Conservation Officers, Dispersal and Urban Frontiers

Abstract

This chapter addresses National Capital Commission (NCC) conservation officers' regulation of homeless people, many of them Indigenous people, in Canada's capital city, Ottawa. The policing of NCC parks is organised by a logic of dispersal. Such policing aims to preserve an aesthetic for public consumption and ceremonial nationalism, entails specific temporalities, and is made possible through a policing and security network. Dispersal more accurately conceptualises the spatial regulation here compared with alternative concepts like banishment, and therefore supplements existing typologies of spatial regulation. The chapter then looks at these typologies for future research on urban policing and regulation and the notion of frontiers. There is a sense in which they reproduce the colonial dimension of the frontier in how they approach these peoples.