Let's Meet
at the intersection of Granville & Georgia,
9:00 AM, Saturday September 10, 2022.
My cell is 778 899 7906


Disclaimers: This is a voluntary activity, provided as a public service for conversation, learning, discovery, and engagement with the fascinating evolutionary dynamics of city life in this tiny yet unique node of a world of planetary urbanization.  Attendance is not an explicit or implicit requirement to pass any course or to achieve any particular grade.  Attendance is at participants' risk.  All participants are advised to use appropriate caution to avoid traffic/pedestrian hazards and any other risks that may arise in an urban environment.

Downtown Vancouver, May 2019 (photograph by Elvin Wyly)
"Once, in Helsinki, I was in a hotel where the TV had six channels.  Five were showing made-in-Vancouver cable films, and the sixth was CNN.  I phoned my mom and we watched CNN simultaneously.  It sort of felt like home."

Douglas Coupland (2009).  City of Glass:  Douglas Coupland's Vancouver.  Vancouver:  Douglas & McIntyre, quote from p. 6.
Welcome to Vancouver!
Civic graffiti after the "Stanley Cup riots" of June, 2011 (Elvin Wyly)
Raincity Therapy

When the winter rains put you in a gray mood after a week or so without any sun, then remember to take a look at a few of these images.

"...in its interactions with private interests, particularly in the land market, the reform movement was perhaps too naive, not recognizing that its humane philosophy might be coopted by the calculus of the marketplace and lead to an inequitable outcome where the vulnerabilities of the poor would be exposed.  For in what Hirsch has called the positional economy of contemporary advanced society, wherever scarcity is becoming social rather than material the promise of an enhanced quality to consumption in an environment designed to maximize livability will lead to a predictable market response."

David Ley (1980).  "Liberal Ideology and the Postindustrial City."  Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70(2), 238-258, quote from p. 258.
If you're new to Vancouver, join us for a walk around a small sample of interesting sites around the city's core.  Or, if you're not new to Vancouver, join us so you can correct my mistakes, omissions, and biases!  Cities are collective works of art, and the essence of city life is that everyone is and should be part of the creative vision and expression of the very best possibilities for individual and collective learning and experience.  I'm not really an expert on this place, and I do not have the credibility of the organic intellectuals and ancestral communities who have spent their entire lives learning about this part of the world -- and, often, absorbing the lessons of multiple generations of previous lives lived on these unceded territories that have now become a dynamic industrial-then-postindustrial metropolis integrated into the transnational space of flows.  Consider this:  Kimberley Wong, a fifth-generation Chinese Canadian who works as a Race and Equity Project Manager for the Hua Foundation in Vancouver's Chinatown, takes a walk with Khelsilem, Chief Spokesperson for the Squamish Nation, a 385th-generation local of these amazing lands of ancestry, history, and contemporary transnational connections. Perhaps more than any other part of the world, the lands we today call Vancouver provide a non-linear, multi-dimensional perspective on time and space, local and global processes, history and geography.  The connections are delightfully overwhelming and humbling.  Even so, I've been here for more than a few years now; the years have been spent reading, listening, learning, and walking the streets and alleys of a truly remarkable city and its surrounding suburban environments.  I'm eager to explore a bit of this city with you -- and, just as important, to learn from you how this place compares with other cities in the world that you know and love!

*

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," Montgomery reflects (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.  (Sorry, I still call it "Science World," its original name, rather than the corporate-sponsored nameplate of 'Telus World of Science.')  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 in reality just a shallow sandbar.

Depending on how fast we walk, and how many detours we decide to take, this itinerary will take quite a bit of time.  Every year, it seems, we have more stories to share, more connections to draw.  Last year we started at 9 in the morning and we didn't get to Craft Brewery in the Olympic Village until about 3 pm; but for those willing to endure so much walking and Wyly-blathering, I'm happy to buy you refreshments and lunch!  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 Recommendations

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.

Kathryn Schulz (2015).  "The Really Big One."  The New Yorker, July 15.

Wynn, Graeme, and Timothy Oke, eds. (1992).  Vancouver and its Region.  Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press.

*
"...I remember attending a kind of
gentrification summit
called by a vancouver city planner
to examine the city's victory square
redevelopment plan
david ley, jeff sommers, nick blomley,
and chris olds
reached a similar conclusion
the plan does nothing to prevent
displacement and gentrification
but when recently reminded of this
verdict
the city planner still pushing his plan
said
'I don't care if god and david ley...'

and that's just it
the necessity for heeding
the prophetic blast and rallying cry
delivered by larry campbell
now the provincial coroner
in the carnegie centre last summer

'raise shit,' he said

raise shit
against the kind of 'urban cleansing'
gentrification unleashes
it's a war
against the poorest of the poor

...

to raise shit is to actively resist
and we resist with our presence
with our words
with our love
with our courage

we resist
person by person
square foot by square foot
room by room
building by building
block by block. ..."

Bud Osborne (2001).  "raise shit -- a downtown eastside poem of resistance."  In Paul Taylor, ed. (2003).  The Heart of the Community:  The Best of the Carnegie Newsletter.  Vancouver:  New Star Books, 230-237, excerpts from pp. 235-237.  Note one friendly amendment:  Kris Olds.

"Blight ... is Death to a City...!"

The images accompanying this part of the film seem to be a view of a part of the city that is beautifully documented by a photograph taken by Fred Herzog in 1957.  See Jeff Wall (2011).  "Vancouver Appearing and Not Appearing in Fred Herzog's Photographs."  In Claudia Gochmann, Sarah Milroy, Jeff Wall, and Douglas Coupland, Fred Herzog:  Photographs. Vancouver:  Douglas & McIntyre, pp. 20-24.

National Film Board (1964).  "To Build a Better City."  Ottawa:  Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation / National Film Board.
"U of *&%$ T?"

It's not a bad introduction to the sense of alienation felt in Vancouver, and in UBC, in relation to the established institutions of elite privilege far away in the east, in the settlement "core" of Canada.  Thanks to Graeme Wynn for the recommendation.
How to Understand Vancouver in 90 Seconds.

1.  First Thirty Seconds.  Watch this ad for Shaw Communications, headquartered in Calgary but with major market penetration of a vast, fairly conservative rural section of Western Canada that contains a lucrative but concentrated left-wing electorate in Vancouver.

2.  The Next Sixty Seconds.  Read this, and listen to what it is saying to Vancoverites [as spoken to by Albertans, which for Canada is like saying that in America, Houston Texas speaks for New York or San Francisco.] 

You're young and hungry in Vancouver [can't you urban lefties see how the job creators are heroes?].  You're a hit, so you're growing fast [don't argue with us, yes, all the costs are escalating, and none of the firms ever feels secure.  That's how capitalism is supposed to work, understand, y'all?].  But yes, even you, quirky creative-class Left-Coast urbanites, you need us conservative Calgarians.  [We're the Capital of Rural BC and Alberta Conservatism, but since we live in a fast-growing city, we're the cool conservatives!] 

You're cool, you're so creative to define "coffee-maker" as another young, cool, hard-driven creative type.  [But to all you bleeding-heart leftist urban types, can't you see that you should be thankful to the job-creator, that hard-charging entrepreneur who gives you a job?] 

You're so cool in Vancouver.  Wow, great coffee, everywhere!  [Quick, push all that inequality and poverty as far as you can from the funky coffeeshops, and you'll make sure everyone in the world still thinks you're Lotus Land, Nirvana, Pacific Metropolis in a Province that calls itself the 'Best Place on Earth'].

Oops, I forgot one more color-code.

[Here's a tentative story by an American who's lived here for a while now, but who's still puzzled by this fascinating yet bizarre place.  Those of you who really truly know the heart and soul of Vancouver, tell me if I'm really far off...?]


CopyLeft 2018 Elvin K. Wyly
Except where otherwise noted, this site is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
Oops!

It was an accident, I promise...

I climbed the stairs, pointed the camera down to capture as much of the Woodward's atrium as the lens would allow,

... and somehow, the spirit of Vancouver accomplished a not-so-subtle renaming of London Drugs.
Woodward's Atrium, June, 2012 (Elvin Wyly)
"...the white worthies of Vancouver blamed everything they disliked not only on Asians and native peoples but also, especially, on Americans."
George Fetherling (2012).  "Vancouver Comes of Age in Fascinating Text:  City Outgrew its Steam-Age Industrial Economy, but the Changes Didn't Come Easily or Overnight."  Review of Diane Purvey and John Belshaw, Vancouver Noir, 1930-1960, Anvil Press. Vancouver Sun, August 25, p. D6.
Vancouver has grown accustomed to getting ranked at the top of lists of the world's most "livable cities."  In the last few years, though, some of those rankings have placed Vancouver a bit lower.  It's generated a lot of anxious headlines.  Most recently, a travel writer under the byline 'Gulliver,' writing for The Economist, called Vancouver "mind-numbingly boring."  The Mayor quickly responded, claiming, among other things, that "Adventure is in our DNA."  Radio Host Stephen Quinn had a different response:  "We have the self-esteem of a teenager posting selfies on Facebook and tossing through the night as they dream of waking up to countless likes."

Stephen Quinn (2015).  "So What if The Economist Calls Us Boring?  Get Over It."  Globe & Mail, May 30, S1.
Check out the 1912 Goad's Fire Atlas Layer on Vanmap!
Useful Vancouver References:
"We didn't want any cyclists to be doored, and we didn't want any gowned or tuxedoed guests to be taken out by bikes," said Richardson, who has been representing the city as an auxiliary for 43 years.  "It was probably the only place where a cyclist might get doored by a Ferrari, a Bentley, and a Rolls-Royce all at once."
--Christopher Richardson, an auxiliary police officer assigned to direct traffice for a special Face the World fundraising gala at a luxurious waterfront home on Point Grey Road -- right at the epicenter of the city's recent closure of roads to through traffic in favor of bike lanes.  The organizers applied to the city's film and special events office for permission to use the bike lane for valet parking; the city approved, and then appointed Richardson to direct traffic to minimize conflicts between bikers and supercar celebrities.  See Jeff Lee (2015).  "Bike Lane Bends to Accommodate Gala Guests."  Vancouver Sun, June 19, p. A1.
 
September, 2015
Bright and sunny weather!  We started out at Granville & Georgia, epicentre of contemporary retail and real-estate competition, with Nordstrom's set to open in a few weeks across from The Bay -- a few blocks down from the luxury Shangri-la high-rise across from the rising monument to Ye Orange Hair (the Trump Tower).  Then we headed down past the ScotiaBank tower, the new Telus Gardens, turning left by the Queen Elizabeth Theatre down to Victory Square, the Dominion Building, and Marc Emery's headquarters.  A few blocks into Gastown, and then back over to the Woodward's atrium, down Hastings past Save-On Meats and on the fringe of the Downtown Eastside, turn right up into Chinatown, Rennie's headquarters across from the Chinese Cultural Centre and the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden.  Then over to the new development on Main, past the ghosts of Hogan's Alley and the former Jimi Hendrix Shrine, under the viaducts and on towards the Ivanhoe Pub.  Then past the Pacific Central terminal and the Main Street / Science World Skytrain station, along the False Creek boardwalk to see a performer with a few telents on the flames but a rather inappropriate sense of humour!  By this point our crowd of survivors on this long journey (about five and a half hours so far) was down to the size where I could afford to take us all to the Craft brewery, the old converted Salt Building in the Olympic Village.  "Where Everything's on Tap" is their trademark-protected motto.  Cheers to Beers!
this town
is
a circus
Below:  The City as Text.  A shelf of suggested readings on Vancouver.
"After realizing zillions from False Creek, Concord Pacific poured a million back in this year. That was for a dragon-boat paddling centre's six docks and storage facilities.  The year-round complex will benefit the annual dragon boating festival that CP sponsors.  Those attending the development firm's recent seasonal reception enthused over a 218-unit Calgary project of $800,000 to $13-million condos that president-CEO Terry Hui said should be 'the most high-end building the city has ever seen.'"  Malcolm Parry (2015).  'Adam's Apple Makes a Connection:  Town Talk."  Vancouver Sun, December 19, p. G2.
Vancouver on Canada Day, 2014
Photograph by Maximillian Battison (posted with permission)
"Who said it's not dangerous to dig up the past, to descend into the deeps?  A face in an archive folder will break your heart or break open your mind; a disembodied voice, no more than a series of electronic blips on a tape, will transport you into unknown canyons of grief or breathless peaks of ecstasy.  To snare the soul of a city seems less possible than being snared by it yourself, being sucked into the vortex of its myths and fictions.  I begin to wonder if Vancouver exists, if I exist.  What is this strange landscape of memory, half urban pastoral, half Bosch nightmare, that I inhabit and people with distorted shapes?"  Gary Geddes (1986).  "City at the End of Things."  In Gary Geddes, ed., Vancouver:  Soul of a City.  Vancouver:  Douglas & McIntyre, 13-18, quote from p. 15.
Canada Day, 2016
"Thanks for your Donation"

Vancouver is widely perceived as the pinnacle of a sustainable, post-industrial service, entertainment, and 'lifestyle' city.  That's only part of the story!  This region, the birthplace of the environmental activist organization Greenpeace, is also North America's leading coal export facility.  This sustainable, multicultural metropolis is also one of the world's leading headquarters centers for multinational mining corporations -- with flows of money implicating Canadian corporations in the land dispossessions and violence against indigenous peoples across many sites in the Global South.  Juanita Sundberg and students in her Geography 495 class documented these links, focusing on the case of Angélica Choc, who is leading a precedent-setting lawsuit in the Canadian courts against HudBay Minerals for the murder of her husband.  Angélica spent four weeks in Vancouver in 2015 as the community partner for Geography 495, and students produced this video analyzing the connections between donations to UBC and indigenous struggles in Guatemala and other parts of Latin America.

An anonymous Reddit poster, writing in November 2016, describing Vancouver and UBC:
Victory Square, Dominion Building, July 2017
"Hoarding Summer"
Yes, indeed, wouldn't it be a joy to store up the beautiful summer sun to help us make it through the long dark wet days of winter?
Posted to reddit/r/ubc, July 2018
Vancouver in the news ... in a very bad way.

"Ian M. Smith, a Department of Homeland Security analyst who resigned this week after he was confronted about his ties to white nationalist groups, attended multiple immigration policy meetings at the White House, according to government officials familiar with his work.

Smith quit his job Tuesday after being questioned about personal emails he sent and received between 2014 and 2016, before he joined the Trump administration. The messages, obtained by the Atlantic and detailed in a report published Tuesday, depict Smith engaging in friendly, casual conversations with prominent white supremacists and racists.  In one email from 2015, Smith responded to a group dinner invitation whose host said his home would be 'judenfrei,' a German word used by the Nazis during World War II to describe territory that had been 'cleansed' of Jews during the Holocaust.  'They don't call it Freitag for nothing,' Smith replied, using the German word for 'Friday,' according to the Atlantic. 'I was planning to hit the bar during the dinner hours and talk to people like Matt Parrot, etc.,' Smith added, a reference to the former spokesman for the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party."

"...In a 2016 interview, Smith said he was born near Seattle and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, before moving to Asia and earning a law degree in Australia."

Nick Miroff (2018).  "Homeland Security staffer with white nationalist ties attended White House policy meetings."  Washington Post, August 30.


"I love how UBC this question is..."
Vancouver Field Tour, September 2018
Vancouver Canucks vs. Boston Bruins, October 2018
David Ley's City Tour, September 2018!
For a sampler of Ley's scholarship on Vancouver, look here.
Locavore to Globavore?

A few years into this century, the B.C. journalists Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon began writing a series of articles on local food systems, and the environmental benefits of "eating locally."  The series led to a best-selling book, The 100-Mile Diet, that became popular among many communities across Canada, North America, and around the world.  To eat locally was to be a "locavore," a word that was selected as the word of the year by the Oxford American Dictionary in 2007.  Even before the global attention highlighted by the Oxford designation, however, the 100-mile diet had begun to show up in curious ways in the Vancouver landscape.  The RainCity Grill, an upscale restaurant at Davie and Denman in the West End, began advertising itself as the first restaurant in the world to offer the "100 Mile Menu."  We went there sometime in late 2005 or early 2006; it was pretty good.  And then, not long after that, a student wrote a brilliant paper analyzing an advertising campaign that the restaurant had paid for.  It was lavish, professional, and creative, with feature spots in local television and print magazines.  But the entire advertising campaign for the 100-Mile Menu in Vancouver, B.C., took place in Sydney, Australia.  The restaurant was targeting Australian tourists who were planning trips to Canada.  The route from Sydney, N.S.W. to Vancouver's YVR is one of the longest continuous transcontinental air routes in the world.  Would you like the seafood chowder with the spicy jet-fuel reduction sauce?

The RainCity Grill closed down a few years ago.  The local restaurant landscape in this town is dynamic and creative -- but ruthlessly competitive.  If you want to learn more, read Dani Aiello's brilliant thesis.  But then, in the spring of 2022, we were showing a few visitors around town, exploring places where the local entrepreneurial landscape continued to struggle recovering from the years of Covid lockdowns and uncertainties.  Walking through the Public Market on Granville Island, I was a bit shocked seeing the way one entrepreneur had decided to embrace the opposite of the 100-Mile Menu.  Locavore to Globavore?  Creative and playful, but perhaps with more than a few disturbing implications.  And, of course, the slogan comes with its own copyright.  If you want to learn more about the 100-Mile Diet, see the fascinating update and interview with Smith and MacKinnon in The Tyee.

Aiello, Daniela (2014).  Vancouver's Downtown Eastside:  An Ethnography of Restaurateurs and Neighbourhood Change.  Burnaby, BC:  Simon Fraser University.

Beers, David (2020).  "The 100-Mile Diet, 15 Years Later."  The Tyee, June 29.

The Vancouver Sun journalist Dana Gee (2022) speaks with Charles Demers about his novel Noonday Dark:  "A big plot in this novel is the proposed plan to turn the Knight Street truck route into a corridor of condos that will make developers rich.  Why this story?"  Demers' response is a joyous blend of connections and invitations to think about many analytical narratives of this fascinating city.  "It's partly the old noir trick," Demers replies, "of having the lurid and scandalous action kicked off by some local bureaucratic issue that seems mind-bendingly dull and pedestrian on the surface.  It also felt like a subplot that's really true to Vancouver today:  A city in the last stages of erasing all evidence of its former life as a dirty little blue-collar place where things were pulled out of the ground or the water, as opposed to being what it is now, a beautiful place where people live and things are consumed."  A lovely, concise summary of the intricate history of this region's transformation!  This city-region has evolved at an accelerating pace over the past few generations, from a staples export gateway linking Western Canada's natural resources to global commodity-trade networks (Ley and Hutton, 1986), to a sharp divergence between rural and urban economic industrial and occupational structures, and the increasingly creative pursuit of post-industrial opportunities tied to transnational real-estate development (Olds, 1998), tourism and event promotion (McCallum et al., 2005), and the allure of digital technological innovation (Semiatycki et al., 2016).  If you want to savor a few images of the "dirty little blue-collar place" that Demers is thinking about, see Gochmann et al. (2011) for the entrancing mid-century images captured by a medical photographer, Fred Herzog.  Or perhaps you might be more interested in the drama between sex workers and police in the city's West End neighborhood in  the 1970s, in Aaron Chapman's (2021) Vancouver Vice.  To explore the interplay between image and reality -- how the changing cultures of technology in photography reflect urban realities even as they shape how many people understand and act in cities -- see Purvey and Belshaw's (2011) chilling yet eloquent account of gambling, smuggling, corruption, and murder in this place that is often called Terminal City.

Beyond all those citations and recommendations, however, don't forget Demers himself.  Demers isn't just a novelist; he's a political activist and a stand-up comedian.  One of the best ways to dive into the ongoing, intergeneration conversations about what this city is, has been, and is becoming, is to crack open his love letter to the city, Vancouver Special (Demers, 2009).  Demers has a keen sense of local history, global connections, and the quirks that make this place unique within Canada's dynamic, shifting position in a turbulent world of economic, political, and cultural revolutions.  Every page of Vancouver Special is a blend of insightful cultural analysis and hilarious irony.  Demers is still at it.  A character in Noonday Dark does a bit of work on political speechwriting, and Dana Gee (2022) asks about Demers' own experience doing that for  Adrian Dix and John Horgan.  "Actually, there is one little detail in the book lifted directly from my time writing jokes for Adrian Dix," Demers reflects.  "Adrian had to give a speech at the Vancouver Board of Trade -- this was just after Christy Clark had launched something called 'Free Enterprise Fridays.'  We had Adrian open that he was countering with 'Theoretical Marxism Thursdays.'  Apparently, it brought the house down.  In Vaughn Palmer's column the next day, four of my ghostwritten jokes were quoted, which was a high-water mark."

Dive in to the city, and dive into the great and articles in, about, and from this fascinating city!

References

Chapman, Aaron (2021).  Vancouver Vice:  Crime and Spectacle in the City's West End.  Vancouver:  Arsenal Pulp Press.

Demers, Charles (2009).  Vancouver Special.  Vancouver:  Arsenal Pulp Press.

Gee, Dana (2022).  "Demers Releases New Novel, Resumes Stand-Up Gigs."  Vancouver Sun, June 4, C3.

Gochmann, Claudia, Sarah Milroy, Jeff Wall, and Douglas Coupland (2011).  Fred Herzog:  Photographs.  Vancouver, BC:  Douglas & McIntyre.

Ley, David, and Tom Hutton (1986).  "Vancouver's Corporate Complex and Producer Services Sector:  Linkages and Divergence Within a Provincial Staple Economy."  Regional Studies 21(5), 413-424.

McCallum, Katherine, Amy Spencer, and Elvin Wyly (2005).  "The City as an Image-Creation Machine:  A Critical Analysis of Vancouver's Olympic Bid."  Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 67, 24-46.

Olds, Kris (1998).  "Globalization and Urban Change:  Tales from Vancouver Via Hong Kong."  Urban Geography 19(4), 360-385.

Purvey, Diane, and John Belshaw (2011).  Vancouver Noir:  1930-1960.  Vancouver:  Anvill Press.

Siemiatycki, Elliot, Thomas Hutton, and Trevor Barnes (2016).  "Trouble in Paradise:  Resilience and Vancouver's Second Life in the 'New Economy.'"  Urban Geography 37(2), 183-201.

*
Planetary Metropolis
Anyone alive reading these words is part of the first generation ever to have lived in a majority-urban world.  Some individual cities can be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years.  At the global scale, however, urbanization is bound up with the ongoing processes of capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, and transnational immigration that has been underway for the last five hundred years or so.  By the 1960s a few prescient analysts were able to foresee that a world of separate cities and rural areas was coalescing into something different:  an urban world of interconnecting fields of influence, interaction, and interdependence.  As early as 1967, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre began writing on the phenomenon of "planetary urbanization," theorizing a global condition in which more and more kinds of places are incorporated into the complexity of worldwide networks.  Such networks result in especially dense concentration of transnational relations in the world's largest cities.  But even the smallest towns and villages, the seemingly most isolated agricultural regions, are woven into global flows of capital, commodities, people, and ideas.  Lefebvre's ideas were ignored or misunderstood for many years, but more people -- as well as influential multinational companies and billionaire investors -- began paying attention to cities and urban ideas as the world approached the fifty-percent urban threshold.  That threshold was crossed around 2007.

The Vancouver metropolitan area is large when compared with small towns and rural areas in British Columbia and Western Canada, but it's pretty small when compared with the world's largest cities.  The metropolitan region has about two and a half million people -- a bit more or less depending on how many of the surrounding jurisdictions are included -- and that places it the 191th most populous metro in one ranking.  In other rankings it shows up at 176, in another at 266, because different analysts and institutions use different criteria and data sources; don't let the specific numbers distract you from what's really interesting:  the contrast between Vancouver's two and a half million, versus the 37 million in the Tokyo-Yokohama region of Japan, the 32 million in Delhi, India, or the 28.5 million in Shanghai, China.  Tokyo-Yokohama is a single metropolitan region that encompasses the equivalent of the entire population of Canada.

If the Vancouver region is small by measures of total population, however, that simply magnifies the local experience of transnational connections and influences.  The Vancouver campus of the University of British Columbia is often ranked as one of the most internationalized institutions of higher education anywhere in North America.  Vancouver is often described as the 'most Asian city outside of Asia.'  Canada has the world's second-highest per capita rate of immigration in the world -- only Australia's is higher -- and most new arrivals come to Canada's largest metros -- Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.  When local home prices are expressed as a ratio to local incomes, the Vancouver region is ranked number two or three in the world as the most expensive place to live; the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) of China is consistently ranked first, and Sydney, Australia, jostles with Vancouver for second place.

Cities are the leading edges of social, cultural, and technological evolution on an urbanizing planet.  Why don't we take a look at a few statistical snapshots of the diversity of the Vancouver metropolitan region?  Here we'll draw on the Canadian Census of Population and Housing, which provides the most detailed and consistent view of changes in Canada's evolving social mosaic.  Many analysts use these data to create sophisticated tables and visualization.  One of the most impressive is the "SuperDiversity" graphic views produced by UBC's Dan Hiebert, along with Steve Vertovec and colleagues (2019).  But we can also download the raw data from Statistics Canada, and just run some quick crosstabulations.  Follow the links below if you're interested in the datasets and software applications used to produce the snapshots below.

Statistics Canada (2019).  2016 Census Public Use Microdata File, Individuals File.  Ottawa:  Statistics Canada.

SAS (2022).  SAS On Demand for Academics.  Cary, NC:  SAS Institute.

Vertovec, Steven, Daniel Hiebert, Alan Gamlen, and Paul Spoonley (2019).  "SuperDiversity:  Today's Migration Has Made Cities More Diverse than Ever -- In Multiple Ways."  Rostock:  Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

Here's a fragment of what the SAS code looks like for a few simple tables:

libname pumf2016 "c:\data\pumf2016";
options pagesize=250;
proc contents data=pumf2016.pumf2016ind;
run;

proc freq data=pumf2016.pumf2016ind;
tables aboid / format=comma12.;
where cma=933;
weight weight;
title "Indigenous Populations of the Vancouver Metropolitan Region";
run;

proc freq data=pumf2016.pumf2016ind order=freq;
tables pob;
where cma=933;
weight weight;
title "Place of Birth of Individuals living in the Vancouver Metropolitan Region";
run;

proc freq data=pumf2016.pumf2016ind order=freq;
tables ethder;
where cma=933;
weight weight;
title "Selected Multiple Ethnic Identities in the Vancouver Metropolitan Region";
run;

Here's what the raw output looks like from SAS PROC FREQ:







 
SAS is powerful and widely used in major corporations (see some of their friendly propaganda here) but sometimes the software can be annoying, as in the case here.  The WEIGHT statement produces population estimates from the sampled observations -- responses from 2.7 percent of the Canadian population -- but PROC FREQ gives us meaningless decimal points in the frequency counts.  There are ways of correcting this but it's a bit complicated, and I'm just a geographer with very primitive coding skills.  So I'll just bring things into Excel and clean them up so we can get back to the interesting story:
Vancouver is famous among urban planners and community activists in cities around the world for a legendary battle against a regional freeway network that was planned in the 1950s and 1960s.  The legendary episode is what is often called "the Great Freeway Fight of 1967," in which community organizations managed to stop the City from building a part of the freeway network that would have destroyed Chinatown and major sections of the neighborhoods of Strathcona and Gastown.  As a result, the City of Vancouver is one of the very few cities in all of North America that does not have a major freeway running through its urban core; there's just a very short stretch -- the Georgia Street and Dunsmuir Street Viaducts -- of what was a much larger regional network.  Not all of that network was stopped, however:  a regional freeway matrix had been a core element of the famous Bartholomew Plan of 1928, and while the Great Depression interrupted many planning processes, various construction initiatives resumed in the 1950s.  Resistance to freeway-driven urban renewal in the urban core changed the general framework and mindset of planners in the City of Vancouver, but in surrounding suburbs a different set of forces predominate.  Here, population growth reflects the fact that fewer households are able to afford the costs of living in the city:  local realtors often use the phrase, "drive till you qualify," referring to the way home-buyers go further out to the edge of the metropolitan area until they find a house purchase price where they're able to qualify for a mortgage from a bank.  At the same time, provincial and federal priorities view the metropolitan region not as separate neighborhoods or municipalities -- what the late, great planner John Friedmann (2019) called "Twenty-One Suburbs in Search of a City" -- but as a vast, integrated regional economy that is one of the key nodes of Canada's integration into the global economy.  What this means is that efficiency matters:  for provincial and federal officials, what matters is having a speedy, efficient system so that a large regional labor market can be as adaptive and innovative as possible.  This includes having facilities that enable workers to commute from one suburb to another, as well as handling the large trucks carrying commodities from across Western Canada to regional ports for export shipping -- and then taking commodities arriving from ships that have crossed the Pacific to stock retail stores across B.C., Alberta, and beyond.  What all of this means is that the era of freeway building and planning for the automobile that was so dominant in the 1950s has not entirely disappeared.  There's just a more complex spatiality.  The City of Vancouver is, increasingly, shaped by ever-more expensive plots of land where people are able to rely exclusively on public transportation or walking to work; many who cannot afford the tradeoffs of the city look farther afield in the suburbs, where there's a mixture of options.  Ever since the development of a fast mass-transit system in the lead-up to Expo '86, an expanding SkyTrain network has provided good mobility options for those living near transit stops.  And yet this accessibility becomes capitalized in higher land costs, as developers and planners lay out integrated high-rise developments near the stations.  Lower land costs in suburban land that is not accessible to public transit means that that there are still systemic pressures confronting lower-middle-income households, adding to the cumulative pressures for continued highway development to handle the rising volume of regional traffic.

It all adds up to a complex regional spatiality, as the metropolis is rebuilt in ways that reconfigure space and time.  More than half a century after the Great Freeway Fight, planners and community groups in the City of Vancouver have been discussing plans for taking down the Viaducts, at the same time there are ever-larger regional plans for bridges, tunnels, and highways in the surrounding suburbs.  Vancouver The City, and Vancouver The Region, continue to evolve along divergent paths.  "The slated removal of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts," write Lawrence Frank and Alexander Bigazzi (2019, p. 134), "presents and clarifies the contrast in modal priorities between the City and Region.  The City is tearing down freeways while the Region is building new ones."

Below is an image of the tiny portion of the City of Vancouver where there is a major highway.  It's part of the vast regional highway network built in the 1950s and then integrated into the Trans Canada Highway.  If you look towards the bottom of the image, in that direction the highway turns east, goes through Burnaby, Surrey, and Abbotsford.  Depending on how busy the traffic is, it might take you two hours to get to the city of Hope, at the eastern end of the flat Fraser River floodplain.  Now you'll appreciate local realtors' jokes:  "If you're looking for an affordable home near Vancouver, it's beyond Hope."  Keep driving, hour after hour, day after day, and you'll go through Calgary, Medicine Hat, Regina, Winnipeg ... and eventually, all the way to Halifax.

Look towards the top of the image:  that's where the Trans-Canada highway just barely touches the east edge of the City of Vancouver, crosses the body of water that the Tsleil-Waututh peoples have called Sasamat before the Spanish named it Canal de Floridablanca and the English named it Burrard Inlet.  The bridge is called the Second Narrows crossing -- and also the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, in honor of the workers who died in an accident building the structure in 1958.  Click on the arrow for a brief view crossing the bridge, with some acoustical accompaniment -- You Got to Go To the City! -- by George Michael

References

Friedmann, John (2019).  "Twenty-One Suburbs in Search of a City:  A View of the Vancouver Metropolitan Area."  In Penny Gurstein and Tom Hutton, eds., Planning on the Edge:  Vancouver and the Challenges of Reconciliation, Social Justice, and Sustainable Development.  Vancouver, BC:  University of British Columbia Press, 3-10.

Frank, Lawrence, and Alexander Y. Bigazzi (2019).  "Transportation:  Vancouver the City and Vancouver the Region."  Penny Gurstein and Tom Hutton, eds., Planning on the Edge:  Vancouver and the Challenges of Reconciliation, Social Justice, and Sustainable Development.  Vancouver, BC:  University of British Columbia Press, 125-143.
Lucy's Eastside Diner, Main Street, Mount Pleasant
Better than Angie's List

If you're interested in recommendations on whether this walking tour is worth it, here's one of the more interesting reviews received.

It's a September morning in 2012.  We're just about twenty minutes into the tour.  We've walked down the hill from the intersection of Granville and Georgia, and now we're on Georgia Street right out in front of the Scotia Tower.  Surrounded by a good crowd of curious, brilliant students, I'm telling a few stories about Vancouver's experience with the "urban renewal" movement that swept through so many cities in Europe, the United States, Canada and beyond in the 1950s through the 1970s.  On this site a beautiful "terracotta-clad beauty" of a building constructed in 1913, the Birks Building, had been demolished in 1974 despite grassroots opposition - a loss that led the City of Vancouver to establish an architectural conservation program (Kalman and Ward, 2012, p. 125); an adjacent building, the Strand Theatre built in 1919, was also destroyed to make way for the new and the modern - the Scotia Tower, completed in 1977.

At this point a guy walks across the intersection, and pauses for twenty or thirty seconds to listen to the stories about urban renewal - an era of urban thought and planning practice that was once widely accepted as a logical, scientific technology of improvement.  Urban renewal gets its own formal dictionary definitions - "The rehabilitation of those portions of urban areas deemed to have fallen below prevailing standards of public acceptability," in the words of one influential source (Hoare, 1988, p. 514) - but it also entails many serious problems.  Urban renewal was driven by top-down decision-making, with little public input; it assumed that newer buildings were always better than older structures; and it often undermined existing communities while making cities more expensive and competitive. 

Our visitor starts walking up Georgia Street, and then turns around.  "Hey, I've been here all my life," he declares to the crowd in a loud, bold voice.  "And I know this place!"  He looks at me to make eye contact, and then he shouts, louder this time, with passion,

"...and I think you're full of shit!"

Then he stumbles just a bit, turns around, and resumes walking west up Georgia.  It's no criticism to observe that he seemed to have a pretty nice mixture of something on board, and this metropolis is a particularly dynamic vortex of all sorts of natural and high-tech cognitive enhancements; the legendary urban researcher Loretta Lees (2001) once described the place as a "city on Prozac," and that was years before literally hundreds of cannabis retail stores proliferated as Canada's federal government prepared to de-criminalize the substance in 2017.  It is therefore important that we respect our critic's wise assessment.  In the moment, his admonition - "I know this place!" - reminded me of an anonymous resident's quote that introduced a report by a local community organization based in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.  "I know this place like the back of my heart," the resident had told the organizers and researchers (Pedersen and Swanson, 2010).  The Downtown Eastside is famous across Canada and beyond as an epicenter of poverty and drug use - and yet such narratives are terribly unfair stereotypes that ignore the true complexities of community and shared local experience.  Besides, if there were time, there are plenty of stories to be told about what happens behind closed doors in other neighbourhoods in this region - with their own shares of wild, drug-fuelled parties in multimillion-dollar suburban mansions or high-rise luxury condominium penthouses.

But of course there's never enough time.  We're on Georgia Street and a crowd of students awaits a response.

"Yes, indeed, I am!" I replied. 

Our wise critic was walking steadily out of earshot by this point, but his review certainly provided valuable commentary - of the same sort found on the pre-Yelp ratings website Angie's List, where you can read and submit reviews of plumbers, gardeners, painters, and almost any other kind of person you can imagine hiring for home services.  This was a valuable opportunity to explore the illusions of traditional understandings of knowledge and expertise produced over the course of the past few centuries.  One influential philosopher warns of the "blind field" as we struggle to understand cities, because urbanism is a literal transformation of the experience of space and time, produced by the material and ideological distractions in the "accumulation of knowledge, technologies, things, people, wealth, money, and capital" (Lefebvre, 1970, p. 24).  Cities are real, physical, material places, but they are also portals that allow and require that we perceive space and time in complex, non-linear ways.  I spoke of the history of colonialism and dispossession upon which this city is built.  Everything I do, think, and say in this region takes place on unceded Indigenous territory, which is another way of saying that the land has been stolen.  Yes, I really am full of shit, from my very limited understanding of the full scope of Indigenous histories in this part of the world, to my increasingly frequent split-infintive grammatical lapses.  ("A little Strunk and White is a dangerous thing," observes the publisher of the definitive Elements of Style [Plotnik, 1982, p. 3]; for a more humorous and enjoyable commentary on the strange rules of written communication in the English language, see Truss, 2004). 

But self-awareness of ignorance is a very special kind of knowledge, and provides an invitation for learning and true insight.  For those of us new to Canada and new to Vancouver, for example, we are likely to think of the City of Vancouver as located in British Columbia, a province of a nation-state with a large territory and a comparatively small population called Canada.  That's certainly one way of thinking about it.  Vancouver is routinely ranked near the top of rankings of the world's "most liveable cities," and Canada has the world's second-largest land area - 9.8 million square kilometers, second only to Russia's 17 million - with a population slightly less than that of the State of California's 39 million people.  The images in our mind's eye might also include various symbols and slogans - snow, Polar bears, beavers, bilingual signs in English and French, hockey, Maple syrup or the Maple Leaf flag - as well as perceptions of how the place is very different from its neighbour to the south (including such curious subtleties as the extra u's in words like neighbour or colour). 

All of these features and images do express certain real facets of this part of the world.  But they're the beginning of the conversation, not the end.  Recent Canada Day social media memes have included a reincarnation of the Maple Leaf flag in the Canadian Native Flag designed by Kwakwaka'wakw artist Curtis Wilson, and in Vancouver's temperate climate, sometimes you get lucky enough to watch a sunset from the beach at English bay before walking home to your West End apartment to watch the Stanley Cup finals in Hockey Night in Canada's Punjabi edition (see Ian Hanomansing's CBC story about Harnarayan Singh, who sometimes goes by the handle "IceSingh," here).

And as soon as you begin thinking about space and time in broader, open-ended ways, things get very, very complex.  The City of Vancouver was formally incorporated in 1886, just a few human lifetimes ago.  The entity today called Canada was created through a 'Confederation' of separate colonial provinces that began in 1867; even here, the process was and remains uneven and non-linear.  Newfoundland didn't join Confederation until 1949.  On April 1, 1999, after decades of organizing and legal struggle, a new flag and coat of arms were unveiled in the formal establishment of Nunavut, the homeland for the indigenous Inuit people in Canada's far north; Nunavut is the world's largest land-claims settlement between a modern nation-state and Indigenous peoples.  In a book analyzing the cultural and political histories of relations between European colonialism and the diverse Indigenous societies of this continent, the philosopher John Raulston Saul (2008, p. 3) writes, "We are a métis civilization.  What we are today has been inspired as much by four centuries of life with the indigenous civilizations as by four centuries of immigration.  Perhaps more.  Today we are the outcome of that experience."

Saul's book is written for a particular audience - for upper-middle class and elite readers in the power centers of Ontario and Quebec who see themselves first and foremost as the descendants of the English and French.  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these and other immigrants from Europe gradually moved away from identities as separate cultures (Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish, German) and came be associated with a broader definition of 'whiteness' (see Roediger, 2018).  Saul, therefore, is using the word "métis" in a general sense of cultural mixture, as well as a provocation.  Saul's book is written to challenge the mindset of Canadian elites who remain obsessed with European and U.S. notions of power and prestige that all too often involve underlying assumptions of ethnic and racial purity.  But 'Métis' has more specific, formal, and complex meanings in the histories and current commitments of organizations like the Red River Métis - La Nouvelle Nation, the Métis Nation British Columbia, and the North Fraser Métis Association.  In Canada, the Métis peoples are descendants of early European fur traders and trappers, and Indigenous, First Nations peoples; early on, a pattern developed in which these 'mixed' peoples were marginalized both by Indigenous First Nations and colonial settlers increasingly influenced by the ideas of ethnoracial purity forged in the development of modern European nationalism.  Even today you'll find difference and disagreement if you look for it.  British Columbia - that phenomenon created in 1858 that we tend to think of as just a single provincial subdivision of Canada - is, in fact, comprised of hundreds of separate nations.  One BC Government website lists 198 First Nations, while the BC Assembly of First Nations itself identifies 204 First Nations, with 34 distinct languages and almost three times that many unique local dialects.  Not all First Nations agree on everything, and in some cases there are sensitive matters among BC First Nations and the Métis, most but not all of whom trace their ancestry to the Red River Settlement in present-day Manitoba, around what is today known as the City of Winnipeg.  Some First Nations peoples who are indigenous to the lands now known as British Columbia see the Métis as uninvited settlers, not that much different from European colonizers.  It is important to think carefully about such perspectives, while also noting that they reproduce some of the syndromes from previous centuries examined in Saul's (2008) history.  Another option is to embrace difference while searching for agreement, learning, conversation, and the mutual challenges and opportunities of an interconnected world that has only recently become majority-urban.  Not long ago, I spent time with several Métis elders in the Vancouver region, learning much from their wisdom.  There was an Acadian Métis man who joked that in old photographs, all his ancestors looked Filipino; go back a few lifetimes here, and the Acadians in Nova Scotia were dismissed by the British as "a distinct race, a people by themselves," amidst years of tense negotiations between Britain and the rebellious new nation of the United States - with arbitration by King William I of the Netherlands - over the border between New Brunswick and Maine (see Meinig, 1993, pp. 124-125).  That lineage also involves those who found Acadia more unfriendly with the border-drawing obsessions of nationalism, and departed for New Orleans, Louisana, in the late nineteenth century, where they came to be known as 'Cajuns.'  Or consider the present and the future:  on the medical frontiers of coping with the global Covid-19 pandemic is a bioscientist who recently earned a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, and who has now joined Oxford, working on the evolutionary genetic mutations of the coronavirus.  She's the grand-daughter of a Métis elder, who proudly told me that she is "Asian-Métis."

Back in September of 2012 I knew some of these things, but I still had a lot to learn.  Even today this complex urban region constantly teaches me new things and stretches the imagination; genuine immersion in city life is the true mind-altering psychedelic.  "Vancouver, like the province in which it is located, is no easy place to understand," wrote a prominent environmental philosopher introducing an influential book on the changing physical and human worlds of B.C.'s Lower Mainland.  Many "have despaired of grasping the essence of the contemporary city," Graeme Wynn (1992, p. xiii) explained; "'There is no real centre to Vancouver,' concluded one recent commentator ... it is a place of 'pockets, strips, [and] urban moments,' each of which is but a fragment of an intricate urban kaleidoscope.  Because most people are familiar with only a few pieces of this fabric, most views of the city elevate one or two facets of its character above others."  On the rest of our short itinerary around part of the urban core of Vancouver, I was able to remind myself of how little I know.  We'd be standing in front of one building or another, and I wouldn't be able to recall if it has been completed in 1910, 1911, or 1912.  Certain moments in the evolution of this city have involved wild orgies of construction, and various structures briefly held designations of 'the tallest building in the British Empire.'  As I fumbled remembering the specific years of construction on the Dominion Building, or the Sun Tower, I'd remind everyone, "Well, we have it on good authority that I'm full of shit!"

Back in 2012, our tours of the "intricate urban kaleidoscope" were comparatively short.  Walking and conversation around parts of the downtown core, Gastown, the Downtown Eastside, Chinatown, Hogan's Alley, and the Olympic Village would suddenly end after about four hours, and I'd think, "Oh, there's more stories to tell!"  How did I forget to tell the story about Tommy Chong meeting Cheech Marin in Vancouver?  Their comedy routine lampooning the drug busts of "Sgt. Stadanko" was based on a real police officer who worked undercover in Vancouver! (Mackie, 2017).  Cheech and Chong's bit about Stadanko encouraging kids to turn in their friends and family or anyone who might be a "drug pusher" should make us think about Steppenwolf's famous song, which someone has remixed with lots of local images in a "420 Vancouver Edit."  Tommy Chong's career also helped inspire the Vancouver comedian Charles Demers, who wrote a great book on the city published shortly before Vancouver hosted athletes and visitors from around the world in the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games (Demers, 2010).  Most of the images seem to be from an actual 420 Day event on English Bay in the West End, which would in turn require explaining what 420 has often meant in police officers' radio dispatch codes.  Vancouver has always been a major center of film production and other creative enterprises - a few years we watched as they closed down the Georgia Street Viaduct to film the opening scene of the bizarre film Deadpool; did you know that Ryan Reynolds is from Kitsilano?  Still, Vancouver's nickname - "Hollywood North" - means that when someone gets just a little bit of success, they head off to the even bigger center of celebrity image and creativity, Los Angeles.  Cheech and Chong headed for L.A. and became famous in comedy and films in the 1970s and 1980s, and the talent pipeline continues, as in the case of the Vancouver Film School graduate Leenda Dong - who did wild stuff in Vancouver and then partnered with the Fung Brothers in sendups like 'Asian Canadians vs. Asian Americans.'  Think of Leenda D's praise for Drake as the "Prince of Canada" the next time you step into October's Very Own Store on Robson Street.  Robson is Vancouver's version of the upscale retail streets like Chicago's "Magnificent Mile," or Hollywood's Rodeo Drive.  Comedy, like cinema, can be a serious business, and when Leenda D and the Fung Brothers point out that America has fought so many wars in Asia, it's worth remembering how Bruce Springsteen wrote about soldiers coming home from Vietnam only to wind up unemployed as factories shut down and jobs disappeared; Springsteen's song was widely misunderstood - it's a critique of war-making mindless patriotism and nationalism, not a celebration - but Cheech and Chong got the right idea when they did a parody for undocumented Mexican-Americans, in "Born in East L.A."  Not long after Springsteen performed at Rogers Arena in Vancouver surrounded by all the team logos for the local hockey team - "What the Fuck is a Canuck?" he asked the crowd - Sarfraz Manzoor's memoir, Greetings from Bury Park about growing up in Luton not far from London, was produced into the film Blinded by the Light ...

... oh, my, where did that stream of consciousness come from?  Spend a little bit of time in YouTube or any of dozens of other portals into what the computer scientist David Gelertner calls "Mirror Worlds" and you see the real, material experience of urban life coalescing with the virtualities and connectivities of digitization, computation, simulation, and image.  Have I told you about William Gibson and Neuromancer...?

... I could go on, and if you join us on the tour, we'll see how much energy we have.  You can join us late, or you can leave early, and the entire tour is entirely optional.  But I hope you can join us.  This is such a fascinating urban region, a true portal into entirely different experiences of space and time.

References

Demers, Charles (2009).  Vancouver Special.  Vancouver:  Arsenal Pulp Press. 

Hoare, Anthony G. (1988).  "Urban Renewal."  In R.J. Johnston, Derek Gregory, and David H. Smith, eds., The Dictionary of Human Geography, Second Edition.  Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 514-515.

Kalman, Harold, and Robin Ward (2012).  Exploring Vancouver:  The Architectural Guide.  Vancouver:  Douglas & McIntyre.

Lees, Loretta (2001).  "Towards a Critical Geography of Architecture:  The Case of an Ersatz Coliseum." Ecumene 8(1), 51-86.

Lefebvre, Henri (1970).  The Urban Revolution.  Translated by Robert Bononno, 2003 edition.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press.

Mackie, John (2017).  "Hippie Nemesis Abe Snidanko Dies at Age 79."  Vancouver Sun, August 9.

Meinig, D.W. (1993).  The Shaping of America:  A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

Pedersen, Wendy, and Jean Swanson (2010).  Community Vision for Change in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Vancouver:  Carnegie Community Action Project.

Plotnik, Arthur (1982).  The Elements of Editing.  New York:  Collier Books.

Roediger, David R. (2018).  Working Towards Whiteness:  How America's Immigrants Became White, Updated Edition.  New York:  Basic Books.

Saul, John Ralston (2008).  A Fair Country:  Telling Truths About Canada. Toronto:  Viking Canada.

Truss, Lynne (2004).  Eats, Shoots & Leaves:  The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.  New York:  Gotham Books.

Wynn, Graeme (1992).  "Introduction," in Graeme Wynn and Timothy Oke, eds., Vancouver and its Region.  Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press, i-xvii.


"At the police station my arrival seemed to spark considerable interest.  First, I was closeted with a young detective who had a whole series of questions, starting with asking me which group I belonged to, the Congress of Racial Equality or the Catholic Worker Movement.  When I told him that I didn't belong to either of those groups, he said, 'Then you must be a member of the Communist Party.  Am I right?'  'No, I actually voted Progressive Conservative in the last Canadian election because I wanted to support John Deifenbaker,' I responded with a smile.  'You're talking nonsense.  How can someone be one of those fucking progressives and be conservative at the same time?  You're a commie -- don't try to make a fool of me!' he said menacingly.'"  -- Michael Audain (2021, p. 99).

Cities are portals that allow, and require, that we perceive across space and time in unique ways.  If you take the 99 B-Line express bus to or from the Vancouver Point Grey campus of the University of British Columbia, you'll pass by a cluster of condo towers under construction.  Glance quickly and it seems like just another of the hundreds of towers sprouting across the vast regional landscape.  But look closer and you see fascinating, dynamic connections across space and time.  It's a partnership between the Musqueam Capital Corporation and a development company known as Polygon Homes, with construction financing provided by the federal government's Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).  UBC is located on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam Nation, and in recent years decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada have begun to acknowledge, consolidate, and strengthen land rights made explicit by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, issued in London by King George III after the surrender of French possessions to England after the Seven Years' War.  According to the founding documents of the nation-state presently known as Canada, nearly all of the province of British Columbia is legally classified as Indigenous lands.  Thus the recent Supreme Court decisions have begun to reshape the landscape of urban development in the region in significant ways.  For example, the Musqueam formed a partnership with the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, and now the consortium -- MST -- is now the single largest private landowner in what is called the City of Vancouver (see the lecture by Khelsilem, 2021).  Some of the most interesting trends in contemporary urban planning, and public debates over affordable housing, now involve partnerships between Canadian and transnational development companies established in the twentieth century, and the corporate divisions of the newly-strengthened Indigenous nations.  As noted earlier, the Lelem Village Project is a partnership between the Musqueam Nation and Polygon; Polygon was established in 1980 by Michael Audain.  The quote above is from the chapter of Audain's memoir recounting his experiences traveling to Mississippi as a Freedom Rider during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement; Audain was arrested and imprisoned in Jackson, MS, in June, 1961, as part of protests of the stubborn refusal of Southern States to honor the 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Morgan v. Virginia) striking down racial segregation of interstate travel facilities as a violation of the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Michael Audain (2021).  One Man in His Time:  A Memoir.  Vancouver:  Douglas & McIntyre.

Kenneth Chan (2021).  "$88 Million in Federal Financing for First Nations-Built Affordable Housing Near UBC."  Daily Hive, August 5.

Khelsilem (2021).  "Provocations on the Future of Downtowns."  Lecture, March 15.  Toronto:  Canadian Urban Institute.




EKW in midst of blah blah BLAHthering endlessly on West Georgia Street, Vancouver City Walk
Photograph by Shirley Zhong
Factorial Ecology of the Metropolitan Vancouver Region

...just an excerpt of analysis in progress.  Ninety-something variables so far -- selected from the seven thousand provided by Statistics Canada -- measured across nearly four thousand dissemination areas.