If you're new to Vancouver, join us for a walk around a small sample of interesting sites around the city's core. I'm no expert on the place, and I do not have the credibility of the organic intellectuals who have spent their entire lives learning about this place; but I am learning, ever so slowly, and would be happy to explore a bit of the city with you.
The architect and designer Lance Berelowitz (2005) calls Vancouver "Dream City," and for the planner John Punter (2003), this place is the "Vancouver Achievement." The writer and cultural analyst Douglas Coupland (2009, p. 6), fascinated with the visage of the downtown forest of skycrapers he dubs the "City of Glass," puzzles over the place's evolution into an urban chamelion for film shoots: "The thing is, Vancouver can neatly morph into just about any North American city save for those in the American Southwest, and possibly Miami." The geographer Derek Gregory (1992, p. 292) is also amused at the city-as-a-film-set, as he navigates his "way past the mobile dressing rooms parked nose to tail along the sidewalk..."; Gregory is captivated by an urbanism broadcast around the world: "Its streets and buildings, its mountains and forest are filtered through the soft Pacific air and made to stand in for New York or New Guinea; the landscape is framed, cut up, and spliced into a placeless montage to be projected onto video screens around the world." This is place that captivates so many people, from near and far; and yet love and passion are volatile, aren't they? "From overzealous drivers to errant cyclists, uninspiring architecture to the closure of beloved cultural venues, Vancouverites have plenty of reasons to heap scorn on their city," suggests Charles Montgomery, the curatorial associate at the Museum of Vancouver; Montgomery compares Vancouver to "an enticing but dysfunctional lover."
"It's as though we're in a relationship with this beautiful, yet sometimes superficial entity that hurts us and wounds us." (quoted in Barrett, 2012, p. A7).
Here's a tentative itinerary. I suggest we meet at the intersection of Georgia and Granville right downtown. Take the Skytrain to the Granville station and walk south half a block, or take the Canada Line to the City Centre station. We'll walk a bit through downtown, then we'll head east through Gastown, past the new Woodward's District, and then down Hastings to Main Street in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. When we get to the Carnegie Centre, we'll turn right and head south on Main Street, through Chinatown. We'll pass underneath the Georgia Viaduct, a remnant of a stillborn mid-twentieth century modernist vision for American-style urban renewal and downtown freeway construction. Then we'll walk by Science World, one of the curious architectural legacies of Vancouver's World Exposition of 1986. We'll walk along the south shore of False Creek, through the Olympic Village -- subsequently dubbed "Millennium Water" in the first wave of condo sales, then after slow sales re-launched as the "Village at False Creek." We'll probably go our separate ways from there -- you can walk west to the Canada Line at the Olympic Village station, or you can walk back a bit east to the Main Street/Science World station.
Or, if you choose, you can walk further west along the redeveloped shore of False Creek, underneath the Cambie Street Bridge. Eventually you'll walk through the vision for mixed-income housing of Vancouver in the 1970s at South False Creek. Across the water are the more upscale landscapes of Concord Pacific Place on the north shore of False Creek; as David Ley quips so brilliantly, on the south is the landscape of liberalism; to the north is the landscape of neo-liberalism (see Ley, 1987). If you keep walking along this route you'll get to another deceptive piece of toponomy, Granville Island, which is of course only a peninsula.
Depending on how fast we walk, and how many detours we decide to take, this itinerary might take us three hours or more. Feel free to join us only for part of the tour, or to meet us somewhere along the way if you can't make it to the beginning of the itinerary. If you want to find out exactly where to meet us on the way, just give me a call on my cell, 778 899 7906.
References and Reading List
Barrett, Jessica (2013). "Vancouver, I Love You, But..." Vancouver Sun, January 24, p. A7.
Berelowitz, Lance (2005). Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre.
Coupland, Douglas (2009). City of Glass: Douglas Coupland's Vancouver. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre.
Demers, Charles (2009). Vancouver Special. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Enright, Robert (2010). Body Heat: The Story of the Woodward's Redevelopment. Vancouver: BlueImprint.
Gregory, Derek (1992). "Epilogue." In Graeme Wynn and Timothy Oke, eds., Vancouver and Its Region. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 291-297.
Hutton, Thomas A. (2008). The New Economy of the Inner City: Restructuring, Regeneration, and Dislocation in the Twenty-First Century Metropolis. New York: Routledge.
Ley, David (1980). "Liberal Ideology and the Postindustrial City." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70(2), 238-258.
Ley, David (1987). "Styles of the Times: Liberal and Neo-Conservative Landscapes in Inner Vancouver, 1968-1986." Journal of Historical Geography 13(1), 40-56.
McWhirter, George, ed. (2009). A Verse Map of Vancouver. Vancouver: Anvil Press.
Punter, John (2003). The Vancouver Achievement. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Wynn, Graeme, and Timothy Oke, eds. (1992). Vancouver and its Region. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
