Designing Resistance: Leveraging graphic design to combat dispossession and foster tenant agency

Abstract

The resurgence of the tenant movement in Canada is a response to the dramatic erosion in affordable multifamily rental housing due to legislative acts and omissions which incentivize rent gouging and repositioning practices. While a small minority of tenants have successfully challenged institutional landlord power through rent strikes, the vast majority are not organized due to a structural deficit within the movement. To address this, my project uses graphic design in both informative and evocative ways. The first approach targets political stakeholders and fixed-income tenants, using a systems map to problematize how repositioning practices perpetuate housing instability and suggest ways to mobilize for right-to-housing protection. The second approach aims to galvanize public support by showing how judicial systems mobilize on behalf of landlords. Drawing on litigation-focused tropes, I design works which reveal how legislation emboldens corporate landlords to create their own “letter of the law” to harass and displace tenants.