Writing Back Against the Car: A Photovoice Analysis of "BAN CARS" Graffiti in Vancouver, B.C.

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 16: Urban and Community Sociology

Abstract

This paper explores the persistent tension between Vancouver’s global "Greenest City" branding and the normalized hegemony of car-centric "gray" infrastructure within Stanley Park. Using an adapted photovoice methodology, I analyze a targeted graffiti campaign featuring "BAN CARS" and "CARS KILL" tags as a sophisticated form of contentious politics and symbolic predation. I argue that these unsanctioned interventions serve as a "writing back" against a post-political "police order" that treats automobility as a non-negotiable priority over human and ecological health. The study contextualizes the 2023 removal of the Stanley Park bike lane as the culmination of a manufactured moral panic that scapegoated alternative mobilities to restore car dominance. By examining the artist’s tactical placement of tags on regulatory signage and municipal branding, I demonstrate how this campaign exposes the profound gap between the city’s sanitized political narrative and the inequitable lived reality of its residents. Ultimately, I frame this campaign as a demand for mobility justice and a decolonial, interspecies future where the "right to the city" belongs to people and the land rather than the car.

Author

• Evan Accettola Accettola, Simon Fraser University