Displacement City

Greg Cook is an outreach worker at Sanctuary Toronto. He partners with many community groups to advocate for a more just society. He is on the steering committee of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network and volunteers for the Toronto Homeless Memorial. He has worked on two documentaries: Bursting at the Seams, about the shelter crisis, and What World Do You Live In, about police brutality.Cathy Crowe is a recipient of the Order of Canada and a pioneer of street nursing. She is currently a public affiliate in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. She has fostered numerous coalitions and advocacy initiatives that have achieved significant public policy victories, including the 1998 Disaster Declaration. She is the author of A Knapsack Full of Dreams and Dying for a Home and producer of the Home Safe documentary series. Her work is the subject of the documentary Street Nurse, by filmmaker Shelley Saywell.Robyn Maynard is an assistant professor of Black feminisms in Canada in the Historical and Cultural Studies Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Fernwood, 2017) and the co-author of Rehearsals for Living (Knopf/Haymarket, 2022).Shawn Micallef is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness (McClelland & Steward, 2016), Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Coach House, 2010), and The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure (Coach House, 2014). He is a weekly columnist at the Toronto Star and a senior editor and co-owner of the independent, Jane Jacobs Prize-winning magazine Spacing. Shawn teaches at the University of Toronto and was a 2011–12 Canadian Journalism Fellow at Massey College. In 2002, while a resident at the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab, he co-founded [murmur], the location-based mobile phone documentary project that spread to over twenty-five cities globally.

"Anyone who visited downtown Toronto during the pandemic knows the devastating and powerful impact it had on the city’s homeless. Outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe have a deep knowledge of the people behind the statistics and the headlines, and here create a better understanding of how policies affect people. In this powerful book, they have collected poetry, photography, essays that tell the stories of front-line workers, advocates, people who are unhoused. These include experiences living in the shelter system, displacement, the legacy of residential schools and the experience of the Indigenous population. A unique and powerful account."- Deborah Dundas (Toronto Star)

• AcknowledgmentsForewordIntroductionCathy Crowe and Greg CookPart I: We Are [Not] in This Together1. "Displaced Again and Again and Again"Nikki Sutherland 2. The Housing Crisis and the Indian Residential School LegacyBlue Sky, Leaders from the Houseless Community, Sandra Campbell, and Leigh Kern3. Inconvenient Bodies and Toronto’s History of DisplacementLorraine Lam and Greg Cook4. Displaced There, Displaced HereJenn McIntyre and Steve Meagher5. Dystopian RealitiesMichael EschbachPart II: Fighting Back6. Responsibility Downloaded: How Drop-in Centres Stepped Up and Pushed Back during the PandemicDiana McNally 7. Surviving COVID-19 in the Shelter SystemBrian Cleary8. Social Murder: We Need More than Band AidsRoxie Danielson9. Slipped through the Fingertips of the System?Greg Cook and Dredzz 10. The Toronto Encampment Support Network Fights Back Simone Schmidt with Photos by Jeff Bierk 11. Wish You Were HereZoe Dodd12. Fighting AbleismJennifer JewellPoem: Our WildernessZachary Grant13. Palliative Care in a PandemicTrevor McNally and Naheed DosaniProfile: Building Tiny Homeless SheltersCanadian Human Rights Commission Poem: Lord We PrayZachary GrantGraphic by Michael D.Part III: COVID-19 in the Courts14. In the Parks and in the Courts: The Legal Fight against Encampment EvictionsA.J. Withers and Derrick Black15. COVID-LifeSarah White16. Two MetresDoug Johnson Hatlem, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, and Geetha Philipupillai17. Homelessness, Housing, and Human Rights AccountabilityLeilani FarhaPoem: There Is a Development Proposed for This SiteZachary GrantAfterwordAuthor Bios