Melora Koepke talks about her lived work as a human geographer and activist
Ren Zhang (they/them) // Contributor
Rachel Lu (she/her) // Crew Illustrator &
Anna Israfilova (she/her) // Illustrator
Readers that regularly consume media from a major Canadian or international media outlet may not know Melora Koepke’s name, but it’s likely that they’ve read her work.
Her CV is extensive, and includes over two decades as a journalist, writer, researcher and media working professional who has produced thousands of contributions for publications, film projects, exhibits and more. This is Koepke’s rich background informing her current work as a human/urban geographer and educator. Working in both French and English, Koepke draws connections through her comparative research of the cities of Vancouver—where she was born—and Paris, where she currently lives.
With a Zoom background of a cozy kitchen cluttered with books and a meeting set in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, Koepke exudes a groundedness and directness that subtly conveys her vast skillset and experience. “Human geography covers everything,” she states.
When asked about how she got into human geography, she says simply, “I like cities.” While completing her master’s degree in media studies at Concordia University, Koepke was researching how newspapers cover urban politics and the groups of people marginalized by those politics. In her master’s thesis she wrote about the missing women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside—most of them Indigenous women—and how they disappeared from their communities, but also from the media narratives that recorded a fragmented version of their stories.
Writing about and for the people most affected by urban policy in housing, public space and essentially existence seems to be a most natural progression into the kind of urban crisis research that Koepke does now, which she says is specifically focused on “the ways that marginalized people are either further marginalized or find liberation in their practices and their inhabitations of the city.”
Around 2022, major street sweeps were carried out in Vancouver and the north of Paris, destroying the few possessions and shelter that belonged to people living on the street, in addition to displacing and forcing them to start over from nothing. Koepke explains that she and other team members worked with the community to create subjective counter maps—later published in a book called Corpus Delicti—that recorded both the movement and “expressed the pain of displacement and the disruption of displacement, and how communities work together to weave a different kind of safety and community in its stead.” In this case, the words “subjective” and “counter” are not negatives. While more traditional narratives are recorded as sanitized, necessary actions, these countermaps flesh out the real human impact that these decampments have. Looking through a subjective, journalistic lens is a method to bring a different truth and reality to what is considered objective.
“There’s a large body of work that demonstrates that mapping, while often understood to be an objective process, is actually not. In fact, maps can be subjective; they can interpret human experience and they can interpret all kinds of data in variable ways, just like data itself is not, I would argue, objective,” Koepke says. “Maps used to be drawn by people in power to express and advance political ends […] the most value is in the questions that you ask and who you ask them to. That shapes how we know knowledge, how we understand knowledge, and how [it] is produced.”
Koepke’s projects have had a lot to do with the concept of knowledge: for example her 2024 project in which she helped facilitate knowledge sharing between Vancouver and Paris community partners of what they learned from major displacement events caused by hosting sports events, for example, the Olympics. Now, Koepke and her team are bringing this knowledge back to Vancouver in light of the city’s upcoming FIFA World Cup, which advocates predict will cause similar displacement.
A part of Koepke’s focus on people surviving urban crises such as homelessness, the toxic drug supply, stigma, mental health, etc., is looking at the unique way race, gender and sexuality also affect how people experience these crises. The term narcofeminism was created by drug user activists in 2019 to describe the unique ways substance use overlaps and interacts with feminist issues of marginalization and bodily autonomy. Koepke describes it as “feminism from a drug user-involved lens.”
Intersectional barriers faced by women and gender-nonconforming people such as gender-based violence make it harder to access the already difficult and convoluted system of aid for marginalized people in B.C., which has been known and recognized by the British Columbia’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, BC Housing, and even on a national scale. People in survival situations are held to a high standard that may not be possible for them, such as complete abstinence from drugs in order to access services like healthcare and housing, the nature of which is carceral. Koepke states, “A lot of services that are provided are gender-blind, whereas the issues that face women and gender-diverse people who use drugs are not gender-blind.”
One of her many projects at the moment is an international research question encompassing both Canada and France. Koepke and a team of advocates and researchers are looking at program assessments using gender as a primary determining factor. On this, Koepke reiterates the importance that the varied experiences of women and gender-diverse people are “foregrounded in research and assessment.”
“[We are] hoping that we can make recommendations and imagine, create, and draw from existent models that are specifically designed for women and gender-diverse women who use drugs.”
Koepke’s work stands out in a time of what she agrees is the pendulum swinging to conservatism. Supportive housing projects across the Lower Mainland have faced major backlash and cancellations, including in Richmond according to Vancouver City News and Surrey according to the CBC, with Burnaby seemingly following in their footsteps according to Freshet News.
“This is a symptom of late-stage capitalism, where everybody thinks that the role of housing in real estate is to make them money, and that any inclusion of people who are struggling is counter to their financial objectives; this is symptomatic of the times and places that we live in. Paris and Vancouver are both places where land is intensely expensive, and people have a lot of feelings and struggles around that,” she says, going on to explain that there is “ignorance about what treatment facilities do, ignorance about what supportive housing is and what it should be, and a lack of support from government as well, a lack of education, [and] a lack of financial investment. A lot of the problems and the crises that we see in public space can be directly linked and traced to decades of disinvestment in social services and care.”
She also emphasizes the role that elected governments play, saying, “In my view, it is the job of our elected governments to do a better job of supporting those needs and creating alternatives to market-rate housing that suit the people that need them. That is their responsibility. Therefore, it’s not really open to the court of public opinion to decide whether people have a right to belong, but rather up to our elected officials to figure out what’s missing and provide it.”
Referring to B.C.’s recent decision of rolling back its drug decriminalization project—extensively covered by news outlets including the CBC—Koepke states that policy experts are in consensus that the government is “disregarding their own evidence and bending to political pressure.”
So, what do we do when people don’t listen to evidence? How can we change policy? Koepke says to advocate, vote, resist and struggle. “Progress can be made when we support initiatives that already exist that are created by and for people who are the most concerned by any given problem,” she adds, elaborating that peoples’ ingenuity can shine through their own expertise, voice, and experience of their struggles.
“Knowledge is power. It’s a cliche, but it’s true.”
You can find more of Koepke’s work and explore what she is up to on her website: melora.ca.