investigated the many socio-cultural clashes over
landscape design, house demolitions, house size,
architectural style, tree removal, downzoning
and other points of conflict involving the recent
immigrants from Hong Kong and the long-term
residents of the neighbourhoods. Although the
clashes were often represented as primarily about
race and racism, there was a complex, multi-
dimensional layering to the cultural conflicts that
was deeply bound up in the economic context in
which the immigrants arrived and in which the
struggles occurred.
As a result of the popularity of the Business
Immigration Programme, combined with the
easing of restrictions over banking and invest-
ment in Canada (owing to a number of neoliberal
federal policies), numerous Hong Kong property
investors became interested in Vancouver as a
site of investment. This interest snowballed
rapidly, and during the late 1980s the Vancouver
property market was so hot that numerous
developments that were controlled by Hong
Kong developers sold out in Hong Kong in a
matter of hours, before Vancouver buyers had a
chance to make a purchase. At the same time,
many houses in older, staid neighbourhoods were
being demolished to make way for houses two or
three times their size. These new, so-called
‘monster’ houses were targeted mainly for
purchase by the new Hong Kong immigrants.
As a result of government policies designed to
rejuvenate the business sector with an influx of
capital and to integrate Vancouver and Canada
into the global economy, many cities and regions
in the country went through major transforma-
tions in form and atmosphere. The changes in
some neighbourhoods were so rapid and all-
encompassing that many older residents felt a
complete loss of control and alienation in
neighbourhoods they had lived in most of their
lives. At the same time, owing to the stipulations
of the Business Programme, which required that
those migrants arriving as ‘entrepreneurs’ must
establish a business in Canada, many recent
immigrants felt it necessary to live part-time in
Canada and part-time in Hong Kong in order to
sustain successful business operations in both
places. (At this time the Hong Kong economy
was booming, while the Canadian economy was
comparatively stagnant.) The evident ‘trans-
national’ mobility of the immigrants made them
appear as ‘sojourners’ to many of the older
Vancouver residents, who then questioned their
allegiance to the neighbourhoods and to the
nation. Many battles over the neighbourhoods’
redevelopment then ensued.Thus although racism was clearly a factor in
the socio-cultural struggles between the trans-
national immigrants and the long-term Vancouver
residents, it was just one factor among many.
Understanding the economic and geopolitical
contexts of Canadian federal immigration policy,
of the perceived imperative of global economic
integration, of the attraction of the booming eco-
nomic region of Asia in the mid 1980s, of the rise
of global property markets, of excess capital
accumulation in Hong Kong, and of Hong Kong’s
transition to Chinese control, is a necessary
starting point for any discussion of Vancouver’s
urban change, social formations, political
alliances or cultural struggles. The concept of
transnationalism should recast our understanding
of the social and the cultural by showing how
they are always bound up with the economic and
the political at a number of different scales.
A second important feature of contemporary
capitalism that affects the cultural geography of
transnationality is the rise of networks. Networks
are webbed structures through which goods,
information, capital and people flow in a multi-
directional manner. They are also forms of
corporate governance that are based less on hier-
archical models and more on flexible nodes and
vertices linked together through both formal and
informal relationships such as subcontracting
(Thrift and Olds, 1996). Social networks are
based on affinities between people (such as
ethnicity or college ties) and much of the work
on the social adaptation of immigrants focuses
on the ways in which the intimate connections
between immigrants greatly affect their access to
certain kinds of residence and employment
opportunities, business information and/or credit
(Light and Karageorgis, 1994; Portes and
Manning, 1986). Transnational migration within
the contemporary global economy may acceler-
ate the extension of these social networks,
including ethnic ties, across space in a manner
that has implications for capitalist articulations
globally as well as locally (Mitchell, 1995;
Mitchell and Olds, 2000). Transnationalism also
has implications for the ways in which local
networks operate vis-à-visimmigrant adaptation
and in terms of commodity flows and global
consumerism(Jackson, 1999).
It has been evident that advances in the tech-
nological arena have facilitated and accelerated
globalization processes. Many scholars have
argued further that new technologies such as
telecommunications and computing have actually
enabled global restructuring to take place.
Castells (1989; 1996), for example, proposes a76 RETHINKING THE SOCIAL3029-ch03.qxd 03-10-02 4:50 PM Page 76