urban planning in vancouver:
The relatively small downtown of Vancouver has a highly fragmented geography, one in which a person can pass with an extraordinary abruptness from the spectacles of privileged lifestyles into pockets of severe poverty. Urban planning policy has allowed gentrification to accelerate in recent years, displacing low-income housing residents and disrupting well-established communities. For these residents, the words "urban revitalization" carry dangerous connotations, as they refer to a process by which new by-laws and re-zoning decisions effectively drive them out. One such community is the Aboriginal people living in the impoverished Downtown Eastside, who continue to be exposed to institutional racism as their needs are overlooked and rights are diminished in a variety of unspoken yet pervasive ways.
(...) Activist groups, representing Aboriginal people as well as other marginalized communities, have continued to advocate against the Olympics since Vancouver was selected as host in 2003. They criticize the Canadian government for channeling massive amounts of money into this event while failing to alleviate homelessness and other social problems, as expressed in the slogan "homes not games." Also, the Olympic project has shamelessly appropriated Aboriginal cultural and land-based property. For example, the official logo of the 2010 Winter Olympics is a stylized inukshuk, a traditional stone sculpture of the Inuit people, and construction of Olympics infrastructure is currently taking place on Aboriginal land.