Table of Contents
HOMEBOY - East Vancouver, British Columbia
KEEPING IT REAL - Thessaloniki, Greece
THE END OF LAWNS AS WE KNOW THEM - Istanbul, Turkey
NO RECIPE FOR URBAN FUNK - Montreal, Quebec
WHERE THE RAPIDS ARE - Fort Good Hope, Sahtu, Northwest Territories
SNAKE EYES - Las Vegas, Nevada
SUSTAINING PRIVILEGE - Portland, Oregon
BAIT AND SWITCH - New York City, New York
URBAVORE - Diyarbakir, Kurdistan
AQUACULTURE - Kaunakakai, Moloka’i, Hawai’i
OUTRO - Another City Really Is Possible
Acknowledgements
I owe much gratitude to the good folks at AK Press, especially Kate Khatib, who have made this book happen and been so generous in their support. Chuck Morse was a terrific editor, again, and his friendship, articulate incisiveness, and brains were vital. Their enthusiasm for this project has been so appreciated.
Parts of this book have appeared in other publications in article form. Much thanks to re:place, the Vancouver Review (twice), the Review of Education Pedagogy and Curriculum Studies, the Defenestrator , and Rain for running pieces, editing them well, and helping me think through my ideas.
There are many people in each of the places that I write from—pals, collaborators, schemers—who were kind and hospitable to me this time round, hosting me while I was writing these chapters: Stavros, Fani, Kristos, Kostas, Elizabeth, Eylem, Emre, Tayfun, other Eylem, Metin, Yasin, Tuna, Barbara, Gabe, Ivan, Janet, Muriel, Frank, Lawrence, Ron, Dolly, Michel, Pastor Lance, all the Fort Good Hope kids who showed us what was what, Mark D., Terrance, Scott, Adelphi, Zoobomb, Ayten, Gaye, Ceren, Mariana, everybody at Kamer, Dirk, Shaveen, Richard, Brooke, Dan-no, Katrin, Amanda, John … and many, many more. Really, there are so many generous folks who have housed and cooked for me, shared drinks and meals, introduced me to friends, answered my questions and showed me around. Very literally this book would not have been possible with out you guys—I hope you hear some of yourselves in here.
Over the past three years I have interviewed something like seventy or eighty people here in Vancouver, trying to figure out what I wanted to say. It involved a lot of tea, coffee, beer, and bourbon, and a lot of people being real patient with my questions. There are a couple dozen folks whom I ended up quoting at length in here and I am so grateful to all of them—but also to the many, many folks who took time to talk to me but didn’t end up in the book. I remain totally in all their debt and I look forward to hearing what you all think of this.
And, despite all those interviews, I still feel slightly embarrassed about all the people I really should have talked to but just didn’t. If you’re not in here but should be, please accept my humble apologies. There are a lot of you.
Huge thanks are due to Diana Hart for stepping up and taking these great photos (with support from Sarah Lum). Others who contributed pictures: Selena Couture, Barbara Trottier, Billy Collins, Mark Douglas, and Amanda Marchand.
Of course, much love to my Island family: Adele, Riley, Gan, Sean, Kelly, Kyra, Sam, David, Thirell, Riley and Fraser, Michele, Dave, Bronwyn, and Sean. Finally, and more than anything, this book is something like a love letter to East Van and my family here: Selena, Sadie and Daisy, Diana, Sarah and Mica, Ashley, Keith, OZAM, Stu, Pennie and Hamish, Goo, Mark and Levi, the gone but hardly forgotten Dan, Sarah and Layla, the whole Thistle and CFVD crews, our good neighbors, and all the lovely friends who make this our home.
Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
—Aldo Leopold
EAST VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA PHOTO BY DIANA HART
HOMEBOY
East Vancouver, British Columbia
It’s funny how people tend to describe Canada: fish, timber, prairies, empty beaches, crashing waves, lonely farmers, isolated small towns. That picture is a romantically attractive one but distorting. The reality is that Canada is an urban country. More than eighty percent of Canada’s population lives in urban centers, half the country lives in Vancouver, Montreal, or Southern Ontario, and virtually all the population is crowded tightly along the border.
That’s a good thing. With a world population closing in on seven billion and not expected to stabilize until nine or ten billion, people are increasingly concentrating in cities all over the world. And thank goodness for that.
The only chance the world has for an ecological future is for the vast bulk of us to live in cities. If we want to preserve what’s still left of the natural world, we need to stop using so much of it. We need to start sharing the resources and land bases we do have, to stop spreading out so much, and focus our transportation and energy resources carefully. It may sound counter-intuitive, but there can be no doubt that an ecological future has to be organized around cities—which kind of ironically is also our only route to protecting our non-urban areas. If we love and want to protect our small towns, rural, and farming