Being Everywhere and Dreaming about Possible Places: An Interview on Danya Fast’s The Best Place

Introduction: In the Wake of The Best Place 

In the summer of 2024, I returned to Toronto to trace the daily movements of Somali Canadians experiencing homelessness and a history of substance use. As I became interested in developing methods that attended to spatial histories and invitations to life stories offered through Somali Canadian movements, I encountered Dr. Danya Fast’s The Best Place.

The Best Place is an ethnography that explores how youth in Vancouver dream of a place amid systemic exclusion, overdose risks, and housing precarity. Fast offers a compelling example of the possibilities that emerge when ethnography and public health interventions take communities’ dreams and imaginations of place seriously. In the fall of 2024, I was fortunate to interview Fast to explore themes of place, field sites, writing, dreams, and the anthropology of the future. What follows is a glimpse into our conversation.

The Interview

Hannah: I’d like to begin with how you organized The Best Place. I appreciate how your ethnography begins in a particular setting (e.g., a shelter) and moves towards this concept of ‘everywhereness,’ highlighting the multiple ways youth experience place in Vancouver. What did you want readers to take away from the structure of the book?

Danya Fast: The chapters in the book reflect where I began, in downtown Vancouver, and how I was drawn into the evolving possibilities of places for young people. From the outset, I was compelled to write in moments when young people refused assumptions about belonging to “street youth community” tied to a specific inner-city neighborhood. It took me some time to realize how their mobility could be read as a refusal of confinement—within poverty management and public health infrastructures, as well as assumptions about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood as the “proper” place for those experiencing addiction.

Instead, my young interlocutors had big dreams and their geographic mobility through the city continually ruptured bounded notions of who they were, where they belonged, and what they were reaching for. I