Displacement City Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic - Greg Cook and Cathy Crowe

In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe present the stories of frontline workers, advocates, and people living without homes during the pandemic. The book uses prose, poetry, and photography to document lived experiences of homelessness, responses to the housing crisis, efforts to fight back for homes, and possible solutions to move Toronto forward. Contributors provide particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic. Offering rich stories of care, mutual aid, and solidarity, Displacement City provides a vivid account of a humanitarian disaster.

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.

320 pages