved
comprehensive planning and promised economic renewal, but in each
case they caused the end of a way of life for those whose homes were
drowned. Two British Columbia projects (the W.A.C. Bennett Dam
and the Kemano project) met the needs of industry and power planning
but not those of the First Nations peoples who were displaced.
The first example comes from the Great Depression years in the
United States, which saw the development of many projects by the
Tennessee Valley Authority. This Norris Basin project included the
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142 domicide

introduction of land use planning, regional development, and multi-

purpose stream development. But it also involved land purchase, fam-
ily removal, and relocation, albeit from an area that was isolated and
economically disadvantaged. The project had a proponent in a position
of ultimate authority. Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated in On Our
Way: “Before I came to Washington, I decided that for many reasons,
the Tennessee Valley – in other words, all of the watershed of the Ten-
nessee River and its tributaries – would provide an ideal land use
experiment on a regional scale embracing many states” (McDonald
and Muldowny 1982).
Through a series of oral interviews, McDonald and Muldowny have
created a picture of the basin before it was flooded and also a sense of
the positive and negative aspects that this development brought to peo-
ple who lost their homes and their way of life as part of Roosevelt’s
“ideal land use experiment”:

And when they were leaving here, it was just like a funeral here at the store
every day – they didn’t know whether they’d see them any more in their life.

It’s very difficult to describe the attachments that they had for their land, their
emotional involvement, and the fact that they were going to have to leave all
that and come somewhere else.

It wasn’t just that they had spent all their lives there, you know, but as far back
as their grandparents could remember.

Well, I didn’t feel too awfully bad about it. One way of looking at it, I just
thought that when the government took a notion to do anything, they just
done it, and I just passed it by, is all I can say.

I don’t know how – they existed, they didn’t live. Now, [for] the people like
that, I guess in the end it was better – turned out that it was better for every-
body that they did move.

I know some people up there that resented moving at all. In fact, I know two
who committed suicide. I knew personally of them. They bought all around
[one man], but he wouldn’t sell, and he went down to the pond there and put
a rope around his neck and hung himself.

The thing that hurt so bad was that we just didn’t want to be taken away from
the place we loved. Even if we went away, we would like to come back and see
the place again. Now, it’s a hundred feet under water. We can never go home
again.
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Everyday Domicide 143

These interviews provide us with an opportunity to listen to the

feelings of some of the persons who lost their homes through the
creation of a reservoir. In the next three examples (in Ghana, Zambia,
and Egypt), the commentators have provided a critical view of the
process by which domicide occurs as well as some insight into people’s
reactions.
The development of the Volta River Project in Ghana in the 1960s
necessitated the flooding of an area of 8484 square kilometres. Before
the water submerged traditional lands and homes, some 80,000 people
lived in the area. This was a project for which careful plans were made.
The British and Gold Coast governments announced the establishment
of a Preparatory Commission in 1952 to report on technical aspects
and economic viability. All aspects of project construction were stud-
ied, including human issues such as compensation and resettlement.
But, in retrospect, the chair of the commission said: “Those of us who
are not Ghanaian ... clearly realised how little we understood the
minds of the people who would have to leave their ancestral lands and
homes”(Chambers 1970, 5). Land had particular significance for the
Ghanaians. Traditional beliefs stressed the connection between land
and life (Amarteifo 1970, 131).
Problems arose due to the long delay in obtaining financing for the
dam and internal difficulties with staffing the secretariat for the project
from existing government departments. Then, dam construction was
suddenly begun, and there were only three years to remove the resi-
dents of the basin. Further tensions arose in trying to implement self-
help policies while still meeting the minimum housing standards set by
the authorities. This caused costs to rise significantly. Villagers who
were to be given the opportunity to construct their own dwellings lost
enthusiasm when considerable speed was necessary to accommodate
the coming flood. Eventually, the Department of Social Welfare rec-
ommended that housing projects should be built, and that self-help
projects should follow as “an excellent way of rehabilitating [the vic-
tims] and giving them a stake in their new environment” (Kalitsi 1970,
40). Reviewing the limitations of planning in this project, Huszar
(1970, 161) notes that while planners can create the physical manifes-
tation of a new settlement, they cannot create the same social and eco-
nomic environment. Thus, persons who were resettled lost their tradi-
tional house forms and occupations.
Resettlement of the Gwembe Tonga in Zambia in the 1960s was
brought about by the construction of another African project, a large
hydroelectric dam across the Zambezi River at Kariba Gorge. The
social consequences of this resettlement as described by Colson
(1971, 2), included hostility toward government, loss of legitimacy of
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144 domicide

local leaders, and questioning of existing religious practices. On the

positive side, Colson reports a new focus on kinship ties. Colson sug-
gests that resistance to technological change was experienced not
because the Gwembe Tonga were averse to the proposed change, but
because the resettlement program threatened people’s basic securities
such as land for cropping and grazing; those resettled did not under-
stand the technical facts, the project resulted from a command from
outside their community, and the Gwembe Tonga believed that they
were made to suffer for the longer-term good of their community.
While new settlements were eventually created, that which was lost is
expressed in a rather special way for the Gwembe Tonga: “The reset-
tled people came from an area of old settlement, where all the fea-
tures of the landscape were named and people were easily oriented in
space. They came from a landscape threaded with paths linking one
homestead with others in village and neighbourhood, homesteads
with fields, fields with one another, neighbourhoods with other
neighbourhoods. In most resettlement areas, there were few game
tracks, and while newcomers recognized major landmarks if they
were lucky enough to move into the uplands, most of their new world
was anonymous” (Colson 1971, 50).
One final example in Africa involves the Aswan Dam. The Aswan
Dam was completed in 1970 and created the world’s third largest
reservoir, Lake Nasser. The reservoir was named after Gamal Abdel
Nasser who was then president of Egypt, advocate of the dam’s con-
struction, and a major influence in the securing of funds for construc-
tion. While the dam benefits Egypt by controlling the annual floods,
providing about twenty percent of Egypt’s power supply, and improv-
ing navigation, problems have developed through seepage, evaporation
and siltation. The costs to those displaced were also high.
Ultimately, this project was responsible for the displacement of
100,000 Nubians in Egypt and the Sudan. Hussein Fahim undertook
research in Egypt in 1969, 1973, and 1980 to study the means of cop-
ing developed by those who had been displaced. His account was pre-
pared to assist persons responsible for future resettlement programs
to understand “the instinctive need for mankind to preserve individ-
ual cultures”(Fahim 1983, x). The construction of the High Aswan
Dam displaced all Nubians within Egypt and flooded one-third of the
Nubian lands in the Sudan. While the Egyptian Nubians were reset-
tled within the Aswan area, the Sudanese Nubians were located in a
unfamiliar area. It has been suggested that a pattern of out-migration
had long been set for the Nubian people before construction of the
dam. But many Nubians had expected, despite the poverty of the
area, to return from the big cities to retire, to enjoy a life of freedom
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Everyday Domicide 145

and independence, to a country of silence and beauty, and to houses

and extended compounds that had been in the same tribe for genera-
tions. With the dam construction, some Nubians became, in their
own words, “inflicted people” who suffered from depression and
grief.
This displacement occurred despite the fact that the Egyptian gov-
ernment took the problem of resettlement seriously. While the Nubians
were not given an active role in the formulation of plans, they were
consulted, and a compensation policy was developed that would be
suitable to their needs. At first, the Nubians did not really believe that
their valley would be drowned, but when the time came for resettle-
ment, some saw it as an opportunity for new material and social
advantages. Others saw an end to their peaceful and quiet way of life.
Fahim (1983, 43) tells of the day of departure for the first village when
“the women rose at dawn to sadly and silently visit their dead, spray-
ing the graves with water, expressing compassion and sanctification.”
Many “kissed the land as they left their empty vacated homes, while
others filled their pockets with small bags of soil.” Every effort was
made by government officials to welcome them to their new location,
and new houses were ready for them. Unfortunately, even with this
excellent start, problems surfaced thereafter including delays in sched-
uled moves and in the provision of new housing.
Many of the efforts to resettle persons displaced by the creation of
reservoirs in Africa were missing in two contemporary British Colum-
bia projects. The W.A.C. Bennett Dam created Williston Lake in the
late 1960s by flooding the Peace River along 632 km of the Rocky
Mountain Trench, thus drowning a valley of historical significance that
was the homeland of the valley’s residents – the Sekani. Some of the
Sekani refused to leave, and on 25 May 1968, the provincial govern-
ment sent in bulldozers and pulled their houses to higher land. Living
in poverty, due to the flooding of traditional lands, and suffering health
problems since then, some of the Ingenika people of the Sekani have
been reluctant to leave Ingenika Point, which is the only part of their
traditional lands remaining. One woman said: “I’d get heartbroken ...
to move from a place where we’ve been so long ... when I go away, I
want to come back fast ... I get real lonely ... It’s a nice feeling to get
back home” (Cruickshank 1987, 1). Only in 1987 did the British
Columbia government recognize the plight of the Sekani and begin to
provide aid to their settlements. While the Bennett Dam and the Willis-
ton Reservoir glorified two local politicians and became the primary
source of electrical power for British Columbia, they diminished an
already-suffering Indian nation and became a primary source of sor-
row and suffering for the Sekani (Jensen 1996, 7). Investigations by
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146 domicide

newspaper reporters (Glavin 1987) and scholars (Koyl 1992) con-

firmed that the native people had been disregarded, marginalized and
mistreated.
White people in the area, primarily in the community of Hudson’s
Hope, were treated with greater courtesy by government officials and
the bc Hydro corporation. Nevertheless, local residents were suffi-
ciently disturbed to publish their own book, This Was Our Valley (Pol-
lon and Matheson 1989). In it, they describe the expropriation and
compensation process as follows: “They [bc Hydro agents] sniffed
through the community, smelling out its most avaricious members,
those most susceptible to an offer. They spread rumours; they spread
lies ... they played on the social conscience of community members
accusing them of selfishness, of denying the greater good to the greater
number. And, in the final resort, judiciously at first, then more threat-
eningly ... they invoked the prospect of eminent domain. They did this
all without a sense of shame because they told themselves they were
serving an ultimate good” (209, 212). In Hudson’s Hope, white people
lost some homes. Economically, however, the town gained consider-
ably. Not so the Dene Ingenika, who developed both physical illnesses
and severe symptoms of psychological stress, “so we don’t know which
is the real sickness, or which is in our minds. But it didn’t used to be”
(Isaac, quoted in Pollon and Matheson 1989, 339).
Another British Columbia reservoir created by the Kemano Dam on
the Nechako River severely affected the Cheslatta Indian Band. The
treatment of the Cheslatta Carrier Indians has been described by a
member of the federal Royal Commission on Aboriginals as “a story
of horrors” (Hume 1993, Robertson 1993, 1; Wagg 1993, 1). The Alu-
minum Corporation of Canada (Alcan) called the Department of Indi-
an Affairs in March 1952, saying that the Cheslatta Band would need
to be evacuated. According to Marvin Charlie, who later was elected
chief of the Cheslatta people, they were self-sufficient and knew noth-
ing of the government until 3 April 1952 (Charlie, 1993). On that day,
the Department of Indian Affairs told the band to move from their
homes immediately. On 8 April the gates of the dam were closed and
the water started to rise, flooding some buildings. The Indian agent
called a meeting for 16 April, and the people gathered, but neither
Alcan nor the Department of Indian Affairs arrived. Finally, on 21
April, when many people had run out of food, officials arrived and
started to negotiate for land. Since there was no native chief, the Indi-
an agent appointed a government chief and two councillors. Few Indi-
ans spoke English.
People asked for compensation for “life” because they said that the
dam would destroy their way of life. Alcan promised that they would
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Everyday Domicide 147

replace what was left behind, pay for the land, and move two grave-
yards. Some graveyards were too old to move, and so the grave hous-
es and markers were gathered together and burned. A sign was placed
on them, which, as Chief Charlie recounts, reads: “Here be mens,
womens, children. May they rest in peace.” His description of this sign
is somehow more affecting than the reality, which is an aluminum
plaque reading: “This monument was erected in 1952 to the memory
of Indian men, women, and children of the Cheslatta Band, laid to rest
in the cemetery on Reservation Five, now under water. May they rest
in peace.”
The negotiations took two days. Some elders refused to move but
were told that the law would come, and then there would be no com-
pensation. Often surrender was executed by taking each individual out
of the meeting separately. The first person would be offered $5,000,
the next $6,000. Many of the younger people left on saddle horses with
only what they could carry. Two weeks after the move, all the houses
were burned, barns were torched, and everything was plowed over by
machines. The Alcan contractors refused to burn the church, and in
June, the Indian agent flew in by helicopter and burned it down. Char-
lie says that, despite having to wander around for three years to find
land to buy: “All this did not bother us so much ... but when [the]
graveyard was flooded [including the grave of one of his brothers], that
really hurt my people.”
The Cheslatta people moved to the Grassy Plains area and lived in
tents and cabins. “We were refugees in our own country” (Charlie,
1993). They bought their own land, and despite promises, have never
been reimbursed for their lost land or equipment. They lost their live-
stock, their way of life, their way of hunting, and almost their own lan-
guage. When Charlie was elected chief in 1990 he noted that in the old
graveyards, not one person buried there had died of alcohol or suicide.
In the new reserve, there were three huge graveyards and every other
death was from drug or alcohol abuse. Ninety-seven per cent of his
people were on welfare. This factor simply exacerbated the effects of
loss of home, all of which have been redressed in part by Marvin Char-
lie. He has worked to create job opportunities for the young people on
his reserve, and now the welfare roll has dropped to 35 per cent. They
have “found out where their roots were, where their ancestors were ...
bringing them back to the ground where they come from.” All this was
again threatened by the Kemano Completion Project, which, through
lowering of water levels on the Nechako River to create more hydro-
electric power, would, according to Charlie, ensure that “the lake is
going to die, and my people will die too.” The British Columbia gov-
ernment’s announcement on 23 January 1995 that this project had
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148 domicide

been cancelled may have come as good news to the Cheslatta; concern
about protection of the fisheries resource remains.
The disregard for native peoples in the creation of major projects
was summed up by Isak Dinesen thus: “It is more than the land you
take away from the people, whose native land you take. It is their past
as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that
they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a
way, as well take their eyes” (1972, 375). Yet, our final example of
domicide, the Oldman River Dam in Alberta, points out the similari-
ties between people who use the land for their livelihood, whether they
are indigenous or settlers. Million’s doctoral dissertation, It was Home,
takes its title from a dispossessed white rancher, whose words surely
form an epitaph for all such circumstances: “It was home. So thinking
of leaving it was painful. But thinking it was to be all gone, all
destroyed, that was the hardest part. I mean you’ll never be able to see
it again, to walk on it again” (1992, 131).
Million’s work on the Oldman River Dam ranch displacements is
useful in its consideration of the cycle of attachment, uprooting, and
resettlement. The founding of place involves “work-in, pleasure-in,
name-in, and living-within-place,” while the subsequent growth of
belonging includes “everything-in-place, habit-in-place, and time-in-
place.” The process of uprooting and forced journeying demands a
sequence of “becoming uneasy, struggling to stay, having to accept,
securing a settlement, and searching for the new,” while the final stage,
rebuilding place, involves “starting over, unsettling reminders, and
wanting to settle.”
Further useful insights to be found in Million’s work include: the
close “fit” that emerges between individuals, their homes, and sur-
roundings within the geography of a particular place; the pleasures of
working day in and day out on a place, often a place that holds a fam-
ily’s history; the existence of place as a totality of habits, and the deep-
ening of care that occurs for a place; the moments of “being uneasy”
and “seeing to believe” as projects move from the drawing board to
reality, followed by the “struggle to stay”; the belief that confrontation
is hopeless, that displacement is a contribution to the “common good”;
that being unable to return does not preclude recollection of place by
way of memory, but this past may be regarded as make-believe; and
that having to struggle to secure compensation causes an additional
violation of place, and that compensation principles overlook the
“pragmatic working totality” and the “embodiment of identity” of
place (Million 1992, 133). Million’s study provides an opportunity to
learn directly from individuals about the process of being displaced,
which materially assists our understanding of domicide.
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Everyday Domicide 149

In sum, the economic advantages of dam building are well known

and, in some cases, worthwhile. But there are also less obvious advan-
tages that accrue to engineering companies, development consultants,
United Nations agencies, major financiers such as the World Bank and
the Asian Development Bank, rich governments with aid to distribute,
and even those hired to supervise domicide with the least uproar. While
many of these advantages are indeed economic, they are also social and
political, centred on the immense prestige that accrues to those
engaged in megaprojects. Profit and prestige are quite sufficient for
most of those involved to overlook, minimize, or explain away the
tremendous environmental and social effects of such dams (Goldsmith
and Hildyard 1984).
Nevertheless, international opposition to both the environmental
outcomes and the plight of the one million “reservoir refugees”
uprooted each year has been vociferous. From the Sommers’ (1984)
quirky Scenic Drowning to Cummings’s (1990) Dam the Rivers, Damn
the People, many publications now chronicle the development of resis-
tance not only among international observers but, increasingly, among
those victimized by dam construction. This resistance is best chronicled
later in this book; we leave this section with a thought from that Cold
War novel of almost half a century ago, The Ugly American: “We
finance dams where the greatest immediate need is a portable pump”
(Lederer and Burdick 1958, 238).

c o nclu si o n

The central conflict of the twentieth century [is] the efforts of individuals,
families, and communities to preserve their freedom against the over-
whelming power of the techno-industrial superstate.
Edward Abbey (in Balian 1985, 59)

This review of domicide that occurs on an everyday basis through

urban redevelopment, economic restructuring, or the placement of
public facilities compels us to revise somewhat the conclusions gained
from the earlier study of extreme domicide. Here, the process is much
more subtle. Motives, for the most part, may be legitimate or even
admirable. Common good rhetoric makes more sense to the victims of
everyday domicide; even removals for purely profit-making enterprises
can be cloaked in the language of public interest, such as the genera-
tion of more local employment. Further, everyday domicidal actions
are almost invariably legal. These characteristics contrast with those of
extreme domicide, in which case subtlety is often absent and motives,
legalities, and common good rhetoric are usually suspect.
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150 domicide

Further, incidents of everyday domicide tend to occur on a smaller

scale, although super-dam projects can affect whole regions. And
everyday domicide is distinguished by its frequency; the chances of
being caught up in it can be quite high, depending upon who you are
and where you live. Governments are the proponents of many projects
that cause everyday domicide; their minimal role is to provide regula-
tion when projects are proposed by private interests. Leadership may
come from powerful politicians with particular visions of progress,
such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States or W.A.C. Ben-
nett in British Columbia. Other decision makers include high-level
bureaucrats who closely identify with the success of their projects and
have little interest in the communities they will inevitably dismember
or expunge. The benefits accrued by such persons are not primarily
economic but psychological – the sense of esteem that comes from the
successful implementation of a major project.
Significant planning activity often occurs before and during the pro-
jects, including, in cases such as the Roskill Commission, several years
of elaborate inquiry. Despite this, the values of those to be displaced
are often not adequately recognized. In Third World cases, in particu-
lar, traditional cultural relationships to land are generally ignored.
Inadequate communication between planners and planned-for is, sadly,
almost commonplace. Too frequently, those most affected simply have
no effective way to make their wishes known.
Protest against the prospect of domicide does occur, but it is not
often effective unless there is clever use of the media, as was the case
with the proposed third London airport. Usually, however, people
believe that confrontation is hopeless. During project implementation,
the expropriation process is often inadequate, leaving people to suffer
through anxiety. Too often, there is evidence less of maltreatment than
of lack of consideration for the victims. People forcibly relocated lose
more than loved homes; they also lose social networks and a sense of
belonging to both community and the physical environment that sup-
ports it. Many suffer anger, sadness, and grief, or even more serious
physiological and psychological effects.
Finally, while extreme domicide was shown to be, in some cases,
reversible, and certainly avoidable, everyday domicide occurs so often
that those who are not involved treat it as part of normal life. It is nei-
ther avoidable nor reversible. While bombed cities are rebuilt and
native peoples are recovering some of their ancestral lands, few of
those drowned out by dams or concreted out by airports will ever have
the chance to restore their homes. The following chapter presents two
in-depth studies of this irreversible drowning of home.
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CHAPTER F I V E

Drowning Home:
The Columbia River Basin
in British Columbia
Can we not maintain at least some semblance of dignity, some shadow of our
former selves? By leaving now, by collapsing and admitting defeat, we only
aid and abet the destructive plans of our occupiers. Should we not stay here
as long as we can, and live what remains of our cherished lives here as fully
and richly as we can? Each family that leaves now tears a permanent hole in
the web of our community life. No new neighbours will come to replace
those we lost: we are the last people who will live here, and we must band
together. Let us leave only when we must. Let us leave together, at the end –
not piecemeal, in panic and terror, at the beginning.
Frank B. Auberon, Sr., “Letters to the Editor,”
Paradise Valley Daily Transcript, (6 July 1927),
in Barrett (1992, 123).

In this chapter, we deepen our understanding of the concept of domi-

cide. All that has been discussed in previous chapters is tested by explor-
ing two British Columbia situations in which the drowning of home
occurred as a result of the construction of reservoirs for the Keenleyside
(High Arrow) Dam and the Libby Dam in the 1960s and in which,
today, a new association has arisen based on that original drowning of
home. This chapter asks the following questions: What did home mean
to the area residents? What did the residents of this area believe they
would lose when they lost their homes? What was the process by which
they lost their homes? What were the motives behind dam construction,
and who was responsible for these motives? Who benefited from dam
construction? What was the reaction of people to losing their homes,
and what effect did it have on them? and What plans were made to
assist people who were to lose their homes?
In answering these questions, it will become evident that the con-
struction of large hydroelectric projects provides a particularly vivid
and significant example of home destruction. There is a finality to the
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152 domicide

destruction; it is not possible to rebuild or even view the landscape on

which homes once existed.
Three major published sources deal with the Columbia River dams.
The first, Waterfield’s Continental Waterboy (1970), is an entertaining
“tale of what happens to people, to their homes, and to their habitable
valley when they get in the way of the apostles of progress and of
hydroelectric engineering.” Neil Swainson’s Conflict Over the Colum-
bia (1979), prepared from a political science perspective, clarifies the
background to, and considerations involved in, negotiations of the
Columbia River Treaty. The most significant source of information on
the measures taken to assist people who were displaced by the Arrow
Lakes project is People in the Way (1973) by J.W. Wilson. Wilson was
responsible for the resettlement program on behalf of the project devel-
oper, bc Hydro and Power Authority. He tells “the story of the attempt
to deal with the problems of human settlement and displacement
resulting from the Columbia River project” and how frequently “the
best laid plans ... gang aft agley” (Wilson 1973, xiii).
This chapter augments these published sources in its focus on hear-
ing those who would lose their homes from the perspective of the
process they endured and, in addition, bringing their story up to date.
Following a brief general description of the years leading up to
approval of the projects, public hearings relating to the projects are
described. The meaning of loss of home and reaction to the process of
losing home are discussed based on evidence from the public hearings
and other available sources. Finally, the question of who benefits in
these circumstances is discussed.

pr elud e to d o mic i d e – y e a rs
o f uncerta i n t y

The Libby and Keenleyside Dams are part of a comprehensive system

for flood control, navigation, and hydroelectric power in the Colum-
bia River Basin that straddles the border between the Canadian
province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington,
Idaho, and Montana. Creation of the dams had been discussed by the
United States and Canada from 1944, when the Canadian and Amer-
ican governments requested their International Joint Commission to
determine whether greater use could be made of the Columbia River
system. On 9 March 1945, Prime Minister Mackenzie King
announced that the Canadian government had requested the commis-
sion’s Columbia River Engineering Board to survey hydroelectric and
flood control potential. Despite the presence of surveyors in the area
from this time and warnings from their mp, H.W. Herridge, most
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Drowning Home 153

people took little interest in the proposal beyond their attendance at a

few local meetings. This changed when us Senator Richard L. Neu-
berger made a grand tour of the area and, in addressing the Nakusp
Chamber of Commerce, ended with the threat: “If you Canadians
continue to delay the building of storage, we shall have to consider
your behaviour an unfriendly act between nations.” The dams were
represented by Neuberger as an essential response to the needs of a
growing population and to the improved post-Second World War
economy, thereby introducing the public interest argument to this
situation for the first time.
However, the need for the dams and for flood control through the
creation of upstream water storage suddenly became even more press-
ing. As a result of serious flooding in 1948, Trail, British Columbia,
was inundated, and in the United States, fifty lives were lost and $100
million in property was damaged. Recognizing the possibilities of com-
prehensive development including the provision of flood control, a
number of options were presented, and discussion relating to these
options ensued for many years.
In December 1960, Waterfield (1970, 35) reports that the Arrow
Lakes residents began to hear rumours from afar that an agreement
had been finalized between the United States and Canada. The
Columbia River Treaty was signed on 17 January 1961 and ratified
16 September 1964 following a bitter debate by a large section of the
Canadian population regarding the sovereignty of Canada’s water.
The treaty’s preamble consisted of the following words: “Recogniz-
ing that their peoples have, for many generations, lived together and
cooperated with one another in many aspects of their national enter-
prises for the greater wealth and happiness of their respective
nations.” It required that Canada provide more than 19 million
cubic metres of storage by the construction of three dams: two on
the Columbia River – the Mica and High Arrow (Keenleyside); and
one on the Duncan River (Canada 1964). The British Columbia
Power Commission (subsequently known as bc Hydro) was named
as the Canadian entity responsible for constructing and operating
the three treaty dams. The Libby Dam was also accepted, and the
American Bonneville Power Administration was made responsible
for its operation. Of the four dams, the Keenleyside and Libby Dams
were the only two that significantly affected the population in
British Columbia.
In the words of one of the treaty’s opponents: “The present treaty
assigns all the risks and obligations to Canada and most of the
benefits to the United States. An outsider reading the terms of the
treaty could be excused for assuming they had been imposed on a
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154 domicide

conquered country which has surrendered unconditionally after a

war. The terms represent a perpetual erosion of Canada’s self respect;
a national characteristic that already is in a frail condition” (Ripley
1964, 60). Before construction could occur, however, there were
many years of uncertainty and pain for the perople who would be dis-
placed. This had started years before, when public hearings (of a sort)
were held.

pub li c h ea r i n g s

Many of the benefits of building the Libby Dam were confirmed by the
International Columbia River Engineering Board and acknowledged
by residents of the Kootenay Valley near Creston in the hearings that
were held in July 1948 by the International Joint Commission (Swain-
son 1979, 43). Public hearings were also held by the International Joint
Commission in Spokane, Nelson, and Cranbrook in March 1951. In
fact, the hearings’ transcripts reflect mainly the positions held by the
provincial and federal governments and only to a much lesser degree,
those of individuals in the area. The commission was represented by
General A.G.L. McNaughton, chairman of the Canadian Section, and
A.O. Stanley, chairman of the us Section.
The official statement from the Province of British Columbia did not
oppose the project but requested prompt protection and indemnity of
all interests in British Columbia that would be affected by the erection
and operation of the works; recognition for loss of taxes and for the
loss to the economy of the province of the productive value of the lands
to be flooded; and an amount of electrical power to be delivered in
British Columbia as the commission deemed appropriate.
The Government of Canada did not oppose the application either,
citing its “sensitivity to the potential costs to Canada as a whole of a
major frustration of a strongly-held American desire” (Swainson 1979,
46), but submitted that the approval should be subject to conditions to
ensure protection and indemnity against injury of all interests in Cana-
da that might be affected by the construction and operation of the dam
and reservoir, as provided by Article viii of the Boundary Waters
Treaty, 1909, and a fair recompense to Canada for the utilization by
the project of Canadian natural resources.
Of the few other statements from those appearing at the hearings,
one is of particular interest. It is therefore produced at length. The
statement to Commissioners A.O. Stanley and General McNaughton is
by Jack Aye, a Canadian rancher from the South Country (Lake
Kookanusa area), who was to lose his home (International Joint Com-
mission 1951):
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Drowning Home 155

Aye: There are a few questions that I would like to ask on behalf of some of the
ranchers in the district that are going to be flooded. At first we had thought
about organizing, but on giving it further thought we decided that it would be
futile for us to try and stop the building of this dam. I know myself for one, I
am certainly not in favour of it, probably for a very selfish reason. We have
spent the most productive part of our lives building up a ranch that will be
flooded in this area, and the place is just now starting to produce. It is not into
production yet, and it is not a very nice feeling to have something like this come
on you. But, I do not feel there is anything I can do to stop it, but I would like
to know how much longer we are going to have it hanging over our heads here.
If they are going to go on and build this dam I feel that we should get a set-
tlement so that we can get out of there, and get started again before we are too
late altogether.
I am afraid that I do not agree with Mr. Melrose here that there is plenty of
room on land in the district to move us ranchers to. I have not seen any place
in there, and I have lived there all my life, that would be up out of the flood,
out of the river bottom that will be flooded that would take the place of what
I have.
Stanley: In making this, just like when a railroad goes into a piece of land, or
a mill floods it, it depends upon the value of the land, and the value by reason
of what is destroyed by the loss of the land will be taken into consideration.
All these things will be taken into consideration, and I do wish to assure you,
my friend, that you would not have to wait until the dam is built to be com-
pensated. That can be done before that, and it often is. You are worse scared
than hurt. We are going to take care of you.
Aye: Yes, but there is another point there. It is very easy for a man on the out-
side to say, “Well, you are getting paid for it, you will get paid for it.” How
much? When? Where? If a man comes along to buy your place, you make a
deal, and if you don’t like it, you don’t deal. This is a different proposition.
You, gentlemen, the Government, they say: “Here now, we are going to build
this dam.” But I cannot say that I am going to stay there.
Stanley: Going to what?
Aye: I cannot say I am going to stay there. It is a very different proposition. It
is a different setup altogether.
Stanley: These things happen every day. Every time you build a railroad, every
time you build a highway from your market, from your farm to your market,
you exercise, the Government exercises what they call the power of expropri-
ation. It is the duty of every good citizen to waive his gains ... But I do believe
in the right of a Government to do these things necessary for the benefit of all
of us, and then [give] our good citizens ... complete and adequate monetary
compensation, and that without delay.
Gen. McNaughton: I would like to state from the point of view of the Cana-
dian Section of this Commission, I would like to reaffirm what my colleague
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156 domicide

has said, the Chairman of the American Section, that the Treaty provides that
the payments for compensation have got to be on such a scale that the Com-
mission are satisfied as to the equity, and so we are not only to help forward
the project which needs to be undertaken in the general public interest, but we
are here as trustees over and above the governments, in this case to measure
the compensation to be paid to individuals who are hurt or damaged in the
process of making their land and property available for the public good, that
they will receive compensation which is just. Otherwise, no permission to
build a dam can go. That is settled by Treaty. I can give you assurance on that
score.
Stanley: In addition to that, the treaty provides that we must give you adequate
compensation, and every individual must be compensated for his land or prop-
erty at the time that it is taken. We will compensate you at the time that we
take your property, and give you an adequate return for every nickel that it cost
you. We do not want to split hairs with you over a shirt tail full of land.

Attendance at the second Canadian public hearing held at Nelson in

March 1951 was similar to the Cranbrook meeting. Of particular
interest is the statement by Guy Constable in favour of the application
on behalf of the Associated Drainage District of Creston, the Associat-
ed Boards of Trade, and the Associated Drainage Districts. He noted
that the project would allow the additional reclamation of 6880
hectares of land, which would no longer be subject to periodic inun-
dation. This was equal to the amount that had been reclaimed up to
that time – a clear statement of an expected benefit to the region, if not
to all the people of the South Country.
The treaty enabling the Hugh Keenleyside Dam, which affected the
Arrow Lakes area, was signed without benefit of any real representa-
tion from the people who were to be displaced. When, on 6 February
1961, a delegation from the area to be affected by the dam went to Vic-
toria to protest, they are purported to have been told by Dr. Hugh
Keenleyside of bc Hydro “that they should have faith in the people
running the country and should accept their decision as being in the
best interests of all concerned” (Canada, House of Commons 1964,
602).
The only hearings occurred in Revelstoke, Nakusp, Castlegar, and
Victoria in the fall of 1961, and these were part of the water licensing
process, which is primarily concerned with the impact of water use on
the holders of existing water licences (Comptroller of Water Rights
1961 a,b,c). Unlike some jurisdictions that base water law on riparian
rights, proprietary rights to water are vested in the Province of British
Columbia, and the opportunity to use or divert water is subject to a
licence. The issuance of licences is based on whether or not sufficient
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Drowning Home 157

water exists. Consideration of intangibles, such as the significance of

loss of home, was beyond the scope of the comptroller’s hearings. In
the words of one resident, the hearings were “a farce” (Wilson and
Conn 1983, 46).
The editorial from the Arrow Lakes News (1961), a broadsheet
published by bc Hydro for local residents, for the week of the hearings
stated:

On Friday and Saturday of last week, in the Legion Hall, Nakusp, the town’s
residents and those from the neighbouring districts, Galena Bay to Edgewood,
were “on the stand” to defend their homes and valley, from destruction, by the
High Arrow Dam.
The “court” was conducted according to law, and we can well be proud of
the very fine material presented by a large number of our citizens and the excel-
lent manner of presentation. Dignity and sincerity were evident in most briefs,
from those who spoke without notes to the most elaborately prepared docu-
ment by the larger organizations.
The trust and considered thought put into all material presented made a
favourable impression on the chairman, Mr. Paget, and also on Dr. Keenley-
side, the chairman of the B.C. Power Commission.
No political prejudices entered the appeals. No superficial supposed reasons
were offered. This was a “court” where each individual was fighting for that
which was closest to him or her – his home, his living, and his country …
Somehow, we feel that these expressions will not go unheeded, but will find
a sympathetic ear, and a second look will be taken at the whole situation of
Columbia development, to make it really development, not destruction.

But the Arrow Lakes’ residents who spoke against dam construction
were not successful, and the water licence appurtenant to the project
was issued on 16 April 1962, the comptroller “being satisfied that no
person’s rights are injuriously affected” (British Columbia Department
of Lands, Forests, and Water Resources 1962).
In the terms of the licence, the only clause that directly related to the
human inhabitants of the reservoir area read that: “The licensee shall
review with the Comptroller of Water Rights prior to expropriation
under the Water Act or any other Act any matter where the licensee is
unable to reach agreement with the owner or owners of land affected
by the works and the operation thereof as authorized under the
licence.” Even after issuance of the licence, the Arrow Lakes residents
continued to doubt their impending fate due to continued bickering
between Premier Bennett of British Columbia and Davie Fulton, the
federal minister of Justice. However, their sense of security was to be
short-lived.
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158 domicide

In April 1963, the Liberals came into power at the federal level with
a narrow majority and signed an agreement with British Columbia that
made it clear that High Arrow would go ahead. Then the federal Exter-
nal Affairs Committee was convened by the minister of External
Affairs, Paul Martin, to accept or reject the treaty; no alterations were
permitted. The treaty was accepted, the way was paved for the treaty’s
ratification on 16 September 1964, and the fate of the Arrow Lakes
residents was sealed. This decision would cost the 2,300 people who
lived along the Arrow Lakes their way of life, their well-being, and
their long-accustomed environment.
The process leading to treaty ratification including the public hear-
ings illustrates aspects of domicide discussed in chapters 3 and 4. The
concept of benefit at local, regional, and national levels is revealed.
For the victims, there is the sense of futility regarding any possibility
of resistance; the pain of uncertainty; the difficulty of leaving land that
has been worked for years to reach a productive state and the sense
that nothing will replace it; the need for a quick settlement and com-
pensation to allow those who were affected to find a new home, new
land, and start the work necessary to get into production again; the
victims’ superior familiarity with the land compared with that of the
officials; the official paternalism in negotiating the domicidal process
(“we are going to take care of you”); the assumption that victims will
always bend to the common good; and the giving of false promises.
Given these feelings, it is important to examine the process of project
development.

pro ject d evel o p m e n t

In response to the impending flooding of the South Country behind the

Libby Dam, the British Columbia government was held responsible for
the procurement and preparation of land. To this end, the bc Water
Resources Service issued a letter and brochure to residents of the area
in the summer of 1968 introducing the program of reservoir operation,
but unfortunately its delivery was delayed by a mail strike. Next, a
preliminary Guide to Property Owners, which explained the benefits
of the project and its extent, was delivered. The brochure indicated
that the lake to be formed would extend sixty-seven kilometres into
British Columbia, covering 7,223 hectares of land. Filling of the reser-
voir was to begin in 1972.
Many different agencies of the British Columbia government were to
be involved: the British Columbia Water Resources Service as respon-
sible coordinating agency; the Department of Highways for land acqui-
sition and road relocation; and the British Columbia Forest Service for
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Drowning Home 159

directing the clearing of the reservoir area. The bc Water Resources

Service, Power and Special Projects Section, an engineering depart-
ment, also became an unofficial ombudsman to represent people’s
interests (albeit from the capital city of Victoria).
Two small communities, Waldo and Newgate, were seriously affect-
ed, while other areas suffered adverse effects from the dam construc-
tion. The agencies directed an operation that resulted in the flooding of
one hundred parcels of land and partially affected a further 120
parcels. There were 134 owners of the land parcels and twenty-five
ranchers – about 200 people in all – who were to be affected as a result
of the Libby Dam construction. The fate of these residents was dis-
cussed with them at a public meeting attended by 150 people in the
school hall at Baynes Lake on 11 September 1968. Seven staff from the
Water Resources and Forest Service, as well as representatives from the
Highways Department, were in attendance (bc Water Resources Ser-
vice 19 September 1968). Many assurances were given.
The meeting was opened by an official of the bc Water Resources
Service with a description of the Columbia River Treaty, the policy on
reservoir preparation, and a general timetable that contemplated land
appraisals starting in September 1968, acquisition beginning in Octo-
ber 1968, clearing commencing in spring 1969, program completion
by December 1971, and reservoir storage to begin mid-1972. The
speaker stressed that “all property owners will be treated honestly and
fairly and on the same basis” (Fernie Free Press 1968). This was fol-
lowed by another address from the Water Resources Service in which
the dam was described as well as the amount of land to be acquired. A
map reserve, which ensured that crown lands would be retained, was
to be placed around the reservoir to curtail speculation and to make
certain that displaced persons could remain in the valley.
The Department of Highways property negotiator indicated that all
appraisals would be undertaken by an independent appraiser from the
American or Canadian Institute of Appraisers. Appraisals were to be
undertaken, and then negotiations would occur when all the informa-
tion was available. Full payment was to be made once the survey was
complete; in the meantime, partial payment was available. Voluntary
resettlement was expected, with compensation adjustments to be made
later.
Following these presentations, there were only twenty-seven ques-
tions, since those who attended the Baynes Lake meeting had been
advised that questions relating to private land holdings could not be
answered at a public meeting. Many sought general information relating
to the use or disposal of agricultural land and stocks, the flood level, and
the fate of the community of Waldo; others commented on the delays in
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160 domicide

starting the preparation program. Only the first question and answer are
noted as of particular interest to this discussion (Borneman 1993):

Question: Since we are forced off our land, is there any payment or compen-
sation for the inconvenience created? How can a ranch be relocated in three
months? We are caught in a trap for 20 years ... since 1966, we cannot ranch
from year to year.
Answer: To be forced off the land is not in my jurisdiction. Three months to
relocate is not correct. First amount paid is substantial, approximately 80%. It
is recognized that land owners are being displaced. This is taken into account
in the settlement.

Of significance in this interchange are a number of issues: the request

for adequate compensation including compensation for disruption; the
sense of entrapment caused by the lengthy time between project
announcement and implementation; and the difficulties caused by the
number of players involved from the government side in major pro-
jects. All of these difficulties contrast with the assurances of Senator
Stanley and General McNaughton given in 1951.
Department of Highways officials were to visit the affected area in
the fall of 1968 to begin negotiations for the acquisition of land. Even
at this time, some properties had been offered for sale voluntarily.
However, for others, the following words in a brochure were intended
to give comfort:

Despite the fact that our Province will become richer, more stable, and more
accessible as a result of the Columbia River Treaty projects, of which the Libby
project is the last to be developed, we realize that the owners of the property
affected by the Libby Dam Reservoir are deeply concerned.
For you, it will mean dislocation and change. Some of you may be pleased
to sell your properties to us because it suits your plans to move elsewhere.
Some of you, understandably, would prefer to stay where you are and have no
desire to sell.
We cannot avoid the impact the development will have on your lives, but it
is our intention to assist you as far as we reasonably can to ensure that the
changes will take place as smoothly as possible (bc Water Resources Service
Draft 1968).

The brochure went on to describe, in general terms, the land that

would be needed, how the appraisal of land values would be made,
how offers would be made, how expropriation would be used only
when necessary, when it would be time to move, and how new com-
munities could be established.
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Drowning Home 161

In contrast, the Arrow Lakes Project was much larger in scale and
was subject to a more elaborate planning process. Construction of
the project necessitated the acquisition of 4,376 parcels of land, of
which about a quarter were owned by the Crown. The remainder
were acquired from 1,350 private owners. Fourteen lakefront com-
munities disappeared; 2,000 people living in the valley, 615 house-
holds, and 269 farmsteads and small ranches were affected. In addi-
tion, the land acquisition program affected many businesses and
community institutions.
Remembering that there was very little onus on the project develop-
er to care for the needs of those the project would displace (i.e., the
water licence only required that the licensee review with the Comp-
troller of Water Rights prior to expropriation any matter where the
licensee is unable to reach agreement with the owner or owners of
land), the goals and activities of bc Hydro were significant. A redevel-
opment committee was established, with the goal to ensure the inten-
tion of the bc government “that any adjustments required by the
Columbia developments shall be made in a fair and equitable manner”
(bc Hydro 1961, 4). This five-person committee made contact with
organizations and persons in the affected area and invited written sub-
missions. In addition, their chair, H.D.C. Hunter, travelled from
Castlegar to Revelstoke, explaining the proposed project to affected
persons. At this time, bc Hydro also undertook a comprehensive cen-
sus, title search of affected lands, and an economic study.
Once the treaty was ratified in 1964, bc Hydro published a booklet
for property owners in which assurances were given that the Columbia
Region would become richer, more stable, and more accessible and
that the commission would assist residents “as far as we can to ensure
that the changes will take place as smoothly as possible” (bc Hydro
1964, 2). In 1965, in The New Outlook, bc Hydro (1965) told the res-
idents of the Arrow Lakes valley what their options were in terms of
resettlement, including resettlement to a larger community (such as
Nakusp, Revelstoke, or Castlegar), out of the valley, or to a new com-
munity. Three new communities were eventually created at Edgewood,
Burton, and Fauquier.
Besides the activities described above, other actions were taken (bc
Hydro 1966). These included: the publication of a Columbia News Let-
ter, which kept the valley residents updated on the project; the publica-
tion of a regional plan and public discussions of this plan; the appoint-
ment of an Ombudsman, Chief Justice Colquhoun of the Supreme Court
of British Columbia, who acted as a special Commissioner to advise
those who believed their rights or interests were adversely affected; and
the appointment of a former bc deputy minister of agriculture to help
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162 domicide

the aged and infirm to relocate; helping waterfront property owners to

buy Crown-owned waterfront property elsewhere; holding community
meetings; giving community planning and other financial assistance to
schools and hospitals; arranging for appropriate donation of historic
articles; performing economic and archaeological studies; providing sig-
nificant community infrastructure in the form of tourist facilities, parks
and beaches, marine facilities, housing subdivisions, new cemeteries,
waterfront protection, water supply systems, roads, and power lines.
However, despite these efforts, as Premier Bennett opened the Arrow
Lakes Dam in 1969 and renamed it after Hugh Keenleyside of bc
Hydro, the hecklers “protested against honouring the man who had
come to symbolize for them the tyranny of bc Hydro” (Hodgson 1976,
204). mp Bert Herridge, who fought for the preservation of the Arrow
Lakes for twenty years, placed a quarter page advertisement in the Nel-
son Valley News on behalf of the Mourners of the Arrow Lakes Non-
Partisan Association. The effect on people who were to lose their
homes is still of significance.

th e pro c es s o f d o m i c i d e
and wh at was l o st

While an assessment of what losing home would mean in the Arrow

Lakes area was derived mainly from the water licence hearings, the
story of some of those who lost their homes in the construction of the
Libby Dam has been recreated from files and press reports. In both
cases, comments heard in the course of the Kootenay Symposium meet-
ings held at Cranbrook and Castlegar in June 1993, and described in a
following section, added additional information. During the meeting in
Cranbrook, particularly, in one of the smaller sessions, people shared
their feelings about the past. For this observer (Smith), it was remark-
able how they could speak so easily, and apparently without malice, of
a past about which they clearly must hold some rancour. The notes
taken can never adequately capture the faces of two of the women who
told the story with a smiling calm.
To a large degree, it is a story of the enormous difficulties encoun-
tered by these people. Together, these sources tell a little of people’s
feelings about their homes, but more about the way in which they were
treated. One caution is necessary here. As the files and newspaper
accounts are reviewed, certain “stories” repeat themselves, a situation
not unlike the traditions created within societies that depend on oral
history. To some degree, this “perception” may be understood as “real-
ity,” for in such stressful circumstances, these stories become the only
reality for the victims.
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Drowning Home 163

From the information gathered about the creation of the Libby

Reservoir, one effect is more clearly demonstrated than all others:
namely, the problems associated with the process. These problems may
be generally described as the difficulty in finding a new home and
appropriate land at an affordable price, problems associated with the
method and length of negotiations, and the uncertainties surrounding
expropriation and compensation. Negotiations were still ongoing
towards the end of 1972, even though water flooding behind the dam
was to start on 17 April 1973. In late 1972, there were still fifteen set-
tlements to be reached, including four families whose homes would be
inundated. It must be acknowledged that British Columbia’s expropri-
ation laws were less than adequate at this time and have since been
improved; however, much of the problem can be attributed to the split
in responsibilities for reservoir clearance between several government
departments. The confusion that this engendered is summarized by Leo
Nimsick, then minister of Mines and Petroleum Resources, when he
wrote to the lawyer of a constituent: “I find many of these problems
very difficult to analyze because there is so much hearsay evidence and
very little written down in black and white. A big mistake was made at
the start of this whole affair when the negotiations were not placed
under one negotiator and with the power to buy the people outright by
written agreement. Now I find that many of the people are saying they
were promised things and the people to whom they refer deny any of
it” (bc Water Resources Service, 1972–1981). For persons who were to
be displaced, it was difficult to find a new home and to deal with dis-
posal of existing assets given the conditions of uncertainty surrounding
the Libby Reservoir project.
The length of time that it took for negotiations is very apparent. Pre-
sumably, some of this delay arose when residents chose to hold out,
hoping for the highest price. Nevertheless, it is a part of the process of
losing home that cannot be ignored. One person complained about
how appraisal and settlement offers were handled, including the pre-
sentation of one expropriation offer during a wedding reception, and
two offers by a lawyer who arrived late in the evening, apparently
intoxicated. This circumstance led to an article in the Vancouver Sun
titled “Rancher vows he’ll stay put until dam floods his land,” which
stated: “The waters of the Libby Dam pondage are steadily inching
toward the home of an 86-year-old pioneer rancher near here. But
Henry Sharpe is determined to stay until he gets a satisfactory settle-
ment for his flooded land. He is one of 13 individuals and three com-
panies still trying to reach agreement with the government over com-
pensation for their property ... ‘My husband’s going to stay put in our
ranch house until the water comes,’ said Mrs. Sharpe Saturday. ‘If he
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164 domicide

doesn’t stay there the government might come in and burn it down –
they’ve done that to other people’” (Farrow 1972).
Underlying all of the difficulties for those persons who did not set-
tle until the very last moment was their firm belief that the govern-
ment did not appreciate the value of their land. Appraisals were based
on specific criteria (bc Water Resources Service 1972–1981). While
the appraisal guidelines may have tried to create a fair process, many
of the ranchers eventually hired an independent appraiser because the
government-appointed appraisers did not appear or their valuations
were considered unfair: “I have had no attention paid to my appraisal,
instead I have had to deal with people that appear to have no idea of
the value of ranch land, refuse to meet with my appraiser, and prefer
intimidation type of tactics when dealing with the people” (bc Water
Resources Service 1969). Further: “And the people who haven’t set-
tled can’t afford to for the offers they’ve received. There are discrep-
ancies of $30,000 to $40,000 between the prices offered and what the
people believe their property is worth” (Farrow 1971). But to counter
this, the lawyer for the Highways Department, who grew up in the
valley and recognized the bitterness of the “victims,” insisted that the
prices were fair: “The trouble is that people have become bitter over
being uprooted and not knowing where to go. But simply because
someone is sentimentally attached to a place doesn’t mean that we can
give him an extra $50,000 of taxpayer’s money ... Sure, I’ll try my best
to work out some agreement with a landowner. But it’s got to be jus-
tified. You can’t put a price on sentimentality. Its simply a case of pub-
lic good taking priority over individual rights” (Farrow 1971). This
statement seems to underlie the apparent belief by many that, while it
is difficult to give up your home, such an action is acceptable, given
adequate compensation. In the end, given the momentum that devel-
ops around major project construction, it is often this question of
compensation that forms the basis for resistance by the victims rather
than any feelings about home.
Resistance in these circumstances is frequently led by one or two
individuals. A speaker at the Kootenay Symposium meetings, held in
Cranbrook on 4 June 1993, paid tribute to Lloyd Sharpe, describing
his “valiant effort” on behalf of the ranchers, but, in the words of the
speaker, “it was bigger than all of us.” Sharpe was spokesman for the
ranchers and fought against the project for many years. In particular,
he objected to the length of time that the negotiations for expropria-
tion took and the values placed on the ranches. When asked to discuss
the benefits of what had happened, one delegate at the Kootenay Sym-
posium said that it “brought out how little power people have” and
“the need to tell future generations to fight for everything ... to put in
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Drowning Home 165

a wide open process for negotiation ... and legislation which will pro-
tect individuals – the common thing is for the common good.” The
speaker felt that the “common good” would always prevail over the
rights of individuals.
In general, the loss of home to those affected by the Libby Dam
meant loss of a beautiful place, livelihood, family, identity, familiar sur-
roundings, and community. It also had a negative effect on their health.
To put it most simply, “it was a beautiful valley” (Kootenay Sympo-
sium 1993 c). One reporter suggested that the 300-acre Island Ranch,
owned by Lloyd Sharpe and founded by his father in 1917, was the
most beautiful place of all, with its “lush meadows and woods
abound[ing] with deer, moose, elk, and bear” (McCandlish 1971).
Another spoke of a property where, “from the living-room window,
you look across a little valley and see cattle on their winter grounds. A
creek runs through the valley, which is dotted with a few small lakes”
(Jacobs 1968, 58).
Given the rural nature of this area, it is not surprising to learn that
loss of livelihood was a major concern, particularly for the twenty-six
ranchers of the area who became “victims of the great Columbia River
Treaty” (Jacobs 1968, 10). This situation must have been particularly
difficult for the men who had come home from the Second World War
to settle in the valley, only to see the Libby pondage occur (Kootenay
Symposium 1993 c). In 1951, United States Senator Stanley had told
the ranchers: “You will not lose a dime – we will pay you big Ameri-
can dollars” (Jacobs 1968, 3). But the ranchers claimed that they had
been losing for a long time prior to the dam construction. Because the
project was under consideration, the government recognized that
expansion of the ranches through crown land would cost money when
it came time for expropriation. Hence crown land sales were terminat-
ed. In reaction, Jack Aye, the community leader who had ranched in
the Sand Creek area on the borders of the Kootenay River for thirty-
one years, and whose comments at the International Joint Commission
hearings seventeen years earlier have been quoted at the beginning of
this chapter, stressed the cost of uncertainty:

After World War II, up till quite recently, ranchers anywhere but here could
expand. Some of them bought crown land at $3 an acre, which they could
develop; others got additional grazing permits, or leases, or S.U.P.’s. We could-
n’t do anything. If we had been smart, we would have sold out then and taken
our chances somewhere else. We kept thinking next year we’d know what the
score was and we might be able to make a deal.
Another thing works against us ... this area is dead if you try to sell it. Who
would pay any real money for a place along here, knowing that it could be
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166 domicide

flooded at any time? Who would lend you money to buy a place? The few
places which have sold, have traded under value – really at ridiculous prices.
When the government does come to expropriate, they’re going to look at these
low prices and figure that’s what our land is worth. And how can we put a
value on what is lost in the last 20 years because the government hasn’t let us
expand our units? (Jacobs 1968, 54).

Besides loss of the physical structure, loss of home also meant loss of
family and community. Persons attending the Kootenay Symposium
recognized that before the reservoir was formed, there was a commu-
nity that was of importance to its residents. One person stressed the
special generosity of the people of this area. Another felt that breaking
up the social fabric of the community should have a price tag, too,
“just as it did with the restoration of communities in Los Angeles after
the race riots.” But many people did leave the area entirely and now
are forgotten. A few people remain, but they feel that new people mov-
ing into the area do not become so involved in the community. One
speaker, from the generation after those directly affected, noted that
many of their relatives lived south of them, and when the valley was
cleared, they were the only ones left. Family histories were lost (Koote-
nay Symposium 1993 c).
Loss of home is particularly hard for those who have lived in the
same area for much of their lives. One couple affected by the reservoir
had lived in their ranch house for fifty years. Another said: “All my
working life, I have lived right on this ranch. Where are you going to
find a place like the one you grew up on?” (Jacobs 1968, 54). Others
lost only half their land, but it was difficult to begin building a new
home on the same lot on which they had lived all their lives. One per-
son felt that “It looks as if the government’s policy is to drown us out
like gophers and then if any survive, keep making excuses until we die
of old age” (bc Water Resources Service 1972–1981). It was perhaps
easier to just give up in these circumstances: “Sure, its hard uprooting
yourself after living in the same place for years,” he said, “but I don’t
have much longer to go, and I’ll let the younger men fight the govern-
ment” (McCandlish 1971).
For older persons, the effect of stress and uncertainty was particu-
larly evident: “There have been some elderly people around here who
died of worry,” she said. “Ownership seems to mean nothing to the
government. It’s so unsettling not knowing what we are going to do in
the future” (Farrow 1972). And “His health is failing and he is worry-
ing himself sick over our situation. He repeats ‘if I should die tomor-
row, you haven’t even got a home,’ which I know a lot of people don’t
have. But we did own a comfortable home ... and did not owe a cent
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Drowning Home 167

to any one. We have had this terrible debt over our heads and heavy
on our hearts for 1 1/2 yrs. now, and it is surely showing” (bc Water
Resources Service 1972–1981).
Some people became ill or were very disturbed by the negotiation
process, finding difficulty in coming to terms with the reality of the sit-
uation (Kootenay Symposium 1993 c). A Forest Service crew member,
who was sent in to burn the evacuated houses, tells of one occupant
who simply left all his furniture and departed the night before his
house was to be destroyed, compensated either inadequately or so well
that his future relationship with his neighbours might be called into
question (Bugslag, 1993). A negotiator acting on behalf of the ranch-
ers said: “It is a deplorable situation. They are driving the hearts and
minds out of those poor ranchers” (Farrow 1971). At the Kootenay
Symposium, it was suggested that compensation should be given for
the stress of forty years that had hung over their heads and those of
their children (Kootenay Sympsoium 1993 c). In the final analysis,
however, another delegate recognized that money doesn’t replace the
things you hold dear (Kootenay Symposium 1993 d).
Review of the process and meaning of domicide in the Arrow Lakes
situation reveals many similar themes to those expressed in the Lake
Kookanusa area affected by the Libby Dam. Because most of the infor-
mation was gathered from the hearings’ transcripts, the perspective
provided is frequently from people who still may have felt that they
had some hope of changing their circumstances. Three themes are iden-
tified: namely, the plague of uncertainty, the feeling of injustice, and
finally, the sense of bereavement and bitterness felt. Over and over
again, people at the hearings related feelings of uncertainty, feelings
which affect both individuals who seek certainty as to their future and
the community where a sort of “planning blight” sets in: “I understood
when a man came in there first and spoke about the dam that this
would take place, and in the very near future, but it has dragged on
and dragged on until I don’t know what to do any more, whether to
do any more improvements or not, although I have done some things,
but things are pretty much at a standstill” (Comptroller 1961c, 833).
And “Every place I go, I make my living up in the Arrow Lakes for
over 25 years, and through the indecision of our Governments, I have
been unable to get any work. Nobody wants to repair anything. Every
place you go, the people are really nervous, and only people who make
something out are doctors and chiropractors” (Comptroller 1961c,
820). Finally, people could only hope that “what you have to do, and
feel is your duty to do, may it be done quickly and put an end to this
uncertainty, this pall which has descended on this area where no deci-
sions can be made” (Comptroller 1961b, 642).
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168 domicide

The prospect of domicide might have been better accepted if there

had been some certainty around the issue of compensation. Certain-
ly Wilson believes that the whole Arrow Lakes program was over-
shadowed by the issue of compensation (Wilson 146). Hugh Keen-
leyside, speaking on behalf of bc Hydro at the water licence hearings,
had made it clear that no decision had been made about a fixed rate
of payment and stressed that each case deserved individual compen-
sation. He suggested that each family would be paid the market value
of their land plus a bonus of 10 per cent for forcible taking. But the
problem was that the value of the land in the area had been depressed
because of the years of uncertainty over project construction, and
sometimes it was just not possible to find comparable agricultural or
other situations. And if an owner held out, would that ultimately
result in a higher settlement? (Waterfield 1970, 45–7; Wilson 31–2).
Concerns of residents of the area also included the feeling that they
would not be fairly compensated, the belief that “No amount of
money would ever repay us for what we would lose, our home, our
livelihood, and our whole way of life,” or that it was impossible to
compensate for future value (Comptroller 1961b, 652, 644; Comp-
troller 1961c, 800).
During the water licence hearings, people praised the beauty and
peace of the Arrow Valley, which provided the setting for their
home:

The dam will completely destroy practically all existing and potential ameni-
ties of this 150 mile long valley, whose elevation, soil, climate and beauty are
second to none ... but [for] visitors and tourists who love the beauty and peace
of our Arrow Lakes, the shores and beaches would be lost for hundreds of
years (Comptroller 1961a, 462).

We have been looking forward to move to that place and have a nice quiet
life after 37 years working on the smelter and all kinds of noises … but every-
thing is kind of shattered now, and that is actually my only complaint (Comp-
troller 1961c, 831).

I never seen anything like [this valley on] three continents, in Europe, in
Australia, and in this continent. The situation is absolutely ideal. It is warm,
there are beautiful mountains, there is lovely forest, there is good land, the
whole area is well protected against gusts of wind (Comptroller 1961a,
446).

The sense of violation was stated most dramatically by Mrs. Alma

Jordan who said simply: “Mr. Comptroller, ladies, and gentlemen, I
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Drowning Home 169

protest the mutilation of our beautiful valley” (Comptroller 1961a,

409).
However, the valley was more than just a beautiful place as a setting
for home, for, with its small settlements and natural resources, it pro-
vided a living and a source of community life. With the threat of the
Columbia development, the area stood still from the 1950s onward.
Because of this, many of the people in the area were older, those “who
had lived in the valley for decades and for whom the whole landscape,
natural and human, was a comfortable tapestry of things familiar”
(Wilson 1973, 10). It was the “humanity of the landscape, evolved
over so many years of settlement” that disappeared with the coming of
the dam (129).
It is also this humanity of the landscape that brings us to a review
of what home meant to the residents of the Arrow Lakes. The best
source for such information is the thousands of pages of transcript
from the water licence hearings, even though such evidence was fre-
quently not admissible in the eyes of the comptroller of Water Rights,
described as an “omniscient presence” by one of the people of the val-
ley (Comptroller 1961b, 655). From these transcripts, published
sources previously described and statements made at a recent “revisit-
ing” of these events (Kootenay Symposium, 1993 a,b,d), five main
themes appear relating to loss of home, and three relate to feelings
associated with the process leading up to their loss of home as well as
to their sense of loss.
The themes relating to loss of home were: 1) similarities to fighting
for home/nation; 2) loss of environment; 3) loss of entity/communi-
ty/place /final home; 4) loss of land/security/property rights; and 5) loss
of initiative/health/effect in old age and emotional disturbance or loss
of heart. Feelings about the process of loss of home included: 1) uncer-
tainty regarding expropriation and compensation; 2) sense of injustice
in relation to those who benefit; and 3) a sense of bereavement and of
bitterness.
References to home at the water licence hearings were often coupled
with references to nation. Since two world wars were very much part
of people’s memories at this time, the comparisons between fighting for
one’s country and for one’s home were easily made, particularly for
those who fought in the war, came back, acquired land under the Vet-
eran’s Land Act, worked that land, and now found that they were to
be removed from it: “If this High Arrow goes in, my place will be com-
pletely flooded. I will have no land or anything left, no home, and I
have lived on the place now for fifty years. I was practically raised in
the Arrow Lakes. I was only four when I came here. Furthermore, I
joined the Army to fight for this country, and I believe that every
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170 domicide

returning soldier should have a fair chance, not to be driven from his
home” (Comptroller 1961b, 741). The spokesperson for the Nakusp
Women’s Institute stressed the relationship between home and nation,
citing similar feelings of sentiment toward each, as well as recognizing
the stabilizing influence that each provides: “The 25 to 30 members of
the Nakusp Women’s Institute ... do have and are concerned with their
motto, ‘For Home and Country.’ It seems now that these two are close-
ly bound up in each. Love of home and country, and the desperate
measures taken to protect them, has sometimes been called sentiment.
If it is, then it is something very strong ... In our opinion, the very
words ‘home, country, sentiment, patriotism,’ call it what you will, is
still one of the most stabilizing influences we have left today. It pro-
vides a counter-balance to the changes and uncertainty the world over”
(Comptroller 1961a, 461).
The most powerful of the presentations was that of the Reverend
Pellegrin, deacon of the Anglican parish in the Nakusp area, who
stressed the importance of home in people’s lives and their identifica-
tion with home more than nation and, in so doing, emphasized the
magnitude of the expected loss: “In times of national stress, we are
urged to show in visible ways what our fatherland means to us, to pay
the price for self-determination and, if necessary, to die for it. You
can’t expect us now to give away what many have died for just
because the government feels that it is a convenient way of making
some $65,000,000 or thereabouts. To each of us, our home is the
most important place on earth, and it is this which we seek to pre-
serve, not some nebulous thing called a nation” (Comptroller 1961a,
509).
Just as strongly felt was loss of place, community, and identity. At
the Nakusp meeting of the Kootenay Symposium held on 2 June 1993,
these communities were remembered. When asked to define the past
impact caused by the construction of the reservoir behind the Keenley-
side Dam, people listed loss of small community lifestyle, friends, and
roots. The Story of Renata 1887–1965 tells of that community life that
was lost: church services, the Women’s Institute “Dollar Teas” for the
upkeep of the cemetery, and the “bees” to butcher the pigs in the fall –
each family attending ten or more bees within a few weeks (Warkentin
and Rohn 1965).
Loss of community also meant loss of the final home for the ances-
tors of the flooding victims. The fate of cemeteries became an issue at
the hearings when it was suggested that they might be covered by con-
crete. As one person said: “It is a disgrace to disregard the work of the
pioneers of this valley, those who have passed on, to cover their graves
with dirt, driftwood, and filth of all kinds every year, when there is no
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Drowning Home 171

sensible reason to do so, only for money” (Comptroller 1961a , 415).

In describing the detailed steps taken to close cemeteries, Wilson
acknowledges what an emotional subject this was. He remembers one
young woman who was able “to stir a crowd by crying, ‘We are not
just to be thrown out of our homes. Now it appears we can’t even die
in peace!’” (Wilson 1973, 90–1).
Loss of home and loss of “the concentrated efforts of our hearts and
hands” (Comptroller 1961b, 644) was most difficult for those who
had cleared the land with their own hands and stayed, often when
there was no profit in so doing, believing always in the valley’s future
potential: “My late parents and myself took possession of this proper-
ty in 1924 and have improved it with good buildings, cement walks,
propane gas installations, rock wall, gardens, fruit trees and planted
the street with acacia trees, now grown to enormous size and height.
The street for nearly two blocks is lined with these trees, and also
maples. It took many years to bring them to this beautiful and useful
stage” (Comptroller 1961a, 489).
And what losing this meant – the loss of memories and of identity –
is explained in the following:

After six years of hard work and after having made something out of nothing,
it is not a very pleasurable position to see the thing ruined and go under water,
even if you are paid for it. If you work, it is not only for doing something for
yourself, but to do something for the country, and if it is ruined, it really hurts.
I have my personal experience what it means to lose what you have. I had a
very nice property in Europe, in Poland, 3,000 acre property which we farmed
for four generations. I had only two hours time to run away from it when the
Russians came, in order to keep my head where it belonged. It is not the finan-
cial loss that hurts. What hurts is that you are losing the land on which you
worked, where you know every bit of it, where you get accustomed to it, you
know how to farm it. It is full of remembrances, of your failures and success-
es. It becomes a part of you (Comptroller 1961a, 446–7).

The harder edge of loss for those who have worked to build up a
home and, in the case of the Arrow Lakes Valley, often their livelihood,
is loss of security and property rights. A sense of helplessness is creat-
ed: “So far, I have been working my head off to get far enough to have
a roof over my head, or even my family, if necessary, but if they take it
away from me, I have nothing” (Comptroller 1961c, 821). A sense of
desperation is expressed:

I am now 61 years of age, and up until the last twenty years or so, have not
been in a position to help myself financially to any extent owing to various
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172 domicide

conditions. During the last twenty years, I have put practically all my savings
in earnings into my home, of which I am very proud. My wife and I are entire-
ly contented where we are, and I have arranged our house and grounds to suit
our wishes, and at the same time, stay within our means. Therefore, consider-
ing our age and contentment, we would not sell willingly to anyone. In other
words, the only way we would move is to be compelled to. Apparently, that is
what may happen. No one knows the meaning of this except those that are
vitally affected. At our age, we do not feel like starting over again to get our
home and grounds prepared in the same condition as they are at present
(Clough 1961).

Loss of property rights is, of course, a serious issue. The spokesman

for the Farmer’s Institute stressed the importance of tenure: “WE
OBJECT to this water licence on moral grounds. More than any other
section of the community, farmers set great store by their indefeasible
titles. Farming is a long term business based on security of tenure”
(Comptroller 1961a, 548).
Loss of home may also signal a loss of heart, loss of initiative, and
even loss of health: “No, a few hundred or a few thousand dollars for
each family will not buy a real home, for the people’s hearts will be lost
in the flood. There can be no love if hearts are gone, just death in our
valley” (Comptroller 1961a, 464; b, 638). And: “The small man was
encouraged to play a large part in this development. It is the small man,
such as my husband, who has been the backbone of this country, and
I deplore seeing much of the initiative taken away from them.” Anoth-
er person spoke of the difficulties of salvaging materials from her old
home and told how her husband took ill and died one year after they
moved. Yet, still she hoped to make the best of her situation (Wilson
1973, 144). At the Kootenay Symposium, one speaker said: “I have
been waiting for twenty-five years for this opportunity.” He then told
how his mother, who lived in one of the first communities to be flood-
ed, lost a store, six lots and a home on a two-acre waterfront lot, all
for compensation of $47; she subsequently had a nervous breakdown
(Kootenay Symposium 1993d).
Waterfield (1970, 48-9) writes of an individual who, because of
his role as a real estate and insurance agent, probably stood to gain
while others lost, but who spoke strongly at the hearings of how the
dam “would smother the spirit and initiative of many of our peo-
ple.” Waterfield concludes that the speaker was emotionally dis-
traught but suggests that so were most people faced with eviction:
“How could one be otherwise and claim membership in a sentient
human race? While one cannot prove it, many people firmly believe
that elderly persons who, later, through the procrastination of the
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Drowning Home 173

servants of the bc Hydro and Power Authority, witnessed the

destruction of their and their neighbours’ homes, were emotionally
disturbed – fatally.”
Wilson (1973, 110–11; 144–5) suggests that older persons, of
which there were an unusually large proportion in this area, were
often the least able to cope with losing their homes. Not only were
they not able to start over again building or working the land, but
also they frequently lost the legitimate “expectation of living the rest
of my years in familiar surroundings in a home that I had helped to
build among groves and flower beds that we had built up gradually
over the years. No amount of money can compensate me for this
property, and I am now too old to start over again.” For many, mov-
ing from their home would also mean loss of independence (Comp-
troller 1961a, 510; 1961c , 823, 838). Older people often dislike any
sort of change, never mind the massive transformations that they had
to face here.
In fairness, it must be noted that for some people, there may have
been an advantage to moving. Based on a survey of eighty persons
over sixty years of age who were to be displaced, Wilson found spe-
cial problems including low earning power and therefore a require-
ment for a low cost of living, as well as physical disabilities, lack of
mobility, and dependence on neighbours for chores and transporta-
tion. For these people, it is suggested that the move to the village of
Nakusp or other larger communities may have been welcomed, par-
ticularly for the access to medical services. In these circumstances,
with no follow-up survey of older persons possible, it can only be sug-
gested that while living standards may have improved for some, the
loss of long-time homes would be a terrible thing to endure. Wilson
concludes that “forced removal from a familiar environment is an
inescapably brutal act which should in no way be glossed over” (Wil-
son 1973, 145).

wh o b enefi t e d f ro m
pro jec t co nst ru c t i o n

The question of who benefited by the construction of the Columbia

Basin projects is an important issue. Persons affected by the Libby Dam
project were particularly concerned about the need for fairness in the
process, given that it was others who benefited. Many felt that: “We’re
being thoroughly and completely shafted by the government of British
Columbia” (McCandlish 1971). Reflecting on this, thirty years later,
one person noted that in the 1960s, bigger was always better, and it
was this belief that set government priorities; now, our value system is
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174 domicide

changing (Kootenay Symposium 1993 c). But returning to the time

when the dam had just been constructed, after hearing Donald S. Mac-
donald, Canadian minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources, address
the dedication ceremony that day, one of those who had lost their
home to the dam wrote: “Do you think it is justice to take away a
man’s livelihood and let him starve to death when you agree that the
Columbia River Treaty was such a benefit to the rest of the people?”
(bc Water Resources Service 27 August 1975).”
Another wrote to local mla Leo Nimsick regarding a proposed
“Access Act,” demonstrating the sense of trespass, felt both when
someone crosses your property illegally and when property is taken for
dam construction: “But when there is a reason to take care of a few
people with not enough votes to interest anybody, there isn’t any
money, so the story goes ... The act passed regarding Libby basin gives
powers “to take” any property needful but not one word about pay-
ment – no money mentioned” (Nimsick Correspondence 2 April
1968). Nimsick’s response represents a politician’s answer to the ques-
tion of who benefits. He replied that as a member of the opposition, he
had only limited influence on government policy. He had done his best
to explain the wishes of the people to the government, and:

contributed something, I hope, to a solution and which will assist the farmers
during the period that is coming up in the near future when these properties
will have to be bought out ... It is difficult to give you a complete picture of
what our rural representatives must try to do. He has got to be interested in
the common good of all the people, not on just one section, and while some
people may think I have failed in this regard, it has not been due to want of
trying (Nimsick Correspondence 4 April 1968).

Or, put another way, on behalf of an individual who, with his family,
had ranched in the area for approximately fifteen years, on a farm that
had existed in the area since 1912: “It does seem fair to suggest that
when a man is expropriated innocently, as was the case, then everyone
should move over a little to let the victim carry on as he desires” (bc
Water Resources Service 8 January 1973). In the colourful words of
one Arrow Lakes resident: “Too much luminous paint [was] being
used on the benefits of High Arrow – too little emphasis on the detri-
ments and the losses through destructive flooding”(Comptroller
1961b, 701).
There was another side to this story, however, perhaps best spoken
by someone who might benefit. A real estate agent and local mayor in
the area was quoted as saying: “It’s a shame that good farming land is
to be flooded. But I think the benefits of the dam will outweigh the
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Drowning Home 175

negative factors” (McCandlish 1971). And even those affected directly

can apparently view the situation in perspective. A speaker at the
Kootenay Symposium remembered a rancher telling him that “a few
have to suffer so many can enjoy a better quality of life” (Kootenay
Symposium 1993 c). While the British Columbia government saw
financial advantage in the project construction and the federal govern-
ment saw the opportunity to be a good neighbour, the residents of the
Arrow Lakes saw only benefit to the United States.
Examined in isolation, it would appear that feelings engendered by
the Columbia River Treaty projects might have been sufficient to at
least sway the choice of location for projects in the Columbia Valley,
particularly given that alternative choices were available. We need to
understand why resistance failed in these situations and who did ben-
efit from dam construction. In fact, the issue of benefit in the “public
interest” or “common good” took on a whole new meaning in the con-
text of the Columbia negotiations. Any resistance that did occur was
simply not seen as significant against the background of the negotia-
tions for the Columbia River Treaty.
The Columbia River Treaty, as it finally emerged, recognized that
the Canadian treaty projects – Duncan, Keenleyside, and Mica – as
well as the Libby Dam in the United States, would increase the ener-
gy output and dependable capacity of the American power plants
(British Columbia a 1993, 5). In return, Canada was entitled to one-
half of the additional power generated by the power plants as a result
of storage in Canada. The calculation of this entitlement is determined
six years in advance and is based on the amount of power that would
be produced by the American plants with and without the Canadian
storage. Because this power was not required in the 1960s, these ben-
efits were sold back to American utilities for a thirty-year period for
US$254 million. From the British Columbia government’s perspective,
Swainson (22) identifies three overall benefits that accrued to the bc
government based on this decision: 1 fiscal restraint and the elimina-
tion of provincial debt, 2 the establishment of a reputation as a gov-
ernment that would get things done, and 3 projecting an image of
large-scale thinking.
While the second and third of these benefits may simply relate to the
creation of a good political image, that image was the only benefit the
provincial government of the day got from the Columbia River Treaty.
While there was financial advantage, it was more than eaten up by
other new hydroelectric construction. It is only today that a fourth
gain, from Bennett’s prediction regarding the future increased demand
for power, has the potential to be fully realized as the downstream ben-
efits return to Canada (Swainson 1995).
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176 domicide

But it is interesting to examine the issue of benefit at the time of dam

construction beyond the creation of an image. The Columbia River
Treaty projects certainly had a public interest component (social and
economic gains as discussed above, including the more tangible one of
flood control). However, there were also advantages to those who held
political, bureaucratic, and individual power. Not unimportant in con-
sidering the latter category is the creation of a sense of achievement
and therefore enhanced self-esteem for those in power. While a discus-
sion of such an intangible effect is difficult to portray, it does occur.
When individuals are successful in achieving control, just as in the
business world when the rewards are more frequently monetary, there
are benefits in terms of prestige and knowledge of goals achieved. This
sense of self-esteem contrasts sharply with the losses experienced by
the victims of domicide.
The above discussion has been based largely on documents that
existed from the time of the treaty negotiation and project construc-
tion. Common threads that run through these documents were the sig-
nificant delays and uncertainty that were experienced by the victims of
the Columbia River projects. Much of the delay was caused by the
lengthy period for study of these projects and for negotiation of the
final agreement. Much of the negotiation was taken up with the issue
of whether British Columbia would adequately capture the financial
value of the “downstream benefits” such as protection from flooding
and access to electrical power that accrued to the United States as a
result of project construction. Nine per cent of British Columbia’s enti-
tlement was expected to return in 1998, 46 per cent in 1999, and 45
per cent in 2003, based on the date of completion of the various Cana-
dian dams. The entitlement is now expected to be much larger than
was predicted in 1964, and the Province of British Columbia is con-
sidering alternatives to receive their entitlement recognized in the
treaty. These alternatives include: agreeing to a return of power at sites
other than Oliver (as originally agreed), permitting the United States to
pay for alternative power sites in British Columbia, or reselling some
or all of the power (British Columbia 1993b, 3,6).The issue of the
return of the “downstream benefits” to British Columbia leads direct-
ly to a consideration of initiatives begun by the people of the Koote-
nays and the provincial government in 1992. In particular, these initia-
tives are a manifestation of Smith’s reminder quoted in chapter 6:
“When places die ... they are often believed to be no longer worthy of
attention. But such places are still of importance to their residents, and
therefore when ‘death’ is a consequence of public policy ... the impli-
cations have to be addressed as a matter of social responsibility”
(Smith, 1992).
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Drowning Home 177

pr es ent and f u t u r e

The existence of downstream benefits from the Columbia River pro-

jects to be returned to British Columbia and the belief of the people of
the Kootenays that these benefits should finally return to the area that
suffered most was the impetus for the Kootenay Symposium in Castle-
gar, bc in June 1993. In order to provide a unified voice for the people
of the Kootenay region, the Columbia River Treaty Committee was
formed in 1992 to represent “the 260,000 people within municipali-
ties, Regional Districts and Native Councils in the Columbia River
Basin who have been affected by the building of hydroelectric and stor-
age projects on the Columbia River and its tributaries as allowed by
the Columbia River Treaty” (Columbia River Treaty Committee
1993). The Committee included two members of each of the five
regional districts (local government) and two members of the Ktunaxa-
Kinbasket Tribal Council. The goals of the committee were to forge a
reasonable partnership with the province in the negotiation process, a
partnership that is mutually beneficial, and to allow regional represen-
tatives to have a direct voice in negotiations and be active participants
in the decision-making process.
At early meetings held in smaller centres throughout the region,
there was specific recognition that there was loss of home and com-
munity as well as hardship caused by litigation to settle the claims,
but there was little public call for restitution to the victims of domi-
cide. A much larger gathering, the Kootenay Symposium, was spon-
sored by bc Hydro, the provincial government, and the Columbia
River Treaty Committee in Castlegar from 18 to 20 June 1993 to dis-
cuss the future of the Columbia-Kootenay Region and to plan for the
use of the downstream benefits. This symposium was attended by
three provincial government ministers, the Columbia River Treaty
Committee, representatives from bc Hydro, and other provincial
government departments. Also in attendance were nearly one hun-
dred delegates hand-picked by the treaty committee and the provin-
cial government to represent specific viewpoints. The symposium
began with an open house to familiarize meeting participants with
the treaty, downstream benefits, the operations review currently
under way by bc Hydro and an economic overview of the region. In
the evening, a retrospective presentation was made by James Wilson,
author of People in the Way, and delegates to the symposium who
focused on the benefits as well as the negative impacts of dam con-
struction. This was the major opportunity to relive the past, and the
remaining two days of the symposium were used to look to the future
of the region.
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178 domicide

As it addresses questions of concern to this discussion, the Colum-

bia-Kootenay summary report from the symposium dated August
1993 brings forward a number of specific proposals and includes gen-
eral assurances from the provincial government that it will pursue the
recommendations of the symposium (Salasan Associates 1993). Two
statements are of particular interest here. The first, under the heading
Need for Redress, stated that: “focusing too much on redress can be
destructive and cause division.” The second is the government
response that “both government and bc Hydro must admit past mis-
takes, redress grievances, and take actions to involve people in future
decisions” and that “the trust may be lost, but trust of future genera-
tions can only be built on actions, e.g., allocation of all or a portion
of downstream benefits to a regional management authority” (Salasan
Associates 1993). These statements suggest that there is a recognition
of the need for redress, but when viewed in the context of the whole
symposium report, this redress is seen to be interpreted as various
forms of regional benefit.
In summarizing the options for immediate use of the downstream
benefits, the interim summary of the conference proceedings found six
possibilities: 1 personal compensation, 2 social development, 3 envi-
ronmental mitigation, 4 investment analysis, 5 sustainable planning,
and 6 authority development (Cornerstone Planning Consultants
1994, 1a). On 8 March 1995 the return of a portion of the down-
stream benefits ($1 billion) to the Kootenays was announced. On 16
May 1995 these hopes were dashed as the United States government
suspended negotiations on the non-binding agreement that they had
negotiated nine months earlier because power valued at $45 a kilowatt
six months previously was now worth $20 a kilowatt. The British
Columbia government nevertheless announced that they would honour
their commitment to a return of part of the downstream benefits to the
people of the Columbia Valley.
The Columbia Basin Trust was formed, and in July 1997, a long-term
management plan was completed, which included an objective that the
trust should “advocate for unresolved compensation claims” (Colum-
bia Basin Trust 1998a, 12). In June 1998, a news release (Columbia
Basin Trust, 1998b, 1) indicated that the trust had established a
program to assist original landowners who were affected by dam
construction under the Columbia River Treaty to make their case for
unresolved compensation claims to the bc ombudsman. Eligible
claimants were to be provided with up to $2,500 each toward the
reimbursement of expenses incurred in making and substantiating a
claim to the ombudsman.
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Drowning Home 179

less o ns l e a r n e d

This chapter has discussed loss of home through the creation of the
hydroelectric storage reservoirs in the Arrow Lakes Region and the
South Country of the Kootenays. The primary purpose of the chapter
was to test the validity of the concept of domicide through an empiri-
cal study, and, in particular, to examine the following: the meaning of
home and loss of home; the parameters of domicide including process,
motive, and benefit; the reaction to loss of home; and the means by
which those affected were planned for.
Reflecting on all the material examined, there is clearly a significant
degree of similarity between the findings of previous chapters and
those of this empirical chapter. It is clear that home for the residents of
the Arrow Lakes and the South Country meant choosing to live in a
beautiful place with a strong sense of community and for those who
worked the land, a strong sense of attachment and identity. Loss of
home meant loss of environment, identity, community, livelihood, a
beautiful place, familiar surroundings, final home (grave), land, securi-
ty, initiative, and health. The loss of historic continuity, the sense of
being rooted, was also felt. Both valleys had been settled for over fifty
years, and while they might have seen better economic times, there was
a quiet sense of prosperity to come.
The process of domicide in the Columbia River Basin has been com-
pared to the conclusions of chapters 3 and 4. Many aspects are simi-
lar: project construction justified in the public interest (socio-econom-
ic benefit and flood control); disempowered victims (years of
uncertainty, long-term grieving, and some effect on health); paternalis-
tic bureaucracy (particularly in the International Joint Commission
hearings); a sense of injustice on the part of the victims in relation to
those who benefit; a sense of bereavement and bitterness; and prob-
lems with appraisal and compensation.
Particular insight has been provided about loss of property rights.
This was very serious for those who lost both home and livelihood. As
Million (1992) demonstrated, there is no more significant tie to home
than that which exists for those who work the land. Finally, it is again
found here that, once slated for destruction, home became primarily a
marketable commodity to be given up in return for what people hope
will be fair compensation. Perhaps it is in these moments that the vic-
tims of domicide, unconsciously, attempt to achieve the true monetary
value of their “embodiment of identity” (Million 1992, 153). In the
circumstances of the case studies, it is apparent that for some, this
value was not, and perhaps could not ever be, realized.
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180 domicide

There were also some specific differences from the discussion devel-
oped in earlier chapters. In particular, in the Arrow Lakes, the loss of
an environment of great beauty was frequently cited and is mourned
even today. The sense of home as centre and the effect of loss of home
on identity were not as clearly established. However, aspects defining
centre were evident: there were references to refuge, freedom, posses-
sion, shelter, and security. As to identity, from persons who spoke at
the Kootenay Symposium, their experiences over thirty years appear to
have caused them to forge a new identity, both for themselves and for
their children.
The differences between these case studies and the findings of previ-
ous chapters may well be explained by the following factors:

• This research was almost totally based on the examination of

written records rather than interviews, such as those undertaken
by Million (1992), and therefore, the opportunity to prompt sub-
jects to provide more details was lacking. As a result, less depth is
found in discussions of meaning of home.
• Most of the records reviewed were from a time prior to or dur-
ing the final loss of home, a time when naturally there would be
little opportunity for deep reflection on what loss of home
meant.
• The records in existence are from a very small sample of people
who actually lost their homes, and usually from persons who
resisted the destruction of their homes.
• In many cases loss of home meant loss of both home and liveli-
hood for farmers or ranchers, rather than simply loss of a
dwelling. The emphasis is, therefore, often on loss of land rather
than the physical structure of home.

It is noted, however, that comments made at the Kootenay Sympo-

sium by those who lost their homes thirty years earlier echoed the
thoughts of those who spoke at public hearings and through letters to
the Water Resources Service at the time of project construction.
In reviewing the process by which people lost their homes, there
were also some factors that were more clearly delineated than in the
previous chapters. These included:

• public hearings that did not really deal with the people in the area
(ijc hearings, 1951) or were undertaken after the real decisions
about project location were taken (Comptroller of Water Rights,
1961) and therefore enhanced the sense of grievance and bitter-
ness felt by those who lost their homes
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Drowning Home 181

• the longer period of uncertainty prior to project construction

which affected individuals who wanted greater certainty as to
their future (“You are worse scared than hurt”) as well as lower-
ing property values when property deteriorated while treaty nego-
tiations were under way
• the sense of entrapment given that period of uncertainty
• the sense that people were always waiting for a message from
afar (Victoria, Ottawa, Washington, dc), which would seal their
fate
• the difficulties that arose in the South Country, given the number
of players involved in reservoir clearance (various ministries,
many private appraisers)
• the apparently constant belief that the victims must bend to the
common good – hence the lack of focus on the victims, particu-
larly in the South Country.

In regard to the latter, this chapter has explored, in more detail than
in chapters 3 and 4, the issue of who benefits from project construc-
tion. Certainly, there was benefit to the communities and rural areas
that no longer experienced flooding, to American industries that
required electrical power, and to the British Columbia government and
therefore to the Kootenays in the future, in the form of the return of
the downstream benefits. It is also suggested that gains included an
increase in the self-esteem, based on the achievement of goals, of a
number of people holding political, bureaucratic, and community
power – a concept not dissimilar to that of the “evangelistic bureau-
crat.” Finally, this chapter touches on the planning efforts made by bc
Hydro to provide mitigation to those who would lose their homes:
meetings, advocates, publications, surveys, community relocations,
community financial assistance, and new infrastructure.
In this chapter, we have attempted to demonstrate empirically the
salient characteristics of the process of domicide. To a lesser degree,
we have demonstrated what loss of home means. Contact, which was
made with persons during the Kootenay Symposium in 1993 and
1994, confirms the underlying sense of bitterness that lingers in this
area even after thirty years, bitterness that is tempered by the desire
and the strength for new beginnings and the recognition that the pub-
lic interest can be viewed as a positive element. Nevertheless, it is clear
that more could have been done for the “victims” of the Columbia
River projects. In this connection, chapter 6 will examine both the
process of planned change and the means by which both planners and
those faced with domicide can better deal with proposals for major
projects.
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CHAP T E R S I X

The Nature of Domicide

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.

It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist.
It is the streets that no longer exist.

It is not your memories which haunt you.

It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.
James Fenton (1983, 11)

After a very discursive investigation of a large array of individual cases

of domicide, followed by two detailed case studies, we will now attempt
to draw the threads together and construct a typology, if not a theory,
of domicide. Domicide has been defined as the deliberate destruction of
home by agencies pursuing goals, which involves planning or similar
processes, and which causes suffering to those who lose their homes.
For the proponents, goal-oriented planning is the outstanding charac-
teristic, often with the public interest as a basic motive. For the victims,
the salient characteristic is suffering, for those who are content to give
up their homes are not victims of domicide. On these bases, this chap-
ter will first attempt a typology of domicide, and then provide discus-
sion of victims’ responses and proponents’ remediation measures.

a typo lo gy o f d o m i c i d e

When “death” [of places] is a consequence of public policy ... the implica-
tions have to be addressed as a matter of social responsibility.
Peter Smith (1992)

Typological frameworks for understanding the nature of domicide in-

clude: spatial and temporal scales; proponents; victims; and resistance
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The Nature of Domicide 183

and remediation. Each of these four interrelated components is dis-

cussed separately.

Spatial and Temporal Scales

This first framework locates domicide in both space and time, paying
particular attention to spatial scales. The most intimate scale of domi-
cide is the deliberate destruction of a single home, as with the common
punishment meted out to Palestinians by the Israeli army. At the scale
of village or neighbourhood, the number of people remains small, and
by the same token, it is easier for those responsible to divide and con-
quer. What is lost at this scale, as in Boston’s West End, is not merely
the physical manifestation of home, but also the sense of place and the
meaning and social texture of community that is inextricably interwo-
ven with the physical fabric.
When the destruction of large urban areas or whole valleys and
landscapes occurs, larger numbers of people are affected, and a more
complex set of land uses is involved. Destruction of home at this scale
often takes place to make way for large projects such as highways, air-
ports, reservoirs, or national parks, or, in the case of territorial home-
lands lost by Aboriginals, through the replacement of the original
inhabitants by settlers via geopiracy. At this scale, there may be a loss
of life’s meaning, of belonging to a landscape or territory, which often
comes about through the loss of cultural practices and livelihood. At
the level of region or state, destruction may occur in war or peace,
often by government decree. At this scale, domicide may be conceptu-
al rather than physical, as in the reorganization of political space.
Nonetheless, there is frequently a loss of identity, of a greater sense of
belonging.
Domicide has occurred at all these scales throughout history. In war,
domicide is a tool used to achieve demoralization or a punishment
commonly meted out to the vanquished. In peace, both public and pri-
vate development projects find that there are almost always people “in
the way.” Today, domicide is also ubiquitous in space, occurring on all
inhabited continents and in most regions of the globe.
The sheer number of people uprooted by domicide is globally signif-
icant, probably outnumbering the 25 to 30 millions officially designat-
ed by the United Nations as refugees from political or environmental
causes. Yet, little consideration is given to domicide as a global issue by
governments, the United Nations, or academic studies. First, the issue
has been perceived in a very fragmentary way, often in terms of isolat-
ed cases or due to a single cause, such as dam building. The second
reason for the global obscurity of domicide resides in the fact that the
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184 domicide

victims rarely cross international borders; in general they remain an

internal issue within individual states.

Proponents

The proponents of domicide may be considered according to their sta-

tus and authority, their motives and goals, the benefits which accrue to
them, and the systems they set in place to legitimize domicide. It is also
interesting to consider their actions, particularly planning, in relation
to theories of violence.
Two major categories of motives predominate. In war, motives
include revenge, leverage against the enemy, or destruction of the
physical basis of life and identity of a hated foe. Yet, the common
good rationale may surface even in wartime: Hiroshima and Nagasa-
ki were annihilated, we are told, to prevent the future losses of thou-
sands of military personnel, including Japanese. Rather more astound-
ingly, American propaganda during the Vietnam War insisted that
villages, regions, and even countries were being “bombed back into
the Stone Age” in order to “save” them from the horrors of peacetime
Communism.
In peacetime, the motives for domicide are legion and include socio-
economic improvement, environmental protection and recreation,
racism or other ideology, jurisdictional efficiency, the assertion of sov-
ereignty, the rationalization of government service provision, and the
acquisition of land for settlement purposes. These general motives are
manifested as specific goals, such as urban renewal, the siting of pub-
lic facilities, or colonization. Such goals are almost always justified by
public interest or common good rhetoric, varying from the improve-
ment of living conditions for the poor to improvements in economy
and lifestyle for much larger segments of a population, as with the ben-
efits expected from the building of a super-dam. This type of rationale
is of a different order than that used by private corporations, the pri-
mary motive of which is profit.
Those who espouse such motives and pursue such goals are not ordi-
nary citizens. Domicide is rarely a grassroots policy. Rather, it is typi-
cally instigated and carried out by powerful elites. With a background
of general motivation (e.g., increased bureaucratic efficiency or the bet-
terment of the poor) and a set of specific goals in mind (e.g., slum
clearance), these elites may also be major beneficiaries of domicide in
terms of consolidation of position, achievement of an ideological goal,
enhanced power, improved self-esteem, or even financial gain.
Such elites may be war leaders or academics (implicated in the
genesis of ideas such as apartheid, Yugoslav ethnic cleansing, and
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The Nature of Domicide 185

the partition of British India), religious fanatics or powerful politi-

cians, bureaucrats or business leaders, or any combination of these.
Elite groups are sometimes led by one individual with tremendous
power; the mission of Franklin Delano Roosevelt contrasts with the
destructiveness of Bomber Harris and the megalomania of Nicolae
Ceausescu.
Robert Moses (Moses 1970, Caro 1974, Berman 1982) is a case in
point. New York’s “planning czar” from the 1920s to the 1960s,
Moses pursued a dream of modernization, predicated on con-
sumerism, high levels of automobile use, and public access to exurban
parks and beaches. Supported by General Motors and New Deal fed-
eral money, Moses began the wholesale rebuilding of New York in the
1930s, producing an interlocking network of new highways, bridges,
tunnels, dams, parks and other large public works. His devotion to
democracy – his autobiography was entitled Working for the People –
did not prevent the massive destruction of neighbourhoods to achieve
his ends. He famously remarked that “When you operate in an over-
built metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat-axe” (Caro
1974, 849). The meat-axe approach to the carcass of New York came
to the fore in the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which
began to slice through that borough in the 1950s, destroying stable
mixed-race neighbourhoods, blighting the areas left standing, and
beginning the process that has turned the Bronx into today’s urban
wilderness.
To Moses, the only difference between inner-city road building and
the construction of his famous exurban parkways was: “There are
more houses in the way ... more people in the way, that’s all. There’s
very little hardship in the thing.” When opposed, he simply remarked
“I’m just going to keep on building. You do the best you can to stop
it” (Caro 1974, 876). Only in the 1960s did the opposition to this
Ozymandian passion for destroying and rebuilding manage to bring it
to a stop. “But his works still surround us, and his spirit continues to
haunt our public and private lives” (Berman 1982, 294–5). Weeping
for his lost neighbourhood, Berman “felt a grief that, I can see now, is
endemic to modern life ... All that is solid melts into air.”
Many engineers and planners enjoyed working with Moses, giving
little thought to the lives they were disrupting in their joy in partici-
pating in giant undertakings, ostensibly for the general good. Such
leaders may well be able to transmute values, so that, as Lively
remarks of London’s redevelopment in the 1980s: “Ruthless greed
becomes entrepreneurial skill, opportunism becomes far sightedness
and acumen. The ravished landscapes and blighted lives, incapable of
testimony, slide into oblivion. Finally, the statues are erected; the bold,
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186 domicide

visionary figures arise in bronze upon their plinths.” This testifies, in

fact, that one basic motive may be sheer personal glory, even though
the cost of that glory is “a landscape of secret carnage” (Lively 1991,
196)
Despite much criticism, the concept of power elites appears to hold
water (Catanese 1984). It posits a loose grouping of social and eco-
nomic notables who maintain close links with politicians at several
levels of government and also with powerful bureaucrats. This cer-
tainly appeared to be the case in the domicide of the village of How-
dendyke (Porteous 1989) and has, at the other extreme, been found at
the national level in the United States (Domhoff 1978). Catanese
(1984) believes that such special interest groups can readily counter-
mand public-participation processes in politics or planning, pushing
through their own goals that may or may not coincide with the pub-
lic interest.
Indeed, so great was the polarization of Western societies in the late
twentieth century that elite goals came to differ quite radically from
those of the population at large. For example, in 1996, the Canadian
federal government’s Policy Research Committee asked Canadians to
state their top ten goals or values (Canadian Centre for Policy Alter-
natives Monitor September 1998, 8). The general public’s three chief
goals were freedom, a clean environment, and a healthy population.
For business and financial elites, however, these goals ranked only sev-
enth, ninth, and tenth. The elite’s chief goals were competitiveness,
integrity, and minimal government. In the last decades of the twentieth
century, government power was indeed reduced drastically in several
Western nations, thus leaving corporations more free to change land-
scapes at will.
The leaders of projects are also interested in satisfying their own
needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs includes the category of “esteem
needs,” which involve the desire for mastery, competence, or confi-
dence to face the world. Less positively, Maslow (Lowry 1973, 90)
notes that esteem needs may take the form of a desire for reputation
or prestige: “status, dominance, recognition, attention, importance.”
It is likely that such desires are common among domicide’s perpetra-
tors, whose actions significantly weaken the competence and confi-
dence of their victims. More recent psychological investigations
emphasize that leaders’ needs include “the need to please one’s ...
allies. The need to appear ‘macho’ ... The need to capture the atten-
tion of the world ... The need to prove to oneself that one is brave,
decisive, confident, and powerful. The need to avoid feelings of
shame, weakness, or cowardice. The need to go down in history as a
great leader” (Dixon 1987, 69).
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The Nature of Domicide 187

Such needs may lead to “disastrous decisions,” justified by the adage

“it’s for your own good” (Dixon 1987, 137). However, the factor that
“has probably resulted in more human misery than all the others put
together” is, simply, that the very personality traits that take people to
the top and establish them as powerful decision makers tend to include
the most unpleasant of human personality characteristics: “extremes of
egocentrism, insincerity, dishonesty, corruptibility, cynicism, and, on
occasions, ruthless murderous hostility towards anyone who threatens
their position” (Dixon in Ptolemy 1994, 20). Dixon concludes: “Even
worse, if that is possible, than the traits which take them to the top are
those which they acquire on arrival – pomposity, paranoia, and mega-
lomaniac delusions of grandeur.”
This is strong stuff that may be taken with a pinch of salt, but there
is sufficient evidence of a “command-and-control” approach in all
kinds of planning (Burton 1994, 15) that we would do well to look
with initial suspicion, at least, on the pronouncements and practices of
elites. It is quite clear, for example, that business interests can subvert
the planning process at individual sites (Porteous 1995), while Gleeson
(1994) has shown that recent market-oriented legislation in New
Zealand effectually turns consent for new projects into a commodity
that can be purchased. As Gleeson (1994, 44) asks: “when money
talks, who is silenced?”
The will of these individuals or elites is frequently carried out
through the creation of a special authority, such as the Tennessee Val-
ley Authority, and frequently succeeds through the good offices of the
“evangelistic bureaucrat,” in which “planners are the most highly
developed form of the evangelistic bureaucrat” (Davies 1972, 110).
Planning has been seen as a “very ruthless bargaining process”
(Davies 1972, 111), in which planners tend to have the upper hand
because of their belief that they have the right to specify the future and
that they are capable of defining what the public interest is. These are
telling claims for a profession so dependent upon the use of statutory
powers and sanctions, such as eminent domain, in the pursuit of its
goals.
In the liberal capitalist world, in which the common good is still an
important rhetorical trope, the problem has always been who shall
define it. Whether as the implementer of elite plans or as part of the
elite, the evangelistic bureaucrat “legitimates his schemes not by refer-
ence to the actual consumer, but either in terms of his own self-pro-
claimed and self-induced charisma or by reference to a range of puta-
tive consumers whose wishes and wants he himself can, in impunity,
define” (Davies 1972, 3). In authoritarian states, and in particular in
pre-1991 communist ones, planners could achieve godlike status. As
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188 domicide

the Hungarian novelist George Konrad writes in The City Builder

(1987, 89–90): “If God, whose other name is Plan, resides in man, then
the planner is the most man-like man,” and, “I plan; therefore I am. I
feel my way in the world with plans. With each line drawn on the blue-
print, I cut through the face of doubt.”
In domicide, the elite vision or the bureaucratic plan are often sup-
ported by a law, decree, or regulation that justifies the actions taken
(the Group Areas Act, the Resettlement Act, etc.). Frequently, some
form of common good rhetoric is used to explain vision, law, plan, and
process to the world at large, and possibly even to the victims (“these
people are being liberated,” or “it is sometimes necessary for people to
be moved for their own good”). Thus, those who reject relocation can
be defined as infantile, people simply unable to understand what is best
for them. Victims, indeed, may be looked on with contempt simply
because they are victims.
Further, communication between officials and relocatees is rarely
clear. Some officials may be openly contemptuous of the “sentimen-
tality” of people who wish to stay in what are “objectively poor
conditions.” Even those with sympathy for relocatees, who advocate
social impact analysis and “planning for people as though they
really mattered” (Lichfield 1996, 234) are bound up in a web of
technocratic language, models, and systems that are not only incom-
prehensible, but also very daunting to the average citizen. Relocatees
cannot always understand even the goals or motives of the propo-
nents, thus increasing their sense of powerlessness. Their inability to
formulate succinct ripostes in the language of planning may exacer-
bate their sense of worthlessness. Confusion is further created by the
bureaucratic propensity for acronyms and the use of a host of
euphemisms in the domicide process. For example, the inhabitants of
“designated outports” are “relocated” by the “Ministry of bad”
according to the “Centralization Program,” which will resettle them
in “Approved Land Assembly Areas.” Deportation, murder, rape,
and the destruction of homes and property in Bosnia, for example,
is euphemistically termed “ethnic cleansing,” just as Cold War
American governments calmly proposed the annihilation of Europe
via “multiply-targeted re-entry vehicles” in a “limited nuclear
engagement.”
Finally, the role of elites and planners can be viewed in terms of the-
ories of violence. Violence is defined in therapeutic situations as the
crossing of boundaries without permission. Failure to ask permission
is a crucial issue, especially when not only personal, but also threshold,
community, and territorial boundaries are arbitrarily crossed, as in
domicide. Violence demands submission, which means giving way or
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The Nature of Domicide 189

one’s power to something beyond oneself. Violence, therefore, creates

victims – people in someone’s power or under someone’s control.
Those who perpetrate violence generally dismiss the feelings of their
victims or may even ignore them altogether except as obstacles to be
eliminated. In such cases, those who are victimized feel that, although
hurt, they are “not seen.” Much of the therapeutic discourse of victi-
mology applies directly to the victims of domicide, although the latter
often suffer collectively as well as individually (Walklate 1989).
According to Kastenbaum and Aisenberg (1976, 291–4; see also
DeSpelder and Strickland 1987, 384), eight factors favour violence
between people: physical or psychological separation; the possibility of
justification; perception of people as “the other,” or as less than
human; an obvious means of escaping responsibility; self-perceptions
of worthlessness; reduced self-control; a situation of forced hasty deci-
sion; and anything that encourages the perpetrator to feel above or
outside the law.
It is clear that some of these “psychic manoeuvres” have relevance
to those who plan removal and resettlement projects. Elite groups may
feel themselves, if not outside the law, then as instruments of the law
or as supported by a legal system that is basically theirs. Their position,
education, and power psychologically separate them from the people
they plan to remove. Porteous (1992b) found that the planners and the
plannees thought and expressed themselves so differently that they
could be considered as two separate universes of discourse. Physically,
the planners and plannees are separated by living and work environ-
ments and physical distances that mirror social distance. Consequent-
ly, those to be removed are often considered “less than,” as statistics,
or, at best, in a paternalist manner. Removals are facilitated when
domicide can be defined as something else by the proponents, which is
where common good and public interest rhetoric prove so useful. Some
proponents may invoke lack of personal responsibility: “we are mere-
ly following the plan.” Finally, in some cases, hasty planning decisions
have to be made, so that deliberation is compromised and scruples may
be abandoned.
Although we do not wish to press the analogy between planning and
violence too far, it remains true that, in extreme domicide, in particu-
lar, violence is an inherent component of domicide. In everyday domi-
cide, it is sometimes the case that what is perceived as rational,
socially uplifting action on the part of the planners is experienced and
defined as violence on the part of the victims. Professional planners, of
course, have the invidious task of being “in the middle,” attempting to
mediate between the visions of political or corporate elites and the out-
rage of those impacted by such visions.
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190 domicide

Victims

The victims of domicide are considered in terms of their vulnerabili-

ty, the grief syndrome, and the effects of domicide upon them. Par-
ticular attention is paid to the role of memory and the possibility of
memoricide.

Vulnerability. Paradoxically, the victims of domicide who suffer quite

considerably may be those who have been especially designated as ben-
eficiaries, as in slum clearance programs. More often, they are merely
“people in the way” who must, unfortunately, be sacrificed for the
common good. In war, of course, they are the enemy, as specified by
the elites who have decided to commence hostilities.
In all these roles, the victims of domicide become “the other,”
defined very often by some trait that marks them off and sets them
apart from the elites, the planners, or the public at large – “those
who count.” They may be “the enemy,” “the lumpen proletariat,”
“ethnics,” “the working class,” “ghetto dwellers,” “coloureds” (in
South Africa), or “bush people” (in Africa). A leading characteristic of
domicide victims, then, is their “otherness;” they are people who are
usually poorer, less literate, less educated, less professional, and less
able to see “the global view” than the elites, the planners, or even the
public “who count.” They are also likely to be significantly disem-
powered, lacking the resources, understanding, vision, or experience to
combat the plan that is to devour them. In other words, they are often
people who are used to being, and perhaps expect to be, “kicked
around” by “them.”
Such characteristics may be found among inner-city tenants, who
have no property claims on their dwellings, or workers who are part
of a paternalist system of company towns based on industry or
resource extraction. If the victims are rural or Aboriginal, it is often
assumed that their way of life or culture has little value, and that the
next generation would not wish to live in such a way or in such a
place. In the creation of airports and highways, the definition of vic-
tim is not so clear. It certainly expands to include middle-class peo-
ple occasionally, such as those living in a peripheral “stockbroker
belt” required for an orbital freeway. Most often, however, the vic-
tims are people who “may not think of their bedroom, their corner
shop, or their garment factory as an inner city development site”
(Lively 1991, 60–6), people who yet may be in tune with “the power
of the place, its resonances, its charge of life, its coded narrative.”
Above all, domicide victims are generally subordinate – people with-
out authority.
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The Nature of Domicide 191

Nevertheless, victims vary tremendously in their level of vulnerabil-

ity. The places most vulnerable to domicide are inner-city areas, urban
fringe zones, dammable valleys, remote islands, and the so-called terra
nullius (empty regions) occupied by scattered nomads. The people
most vulnerable to domicide, as already noted, are those most likely to
be considered as “others” by elites and planners, people who are like-
ly to be able to mount least resistance to the project. “Otherness”
appears to reach its extreme among Aboriginal peoples or those who
live traditional lives. This is true whether we are considering those
impacted by Western planners or by the elites of India, Africa, or
Southeast Asia. For example, although only 8 per cent of India’s peo-
ple are classified as “tribals,” tribal people make up 40 per cent of
those who have been displaced by dams, military installations, open-
cast mines, and other grandiose installations (French 1998). The
extremes of vulnerability, then, are to be found in extensive desert,
prairie, or forest zones doomed to be “used” or “settled” from a met-
ropolitan centre, or remote islands valuable for their resources or iso-
lation, the latter being of uncommon interest to the military.
The characteristic feature of most of these vulnerable places and
peoples is their remoteness or isolation. They are either physically
remote, as in equatorial forests, or they are socially remote from cen-
tres of power that may be physically close by, as in poor inner-city
neighbourhoods razed by entrepreneurs who can look down upon
them from their office towers. Islands, of course, are quintessentially
remote in both ways. And, above all, the victims of domicide are
almost always smaller in numbers than those destined to benefit from
the common good. Small in number and relatively powerless – their
chances for successful resistance are not good.

The Grief Syndrome. The response to domicide, and the way people
are affected by it, also varies a great deal. Those who are able to deal
with change easily, see socio-economic advantage, or agree with com-
mon good rhetoric, may benefit. For them, by definition, the change
they have undergone cannot be called domicide. Earlier, we saw cases
in which relocation had positive results. Nevertheless, victims often
suffer through years of uncertainty before they lose their homes. They
have to stand by helplessly while a sort of “planning blight” sets in,
destroying the value of their homes, and then they must adapt to their
new homes through a significant process of change. Others must
weather rejection by the community to which they have been trans-
planted.
The many case studies of uprooting in Coelho and Ahmed (1980)
confirm that sudden change of any kind is a source of stress. Forced
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192 domicide

relocation, often carried out abruptly, creates an enormous amount of

stress, which is sometimes manifested in socially deviant ways. Trimble
opines that “outcomes of forced migration, the type where people are
compelled to leave an area when their presence is not desired by an
external agent, are disruptive, occasionally tragic, and in many cases,
generate irreversible problems” (Trimble 1980, 455)
Thus, for many, sometimes a majority or even a whole Aboriginal
group, the loss of home may bring sadness and grief. Some mourn the
loss of ancestors’ graves and ancestral land, while others lose friends,
extended family relationships, and local social networks. Some may
suffer physiological, psychological, or social distress, and they can feel
anger or a sense of helplessness. Some may accommodate their grief by
focusing more strongly on kith and kin, while others will idealize their
lost home. Some, particularly the elderly, may die or commit suicide.
For those who survive, there may be resentment at having to suffer
for the supposed greater good of the community and against those offi-
cials who are responsible for their fate. This resentment may be trans-
lated into a long-term mistrust of government, and world views
emphasizing powerlessness may emerge: “Politics knows only two
basic methods: The first is cheating, the other violence” (Brink 1974,
236). Kazantzakis (1974, 86) concludes that “you’re either a wolf or a
lamb. If you’re a lamb, you’re eaten up; if a wolf, you do the eating”
and, in a richly Christian spirit, the despairing “Blessed are the unmer-
ciful; Blessed are the violent, for they shall inherit the earth.”
The grief syndrome among the dispossessed is worth extended con-
sideration. Eviction has occurred since Adam and Eve, and there is rich
literary and anecdotal evidence of its psychological effects. But it was
Marc Fried, employed by the Massachusetts General Hospital to sur-
vey the Boston West Enders whom its extension was about to displace,
who first gave the domicide grief syndrome the imprimatur of scientif-
ic medical research.
Fried made an explicit comparison between forced relocation and
bereavement, both of which generate grief reactions that can be
intense, deeply felt, and sometimes overwhelming. People can grieve
for a lost home as they grieve for a loved one now dead. Marris (1974,
25, 44) followed up this lead with studies in both Britain and West
Africa, which confirmed that grief, apathy, and a feeling of “the aim-
less futility of life” can readily follow relocation. In Lagos, Nigeria,
those forced from their homes complained bitterly: “It seems like being
taken from happiness to misery;” “I fear it like death.”
The domicide grief syndrome is clearly not restricted to Western cul-
tures. In a review of forced resettlement across Africa, Chambers (1969,
176) found that oustees tended to adopt one of two polar attitudes to
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The Nature of Domicide 193

their disruptive situation. Individualism, independence, self-help, and a

high degree of activity were found at one extreme, while at the other
was “a high degree of inactivity and apathy, combined with dependent
attitudes,” all common features of grief. A similar bipolar response was
found in Algeria (Sutton and Lawless 1978, 342). Marris (1974) notes
that a bustle of activity and apparent insouciance may sometimes
presage a delayed shock reaction, worsened by a failure to do grief
work. For a few, the trauma of relocation simply cannot be borne, and
they commit suicide. A frightening report from Colombia (Vidal 1997)
suggests that the indigenous U’wa people, their homeland on the point
of being destroyed by oil companies, have considered mass suicide.
A number of attempts have been made to codify the human response
to bereavement or the confrontation of the individual with the process
of dying. One of the first was the idealized model of Kübler-Ross
(1992) that suggested that when confronted with loss, a person may go
through stages of shock, denial, anger, guilt, bargaining, depression,
resignation, and acceptance. After the predicament has been acknowl-
edged, there is generally considerable anger, vulnerability, and depen-
dency. Crisis resolution usually comes with acceptance, although some
of the dying fight to the very end, refusing to go gently.
If grief is a person’s emotional response to loss, mourning is the
process of incorporating the experience of loss into our continuing
lives. There are many models of the grief/mourning process
(DeSpelder and Strickland 1987, 212), but almost all of them begin
with “shock,” go through a middle period of “grief work,” “separa-
tion pain,” or “experiencing the pain,” and conclude with some form
of “re-establishment” or “reintegration;” “grief is essential if we are
to move on in life” (Walter 1990, 125). Survivors may need a variety
of coping mechanisms, including rituals, support groups, and social
institutions, such a grief counselling, in order to come to terms with
the fact of loss.
Grieving for a lost home will likely vary from the grief that follows a
human loss. First, we know human death is inevitable, yet many of us
believe that our dwellings, neighbourhoods, landscapes, and valleys
have inherent permanence. They are bigger than us; they are centres of
stability in a rapidly changing world. Second, when individuals die, at
least in Western societies, there is little thought of blaming some outside
agency; as in a natural disaster, death is an unrepealable act of God. The
victims of domicide, in contrast, may be well aware that their homes
have been destroyed by elite groups for some purpose; there is someone
to blame, if it is only “them.” Third, acceptance of domicide is not like
the acceptance of the death of a loved one. After the latter, life goes on;
whereas those who suffer domicide may well feel that acceptance of
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194 domicide

their loss is yet another blow to their self-esteem, their sense of empow-
erment, their identity. Grief counselling for domicide should not blind-
ly follow the dying-bereavement grief models of social workers nor the
strategies of helping those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In my study of the village of Howdendyke, East Yorkshire (Porteous
1989), I made an attempt to codify grief stages and compare them with
the above sociological models. Both relocatees and those permitted to
stay in the half-destroyed village displayed a variety of emotional respons-
es including sadness, depression, and resignation. Because the domicidal
process was so slow and insidious, there was little shock but a good deal
of denial, summed up as: “but surely they won’t do this to us?” After
recognition of the process had set in, the pain felt was chiefly character-
ized by laments for the past, wherein even people still living in the
remains of the village tended to use the past tense while speaking of it.
There was some idealization of the former village and negative compar-
isons with current living situations, although some acknowledged that
removal had made their lives easier in some ways. A second category of
response involved the assignment of blame. And when efforts to halt the
domicide process were seen to be of no avail – given the power of the
companies, the bureaucracy, and the politicians against a community of
200 persons – resignation and depression set in, followed by acceptance
and an attempt “to make the best of it” (Porteous 1989, 170–3).
In my work on this village I have acted as unofficial therapist for not
a few villagers, being an active listener and friend as they came to terms
with the loss of the physical and social fabric of their lives. The publi-
cation of my book was valuable in several ways. It provided support
when public meetings were held to try to bring village destruction to a
halt, and it has become a valuable prop to memory for those whose
social and physical landscape has disappeared. My own grief at the
domicide of my village has been somewhat assuaged by the time-hon-
oured self-therapeutic practice of “writing it out.” A second wave of
personal grief, however, set in in 1997 when my own former house was
finally demolished. Again, writing it out proved helpful. Here are some
of my verses that fit most closely with this book’s argument:

due pro ce ss

Council has always proceeded legally and according to due procedure.

Mayor Robert Park, Boothferry Borough Council

Government and Business, hand in glove,

Destroy my village. Distanced, staying clean
They send in hired hands. Seen from above
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The Nature of Domicide 195

These managers, dull yet abstractly keen,

Are doing something useful – making jobs
In backward villages for laid-off yobs.

There’s no escaping this cool juggernaut’s

Bulldozing of the future from the past.
No present, this! And there, beyond all courts’
Surveillance, politicians, and bureaucrats
And company directors golf their holes,
Where nothing mars their joy nor thwarts their goals.

jo b s

Workers with jobs come to destroy my place.

Cranes and bulldozers take these hovels down,
Crush up the ancient bricks. Women, old men
And kids look on in bafflement, as their known world
Collapses. It’s rubble now, the Square, where
We had Bonfires, played Mischievous Night, and
Where our elders pubcrawled in one pub,
Shopped at the Post Office, danced the Hokey Cokey
In the hall. All rubble now, and better for it
Say the managers, to be asphalted over, a
‘Hard standing’ for a fleet of haulage trucks.

And now, what was irregular, and bright,

And three-dimensional, and full of life,
And wrong, shrivels to a harsh black flatness
Where stand oily shallows after rain.

My place is like a dying cut-down whale

With busy men dismantling, hacking, flensing.
Don’t get me wrong, such work means jobs.
Jobs are a form of cleansing.

o bs c eni ty br e a k s i n

They are making a killing.

How do they measure their lives?
Endlessly more killings must be made.

Can vision enter the equation?

Unless there’s vision, mind, the people perish.
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196 domicide

Not here. Their vision’s of a slab of concrete

That’s growing money. Of a local habitation
Still named, but suddenly becoming memory.

th e k übler-ro s s app roac h to dy i n g

Denial wasn’t in the cards, so

I tried anger, it was only
Right to try to stop destruction,
Rage against unmitigated
Business murdering my village.

They were stronger, richer, harder.

Blandishments were tried, and threatening,
All of which distraction covered
Up the endless hopeless slither
Of the smothering of my village.

Now I’ve come to some acceptance

Yet I’ll demonstrate their callous
Unforgiving work by witness,
Journalling the lies and truths a-
-bout the murder of my village:
The Kübler-Ross approach to dying.

la nd s c a pes o f t h e da f t

When all the world is concrete

And only starlings sing
We’ll wonder what folk used to eat
When gardens glowed with green,
We’ll speculate and excavate
To find how people lived their funny
Lives before the concrete
When all we’ve left is money.

In the case of Howdendyke, the two worlds of discourse of planners

and plannees never came together. What villagers saw as loved homes,
company directors derided as “hovels,” and bureaucrats saw as “sub-
standard housing.”
Although most Howdendykers came to terms with their loss, some
still mourned their village. A more extreme case of grief, coupled
with severe difficulties of acceptance, can be found among both the
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The Nature of Domicide 197

Christian Palestinians who fled the village of Kafr Bir’im in 1947 and
their co-religionists who stayed in what was to become Israel. The
tented refugee camp in Lebanon proved too difficult a life for some.
“My father ... never really recovered from losing everything. He
hated the tents, and he missed his village and his old life in Palestine.
He would have given anything to return, but he knew that all his
friends who had tried to sneak across the border to their old villages
had been shot dead by the Israelis. Sometimes he would just sit there
looking at the key of his house in Kafr Bir’im and the title deeds the
British had given his father to prove the ownership of our land. He
got ill and very depressed. It was as if something had broken inside
him. He died in 1956. He was only thirty-four years old” (Dalrymple
1997, 270–5). His family had to endure several further relocations
within Lebanon, as refugee camps were attacked or arbitrarily bull-
dozed. After forty-seven years of exile, his daughter said: “After all I
have suffered from the Israelis and the Lebanese, I would like to go
home even if it meant I was naked and starving ... Even if I had lived
a hundred years here, I would still like to go back to Palestine, go
back to Kafr Bir’im where no one can tell me that ... I don’t belong”
(Dalrymple 1997, 270–5).
Her compatriots who had remained in Kafr Bir’im and been given
Israeli citizenship had come to a greater acceptance of their lot: to be
relocated away from their village and to have to ask permission to visit
their old church there. At the relocation, the older relocatees “cried for
many days because they had lost their homes and their land,” but were
reassured by the Israelis that they would some day be allowed to
return. After much effort, in 1953, the villagers won a court case that
declared their eviction unjust, upon which the Israeli army declared the
area a military zone and destroyed Kafr Bir’im by aerial bombardment:
“All the villagers went up onto that hill and watched the bombing of
their homes. They call it the Crying Hill now, because everyone from
Kafr Bir’im wept that day” (Dalrymple 1997, 367–9). Later, some of
the village land was given to a kibbutz.
The villagers regret their “wonderful village” but “could do noth-
ing,” and “still feel betrayed.” They are most resentful of the attempt-
ed memoricide of the village: the site is now part of a national park,
but the park interpretation material makes no mention of the Christ-
ian village that recently existed there: “We’ve been edited out of histo-
ry ... they don’t admit to our existence. Or to the existence of our
fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers.” Though the former
life is idealized, the blow to memory and to identity is bitterly felt.
Today, the former Palestinian villagers of Kafr Bir’im must pay a
national park fee to view the remains of their village, yet: “When we
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198 domicide

come here, we are happy ... All the old memories come back. We
remember many things: the streets, the homes, the neighbours. Every-
thing” (Dalrymple 1997, 372).

Memory and Memoricide. The case of Kafr Bir’im brings up the next
element of our assessment of the victims of domicide, the issue of
memory. Memory cannot be utterly expunged while there are remem-
berers who can pass on stories to future generations, but it can be
mortally wounded when these stories cannot be backed up by accessi-
ble documents or physical structures on the ground. Those whose task
is to destroy memory, then, will take care to expunge such physical
structures.
Memory is important at the national level and becomes part of
nationalist myth; Serbian mythic memories of the Battle of Kosovo in
1389 are part of the background to the wars in the former Yugoslavia
in the 1990s, while equally questionable myths refuel the “temple
wars” of India, resulting in the destruction of an Ayodhya mosque in
1992. History is hijacked by the winners, who promulgate their useful
myths (Swift 1993). In terms of domicide, myths useful to the propo-
nents include “the certainty of progress,” “national destiny,” and a
world organized by the powerful “from the top down.” Those who
resist these views are likely to fall into mythic traps such as “the good
old days” or “the nobility of the oppressed.” As Orwell emphasized,
history is constantly rewritten, from official Chinese history books to
American theme parks.
The physical destruction of place and artifact is commonly used in
attempts to erase memory and alter cultures. We are familiar with the
wholesale destruction of monasteries and of Tibetan buildings in Lhasa
by the Chinese after 1959. The Serbian destruction of mosques, grave-
yards, libraries, and archives in the early 1990s was an attempt to erase
the Bosnian Muslim imprint from the land. In Israel, former Palestin-
ian villages are literally rubbed out, only to re-emerge in outline as the
old villages’ deep-rooted cactus hedges “keep sprouting again and
again to mark the sites of the former garden boundaries and the shad-
ows of former fields” (Dalrymple 1997, 863).
The example of Kafr Bir’im, noted above, is only one case of what
appears to be a systematic attempt by Muslims and Jews to remove
Christian structures from the landscape of the Middle East (Dalrymple
1997). Turkish archaeology ignores the Armenian heritage, and semi-
official destruction of Armenian artifacts continues in a deliberate cam-
paign to destroy all evidence of the long presence of Armenians in east-
ern Anatolia. Similar efforts are being made in Israel. In the Old City
of Jerusalem, all Arabs living in the Jewish Quarter were evicted in
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The Nature of Domicide 199

1967. Since then, radical settler groups have been buying up properties
in the Muslim, Christian, and Armenian quarters, in which non-Jews
find building permits difficult to obtain. There appears to be a con-
certed attempt to Judaize the Old City, the long-term results of which
will be religious and cultural suppression and the weakening of histor-
ical memory (Said 1994, 189).
Individuals combat such attempts to expunge memory in a variety of
ways. While authorities may try to preserve major artifacts and
archives, ordinary people rely on photographs, letters, small memen-
tos, and the retelling of their experiences. Peasants carry away a small
bag of soil from their ancestral lands. Although they may have suffered
much loss – of property rights, dwellings, land, and social networks –
the relocated can maintain both their identity and their attachment to
lost homes in this way for three or more generations. To paraphrase
McKie (1973, 15), the triumph of the rational and efficient over the
picturesque and sentimental is rarely complete.
The popularity of autobiography, childhood novels, and family his-
tory research testifies to the importance of memory in our lives. The
book Planned to Death (Porteous 1989) has become Howdendyke’s
“memorial volume,” and it has generated a number of letters from
readers who credit it with the revival within them of buried memories.
Andre Brink’s novel Looking on Darkness (1974) helps preserve the
memory of Cape Town’s District Six, while the work of Evenden and
Anderson (1972) demonstrates that Japanese-Canadians evicted and
interned during the Second World War strive to retain memories of
their internment camps, which have become an integral part of their
collective identity. Whereas Salman Rushdie’s theory of fiction
demands the chewing over of “big chunks of the universe,” Julian
Evans (1993) rightly suggests that most of us live lives of detail at the
local level, so that the parochial “tiny pieces of human experience”
that Rushdie disdains are, in fact, just the landscapes of the heart that
are so important to us.
It is interesting to note that new trends in medical thought agree with
this proposition. Both allopathic (McCarron et al. 1994) and alterna-
tive (Drum 1998) medical traditions are beginning to recognize that
health and well-being are substantially contextual, and that a signifi-
cant part of that contextuality involves belongingness and feelings of
“being at home.”
The final outlet for the victims of domicide is resistance, while for
the proponents, the issue of domicide is addressed through processes of
remediation. These issues of social justice, which are discussed in the
next section, are more relevant to everyday domicide than to the
extreme variety.
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200 domicide

Too often, in the past, the victims of domicide have been ignored.
Their moral right to resist and to enjoy remediation is forcibly assert-
ed by planner Peter Marris.

Resistance and Remediation

When those who have power to manipulate changes act as if they have
only to explain, and when their explanations are not at once accepted,
shrug off opposition as ignorance or prejudice, they express a profound
contempt for the meaning of lives other than their own. For the reformers
have already assimilated these changes to their purposes, and worked out
a reformulation which makes sense to them, perhaps through months or
years of analysis and debate. If they deny others the chance to do the
same, they treat them as puppets dangling by the threads of their own
conceptions.
Marris (1974, 166)

Domicide is frequently protested, but when resistance occurs, it is often

ineffectual. Attempts to soften or channel resistance, coupled with the
laudable motive of allowing plannees to have their say, generally take
the form of some type of public participation exercise. The goals of
public participation in planning are to strengthen the influence of both
citizens and planners in decision making vis-à-vis economic and polit-
ical elites, and to reduce differences in power (Fagence 1977, 46).
Typologies of citizen participation include that of Milbraith (1965),
who divided the behaviour patterns of political activity into gladiator-
ial (holding public office), transitional (attending a public meeting),
spectator (voting), and apathetic inactivity. Spiegel and Mittenthal
(1968) suggested seven elements including: information, consultation,
registration, shared policy and decision making, joint planning, dele-
gation of planning responsibility, and neighbourhood control. This
concept of an ascending order of popular control of change has been
elaborated by Arnstein (1969) and Lipsky (1970).
For Arnstein, citizen participation is another term for power. She
suggests a framework that arranges citizen participation efforts on a
ladder, with each rung corresponding to the extent of a citizen’s power
in determining a plan or program. The first two rungs – manipulation
and therapy – are basically non-participatory whereby persons in
power “educate” or “cure” the participants. At rungs three, four, and
five, citizens hear or are heard but cannot ensure that their views will
make a difference. At the upper rungs, people are able to negotiate
with persons in power and may, at the highest level, hold decision-
making seats or managerial power.
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The Nature of Domicide 201

Arnstein’s ladder is interpreted by Fagence (1977) to mean that there

are varying degrees of participation tolerated by plan-making agencies
or varying degrees of involvement accepted by participants. However,
there is another way of seeing this framework in relation to prospec-
tive victims of domicide. In reviewing the case studies of chapters 3 and
4, there appears to be a correlation between levels of resistance and the
degree of power achieved by persons who resist the threat of domicide
(Lipsky 1970). There are three broad categories that describe resis-
tance: little or no resistance, limited resistance, and major resistance.
Each of these, in turn, appears to relate to the relevant rungs on Arn-
stein’s ladder. For example, when there was major resistance, a degree
of citizen control was achieved (airport construction was stopped or a
more acceptable project was built). When there was virtually no par-
ticipation in decisions, affected persons were manipulated successfully
by power holders. Having recognized this correlation, it must never-
theless be noted that it is possible that the choice of citizen participa-
tion measures could have some effect on the amount of resistance
encountered. When well designed, public participation measures might
diminish resistance.
At the bottom rung of Arnstein’s ladder, little or no resistance
occurs when project developers do not inform people that they are to
lose their homes until it is too late for them to take action. In response,
citizens adapt to the fact that their community is dying or simply are
unable to make any decision. The villagers of Howdendyke illustrate
this circumstance. Although the agenda to expand industrial holdings
had been clear to industry and planning authorities since 1968, it was
not until eleven years later that the residents of Howdendyke, East
Yorkshire, learned of their fate when permission for improvement to
a cottage in the village was denied (Porteous 1989, 160). Their reac-
tion to the planned death of their village was mixed. Some were indif-
ferent, while others believed that such a thing could not happen. Some
attempted to sell their houses, while others tried to change the situa-
tion through letters to the planners, politicians, and the editor of the
local newspaper. But few had the knowledge of planning procedures
or the ability to organize a resistance that would make any difference.
A survey in June 1981 found that most Howdendykers, of whom two-
thirds were tenants, wanted to stay. All the same, many of the villagers
moved away. For the less than one-third who are left, there has been
a recent change worthy of note. Some of the remaining houses have
had small improvements made to them by the industry that owns
them. It is possible that due to Porteous’ work, the company has
developed a conscience, but if so, it has come too little and late for
most people.
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202 domicide

Limited resistance to the threat of domicide is expressed in a num-

ber of ways and frequently occurs when there is some degree of
involvement of the victims in their ultimate fate. This involvement is
often pure tokenism but may result from situations when planning for
resettlement is undertaken. In the Volta River project, despite signifi-
cant preplanning, some resistance was encountered when people did
not buy into the “self-help” programs designed to help them create
new homes. Similarly, with the construction of the Kariba Gorge Dam,
preplanning occurred, but the Gwembe Tonga resisted settlement for
the following reasons: the program threatened people’s basic securities;
they did not understand the technical facts; the project was the result
of an order from outside their settlement; and they were made to suf-
fer for the longer-term good of their community.
When major resistance occurs, a project may be cancelled or
redesigned, and in the latter case, there will be significant involvement
of affected persons. This resistance is likely to be successful because
social networks are well developed or develop quickly based on strong
horizontal (relationship between a community’s social units) and verti-
cal (relationship between community’s social units and outside politi-
cal, social, or economic institutions) integration (Rohe and Mouw
1991, 58, 59). Two examples of major resistance that resulted in quite
different end points include the resistance of the people of Cublington
in England against the third London airport and resistance on behalf
of the residents of Crest Street, Durham against construction of an
expressway.
Some of the most massive resistance efforts have been mounted
against dam building. These will be discussed in chapter 7, which out-
lines proposals for combating or mitigating domicide. At this point, the
brief discussion of participation and resistance above underlines the
need for better planning practice in dealing with domicide victims as
well as the necessity to investigate the shortcomings of current practice.
While there are circumstances in which citizen involvement has
changed the course of decision making, earlier chapters have described
many situations in which this did not occur. In these circumstances, a
number of measures have been used to involve and provide mitigation
and/or compensation for the victims of domicide, ranging from the
proactive (public meetings and hearings and social impact assessment)
to active intervention (planning), and, finally, to measures to be used
as a last resort, such as expropriation.

Public Meetings and Hearings. Public meetings and hearings were

widely used in the 1960s to gather public input on the effect of major
projects, and, in the process, the need for assistance to the victims of
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The Nature of Domicide 203

domicide was identified. This practice continues today since it provides

a number of benefits to project proponents, including: legitimacy due
to legal authority and frequency of use; the appearance of an open
process; an inexpensive format (at least before the advent of interven-
er funding, which allows people who would otherwise not be able to
attend to participate); and, finally, the opportunity to provide infor-
mation about a project and, in turn, gauge public attitude and receive
public comment.
However, the process is frequently dominated by organized groups
and agencies that have their own agenda and neglect the broader social
views. It is often an arena for confrontation and/or intimidation, and
it is used as a ritual or to co-opt participants. Frequently, it is limited
in terms of time and scope of the discussion. For example, the effects
of a development are discussed, rather than whether the development
should occur or not (Reed 1984, 13–18). For the individual, there are
significant drawbacks; the process can be mystifying and costly both in
terms of the time necessary to participate and in the emotional toll of
such participation.
Reed (1984, 18–19, 51–2) identified seven criteria for a fair hearing
on environmental issues. These criteria are generally applicable to the
situation of probable domicide: all members of the public should have
the right to appear; participation should be enabled early on in the pro-
ject before irrevocable decisions are made; sufficient notice of hearings
and other procedures must be given; an impartial board should preside
over hearings; participants should have easy access to all relevant
information and government expertise; participants should be provid-
ed with research time and financial aid according to predetermined
criteria; and complementary techniques for public education and
comment should be provided.
Meetings and hearings are now frequently augmented by the use of
social and environmental impact assessment and planning processes.

Social Impact Assessment. Social impact assessment has emerged as

an essential component of environmental impact assessment. The pri-
mary focus is on estimating and evaluating the social change that
would be brought about by specified project alternatives. Based on this
assessment, the project can be altered, or mitigation or compensation
can be prescribed.
The primary focus of these assessments is at the level of community
(Hindmarsh et al. 1988), with especial interest in the economic effect on
the community (Bowles 1981). Methods have been gleaned from the
social sciences and have included the Delphi technique, systems
approaches, trend extrapolation, and quantitative modelling (Soderstrom
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204 domicide

1981, vi). In addition, social indicators are frequently used to permit

quantitative measures of the condition of a group of individuals over
time. Such measures include population density, mobility, housing,
crowding, transportation, desirable community growth, and community
cohesion. They may be augmented by a consideration of the perceived
need for property acquisition, cultural heritage designation (Weiler
1980), or landscape evaluation. The gathering of these indicators is
enhanced by the use of public participation during the assessment
process. Hyman and Stiftel (1988, 41ff.) suggest that public participation
allows a more direct and actual role through advisory committees, pub-
lic meetings, or group process techniques. In addition, they suggest that
participation should permit better design of mitigative measures, gain
support from diverse groups, and act to gain people’s confidence. Finally,
they acknowledge the need for public participation to be combined with
an extensive media and outreach program.
Yet a review of a number of sources on social impact assessment
(Bowles 1981, Clark and Herington 1988, Finsterbusch 1980, 1983,
Hyman and Stiftel 1988, Krawetz 1991, Lang and Armour 1981, Lat-
tey 1980, Soderstrom 1981, Weiler 1980, and Wolf 1981) demon-
strates that there is little focus on the individual and home. Undoubt-
edly this results from two factors: the apparent need to provide
quantitative analysis and the fact that most social impact assessment is
undertaken on behalf of the project proponent. Only Finsterbusch
(1980, 103–5) recognizes the significance of attachment to home, par-
ticularly the significance of home ownership as part of the “American
dream,” and the relationship between home value and neighbourhood
satisfaction. While he suggests that the main function of housing is the
provision of living space, he also acknowledges the significance of
home in terms of attachment, security, and concept of self. However,
no guidance is given as to how to take these values into account.
Lang and Armour (1981, 47ff.) identify a number of other problems
with social impact assessment beyond the lack of focus on the individ-
ual. These are the following:

• Social indicators are determined mainly by the project proponent.

• Assessment panels and the public are often unable to assess the
significance of projected changes.
• Public input is often limited, and no opportunity is given to
comment on indicators to be collected or the process to be under-
taken.
• Not enough consideration is given to “way of life.”
• Too little information is given to those most affected by the
project.
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The Nature of Domicide 205

• There is uncertain follow-up on social impacts. Simply requesting

“careful planning” in dealing with a community does not mean it
is going to happen.

In summary, social impact assessment continues to strive to provide

a means by which social and economic consequences arising from pro-
ject development can be mitigated. Despite practical and academic
attention, it has failed to gain the acceptance enjoyed by environmen-
tal impact assessment, which has had more success in describing
impacts. While much energy has been put into the development of pre-
cise descriptors in the form of social indicators, these do not appear to
be easily interpreted by assessment panels.

Planning Processes. Planning processes are very commonly used to

provide mitigation. As discussed by Lawrence (1992, 23), there are sig-
nificant similarities between the planner and someone who undertakes
environmental and social impact assessment. They share a focus on
something that will eventually be built, although the planner’s range of
concerns is greater, touching on social, economic, and cultural factors.
They share a reliance on the rational planning model and have both
struggled with the role of public participation. They both rely on the
production of a plan or impact statement, and, in both cases, the plan-
ners and assessors are seen as advisors and facilitators. However, plan-
ners manage change, whereas assessors simply evaluate proposed
changes. Further, planning has for many years concerned itself with
broader notions of public interest and an emphasis on realizing a pos-
itive end, while environmental impact assessment (in theory undertak-
en to assess whether a project should be built) tends to start from the
perception that there is an imbalance (proposed destruction of the
environment) to be righted.
In the context of everyday projects described in this book, planners
are seen primarily as managers of change on behalf of a commission or
government agency that is carrying out a large project. In this context,
also, planners are inevitably subject to the approval of politicians or
corporate elites, who have a particular definition of the public interest
(Porteous 1977, 316–17). Nevertheless there are examples of attempts
being made to accommodate the needs of the plannees. Two are
explored here.
Finsterbusch (1980, 129–35) studied the relocation of Hill, New
Hampshire, by the American Army Corps of Engineers in 1940. The
town’s residents, under the leadership of their state planning director,
relocated to a new, carefully planned town, which kept most of the
community together. According to Finsterbusch, the success of this
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206 domicide

project relied on: leadership, consensus, co-operation, and community

solidarity; the existence of industries that were willing to relocate; the
existence of an attractive and affordable site for the community; and,
finally, the presence of financial assistance to the homeowners and the
community. Overall, “community cohesion, identity, and pride were
also enhanced” during the relocation process.
The second example is the Volta River Project resettlement under-
taken in Ghana in the 1960s and planned by a Preparatory Commis-
sion sponsored by the British and Ghanaian governments. While this
project was undertaken a generation ago, it serves as an example here
because it was constructed at approximately the same time as the
Columbia River projects analysed in chapter 5 and since it was the
subject of a detailed critical review. The project goal, to leave no one
worse off than before the creation of the reservoir, was to be achieved
through a combination of compensation and resettlement through
self-help and incentives. Information to support the project goal was
collected through an extensive social survey. Self-help was seen as “an
excellent way of rehabilitating” the victims of domicide (Kalitsi 1970,
40). In addition, all public sector infrastructure was to be replaced,
and private interests were to be compensated at market value plus a
“disturbance element” of 20 per cent of the assessed value of private
buildings.
Villagers were given an opportunity to choose the location of their
future home. Difficulties arose only when people did not understand
the reason for one choice of location or another or when people were
unwilling to leave the traditional lands of their ancestors. Kalitsi’s
(1970, 54) description of the evacuation of these areas gives some
insight into the efforts that were made to provide assistance to the
evacuees: “On the day of the evacuation, a despatch team went with
the transport, encouraged the people in packing up and loading, and
issued each family head with a householder’s identification card. Social
workers travelled with the evacuees on the boats and lorries. In some
cases, the journeys took as long as three days, and there were difficul-
ties created by inclement weather ... On arrival, a reception team of
social workers with predetermined house allocation plans conducted
the people to their houses, issued them with rations from food donat-
ed by the World Food Program, and stayed with them to assist them to
find their feet” (Kalitsi 1970, 54).
That the evacuation went as smoothly as it did was attributed to the
presence of social workers in the field for a number of years before the
final move, participation by villagers in the choice of future location,
and the involvement of community leaders. Payment in the form of
housing materials assisted resettlement, as did the provision of simple
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The Nature of Domicide 207

village layouts, house plans, necessary machinery, and the construction

of public amenities. While the development of small communities, dif-
ferent types of housing sensitive to the regions, and the use of commu-
nal labour were intended, the short time frame that was eventually
faced by the project forced the use of imported labour, uniform hous-
ing design, and the creation of small towns.

Advocacy Planning. Advocacy planning has been less frequently

used. The citizen advocate is “an expert [used] to confront an expert,
to enlist on behalf of citizens the services and resources which help to
equalize the struggle against the system” (Stinson 1974, 39). In order
to do this, the notion of value-free planning is rejected, and planners
were to become advocates for “what they deemed proper” (Davidoff
1965, 331–2). Planners were to rely on a person’s life experience in the
area and on their ability to measure and observe, rather than on tech-
nical evaluations. Everyone was to be given an opportunity to provide
his or her opinion (Breitbart and Peet 1973, 97). Two types of advo-
cacy evolved from this position: direct representation of a specific
client group on a planning issue and indirect pressure on behalf of a
community without being tied to any particular interest. While the use
of advocacy planning was initially hailed, there were also a number of
problems, described by Breitbart and Peet (1973, 101), including: the
impact of an advocate’s personal values and biases on a community
group (sometimes taking the form of manipulation); the exclusion of
citizens from the planning process; and data manipulation. Advocacy
planning was also considered chiefly as a reaction to crisis.

Expropriation. In sharp contrast, expropriation is the state’s action

of taking or modifying the property rights of individuals through the
exercise of sovereignty. If no compensation is paid, such an action
amounts to confiscation. Where compensation is made, the terms
“condemnation” or “eminent domain” are used in the United States to
denote the compulsory acquisition of private property for public use or
benefit; compensation should be “just.” Abrams (1971, 100) notes that
the exercise of eminent domain in the United States has been much
more widespread than the equivalent “compulsory purchase” in Eng-
land, because “people lacked the deep attachment to site that was
characteristic of Europe.” In Canada, Todd both defines expropriation
and recognizes its chief deficiency: “In general terms, ‘expropriation’ is
the compulsory (i.e., against the wishes of the owner) acquisition of
property, usually real property, by the Crown or by one of its autho-
rized agencies. The power of expropriation is generally recognized as a
necessary adjunct of modern government, but its exercise nearly
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208 domicide

always results in a traumatic experience for the affected property

owner” (Todd 1992, 1). This definition is obviously germane in the
study of domicide.
In commenting on the subject of expropriation and compensation,
Knetsch (1983, iv) highlights the dilemma of “why some interests
might be favoured over others.” In particular, he recognizes that there
are values that do not have a direct expression through market
exchanges and thus receive less recognition. However, he suggests that
market value has been chosen because values like emotional attach-
ment or sentiment are not measurable, that attempting to reach such
values could lead to different compensations for similar properties,
that such values might lead to “excessive” claims, and, finally, that
there is a long-standing legal principle that an owner must give up land
required by “the community.” He further suggests that as an alterna-
tive to compensation, every effort should be made to exchange one
property for another or to make offers in excess of the market price.
(p. 48)
Knetsch’s views are augmented by a study of the perception of
property settlement payments undertaken by Korsching et al.
(1980). In general, they found that most property owners felt that
they were not paid enough despite the fact that they received greater
than the appraised value. Their antagonism was directed toward the
project developers and their representatives and the method by
which the latter undertook appraisals. The tools of expropriation
and compensation, even when used when all else fails, thus leave
much to be desired from the viewpoint of the victim. If anything,
they highlight the importance of proactive measures to compensate
the victims of domicide.

c o nclus i o n s

We must … mobilize ourselves and struggle to preserve the remembered

sense of community and integrate it into future attempts at change.
Gallaher and Padfield (1980, 22)

This chapter began by providing an initial typology of domicide, which

essentially pitted powerful elites and bureaucracies, intent upon their
goals, against relatively powerless victims who happen to be “in the
way” of desired change. Elites and victims interact in two major ways:
by protest and resistance on the part of the victims, and by remedia-
tion of some kind on the part of the proponents.
Few attempts at resistance have been successful. When the response
to domicide is examined, it is found to range from major resistance and
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The Nature of Domicide 209

confrontation to an almost complete and silent acceptance. Major

resistance may result in some degree of citizen power being achieved.
Limited resistance may at least result in the victims being informed,
placated, or consulted. In each of these, some form of partnership with
the victims may occur. There are, however, many circumstances in
which there is no participation by the victims, and, therefore, they are
merely manipulated to achieve the ends of those in power.
The range of response suggests that processes are needed to ensure
that useless confrontation, passive acceptance, or tokenism do not
occur. This chapter therefore assessed the five techniques that have
been most commonly used. Public meetings and hearings have been
frequently used in the past and continue in common use today. For the
project proponent, they provide an efficient tool in terms of time and
cost. For those affected, the public hearing is the least sympathetic
means by which their loss can be measured and hence compensated.
Social impact assessment is the most well known anticipatory means
used to measure the value of what is to be lost, but this measure has
failed to develop the same utility as environmental assessment. Plan-
ning processes have been used to provide mitigation, particularly
through the creation of physical infrastructure to replace what is lost
when domicide occurs. Success in such planning projects most often
relies on leadership, consensus, and community solidarity. Advocacy
planning is also useful, but this tool is not frequently used at present.
The least successful means of determining compensation is expropria-
tion. While many changes have been made to the legislation that gov-
erns expropriation in recent years, it must be recognized as a mecha-
nism of last resort. To criticize expropriation for not accommodating
intrinsic values is to misunderstand its intent. There will always be
times when a monetary value of loss is required, and this need points
to the developing field of multiple account analysis.
Each of the traditional measures described above could be improved
through greater acknowledgment and respect for the lives of others.
Indeed, the epigraphs to the major sections of this chapter summarize
two of its main themes: that the key to successfully assisting the victims
of domicide lies in the respect that is paid to the meaning of their lives
and their sense of community; and that any processes designed to help
them must come to terms with the importance of intangible values, val-
ues that as yet defy quantitative measurement. An attempt to suggest
such processes will be made in the following chapter.
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CHAP T E R S E V E N

Ending Domicide?

In the vocabulary of profit, there is no word for “pity.”

John Updike (1978, 241)

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?

In small places, close to home.
Eleanor Roosevelt, in Baird (1999, 75)

Domicide matters. It is a normal, everyday occurrence. At least 30 mil-

lion people are currently suffering its ravages. The process of domicide
and the effects on its victims are serious phenomena, and, as such, they
deserve recognition in just the same way that both genocide and envi-
ronmental concerns have received worldwide attention. As the world’s
leading expert on contemporary slavery states: “When people lose con-
trol of where they live and work ... they have lost fundamental human
rights” (Bales 1999, 159).
We may well ask: Why is the destruction of home not prevented?
This question leads to others. Why is someone not responsible for
ensuring that the important personal values inherent in home are
reflected in decision-making processes? Why is it not possible to find
the convincing argument, to gather the necessary public protest, that
would establish that the public interest lies in the preservation of home
rather than its destruction? And, of greatest importance in an age of
endless development, if destruction of home has to occur, why aren’t
the victims involved in a more participatory way so that they under-
stand what is going on, can make serious changes to the plans, and
thus move toward acceptance with much less trauma?
The short answer to the above questions is that we live in a world
that an outside observer might well consider insane, a world controlled
by power elites who operate according to a “command-and-control”
agenda. When suffering is caused, the “react-and-cure” approach is
wheeled in. Development and planning are much like allopathic
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Ending Domicide? 211

medicine, designed not to prevent injury, but to wait until it has

occurred and then try to cure it. These approaches are as foolish as
they sound, but they are normal, which confirms Gruen’s (1992) diag-
nosis of The Insanity of Normality.
In trying to reshape normality, which is the goal of this chapter, it
must not be imagined that we are battling against change. Long before
Heraclitus realized that “all is flux” around 500 bc, the Sumerian
Utnapishtim declared, five thousand years ago: “There is no perma-
nence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to
hold for all time? From the days of old, there is no permanence”
(Sandars 1960, 104). The point of this book is that houses indeed do
not endure, but the decisions that lead to their destruction should
come from the dwellers and owners, rather than be imposed upon
them by external arbitrary force.
The issue, then, is that change should be guided not merely by far-
off power elites for the common good, but by people living locally so
that, at the very least, little harm befalls them. The range of what might
be done is enormous, beginning with the realization that some projects,
mostly those of everyday domicide, do indeed have merit, will enhance
the common good, and may even improve the lot of those to be dis-
placed. Most projects with the potential for domicide, however, will
require larger or smaller modifications to minimize impacts on the vic-
tims. Others, especially some super-dams, simply should not proceed.
At this point, we will develop some principles for development pro-
jects that would protect those “in the way” from suffering domicide.
The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights does not provide
such principles, except rather vaguely in Articles 9 (No one shall
be subjected to arbitrary ... exile), 12 (No one shall be subjected to
arbitrary interference with his ... home), and 17 (No one shall be
arbitrarily deprived of his property). These rights stand or fall on the
meaning of the word “arbitrarily,” which is easily circumvented by
those committed to domicidal projects, who point out that all their
actions are legal and have followed due process. The United Nations
Conferences on Human Settlements do not specifically address
domicide either, being largely concerned with “shelter.” They do,
however, call for: recognition that a human settlement is more than a
grouping of people, shelter, and workplaces; the basic human right of
people to participate in shaping the policies that affect their lives; and
for high priority to be given to the rehabilitation of expelled and
homeless people who have been displaced by natural and human-
induced catastrophes.
Recognizing domicide as a catastrophe brought about deliberately
by human agency, we would prefer that elites and their planning
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212 domicide

functionaries learn to act humanely, rather than ruthlessly. Justice

Thomas Berger asked certain fundamental questions in relation to a
proposed pipeline in Canada’s Mackenzie valley: “What is the purpose
of the project? In whose interests is it being undertaken? How should
the economic gains be shared? Can the negative impacts be ameliorat-
ed or mitigated? We must even ask ... is the project the best way to do
it?” (Berger, 1986, 181).
We might reformulate these questions as a set of fundamental
principles:

• The first question to be asked is whether the project is really

necessary.
• Incremental decisions, which ultimately force project approval,
will not be permitted.
• Before any decision to implement a project is made, all those like-
ly to be affected by it in terms of domicide should be involved as
partners in the decision-making process.
• Before any project is implemented, detailed plans for relocation
and compensation should be drawn up in partnership with those
to be relocated.
• After implementation, the welfare of the relocated should be
assisted and monitored at least into the second generation.

Such basic principles would revolutionize the way future projects are
carried out, and domicide would disappear along with victimhood.
Many projects would simply not be built.
The ultimate aim is that when development occurs, there should be
no victims; in other words, we are looking for ways to prevent domi-
cide without bringing development to a halt. In terms of implementa-
tion techniques, three chief approaches suggest themselves: the
improvement of existing mitigation techniques; the adoption of alter-
native techniques; and the development of resistance on the part of the
plannees. The latter, clearly, is most important in cases in which fool-
ish and destructive projects must be utterly prevented.

exi sti ng pla nni ng techn i q u e s r e v i si t e d

We cannot know why the world suffers. But we can know how the world
decides that suffering shall come to some persons and not to others. While
the world permits sufferers to be chosen, something beyond their agony is
earned, something even beyond the satisfaction of the world’s needs and
desires. For it is in the choosing that enduring societies preserve or destroy
those values that suffering and necessity expose. In this way, societies are
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Ending Domicide? 213

defined, for it is by the values that are foregone no less than by those that are
preserved at tremendous cost that we know a society’s character.
Calabresi and Bobbitt (1978, 1)

The first step is to decide whether domicide-producing development

should occur at all. The second is to find out how far the visions of the
elites differ from those of the public, and especially from those deemed
to be “in the way.” In this regard, there are a number of improvements
that could be made to existing decision-making processes, particularly
in public meetings and hearings and in social impact assessment pro-
cedures (which were discussed in chapter 6).

Public Meetings and Hearings

Public meetings and hearings are two quite different processes: the first
is for gathering information; the second is the quasi-judicial stage prior
to a final decision. Nevertheless, there are some improvements that
could be made that apply to both. Both should allow for a specific
period for hearing all persons who will be directly affected and provide
financial assistance to permit their attendance. If these persons cannot
attend the meeting or hearing, an independent assessor should be
charged with providing a record of their views. Participants should be
provided with research time and financial aid, coupled with the oppor-
tunity for public education and comments. Adequate notice of meetings
or hearings should be given, and every effort should be made to ensure
that the actual event is conducted by an impartial board in a non-threat-
ening, non-legalistic atmosphere. Participants should have easy access
to all relevant information, and an information meeting summarizing
the material gathered during the process of project development should
be held for hearing participants just before any formal public meeting.
In this way, those who are charged with the task of approval or non-
approval would have one final chance to decide whether they have ade-
quate evidence on which to move to public hearing. An early example
of an excellent public inquiry process was the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline
Inquiry, which went to thirty-five communities in northern Canada and
heard evidence in seven different languages. The report, which recom-
mended against the enormous Alaska–Canada–us pipeline, was signifi-
cantly entitled Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland (Berger 1977).

Social Impact Assessment

Social impact assessment is the area of anticipatory planning that

appears to require the greatest attention. Assisting decision makers
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214 domicide

who may have little difficulty arriving at personal opinions to arrive at

a decision in terms of social values is the challenge (McAllister 1980,
9). Cost-benefit analysis has been used in this regard, but it relies pri-
marily on monetary values and fails to represent equally all the people
of the present as well as the interests of future generations.
To rectify this situation, it is suggested that multiple account analy-
sis, and particularly social-cost accounting, be used as a method for
valuation. There is currently insufficient knowledge about the value
systems of community and neighbourhood (Korsching et al. 1980,
336) and, we would add, about the individual whose home is being
destroyed, and how this system will condition adjustment at time of
relocation. Korsching (1980, 336–7) recommends gaining knowledge
about this value system through the use of a modified Delphi tech-
nique, (whereby the “experts” are, for example, members of the group
who will lose their home) or by the use of a nominal process in which
a group, individual by individual, creates a list of their concerns in
communication with a group leader, and then priorizes these concerns.
There are disadvantages to this process. Those affected by domicide
might feel ill equipped to assess impacts when a solid background of
scientific knowledge is involved or might find it difficult to participate
in such a process in view of the time involved. Nevertheless, it is sug-
gested that in the context of the Delphi system or in social-costing dis-
cussed below, using “experts” from among those affected should be
essential to augment other input. Such “experts” are, of course, inperts
(Porteous 1977).
Social costing recognizes the need to achieve better enunciation of
intangible values: “By working with people, by informing them of the
issues, and assisting them in evaluating the trade-offs associated with
the problem at hand, there is increased willingness to participate in the
surveys. As well, this approach escapes the need for market informa-
tion and does not require people to pull a price out of their head, which
is the premise of the contingent valuation methodology. Overall, this
approach answers the right question; [that of] the loss to our society
and our region for a given decision” (McDaniels 1993, 21). The cur-
rent focus of much of the discussion on social costing is on environ-
mental factors and methodology. Some persons champion the cause of
contingent valuation, whereby willingness to pay for public goods is
measured (Kahneman and Knetsch 1992, 57–70), while others favour
multiple objective approaches whereby people are asked to consider
one value relative to another (McDaniels 1993, 21). With the latter,
valuation is the final phase of a five-stage approach in which the
“objectives” that matter are clarified, alternatives are structured, the
impacts of alternatives are analysed in terms of the objectives,
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Ending Domicide? 215

trade-offs associated with the alternatives are clarified, and the alterna-
tives are evaluated. There is an opportunity for participation by those
who would be most affected at each of these stages. The importance of
this type of valuation is the recognition of externalities and so the
impact on individuals of loss of home, surrounding landscape, and
community, including the impact on future generations can be added to
the lengthy list of impacts (e.g., on resources, the environment, land use,
health, regional economic structure, and aesthetics). While the subject
of social-cost accounting in relation to social impact assessment would
require much greater consideration, it is simply suggested here that this
emerging field may provide some guidance to persons who must deter-
mine whether projects will proceed and under what conditions.
It is not expected that improvements on existing techniques will be
sufficient to produce an equitable development situation. While the
1960s saw a wave of citizen participation in planning, the 1980s was
a decade of sober re-evaluation of earlier expectations that had in
many ways not been met. Johnson (1984, 214) submits that citizen
participation in decision making, even at the local level, is hampered
by the scope and complexity of planning tasks, the political forces
arrayed on all sides of the question, and the difficult and obscure struc-
tures and procedures through which citizens must act. He concludes
that “the notion that ordinary citizens can influence the decisions of
government as individuals or in groups of their own choosing is a pow-
erful democratic myth,” but its promise is rarely achieved because of
non-involvement, the concern of citizens only for the “here and now,”
and the failure to articulate a vision of desirable futures. Meanwhile,
elite visions prevail, offering vast future benefits that rule out as irrel-
evant any complaints about massive housing destruction (Davies 1972,
Johnson 1984, 217). Catanese (1984, 36–7) adds that communication
between planners and plannees remains difficult, not only because of
the often powerless inarticulacy of the latter, but because planners con-
tinue to provide them with information that is technical and quantita-
tive even when their concerns are clearly social and qualitative. Fur-
ther, he cautions that citizens in democracies such as the United States
are “inherently distrustful of co-operation and sharing,” so that secre-
tive elites are the norm, while participatory planning fails because
“most of the people do not participate in it until it hurts.” By this time,
of course, it is usually too late.
Simmie (1974) is even more pessimistic, arguing that planning is not
an objective, rational, apolitical professional activity conducted in the
public interest, as it purports to be, but it is, in fact, a political process
whereby planners choose to serve certain visions and interests and
deny others. Simmie argues that traditional planning has come to a
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216 domicide

dead end and must learn to incorporate quite different structures of

power, asking the questions: What would happen if there were no
plan? Can people plan themselves? These questions lead us, first, to
alternative techniques in planning, and, second, to resistance.

alter nati v e plannin g t e c h n i q u e s

Democracy is inconceivable without organization ... Organization implies

the tendency to oligarchy. As a result of organization, every party ... becomes
divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed.
Michels, in Johnson (1984, 215)

Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy” pervades more than the political par-
ties he studies. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of citizen participation
after the 1960s has led to a re-evaluation of the public role by both
elites and planners, so that alternative approaches have become ever
more acceptable. In Tinder’s (1980) terms, pre-emptive authority,
which thinks and acts for others and closes off the criticisms of those
who are ruled, is giving way slowly to dialogical authority, which
inspires discourse between all involved parties on the goals and meth-
ods of action. By the 1990s, it was difficult to approve projects of
many kinds without lengthy discussions involving stakeholders of
every kind. It is interesting to note that in the 1990s, even business
journals were beginning to ask questions about the social costs of busi-
ness decisions (Ward 1993) while realizing that the internalizing of
social costs would require an enormous change in mindset for those
previously committed to the ideology of the free market. Though true
for the Western world, of course, this process is only in its infancy in
the remainder of the planet.

Planning Approaches. A variety of planning approaches can be used

to bring the concerns of potential victims to the attention of the deci-
sion makers and the media and to facilitate their real involvement in
the decision-making process. These techniques are most useful when
development is likely to go ahead but requires modification on the
basis of direct input from those likely to be impacted.

Planning. Planning with and for persons who must be relocated

could gain much from several techniques, including: integration of the
social and environmental impact process with the whole planning
process; the use of public participation techniques such as advocacy
planning; and the use of strategic planning with or without environ-
mental dispute resolution techniques. In particular, the goal of such
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Ending Domicide? 217

planning should be to minimize the uncertainty surrounding the time

frame of relocation and maximize the involvement of those who will
lose their homes. Lawrence (1992, 25, 26) suggests that integration of
environmental impact assessment (presumably including social impact
assessment) would permit data, research, and experience to be utilized
fully in the planning process and would provide cost saving as well by
avoiding two separate processes.
As with social impact assessment, and as illustrated in the work of
Arnstein (1969), Fagence (1977), and many others, it is also crucial
that the people most affected be involved in decisions about their
future. To ensure this involvement, use of the nominal process to
design implementation options is suggested, as is “fishbowl planning,”
through which brochures, public meetings, and workshops continual-
ly revise and develop alternatives (Korsching 1980, 336). The Charette
process could also be used, in which citizens, planners, community rep-
resentatives, and politicians work together within a specified time
frame on a community design (Fagence 1977, 301ff.). These methods
could be augmented by other public participation tools such as attitude
surveys and other means of provision of information and gathering of
feedback. In particular, it is suggested that the appointment of an advo-
cate – ideally someone from within the community who is a constant
presence relating the interests of those whose homes would be lost –
would be a useful extension of the concept of advocacy planning. The
benefits of having people participate in decision making are numerous.
Marris (1974, 99) believes that people lose their irresponsibility,
improve their attitudes to administrators, sacrifice apathy or dissent,
yet still interpret their situations as those without power would do.
While this list may be overly optimistic, it is hoped that the definition
of the project might change because of such participation.

Strategic Change Management. Today, it is unusual to be part of a

large organization that has not been subject to some sort of strategic
change management exercise. For these writers, who have been
involved with several such exercises, there appear to be a number of
lessons to be learned that would be of benefit to those who must deal
with the victims of domicide. While there is now an extensive literature
on the subject of strategic planning (for example: Bardwick 1991,
Mills 1991, Moss-Kanter 1983, Peters 1987) and an equally large body
of critique (Mintzberg 1993), reference to the work of a practioner is
useful for this discussion (Haines 2000).
Perhaps most important is the recognition of the “roller coaster of
change” that persons involved in change must ride. During the period
in which change occurs, there are a number of emotions, similar to
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218 domicide

those experienced in bereavement, that people can be expected to feel

and actions that they are likely to take. Upon the first impact or knowl-
edge that change will occur, the reaction may be one of shock,
fight/flight, or mourning. This may be accompanied by numbness or
disorientation, a search for what is lost, and nostalgia for what has
been. This stage is followed by a period in which there may be feelings
of rage, anxiety, guilt, shame, and depression. The focus is on the
uncertainty of the future; in such situations people often appear per-
plexed. During the next period, the search for a new future begins, and
gradually hope returns and new energy is found.
Building upon the knowledge that the above reactions are likely to
occur, strategic planning sets out, through a series of activities, to
directly engage the persons whose circumstances will be changed.
These activities, which could be adapted for use by persons who must
relocate to a new area, include: developing a practical vision of the
future; analysing the obstacles to achieving the vision; determining the
strategic actions required to achieve the vision while still taking into
account the obstacles that exist; determining the tactical actions
required to carry out the strategies of the group; and developing an
implementation plan of “who, what, where, when, how” for each tac-
tical action for the first implementation period. This step-by-step
approach has the advantage of breaking the tasks into small enough
chunks so that people can visualize success while allowing for plan
revision at regular intervals. Overall, the success of strategic change is
likely to rest on a number of factors, including: the commitment of the
leadership; the development of a vision by group leaders, which is
shared and supported by the group, and which is comprehensive and
detailed, positive, and inspiring; the ability to undertake strategies in
the future, but to understand them through the past; the recognition
that people do not resist change but resist loss or the possibility of loss
(and that it is necessary to permit time for mourning the loss of the cur-
rent state); and clear and continual communication throughout the
process.
Processes such as strategic change that depend on social learning by
community groups have a number of advantages (White 1987, 162–3).
They permit the gathering of essential expertise from the people who
will be affected; they create a momentum for changing government
organizations and for promoting learning; and they increase the com-
munity’s capacity to contribute to the development and its capacity for
effective action. There are, however, certain disadvantages, including:
the problem that there is no possibility of “no change;” you are either
in the process or you’re out; the danger of achieving mere participation
as opposed to involvement (the highest rungs on Arnstein’s ladder); the
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Ending Domicide? 219

possibility that certain elites will dominate a process; and, finally, the
possibility that the process will be too complex for those who are
already trying to cope with losing their homes.
Despite these difficulties, the use of strategic change processes
appears to provide a number of strengths beyond those described
above. These strengths arise from knowledge that a loss will occur.
They engage the participants in working toward a self-defined positive
future. Here, knowledge of personality traits, as discussed by Simpson-
Housely and de Man (1987), would be most useful, for those having
the best ability to deal with change would lead such a definition. Final-
ly, they emphasize the importance of communication throughout the
process and the setting of an implementation and monitoring schedule
to ensure that what is planned will occur. Strategic change manage-
ment should become part of the planning process and should include
planners who have undertaken special training in this area. Use of
strategic change management would have a number of strengths in
dealing with the victims of domicide, including: recognition of the
stages of change that people must go through from the troughs to the
peaks of emotion; the use of visioning to plan for the future; and per-
haps most importantly, the design of a monitored implementation
strategy that should continue long after domicide has occurred.

Environmental Dispute Resolution Techniques. Finally, it is suggest-

ed that when determining the planning processes to be used, there are
lessons to be learned from environmental dispute resolution tech-
niques. These techniques commonly involve the following characteris-
tics (Crowfoot and Wondolleck 1990, 19): voluntary participation by
those involved in the process; face-to-face interaction among the par-
ticipants; and consensus decisions on the process to be used and on any
settlement that may emerge (sometimes with the help of a skilled neu-
tral mediator). While time-consuming, environmental dispute resolu-
tion techniques are seen as providing greater power and influence in
the decision-making process as well as greater access to decision mak-
ers. Individuals also gain new skills in negotiation, communication,
active listening, group process, and coalition building, as well as a
sense of empowerment. These benefits would be very useful to persons
who must change their home and sometimes rebuild their livelihood
following domicide.

Softening the Blow

Beyond involving potential domicide victims in the decision-making

and planning processes, a second set of techniques would be valuable
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220 domicide

in softening the blow. Three possibilities are: grief training; victim

impact statements; and people’s histories.

Grief Training. Grief training is the first of these measures. While it

does not necessarily conform to the series of stages set out by Kübler-
Ross (1992, 23) and others, Marris (1974, 23–33) portrays bereave-
ment as “the irretrievable loss of the familiar” and describes the vari-
ous symptoms of persons experiencing bereavement as including
restlessness, exhaustion, illness, a withdrawing from people, a feeling
of aimlessness, guilt, hostility, an inability to surrender the past, and a
clinging to possessions. Three general reactions include a desire to
escape from everything connected with bereavement, a worsening of
physical and mental health, and a refusal to mentally surrender the
dead. Marris further suggests that bereavement occurs, not because of
the loss of others, but because of the loss of one’s identity, and that
intensity of grief is closely related to the intensity of involvement. It is
important to accommodate all of these factors when trying to assist
persons who must lose their homes. There is a significant link between
home and identity, and this link is almost always stronger when there
is greater involvement in the creation of home – for example, when a
person has worked the land.
Another perspective is provided by Cohen and Ahearn (1980, 73),
who suggest that when persons lose their home to a natural disaster,
the following characteristics may occur: loss of self-confidence and
inability to deal with the new situation in which they find themselves;
a sense that everything in the future will result in failure and, there-
fore, feelings of guilt and shame; feeling “singled out” by the disaster
even though they can see others in a similar situation; feelings of
resentment when help is not forthcoming from those they expect it
from; increased dependence on others; and loss of faith in group val-
ues. Where the victims of domicide differ from the victims of natural
disaster is in their additional feelings of directed anger. Their fate is
not caused by an “act of God” but by human action; therefore, some-
one is to blame.
Marris believes that survival in any situation depends on the ability
to predict events. Such prediction is most successful when we are
placed within a context that we understand, within the structure that
each of us has learned from past experience. Simpson-Housely and de
Man (1987, 3) corroborate this finding in their studies of natural dis-
aster victims. They confirm that knowledge of personality traits and
response to natural hazards enhances understanding of human
appraisal of the hazards concerned. In essence, “life will be unman-
ageable until the continuity of meaning can be restored” (Marris 1974,
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Ending Domicide? 221

41) and until we learn that what has been lost can still give meaning to
existence. On the other hand, Aiken (1985, 245) argues the need for a
substitute for the loss in the form of: a reliance on religious or philo-
sophical beliefs that stress the future; intensification of old social rela-
tionships or forming new ones; or becoming actively involved with
other activities. Either way, a successful return to normality is the
desired end: “Like death, the moment of transition is abrupt: the
household wakes one morning in familiar surroundings and by night-
fall is gone for ever. And as in grieving for the dead, all purposes and
understanding inherent in those surroundings have to be retrieved and
refashioned so that they still make sense of life elsewhere. If the new
home is adaptable to their way of life, the adjustment is soon made …
The predictability of the new environment is not hard to learn, since it
involves no radical revision of the past” (Marris 1974, 57).
What has been learned most recently in studies of dying and of griev-
ing is the need to help people during this time through listening, coun-
selling, and unconditional caring; through knowing when privacy
should be respected and when intervention is necessary; through rec-
ognizing that conflict will occur; and through recognizing that both
time and patience are required. All of these skills, utilized by trained
professionals or lay counsellors such as social workers or hospice-
trained therapists, would ease the transition when homes are lost and
new circumstances accommodated.

Victim Impact Statements. The use of victim impact statements is

borrowed from the criminal justice system and has been narrowly
defined within that context to date. Since much of the literature on this
subject relates to the procedures to be used and case studies of use,
rather than the theory associated with use, this section is derived from
discussions with Tim Roberts of Focus Consultants (Victoria), who is
recognized as the British Columbia expert in this area.
From the nineteenth century, crimes were defined by the judicial
process as an issue between the individual and the state, so that the vic-
tim was excluded from any part of the trial. Victim impact statements
were developed recently to permit the person who had been most
affected to have some say in the sentencing of the offender, while the
state retains the right of judgement based on facts. Two benefits accrue:
first, the statements sensitize the criminal justice system to the essence
of the crime; and second, the victim may be helped by the therapeutic
aspect of having his or her story officially recognized. The use of these
statements is now leading to victim–offender mediation based on a tra-
dition of restorative justice, which believes that relationships must be
mended.
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222 domicide

In the context of this discussion, victim impact statements would

prolong the compensation process, a fact that should not detract from
their use but that should be planned for initially. Beyond the useful-
ness of victim impact statements to assist in the establishment of mit-
igation when people lose their homes, there is a problematic theoreti-
cal perspective. The concept of victim–offender mediation allows a
closing of the circle. However, in the case of the victim of domicide
trying to speak to either government or a large corporation, there
would always be the question of whether there was anybody “at
home” at these levels to close the circle and mend the emotional rents
of domicide.

People’s Histories. The creation of people’s histories, as undertaken

in the History Workshop movement and in oral and family history, is
a technique that could be used effectively when it becomes certain that
people will lose their homes. Life history has been defined as “the
account of a life, completed or ongoing, the use of which can present
an individual’s evaluations of experience and give the context of expe-
rience” (Eyles and Smith 1988, 10). Plummer (1983, 13–38) identifies
a number of different types of life histories. Of these, however, the
most successful are those whereby people are able to tell their own
story in their own way. As the Yorkshire Art Circus asserts: “Everyone
has a story to tell. We find ways of helping them tell it” (Griffiths et al.
1988).
Porteous (1989, 232–3) has noted how ordinary people have seldom
created autobiographies. Indeed, stories of domicide and the erasure of
the past are most often incorporated into fiction, following the roman-
tic “impulse to set free tongues tied or silenced by oblivion or oppres-
sion” (Hughes 1988, 94). This lack has been rectified to some degree
with the new emphasis on the recognition of everyday life in the acad-
emic fields of history (particularly labour history), geography, and
planning. Family histories contain an evocation of place as well as the
motivations of individuals. In this way, they provide a valuable record
of places that are to be destroyed and become a source of memory.
Cragg (1982, 48), in undertaking family history, acknowledges that
“nostalgia has become a key to determining what I valued in the land-
scape and what responses prompted my emotional and imaginative
growth.” Ebaugh (1988, 31–4) describes this process as permitting the
experiences and definitions held by a person, group, or organization to
be interpreted by that person, group, or organization. In so doing, it is
possible to elicit the different ways in which each person interprets an
experience and therefore reacts in a specific way. In gathering this
information, the sequence of events, social context of the events,
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Ending Domicide? 223

interpretation by the individual, and reasons for individual reactions

are all important.
It is also important to recognize the possible shortcomings of this
tool, including the possibility that a person’s memory may fade or that
present experience may influence past experience. However, these
records are likely to be the only ones that will ever be available, and,
once again, perception is reality. The telling of life histories also has
therapeutic value as a palliative measure. Encouraging the victims of
domicide to provide information about their homes enables special
recognition of their circumstance and comfort that someone is listen-
ing. Such histories will quite simply prevent memoricide, the loss
of individual feelings about a place that could otherwise disappear
forever.
In their heartening Listening For a Change, the oral historians Slim
and Thompson (1995) demonstrate the value of people’s history based
on case studies carried out among displaced people in the Sudan,
Mozambique, and elsewhere during the 1980s. For the Dinka of the
Sudan, the telling of stories and legends not only provided important
information about how previous disasters had been weathered, but
was also of great spiritual value to a community in crisis. The narra-
tives of Mozambicans indicated that the displaced knew what they
needed to make their survival easier and showed that they were the
best placed to design their own relief programs. The authors contend
that community voices need to be listened to very early in the dis-
placement process, so that particular needs and priorities can be
described. Thus, instead of providing the same package of support to
every group, “more appropriately targeted interventions should be
developed which build on a community’s strengths and minimise their
particular vulnerabilities” (Slim and Thompson 1995, 32).

Participatory Action Research

Finally, both planning approaches and strategies for softening the blow
can be brought together in the process known as participatory action
research, a complex approach that may involve elites, planners, citi-
zens, and academics.
From the academic viewpoint, participatory action research stems
from two movements: the recent turn toward qualitative research and
the realization that academics can play a role in redressing the
inequities of the current balance of power between elites and the
plannees, who so easily become victims. Qualitative research came
into its own in the 1980s in a variety of disciplines, both pure and
applied (Gold and Burgess 1982, Lincoln and Guba 1985, Walker
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224 domicide

1985, Eyles and Smith 1988). Practically, this has brought to the fore
the fact that most people live their lives according to intangibles such
as love or loyalty, rather than operating in a strictly quantitative eco-
nomic and political nexus. Elites, scientists, and planners knew this
intuitively, of course, but did not wish to acknowledge such concepts.
As Wikström (1994) points out, his qualitative research on reloca-
tions in Sweden has made the lives of planners and designers more
complicated. When put into action, with the explicit goal of effecting
change, qualitative research becomes more complicated still, rather
like life.
Action research is associated with the work of the psychologist Kurt
Lewin in the United States in the 1940s. Lewin’s (1946) emphases were
four: the research should help solve social problems; it is an iterative
process, requiring many repetitions to become efficacious; scientists
require specialized training to translate data into practice; and inter-
cultural communication between planners and clients must be facili-
tated. The essential feature of the approach was the simultaneity of
research and praxis. The concept was refined by Sanford (1970), who
defined action research as problem-centred research that bridges the
gap between theory and practice. For Sanford, its three interrelated
objectives are: to improve the situation of the participants; to advance
knowledge; and to refine its own theory and praxis. Sommer (1997)
pays particular attention to the need for action research training, facil-
itation of information flow between participants, and adequate post-
research evaluation or follow-up.
In a parallel evolution, coming chiefly from sociology and organiza-
tional behaviour research, Whyte (1991) defines participatory action
research (par) as a partnership between researchers and citizens. It
explicitly rejects research models that identify scientific progress with
survey research and quantitative modelling, since the subjects of such
studies have no opportunity to check the “facts” as the researcher sees
them. In contrast, par requires partnership between academic and cit-
izen, so that the ownership of the research becomes more widely
shared than in the conventional model. Just as findings are shared, so
is theory, and work with the Basque co-operative workers at Mon-
dragon conclusively shows that clients with a stake in the truth are
quite capable of sophisticated philosophical and methodological dis-
cussion. Significantly, Scandinavians are far ahead of North Americans
in acceptance of such methods, mirroring their commitment to worker
participation in industry and their rejection of the hidebound North
American command-and-control approach. In an appraisal of par,
Wisner et al. (1991) document its value in fields as diverse as disease-
control, social welfare, farming, resource management, and house
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Ending Domicide? 225

design programs. Of particular relevance to domicide is the world-

renowned work of Turner (1984) in the field of self-built housing by
Third World squatters.
Directly relevant to domicide is the par experience at North Bon-
neville in Washington State. When the us Army Corps of Engineers
decided in 1971 to site their new hydroelectric powerhouse on the site
of the town of North Bonneville, they told the 470 residents that they
would have to relocate from the area (Comstock and Fox 1982).
Because, according to the researchers, they were politically conserv-
ative and fiercely patriotic, citizens did not try to stop the project.
Nevertheless, the highly independent but socially cohesive community
decided that they wished to relocate as a community to retain both
their social bonds and their physical relationship with the Columbia
River Gorge. Consequently, the community enlisted the assistance of
the Bureau of Community Development of the University of Wash-
ington to form the North Bonneville Life Effort (noble), which pro-
duced an initial survey showing that residents felt a strong identifica-
tion with their town and the surrounding landscape. Subsequently,
assistance came from faculty and students of Evergreen State College,
who used a Latin American model of social change to empower citi-
zens through par.
Students lived in the town and shared the problems and goals of its
citizens. As the groups interacted, residents came to realize the huge
discrepancy between their knowledge of who they were and the very
different perspective of the Corps of Engineers (hooked on technical
efficiency) and the politicians who wrote the relocation laws (con-
cerned mostly with compensation and efficiency). While residents came
to define their community as a collective “home” – a complex network
of social, natural, and spiritual relationships – they discovered that
planning elites saw their town merely as a quantifiable number of indi-
viduals and physical artifacts. They also discovered that their goals,
intangible and social, were quite different from those of the govern-
ment, which was to build the powerhouse as quickly as possible with
the least uproar.
These realizations helped citizens to oppose the corps’ original plans,
demand access to withheld information, and produce a feasible alter-
native plan. In a series of community-wide workshops that involved all
residents in decisions, the community took upon itself the tasks of find-
ing a new site and designing the new town. Despite the efforts of the
Corps of Engineers to dissolve, ignore, and subvert the relocation con-
tract, the town turned to the courts to force the corps to fulfill its con-
tractual obligations. The whole process took from 1972 to 1976, when
the new city of North Bonneville was officially dedicated.
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226 domicide

This experience demonstrates that domicide can be avoided. The

citizens of North Bonneville saw their old town demolished, but
were rewarded with a nearby new city, designed by themselves.
Although student researchers taught them some skills and helped
organize research, citizens were emancipated by the process and
empowered to make their own decisions. The ability to challenge the
us Army and win was a powerful source of self-esteem, valuable in
dealing with the private businesses contracted to build the new set-
tlement. As community power grew, student facilitators withdrew,
their work done.
The Bonneville experience demonstrates the potential for par to ini-
tiate a revolutionary process whereby citizens are empowered to
research and critique the values inherent in a plan, generate an alter-
native scenario, and bring it to fruition. It is perhaps ironic that these
highly conservative citizen activists pursued a course of action with
roots in Mao Zedong’s revolutionary thought, Gandhian social action,
Latin American liberation theology, and Tanzanian self-reliance theo-
ries (Wisner et al. 1991, 273).
Wherever possible, of course, the most beneficial tool to assist peo-
ple who are to lose their homes is a direct share in the benefits of pro-
ject construction, as is now occuring in bc’s Columbia River Basin.
Yet, these benefits may take many years to realize, are often difficult
to estimate, or may never materialize at all. The insights of strategic
change management suggest that people do not resist change so much
as they resist loss. Thus, the emphasis of strategic change management
is on envisioning a desirable future, recognizing the threats to, and
positive means of, reaching that future, and establishing a firm pro-
gram for implementation. All this fits very well with the battery of
techniques (Wisner et al. 1991, 275) used in participatory action
research.
No single measure discussed above provides a sufficient answer, and
the use of some would be problematic when large numbers of people
have to relocate. Nevertheless, loss of home should be addressed at the
outset of any project, and a suitable set of approaches, always involv-
ing some form of par, should be decided upon. Failure to do this will
increasingly evoke resistance.

r es i sta nce: d o no t g o g e n t l e

Now be quite calm and good, obey the laws,

Remember your low station, do not fight
Against the goad, because, you know, it pricks
Whenever the uncleanly demos kicks ...
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Ending Domicide? 227

It’s fearfully illogical in you

To fight with economic force and fate.
Moreover, I have got the upper hand
And mean to keep it, do you understand?
Hilaire Belloc (1912, 36)

Belloc’s lines remind us that, above all, victims of domicide, like those
of colonialism, downsizing, or the myriad shocks that affect ordinary
people, are ultimately dealing with power. Opposed, power fights
back.
As one ngo report asserts: “The quality that most defines
humankind throughout history is this quality of resistance, and the
capacity to struggle beyond the limits of what is human and what is
possible, against all odds” (Inter Pares 1994, 1). Edward Abbey (1984,
1988) is eloquent about resistance, while John Pilger (1998) listens to
what political and business leaders say, watches what they do, and then
contrasts the two. In John Sweeney’s words, “Journalism – the real
thing, not crap about the sex lives of the Royal Family – means poking
people of power with a stick and seeing what happens next” (1998,
14). For opposition is essential, and resistance is necessary whenever
the elite try to ride roughshod over people “in the way” of their pro-
jects. The success of North Bonneville could not have happened with-
out the will to resist the us Army Corps of Engineers. Without resis-
tance, people become wounded human material who “only know how
to think and behave as victims” (Makiya 1994, 225).
Resistance to power arises with what Latin American theorists call
“conscientization” – the bringing to our consciousness that, one way
or another, we are oppressed by authority. In terms of domicide, peo-
ple must come to realize that homes exist at the whim of corporate,
bureaucratic, and political power elites, and that, should these groups
so decide, communities can be eliminated and individuals forced to
relocate. In particular, the common good rhetoric must be questioned,
for in Segal’s words: “Law and order, or national survival, seems less
and less adequate an excuse for the ravages of the social and natural
environment, the subjugation of the person to profit ... More and more
... citizens must ... ask for whose good the state really operates” (1973,
192). As Gold and Burgess (1982, 3) remark: “In many instances, the
true nature of the ‘public interest’ remains obscure, a fanciful concep-
tion occasionally invoked rather than a goal to be actively sought ... it
is not necessarily promoted by the imposition of schemes that ignore
the needs of local communities in order to serve some notional concept
of the common good of society at large.” Most of all, we must resist
the claims of elites and planners that they already know what people
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228 domicide

want; a vast amount of research demonstrates that such is rarely the

case.
Resistance refers to actions imbued with the intent to “challenge,
change, or retain particular circumstances relating to societal relations,
processes, and/or institutions. These circumstances may involve mate-
rial, symbolic, or psychological domination, exploitation, and subjec-
tion” (Routledge 1997, 361). The concept of resistance is heavily the-
orized, the points of view ranging from Gramscian theories of
hegemony through critical social theory to postmodernism (Routledge
1997, Dear and Flusty 1998, Myers 1998). Gramsci (1971), in partic-
ular, argued that the dominant elite’s position and function in the
world of production, together with its moral and intellectual leader-
ship, generated a prestige that led to the spontaneous popular consent
that lies at the heart of hegemonic power. It is our loss of respect for
elites, our withdrawal of consent, that permits us to resist hegemony.
It is the sheer obviousness of oppression, clear to all who have suffered
domicide, been downsized, or otherwise had their lives forcibly
changed, that leads us to seek equity, fairness, and justice.
The roots of modern resistance lie in the social upheaval and bru-
talization that accompanied the industrial revolution, with yet deeper
roots in those eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers who
began to realize that social institutions are not God-given but histori-
cal constructs subject to subversion and change. In the early nineteenth
century, those who took existing power relations for granted argued
for social reform. More radical approaches – notably those of Utopi-
anism, social anarchism, and historical materialism – argued for oppo-
sitional social mobilization (Friedmann 1987) based on social emanci-
pation. From Utopianism came the vision of an alternative future, from
anarchism came the idea that society could be organized on the lines of
peaceful co-operation rather than aggressive competition, and from
historical materialism came the realization that a historical change can
be looked upon as a class struggle between the dominant and the
oppressed, the rich and the poor, the proponents of domicide and their
victims.
In the twentieth century came the realization that although oppres-
sive systems may be global, emancipatory struggle “is always particu-
larized and local. It involves particular individuals and groups, in par-
ticular situations, facing particular problems” (Friedmann 1987, 301).
In the words of the American philosopher John Dewey: “Democracy
must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community”
(1946, 213). It is this truth that lies behind the discussion of resistance,
not only in general terms, but also in terms of the lessons we can learn
from individual cases such as the Chipko and Balipal movements in
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Ending Domicide? 229

India (Routledge 1993), the resistance to road building in Britain

(Routledge 1997), and the use of music to resist state propaganda in
Singapore (Kong 1995).
Resistance is an idea whose time has come. Epochal moments in the
history of resistance include Thoreau’s “civil disobedience,” Gandhi’s
satyagraha (soul force), the flocking of anti-Fascists from many nations
to the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, the “Flower Power”
rebellion, which helped bring an end to the Vietnam War, the socially
dynamic religious philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., the flocking of
idealistic youth to pick cotton in Nicaragua after the 1979 Sandinista
revolution, and in the face of us aggression, the women of Greenham
Common, uk, who helped undermine the nuclear military agenda, the
millions of Filipinos who non-violently overthrew the Marcos dicta-
torship in 1986, the intifada in Palestine, which forced the Israelis at
least to consider the possibility of Palestinian self-rule, and more recent
demonstrations against the World Bank, International Monetary Fund,
and other economic globalization agencies.
The year 1989 was the year when resistance came into its own. The
intifada was changing Israeli politics, the campaign to free Mandela
and destroy apartheid was reaching its climax, and Berliners demol-
ished the hated wall in a symbolic gesture that heralded a completely
new global geopolitics. But the seminal resistance image of the twenti-
eth century will surely be the unknown student who stood firm before
a line of tanks during the democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, Bei-
jing. Previous generations have perversely revered the “unknown sol-
dier,” sent to his death for the purposes of power elites. The twenty-
first century will surely turn their eyes to the “unknown student,” sure
of what he wants, convinced that it is morally good, and willing to
fight the massive power of government to achieve it.
Recent surveys of active non-violence (Deats 1997), indigenous
resistance movements (Pascal 1997), celebrations of resistance (New
Internationalist May 1996), and compendia of grassroots actions
(Ekins 1992) confirm that resistance movements are providing a
seedbed for social ferment and revolutionary change throughout the
planet. Though sometimes led by external activists, they are just as
likely to come up with a Local Hero (Benedictus 1983). They forge
coalitions and links with local, regional, national, and international
organizations while maintaining their local integrity. They learn to use
the media to convey their messages of resistance to both the broader
public and to the authorities. Their techniques are legion, from sit-in
occupations of public property and mass marches to community quilt-
making and parish map making. Street theatre is a common device
locally; Internet connections work globally. Bioregionalists everywhere
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230 domicide

encourage the mapping of home (Aberley 1993). Women are often at

the forefront, most notably in the Third World (Shiva 1994).
The civil strength of the resistance movement is inspiring. Sem
Terra, a Brazilian organization of the landless, has 220,000 members
and enjoys the support of 90 per cent of the nation’s population
(Vidal 1997, 8). The Philippines has 18,000 registered ngos, two-
thirds of which are people’s co-operatives. The state of Tamil Nadu,
India, has 25,000 registered grassroots organizations. Women
activists worldwide presented a petition to the un World Conference
on Human Rights in 1993, which carried 500,000 signatures from
124 countries. Major un and international conferences are now rou-
tinely mirrored by parallel alternative conferences with resolutions,
relatively free of diplomacy, that often make better sense. Trade
union membership, though suffering setbacks in Britain and the Unit-
ed States, has surged in newly democratic countries in Eastern Europe
and Africa. In cities, in which most of us now live, radical planners
see the rise of civil society in a global age as heralding new opportu-
nities for bottom-up planning.
Two points must be made clear. First, resistance is almost wholly
non-violent. The stone throwing of the intifada is not common else-
where. Though Earth First! activists use monkeywrenching ecotage
tactics (Porteous 1996) against machinery and property, they do not
harm people. The moral strength of resistance involves laying down
fragile bodies before bulldozers. Violence sometimes occurs, but it is
almost always carried out by the authorities against non-violent
demonstrators. Second, resistance does not normally indulge in nation-
alist public interest or common good rhetoric. It is more likely to speak
of the good of particular groups or particular localities, or at the other
end of the scale, the common good of the global environment.

Resistance to Domicide

The worldwide resistance to government and business oppression has

a considerable part to play in resistance to domicide. From a wide
array of examples, we choose to consider resistance to domicide caused
by military activities, Third World “development,” the redevelopment
of Western city regions, and dam building across the globe.
Military activities in the Pacific have been major causes of domicide.
Having lost its bases in Vietnam after its defeat there in 1975, the Unit-
ed States military fell back on bases in the Philippines, from which they
were ousted in turn in the early 1990s after a long grassroots campaign
and the co-operation of a volcano that spewed deep mud over Clark
Air Force Base. Requiring a fallback position in the 1970s, the us chose
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Ending Domicide? 231

the tiny nation of Palau (Belau), a trust territory that the United States
was mandated by the un to bring to independence.
Palau, a nation of about 17,000 people east of the Philippines, had
strongly resisted signing a Compact of Free Association with the us,
and had instead written the world’s first constitution declaring itself a
nuclear-free territory. This constitution required a 75 per cent majori-
ty vote to ratify an amendment to permit us bases in Palau. From
1983, the United States forced the nation’s people to hold referendum
after referendum in its pursuit of the right to create military bases.
Anti-nuclear activists and one Palauan president were murdered by
pro-base Palauans, and another president committed suicide. Washing-
ton denied much-needed funds and delayed Palauan independence,
effectively blackmailing the Palauan people. All eight pro-military ref-
erendums were rejected until 1992, when an amendment was passed
requiring only a simple majority for constitutional change. Thirteen
months later, the ninth plebiscite since 1983 was finally passed by less
than half of Palau’s eligible voters (Thomas 1995, 173). The United
States now has the right to conduct military exercises, including
nuclear ones, on about one-third of the nation’s territory. This will
have a profound effect on national self-esteem and identity, and it is
being fought by the Palau women’s movement, Otil a Belaud, and
many others who “do not want our land to be someone else’s ‘contin-
gency plan’” (Denoon 1997, 335).
A more successful case, however, occurred with a peasant move-
ment against the siting of a missile-testing base at Balipal, Orissa
state, in India. A highly stratified society with no history of peasant
insurrection, Balipal felt sufficiently threatened to transcend barriers
of caste, class, gender, age, and political affiliation. The movement
made heavy use of religious symbolism, including the invocation of
Kali as both warrior goddess and earth mother. Women were promi-
nent members of the movement, which expressed itself in an ideolo-
gy of bheeta maati (our soil, our earth, our land, our home) (Rout-
ledge 1993).
Third World movements constantly hark back in this way to tradi-
tional stories of resistance and deeply embedded cultural practices of
self-help and collective co-operation. Routledge (1993, 1997) gives
many examples of this from every continent. Threatened with the
wholesale burning of homes, crops, and rubber trees by ranchers and
speculators, the rubber tappers of the Amazon joined forces with
indigenous peoples to protect the latter’s homelands and the former’s
homes and livelihoods. The Orang Ulu peoples of Sarawak in
Malaysia, who look on the forests as their traditional homeland,
blockaded logging roads against the logging corporations, one of
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232 domicide

which is owned by the Malaysian minister for Environment and

Tourism. Ekins (1992) provides another array of resistance attempts
worldwide, some of which were successful. The Sarvodaya Shramadana
Movement is active in 8,000 of Sri Lanka’s 23,000 villages, and it has
benefited millions of people by promoting grassroots development and
resisting large-scale changes proposed by outsiders. The West can
clearly learn from the Third World; the earlier success of the
Bangladeshi small-loan Grameen Bank has been copied by Shorebank
– a local initiative in one of the poorer parts of Chicago – which took
over the South Shore Bank of Chicago and dedicated it to a revival of
the neighbourhood.
The formerly passive inhabitants of Western cities have also been
moved to take power into their own hands. In the 1960s, protest against
redevelopment was common. Lupo et al. (1971) explain in detail how
the threat of inner-city expressways and the devouring of East Boston by
Logan Airport brought previously separate sectors of the population –
citizens, politicians, and academics; Jews, Irish, and Blacks – together on
the Greater Boston Committee on the Transportation Crisis. Transcend-
ing their educational, class, and ethnic differences, these groups co-oper-
ated in community organization by researching, lobbying, and planning
to save their neighbourhoods from destruction. Before this outburst of
the late 1960s, the decisions to build city expressways in Massachusetts
were taken by autonomous state and city agencies unresponsive to the
public and replete with common good rhetoric. Afterward, public
involvement could not be ignored. Similar movements sprang up across
North America, and by the late 1970s, neighbourhood-destroying road
building was grinding to a halt everywhere. Goodman’s (1972) After the
Planners recounted similar success in the United States and Britain, and
it looked forward to an era when citizens could be free from forced relo-
cation and plan for their own communities.
More surprisingly, perhaps, there was considerable opposition to
Soviet centralizing and modernizing tendencies, particularly in the out-
lying republics of the ussr. Uzbeks, for example, have traditionally
lived in the mahalla (a distinct and identifiable social neighbourhood,
district, or urban ward). Each mahalla is its own world, with its own
rules. Uzbeks cannot imagine a person without a mahalla; such a per-
son would be mahalsiz (“groundless, ill-founded, out of place; insignif-
icant”) (Malcolmson 1994, 179, 193). The mahallalar stood for
decades as bastions against Russian imperialism – from land tenure
laws through intermarriage to resistance to being decanted into high-
rise towers. The Uzbek word for this way of life, this intense identity-
supporting and life-centring localism, is mahallaçilik (the state of
“being-in-a-mahallaness”).
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Ending Domicide? 233

Third World resistance has also been active in urban areas; the case
of the squatter settlement of Sanjay Ghandi Nagar (sgn) in central
Bombay is one of many. Brought to Bombay to labour on the high-rise
blocks that create the Marine Drive skyline, the poor people of sgn
were permitted to squat on a worthless piece of land reclaimed from
the sea (Seabrook 1997). Expected to move on in 1979, they stayed
and took up a variety of central-city occupations; many were servants
in the well-to-do district of Colaba, next to their settlement. When the
rich of Colaba demanded that the servants’ unsightly homes be
removed, the Bombay government destroyed the colony in 1989, but
having nowhere else to go, the sgn squatters rebuilt it. The same
sequence occurred repeatedly thereafter. With much of the Third
World’s urban poor living in slum or squatter conditions, often on land
that is prime for redevelopment, the potential for government violence
and citizen resistance is enormous (Jhabvala 1981, Mistry 1995).
Resistance at dam sites has gained far more attention worldwide
than any other terrain of protest. Moreover, the spectacular nature of
super-dam projects has captured international media attention and
enabled strong alliances to be created between grassroots resistance
and both national and international resistance organizations. Three
super-dam projects are worth detailed consideration.
Because of the nature of Chinese governance, the Three Gorges pro-
ject is most insulated from both grassroots and international protest
actions. The danger of Chinese resistance is seen in the arrest and
imprisonment of Dai Qing and the pulping of her book Yangtse!
Yangtse!. Probe International, a Canadian ngo, has been at the fore-
front here, publishing Odious Debts (Adams 1991), an attack on
World Bank funding for environmentally ruinous projects worldwide;
a book on the Three Gorges project (Barber and Ryder, 1990); and an
English translation of Dai Qing (1994). To expose the role of Canadi-
ans in the cases of both Three Gorges and James Bay in Quebec, Probe
International and the Quebec Cree jointly prosecuted Hydro-Québec,
BC Hydro, the Canadian, Chinese, and Quebec governments, and
three private Canadian engineering firms before the International
Water Tribunal in Amsterdam in 1992. The Tribunal ruled forcefully
in favour, calling for a halt to both projects. Pressure continues on both
environmental and social grounds, the probability of relocation success
being highly unlikely in a command-and-control situation in a culture
of poverty (Dai Qing 1994, 226; Jun 1994 259–60).
In the case of James Bay (Pearce 1991), the James Bay I project was
built by Hydro-Québec in the 1970s. As completed, it comprises nine
dams, five reservoirs, and 206 dykes, has diverted four rivers, cost $20
billion, and flooded over 30,000 square km of the traditional hunting
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234 domicide

territory of the Cree. The project involved several relocations, including

the creation of the new town of Chisasibi on the La Grande River. The
relocation of the Cree to this “piece of big-city suburb airlifted to the
North” (Dwyer 1992, 36) was disastrous. “After the move,” says Chief
Violet Pachanos, “there was a great rise in alcoholism, drug use, family
violence, and family breakups.” The hunting life is no longer viable, and
the promised jobs have not appeared. The Cree soon realized that they
had been taken advantage of chiefly by Robert Bourassa, Quebec’s late
premier, who saw the massive export of electrical energy to the United
States as the basis for greater Quebec independence from Canada.
In consequence, the Cree joined forces with other resistance agencies
to oppose the James Bay II project, which, beginning with the Great
Whale River phase, was planned to divert a total of twenty of Hud-
son’s Bay rivers and flood 23,000 square km, affecting in some way a
total land area of 350,000 square km. As in multi-ethnic Boston in the
1960s, such was this threat to traditional homelands that even the rival
Inuit and Cree began to work together in the 1980s. This multiracial
coalition made effective use of the national and international media
and convinced the state and city of New York to refuse to buy Que-
bec’s electricity. Resistance proved successful, and in 1994, the Great
Whale River project was cancelled (Séguin 1994, 1–2).
An equally interesting and heartening case of resistance to super-
dams is the story of protest against the Narmada River Project (nrp) in
India. Clearance for building the two super-dams was given by 1988,
but already those likely to have their homes flooded were questioning
the project’s plans for resettlement, compensation, and environmental
protection. When it became clear that their conditions would not be
adequately met, a wide variety of opposition groups, many led by
women, made common cause and created one of the most powerful
social movements ever to emerge in India’s half-century of indepen-
dence. Relying, like the Chipko and Balipal movements, on local and
national traditions of resistance, religion, and the security of the
hearth, mass demonstrations, non-co-operation, media projects, and
international alliances were launched.
One early demonstration in 1989 had 60,000 participants who
protested the coming submergence of the town of Harsud. Thousands of
the demonstrators pledged never to move from their homes. These direct
actions reached a large and increasingly sensitized international audience.
At this international level, an extraordinary meeting occurred in 1992
when the World Bank was requested by Canada, the United States, Japan,
Germany, Australia, and Norway to suspend loans to the Sardar Sarovar
and Narmada Sagar projects of the nrp. This protest ultimately met with
some success for, after lending $280 million, the World Bank pulled out
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Ending Domicide? 235

of this project following the launch of an international campaign to cut

off the bank’s source of funding (Probe International, 1993b).
The World Bank made this decision on the twenty-second day of a
hunger strike by a number of people, including a woman doctoral stu-
dent, Medha Patkar, who led a march of 3,000 people from the Nar-
mada Valley to the dam site hoping to stop dam construction. These
are some of the same people who had officially, and impersonally, been
referred to throughout the project construction as “project affected
persons (paps)” and whom Ekins better identifies as “oustees” (Ekins
1992, 91). Even with the World Bank’s departure, the effects of this
project have continued, for India has pressed on with construction
despite a Supreme Court injunction of 1995. Probe International
(1994) has reported deaths in the resettlement sites already developed.
Appalling living conditions have caused fifty of the eighty families sent
to one site to return to their original homes.
Sought by the police, hounded by goonda thugs, her telephone
bugged, Medha Patkar has followed Gandhian principles in her orga-
nization of the resistance coalition known as Narmada Bachao
Andolan. Winner of the 1991 Alternative Nobel Prize, she regularly
refuses international money offerings to retain grassroots control.
Much of the work involves education, conscientization, and empower-
ment of the tribal peoples most likely to suffer from the flooding. In a
fine display of local identity and national pride, a powerful and dis-
arming combination for resisters, one newly literate girl wrote on her
slate: “My name is Sampat and my abode is Pepulchup. Long live
India!” (Powell 1994, 19). The goal is to save such tribal villages from
destruction and the consequent annihilation of tribal cultures by a gov-
ernment that has made promises it cannot possibly keep.
Pressure continues. After months of preparations 10,000 Indian vil-
lagers, led by women, took over the partly built nrp Maheshwar dam
site in January 1998 (Vidal 1998). The dam, the first privatized hydro-
electric power project in India, will submerge the homes of 2,200 fam-
ilies in sixty-one villages and destroy thousands of hectares of cotton
and wheat land. Incensed that the dam will benefit areas downstream
but not themselves, villagers demanded an end to all construction and
a project review with meaningful public participation. When the chief
minister of Madhya Pradesh state officially halted construction on a
temporary basis, villagers quickly reminded the press that “we have
stopped the work, not him” (Stackhouse 1998, D4). The right to
review was granted. Actions like this will continue until the nrp is
either stopped, severely modified, or becomes an issue on which feder-
al and state governments choose to violently overrule the wishes of
major segments of the Indian population.
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236 domicide

International resistance to dams has continued with the exposure as

“a dam-building mafia” of several active dam building engineering,
electricity, and political lobbies such as the us National Hydro Power
Association and the International Commission on Large Dams. In
1991, outraged by projects such as the Itaipu dam that drowned the
homes of 42,000 people and led to their being dumped thousands of
kilometres away, Brazilian resistance groups coalesced as mab (nation-
al movement of people affected by dams). Long-term research projects
are demonstrating that while the lives of the relocated may improve ini-
tially, as with the Kariba dam on the Zambezi, poorer farmland and
worsening social relations have resulted in a second generation distinct-
ly worse off than their parents had been (Economist April 1997, 80).
Because of “a flood of protest” (New Internationalist, November
1995) and “a flood of fiascos” (Economist April 1997), and the work
of organizations such as Probe International and the International
Rivers Network, the building of super-dams in the developed North is
grinding to a halt, while both Third World governments and lenders
such as the World Bank are becoming distinctly cautious. Major pro-
jects have been cancelled in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Nepal (Angelo
1996). With the general slowdown in international funding, it is likely
that the fashion for super-dams may give way to something more rea-
sonable, such as Oxfam’s “Give a Dam” campaign for small-scale
locally engineered water catchment projects. Since the height of dam
building in the 1960s, when the world built over 1,000 large dams a
year, the figure had fallen to about 250 in the mid-1990s, and it may
be less than one hundred by the early twenty-first century.
What is clear today is that no large dam can be constructed anywhere
in the world without controversy, and that local residents facing domi-
cide now have at their command a battery of tools of proven value in a
grassroots-internationalist alliance of resistance against national gov-
ernments and transnational corporations. Like the super-dam itself, this
situation is a major achievement of the twentieth century, which may
well ensure that the century’s destruction of the homes of 60 million
people for dams will not be repeated in the new millennium.
Indeed, staunch local resistance at a number of sites, coupled with
international ngo pressure, led to the setting up of the World Com-
mission on Dams in 1998. Commissioners were drawn, on the one
side, from hydro power corporations, the International Commission
on Large Dams, global engineering firms, and water resource ministries
and, on the other, from Oxfam, the International Alliance of Indige-
nous Peoples from the Tropical Forest, the us Environmental Defense
Fund, the Narmada Bachao Andolan of India, and also a number
of academics from anthropology to engineering. The commission’s
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Ending Domicide? 237

chairman stated that its goal was to find solutions to the problems
“that currently plague the relationship between those who plan,
finance, and build large dams and those who oppose them” (Dorcey
1998, 26). The development effectiveness of dams will be considered,
the “real costs” of dam building will be investigated, and guidelines for
better decision making proposed. And, finally, “one of our aims ...
should be to ensure that such projects in the next century also encom-
pass broad public acceptability before any work begins.”
In its final report, the commission noted a persistent failure to assess
the negative social impacts of dams, and estimated that between 40
and 80 million people were displaced by dams during the twentieth
century (World Commission on Dams 2000). The report went on to
recommend 26 guidelines for the reviewing and approval of projects.
Of major interest to this study was the concept that five core values
should be basic to future decision making: efficiency, sustainability,
equity, accountability, and participatory decision making. The latter is
extremely welcome in the context of possible future domicide.
These, as yet, are mere promises. Broad public acceptability could
still be translated as “the common good,” thus ignoring those who
actually suffer domicide. And capital is powerful; it may still be too
early to agree with Stackhouse that we are already experiencing “the
decline and fall of the big-dam era” (1998, D4).
We must also reiterate that dissidence and resistance are not for the
faint-hearted, and they will probably work best in Third World situa-
tions in which people are generally not held hostage by their lifestyles,
mortgages and pension plans. Numerous protesters have been killed,
beaten, or imprisoned by governments during direct action. Even to
write is dangerous in many countries. Abdul Rahman Munif, author of
Cities of Salt, has had his books banned in several countries and, for
his portrayal of Saudi–American collusion in domicide, has been
stripped of his Saudi citizenship (Said 1994, 289). When facing over-
whelming odds, however, resistance groups can always recall the stir-
ring Hebrew story of David and Goliath, which brings us face to face
with the wider context of domicide, namely, the power of globalizing
capitalism.

re(s )tr a i ni ng c a p i ta l i sm

Many ... see “the state” or “the planners” as their essential enemy, when it
is quite evident that what the state is administering and the planners serving
is an economic system which is capitalist in all its main intentions,
procedures, and criteria.
Raymond Williams (1975, 353)
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238 domicide

One of the saddest facts of archaeology is that the majority of the most
ancient texts from the cradle of civilization, laboriously excavated from
the sands of Mesopotamia, are no more than a turgid mass of commer-
cial and administrative documents, business archives, and inventories.
“A huge library discovered ... in Central Anatolia is entirely made up of
business transactions; and apart from a solitary text, and that a curse,
there is not one of a literary kind” (Sandars 1960, 12). Business, admin-
istration, and a curse: here is an epitaph for Western Civilization.
Some form of capitalism, then, has been with us for several thousand
years, since cities, agriculture, priesthoods, armies, war, and “business
writing” emerged together in the ancient Middle East. Business and
state power, represented at the dawn of history by priest-kings record-
ing tribute, have gone hand in hand to the present day, even unto the
“state capitalism” of the late ussr and the “Red Capitalism” of con-
temporary China. With power comes the possibility of oppression. It is
noteworthy that the framers of the American constitution, realizing
that liberty could never be taken for granted, “assumed a ceaseless and
bitter struggle between the interests of the few and the hopes of the
many, between those who would limit and those who would extend the
authority of the people” (Lapham 1989, 8).
By the mid-twentieth century, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)
had defined the absurd end point of Western progress, and Orwell’s
Animal Farm (1945) had shown us just how far we should trust our
leaders, while his 1984 (1949) was probably the first public perception
of the huge power of information technology to rewrite history, con-
trol thought, and invade privacy. And there is no shortage of late-twen-
tieth-century critiques of this cruel foolishness – from the critical theo-
ry of Herbert Marcuse’s (1964) “one-dimensional man” living an
administered life of overconsumption, to Ezra Mishan’s (1986, 179)
convincing economic argument that “more is worse” in a society in
which power elites increase popular consumption by constantly feed-
ing the springs of consumer discontent. What Aristotle saw as a prob-
lem 2,500 years ago is now normal: an incessant expansion of con-
sumerist “needs” that leaves people perpetually unsatisfied and too
preoccupied with trivial choices to take part either in public life or in
the real art of living well.
Like some perceptive domicide victims, Seabrook does not hesitate
to lay blame: “For what exactly is being held up to our wonder and
admiration? The rich are nothing more than the most monstrous
predators upon the earth’s resources, the cannibalistic devourers of the
substance of the poor. Are we seriously expected to applaud their
prodigious appetites, their bottomless capacity for using up and spend-
ing? They are the most baleful force ever unleashed upon the world.
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Ending Domicide? 239

The ransackers of its beauties, the plunderers of its natural treasures,

the greedy and parasitical exhausters of its fragile covering ... There is
no problem of poverty ... but for the more intractable problem of
wealth” (Seabrook 1988, 21). And in The Insanity of Normality,
Gruen (1992, 86, 91, 138) accepts Tuchman’s view that history is a
record of the actions of “realists” who keep leading us to destruction.
He notes that our self-esteem depends on success, which is, in turn,
defined in terms of control and domination, and he asserts that we
despise victims because we hate the victim in ourselves.
Williams (1975, 362) puts the case most succinctly: “The active
powers of minority capital, in all its possible forms, are our most active
enemies, and ... they will have to be not just persuaded but defeated
and superseded.” The possibility of defeating such power begins with
questioning the insanity of normality. Why do we so readily accept the
capitalists’ myths that theirs is the most “natural” economic system,
the only system that can cope with a complex postmodern world, the
system that will best deliver the greatest happiness to the greatest num-
ber? Or that capitalism is a system made up of innumerable economic
decisions made by numberless decision makers and benefiting hordes
of thoughtful stakeholders? The truth is that the major transformative
decisions, on which all else depends, are made worldwide by only a few
hundred thousand very powerful people in charge of giant national
and transnational corporations, who have strong links with politicians,
bureaucrats, and the military. An even more unpleasant truth is that
today, 500 men control more individual wealth than the combined
worth of the poorest two billion people on the planet. Can they all
have reached this position without committing systematic injustices,
including domicide? In crude cases – such as Saudi Arabia, the Persian
Gulf States, Indonesia, and many African countries – it is quite obvi-
ous that the operations of the state are dominated by, and work large-
ly for the benefit of, a single family and its associates. Power is more
diffused in the Western world, but in Canada, for example, the Busi-
ness Council on National Issues, a group of chief executive officers of
the 150 largest companies in the country, routinely influences political
decisions (Finn 1998, 4). Our consent having been manufactured, we
regard such injustices as “normal.”
In the twenty-first century, human rights will be lost on a global
scale. Injustice is normal in the less-developed world (Bales 1999) but
even in the developed nations “one of the striking qualities of the post-
Cold War globalization is how easily business and government in the
capitalist democracies have abandoned the values they putatively
espoused for forty years during the struggle against communism. ...
Concern for human rights ... has been pushed aside by commercial
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240 domicide

opportunity” Greider 1997, 37). With globalization, the free market,

and the search for international competitiveness and economic effi-
ciency, benefits will accrue to the few, and the hopes of the many will
be dashed. Competitiveness, it must be realized, is a zero-sum game in
which there are winners and losers. We may look forward in trepida-
tion to a late twenty-first century world when national states will no
longer be able to mediate the power of superstate corporations, thus
bringing the global corporation into direct contact with the localities in
which almost all of us live. Geopolitically, nation states will remain in
name only, since the development of supranational organizations and
free-trade associations will end the ability of states to protect their cit-
izens. The confrontation of powerful global corporations with vulner-
able localities does not look promising for place and home.
The defeat of this growing system, and of the few who benefit from
it, will take a concerted effort on the part of both national states and
the international alliance of grassroots resistance networks now being
set up. The rise of a shadow world government in the shape of the
exponential growth of ngos heralds the creation of an interconnected,
popular “embryonic nervous system for our global society, affording a
degree of sensitivity unmatched by the nation states and their 2000
intergovernmental agencies, which are too often tongue-tied by diplo-
macy” (Myers 1984, 238). The goals of such ngos are to oppose
power elites, to act as a global conscience, to invent and implement
alternative development strategies, and to broaden the base of power
to allow bottom-up development to challenge top-down technocratic
approaches. The vision of globalization from above, led by commerce,
is thus being challenged by international social activism, Globalization
from Below (Brecher, Costello, and Smith, 2000).
And further, change will occur inevitably when enough people
become conscientized, and millions of individual decisions are made to
eschew greed, learn moderation, appreciate simplicity, and, under-
standing that more is less, live lives Simple in Means, Rich in Ends
(Devall 1990). This, in turn, requires a restructuring of education that
turns away from making a product with exchange value in the market
and seeks to empower people in political, artistic, intellectual, and spir-
itual ways. It is a telling indictment of our civilization that currently
“only a very tiny proportion of formal education ... is devoted to the
skills involved in the enjoyment of living” (Atchley 1980, 32).
Although the above is a consummation devoutly to be wished, pow-
erful forces are arrayed against any such future. The prospects for an
acceleration of domicide in the twenty-first century are excellent inso-
far as the globe’s 200 countries have only two basic forms of govern-
ment: dictatorship and so-called liberal democracy. In dictatorships –
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Ending Domicide? 241

whether ideological, fundamentalist, or absolutist – domicide can

always be justified. The governments of “free-market” democracies,
whatever their rhetoric, invariably act to strengthen the position of the
rich and powerful, degrade the poor, and weaken the middle class.
Such is the interpenetration of politics, business, bureaucracy, and the
military in many industrial nations, that we need a more accurate
image than former us president Eisenhower’s “military-industrial com-
plex.” We find this in the notion of the corporate state. The corporate
state is an interlocking amalgam of powerful corporate (major trans-
national companies and conglomerates) and government elites (politi-
cians, bureaucrats, the military). It has surfaced before in the twentieth
century in Fascist Italy, Germany, and Japan. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, it is already in place in the world’s largest nation,
China, and in a somewhat different form, in the world’s most power-
ful nation, the United States.
The goal of the American corporatists, with their Japanese and
European allies, is to dominate the global economy and world geopol-
itics, the motives being power, wealth, and the common good of their
shareholders. The means by which this hegemony will be accomplished
is called “globalization,” which involves tariff-free trade on a global
scale, policed by transnational corporations, military interventions,
and organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the World
Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. The Multilateral Agree-
ment on Investment, stalled by global grassroots resistance in 1998,
would effectively destroy national sovereignty in favour of transna-
tional corporations and wealthy investors. It is already in place region-
ally in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The
outcomes of globalization are already being felt worldwide in massive
job losses, the transfer of work offshore, currency collapses, the cur-
tailment of social programs, the growing gap between rich and poor,
the destruction of national and regional cultures, the invasion of pri-
vacy, and the development of surveillance techniques on earth and
from space. When globalization is in full swing, we can look forward
to a world controlled by a very few, to the detriment of over six billion
people, and in which domicide will be quite normal whenever required
by the “magic of the market.” The ultimate end point of this logic will
be terracide.
The alternative to a chessboard world raped of its resources, homes,
and homelands by corporate warriors is to envision, then create, the
exact opposite. It is not difficult to imagine a world in which co-
operation replaces competition, community provides more satisfaction
than consumerism, the local is given social (but not necessarily envi-
ronmental) priority over the global, the poor as well as the rich are
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242 domicide

enabled to live lives of self-fulfillment, home and hearth are valued as

greatly as cosmopolitanism, and a just sufficiency is preferred to capi-
talism’s orgy of consumption (Brandt 1995, Moore 1996, Cox 1997,
New Internationalist April 1997). The “humanistic capitalism” envis-
aged by Harman (1984, 14), in which “humane and social and eco-
logical values predominate over short-term economic considerations,”
could become more than a vision.
Thousands of community forums, co-operative ventures, local devel-
opment boards, grassroots organizations of every kind, community
development associations, spiritual reawakenings, voluntary simplicity
movements, and alternative lifestyles already in place across the plan-
et argue that a bottom-up transformation of the globe is already on the
horizon. Just as transnational economic power is currently replacing
the nation-state as chief decision maker, so the urge to localness, the
belief that small is beautiful, will inexorably bring about, via millions
of decisions made by individuals and small groups, a global network
of individuated, self-governing localities, micro-homelands in which
the centred identity of home is inviolate by uncaring outside forces.
The alternative, to put it mildly, is extremely bleak. In the words of
Italo Calvino (1972): “The inferno of living is not something that will
be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live
every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to
escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and
become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is
risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and
learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not
inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Domicide will be eliminated only if such alternative spaces have the
courage to become an ethical platform from which to speak truth to
power.
BIBLIOG.QXD 9/10/2001 8:09 AM Page 243

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INDEX.QXD 9/10/2001 8:10 AM Page 279

Index

Aboriginal peoples. See British Columbia, 21, 59, 106–7, 187;

indigenous peoples 151–81, 221; dams, 21, re(s)trained, 237–42
administration. See plan- 145–8, 151–81; indige- Chagos archipelago, 73–5
ning nous people of, 81–3; Chernobyl, 15, 18–19
advocacy planning, 207, parks, 135 Chile, 77, 99, 116
216–17 British Columbia Hydro China, 87, 113–15, 198;
Afghanistan, 66, 69 and Power Authority, dams, 137, 139–41,
airports, 127–30 146, 152–3, 156–7, 233, 238–41
Algeria, 69–71, 76 161–2, 173, 177–8, Colombia, 193
Angola, 71 181, 223 colonialism. See geopiracy
apartheid, 20, 81, 93–6. British Indian Ocean Terri- Columbia River dams, bc,
See also South Africa tory. See Chagos archi- 151–81, 226; benefits
Argentina, 137 pelago of, 173–81; compensa-
Arnold, Vera, 121 bureaucrats. See planners tion for forced removals
Arnstein, Sherry, 200–1 Burma, 9, 71 for, 155–6, 158–60,
Arrow Lakes, bc, 151–3, Burundi, 88, 96 163–9, 174, 178–9;
156–8, 161–2, 167–75 business corporations, 19, Keenleyside (High
Australia, 41, 43, 76, 23, 77–8, 82–4, 102–3, Arrow) Dam, 151–8,
86–8, 113; in Pacific 176, 216, 222, 236–42; 161–2, 167–75; Koote-
islands, 116–20 in mining, 115–21, 126; nay Symposium on,
as proponents of domi- 162–7, 170, 172,
Banaba, Micronesia, cide, 184–9, 194–6. See 175–81; Libby Dam,
118–19 also capitalism 151–4, 158–60, 162–7,
Bangladesh, 232, 236 173–5; public hearings
Barbados, 48, 59 Cambodia, 66–7, 99, on, 154–62; victims of,
Belarus, 18 133 158, 162–73, 177–81
Belgium, 114 Canada, 14, 33, 43, 59, Columbia River Treaty,
bereavement, 111, 192–3, 199, 207, 212, 239; 153–4, 158–61, 171–8
218–21. See also grief dams, 83, 137, 145–8, common good, 3, 12–14,
syndrome 233–4; indigenous 22–3, 116, 122–4, 148;
Bosnia, 96–7, 188, 198 peoples, 80–5, 88; in British Columbia,
Boston, 109–12, 232 mining, 116–17; parks, 156–8, 164–5, 174–6,
Botswana, 132 134–5; settlement ratio- 184; questioned, 183–5,
Brazil, 14, 60, 137–8, nalization, 100–3; urban 191–2, 205, 210–11,
230–1, 236 renewal, 112–13. See 237–41
Britain, 59–60, 67–8, 72, also British Columbia; common good rhetoric,
107, 112, 115–16. See Newfoundland 22, 65, 73, 76–8, 85,
also England; London capitalism, 13, 15–16, 94, 184; questioned,
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280 Index

227–31; value of, 200–9; typology of, Fried, Marc, 10, 111–12,
187–91 182–209. See also grief 192
compensation, 16–17, 21, syndrome; health; miti-
63, 73, 91–2, 103, 124- gation; psychological Gandhi, Mohandas, 226,
6, 134, 203–9; regard- problems; resistance; 229, 235
ing dambuilding, 139, social problems; gender, 48–50, 231, 233–5
145–9, 155–60, 163–9, victims genocide, 12, 14–15, 20,
174, 178–9 80, 210
consumerism, 238–42 Easter Island, Chile, 77 geography, 24–5, 46,
corporate state, 241 ecocide, 12, 14–15, 20, 50–1, 68, 222
Czechoslovakia, 112 65, 69 geopiracy, colonial, 76–88,
economic restructuring, 115; in Canada, 80–5;
dams, 5–6, 9–10, 18, 21, 107–21 internationally, 76–7,
136–50; in British Egypt, 144–5 85–8; in Palestine, 92;
Columbia, 145–8, elites, 193, 200, 203–5, in usa, 77–80
151–81; in rest of 210–11, 219; and capi- geopolitics, 236–42
Canada, 83, 137, talism, 238–41; and Germany, 67–8, 89, 99,
145–8; in China, 137, globalization, 237–42; 229, 241
139–41, 233, 238–41; goals of, 184–9; as Ghana, 143, 202, 206–7
in India, 137–9, power elites, 186, 215; globalization, 12, 106–7,
228–36; and indigenous and resistance, 226–30; 229–30, 238–42
peoples, 138–48, self-esteem of, 186–7 Greece, 89
229–35; resistance to, eminent domain, 10, Greene, Graham, 4–5
137–9, 144, 149, 108–10, 146, 187, 207. Greenland, 103–5
233–7; social effects of, See also expropriation Greenpeace, 72, 105
143–5, 202, 206–7; empowerment, citizen, grief counselling/training,
symbolic value of, 216–42. See also resis- 193–4, 220–1
137–40; World Com- tance grief syndrome, 10,
mission on, 233–7 England, 7, 34, 41, 48–9, 17–18, 145, 150,
decision making, 211–19, 57–9, 116; airports, 191–8; in Boston’s West
237–42 128–30; landscape as End, 111–13; in Colum-
Denmark, 103–5 identity in, 124, 128–9, bia River dams’ case,
disasters, 16–20; acciden- 131; parks, 130–1; 166–73, 179. See also
tal, 17–19; natural, roadbuilding in, 123–4, psychological problems
16–17; planning, 19; 229, 232 Guatemala, 44, 88
psychological effects of, environmental dispute res-
17–19 olution, 219 Hall, Peter, 19, 130
domicide, 3–22, 36; bene- Eritrea, 70 health, 70–3, 81–4,
fits of, 14, 158, 184–8, Ethiopia, 70 109–14, 121–4, 146,
226, 240; categorization ethnic cleansing, 88–98 199, 220–1. See also
of, 21; characteristics of, exile, 12, 15, 19, 32, 37, grief syndrome; psycho-
179–209; definitions of, 57–60, 63 logical problems
3, 10–14, 21, 63, 182; expropriation, 10, 12, Hewitt, Kenneth, 11, 16,
effects on elderly of, 207–9; for Columbia 68–9
95–6, 101–2, 116, 135, River dams, 155–7, History Workshop. See
139, 166–7, 171–3, 160–1, 163–6, 169, people’s history
192; everyday, 21, 174; in public facility home, 3–7, 10–13, 18–20;
106–50; extreme, 21, location, 123–7, 146 appearance/decoration
64–105; legality of, of, 27–8, 34–6, 43, 47;
188–9, 194; motives for, Fiji, 118–19 in art, 43–4; attachment
184–8; proponents of, France, 33, 72, 74, 122, to, 50–3, 57, 61–2, 110–
184–9; remediation of, 128 12, 204; as commodity,
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43, 107, 114; defini- International Joint Com- military installations,

tions of, 25–32, 61; and mission (Canada-us), 71–5, 84, 197
domicide, 61–3; for 152, 154, 165, 179 mining, 115–20
exiles, 57–60; idealiza- Inuit, 102–5, 234 mitigation of domicide,
tion of, 40–2, 44, 47, Iran, 70, 86 17, 21, 109, 112, 178,
62–3; and ideology, Iraq, 66, 70–1 212, 222; alternative
42–5, 54; for Jung, 37, Ireland, 8, 115 methods, 216–26; exist-
41; loss of, in British Israel, 70, 87–93, 197–8, ing methods, 199–209,
Columbia, 151–81; and 229. See also Palestine 212–16. See also com-
memory, 37–40, 62–3; Italy, 86, 136 pensation
as place, 32–6; as prop- Mongolia, 76, 86
erty, 42–3; psychoso- Japan, 67–8, 77, 114, 127, Morocco, 71
cially, 31, 36, 45–57, 137 Mozambique, 97–9, 223
61; as security, 52–4; Jerusalem, 14, 66, 90, 92, Myanmar. See Burma
and self-identity, 30–1, 198–9
37–8, 46–8, 52–63, Jung, Karl, 37, 41 Nakusp, bc, 153, 156–7,
75–7, 89–90, 110–13, 161, 170, 173
170–1, 180, 204 Kazakhstan, 86 Namibia, 93, 133
homeland(s), 70–89, 92–3, Kenya, 76, 86–7, 132 national parks, 130–6
96–7, 132, 193, 203; as Kurds, 66, 70–1, 89 Nauru, Micronesia,
identity, 124, 128–9, 117–18
148, 197–9, 220, 231 Laos, 66–7, 133 Nepal, 133, 137, 236
homelessness, 15, 19, Las Vegas, 42 New Caledonia, 86
31–2, 57–60, 211 Lebanon, 197 New York, 124, 185, 234
Howdendyke, East York- Lenin, V.I., 106 New Zealand, 86, 118
shire, 120–1, 194–6, Lesotho, 5–6 Newfoundland, 100–2,
199, 201 Libya, 86 134–5
human rights, 210–12, London, uk, 8, 39, 59, ngos (non-governmental
239–42 109, 112–14, 185; third organizations), 223,
Hungary, 99, 114, 188 airport, 20, 128–30 230–2, 236, 240–2
Nicaragua, 229
ideology, 88–91, 97–103, Mackenzie River Pipeline Nisga’a, bc, 81–3
231; and parks, 131–2; Inquiry, 212–13 nomads, 76–88, 134, 191.
and dams, 137–40 Malaysia, 137–8, 231–2 See also indigenous
India, 20, 58–9, 114–15, Marris, Peter, 10, 11, 114, peoples
191, 198; dams, 137–9, 192–3, 200, 217, Norway, 7, 100
228–36; resistance in, 220–1 nostalgia, 38–40, 62, 91,
228–31, 234–6 Marshall Islands, 72–3 218, 222. See also
indigenous peoples, 11, Massam, Brian, 13, 122 memory
71–2, 75–7, 85–8, Mauritius, 73–5
191–2; and dams, memoricide, 4, 14, 65, 79, Pacific islands, 72–3,
138–48, 229–35; and 97, 182, 194–9, 222–3 117–20, 230–1
mining, 115–17; and memory, 31, 107, 121, Palau, Micronesia, 230–1
national parks, 132–6; 126, 136, 148; collec- Palestine, 14, 89–93,
in North America, 36, tive, 64, 101; re Colum- 196–8, 229. See also
77–85, 102–5; in Third bia River dams, 169–71; Israel
World, 85–8, 229–35 of home, 31, 37–40, 59, Papua New Guinea, 60,
Indonesia, 14, 119–20, 62–3. See also nostalgia 119–20
137, 239 Mesopotamia, 65, 238 participatory action
inner cities, 41, 68, 95, Mexico, 60, 116 research, 223–6
108–14, 123–4, 190–1 military, the, 230–1, 239. people’s history, 28–9, 48,
Innu (Labrador), 83–5 See also war 222–3
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personality traits, 17, bia River dams, 154–62, self-esteem, 184–8, 226,
186–7, 219–20 180 231, 239
Philippines, 8–9, 229–30 public interest. See settlement rationalization,
planners, 75–94, 97–105, common good 97–105; in Canada,
112–14, 117, 120–3, public participation in 100–3; in Greenland,
194–6; of Columbia planning, 121–2, 186, 103–5
River dams, 173–81; as 200–9, 213–19, 224–6, Singapore, 113, 229
evangelistic bureaucrats, 235–7 slums. See urban renewal
187–8; goals of, 11, social impact assessment,
184–9; problems of, ranchers, 148, 151–81, 203–5, 213–16
200–9, 211–19, 225–8, 231 social justice, 199–209,
237; self-esteem of, 150, redress. See compensation; 227–42
176 mitigation social problems, 109–17,
planning techniques, refugees, 9, 12, 15–16, 132–3, 143–6, 192–8,
212–26; alternative, 19 234–7
216–26; existing, relocation pathology. See Somalia, 86
212–16 grief syndrome; psycho- South Africa, 16, 76, 81,
planning, 12–13, 16–17, logical problems 88, 93–6, 199, 229. See
42, 181–2, 211–19, remediation. See mitiga- also apartheid
230; advocacy, 207, tion South Korea, 114
216–17; approaches, resettlement, 10–12, squatters, 60, 96, 113–14,
216–19; of dams, 67–105; via ethnic 139, 225, 233
136–49, 173–81; cleansing, 88–97; of Sri Lanka, 232
methods, 202–8, indigenous peoples, strategic bombing, 67–9
212–26; of parks, 76–88; of nomads, strategic change manage-
130–6; as a political 84–8; via settlement ment, 217–19
process, 215–16; rationalization, 97–105; strategic resettlement,
processes of, 205–7; of strategic, 67–71 69–71
public facilities, 121–49; resistance, 107, 112–14, suburbs, 41–2, 108, 123,
transportation, 123–7 118–21, 191, 199–202, 126, 234
politicians, 19, 23, 75, 226–37; to airports, Sudan, 70, 87, 132, 144,
84–5, 114, 120–6, 127–30; to dams, 223
194–5; goals of, 184–9; 137–9, 144, 149, 164, Sweden, 114, 224
in British Columbia, 175, 233–7; to parks, Syria, 66–7
145–8, 173–81 130–5; to road building,
power elite. See elites 123–7; theory of, Tanzania, 87, 98, 133–4,
property rights, 171–2, 226–30 226
179, 207–8, 211 roads, 122–7 Thailand, 133, 138, 236
protest. See resistance Romania, 99–100, 113 Tibet, 198
psychological problems, Russia, 15, 66, 108, 137, Tunisia, 60
70–2, 101–4, 110–17, 232, 238 Turkey, 89, 115, 198
121–4, 146, 150, Rwanda, 88, 96, 133 Turkmenistan, 113
189–98, 218–21, 239. Rybczynski, Witold, 26–8,
See also grief syndrome 41, 48 Uganda, 132–3
psychological reactions to Ukraine, 18–19
disaster, 17–19 Saddam Hussein, 66, 71 Union of Soviet Socialist
public facility location, Saudi Arabia, 86, 116, Republics. See Russia
121–49. See also air- 237, 239 United Nations, 15, 59,
ports; dams; national scorched earth, 65–7 83, 183, 211, 230–1
parks; roads Scotland, 7–8, 73, 115 United Nations High
public hearings, 152–62, sedentarization of nomads, Commission on
202–3, 213; re Colum- 84, 86–8 Refugees, 15–16
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United Nations Secretariat urban renewal, 108–14; memoricide among,

on Internally Displaced in Vietnam, 66–7, 70 198–9; resistance by,
Persons, 9 urban redevelopment, 200–2, 211–37; theory
United States of America, 107–14, 232–3 of, 186–9; vulnerability
9, 15, 65, 90, 103, 188, urban renewal, 10, 47, of, 190–1; of war,
215, 232, 238, 241; 108–14, 232–3; in 65–8
Army Corps of Engi- Boston, usa, 109–12; Vietnam, 8, 65–7, 69,
neers, 205–6, 225–7; in in Halifax, Nova Sotia, 229–30
Chile, 99; Columbia 112–13 violence, 64, 76, 113, 192;
River basin, 151–81, Uzbekistan, 232 theories of, 188–9
225–6; dams, 137,
141–2, 236; concepts of victim impact statements, Waldo, bc, 159
home in, 26–8, 30–2, 221–2 war, 11, 64–75, 96–8
34–5, 41–4, 48–9; victims, 10, 12–15, 19, Western Sahara, 71
indigenous peoples of, 21–3, 131, 162–81; World Bank, 5–6, 119,
77–81, 88; in Iraq, characteristics of, 139, 229, 234–6, 241
66–7; military installa- 190–200; of Columbia
tions, 72–5, 84; national River dams, 158, Yugoslavia, 96–7, 198
parks, 130–2; in Pacific 162–73, 177–81;
islands, 72–5, 230–1; empowerment of, Zambia, 143–4, 202
power elites in, 186; 211–37; grief syn- Zimbabwe, 69, 76, 97–8,
roads, 123, 126–7, 232; drome among, 191–8; 236
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284 Index