By-Places: Walking Adjacency

The urban landscape is teeming with undergrowth, underworlds, underplaces. They are places of refuge, desire paths, fire pits, ashtrays, guerrilla gardens, and encampments. They are by-places. 

Vancouver as it exists today is undergoing many parallel but entwined projects of mass redevelopment. These offer promises of a safer city, a more beautiful city, one that is accessible and “affordable”. Yet, such redevelopment also overlooks what lies underneath, by-places: ad-hoc zones of refuge and impersonal care. Redevelopment is an act of clearing which prepares the city for its supposed improvement, displacing the most vulnerable as it goes. With conventional forms of appeal dwindling, what new modes of attunement can we experiment with so that we may feel otherworlds, incipient futures, already at work underneath the city, those silenced by the master plans/narratives of redevelopment. 

We invite you to get lost, to feel these otherworldings at work in the city as we walk this adjacency together, guided by figures from our ongoing By-places an/archive. Perhaps you’ll feel a strange urge to follow a small dirt path you’d otherwise pass by. We will meet before the walk to read together some texts on by-places, ruderal ecologies and other forms of (sub)urban undergrowth. Those who walk with us are invited to make traces (drawings, photos, audio, and fragmentary writings) to grow an an/archive of by-places.  

Saturday, November 22, 2025
1 to 4pm at Fraser River Trail Park
Meet at Wick's Café, 1300 West 73rd Avenue

Led by Morgan Legal and Sybil Willoughby