‘A city of the white race occupies its place’

In this chapter we use HGIS to step onto the rich avenue of inquiry opened up by Henri Lefebvre with his observation that ‘space’ is both ‘producing and produced by social relations’. ¹ In this one elegant phrase Lefebvre linked space and time, geography and history, and lived realities with political ideas. For Lefebvre, social relations were largely the relations of capitalism. We are interested in how another set of social relations – race – was produced by and was producing space in the British colonial city of Victoria, British Columbia. We use HGIS to map the racial contours of how people lived in Victoria while we overlay a textual analysis to map the changing social relations of race.