Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

is in immigrant neighborhoods like Commercial Drive, Chinatown, or Little India.

      It’s a tendency that Living First is exacerbating right now. One of the key platforms of the strategy is to extract commitments from developers to include public spaces when they build. It’s the least they can ask for in return for a virtual guarantee of windfall condo profits. Throughout downtown there are little parks, playgrounds, seating areas, mini-squares and proto-promenades that have been built as a kind of graft to the city. Many of them are nice enough, but like so much of the rest of Vancouver’s public realm, they taste pre-packaged, and are about as healthy as twenty-six-cent Ramen packs. And of course they tend to be under-used, or superficially used, because they didn’t emerge from any kind of community need or local desire—they are just one more hoop for developers to jump through in return for those sweet views.

      As Villagomez pointed out, one of the reasons much of downtown’s new public spaces are mostly empty is that they are often hidden from whatever sun might be out, left in perpetual shade throughout the year. “More sensitive planning may have created a more varied built form that ensured public spaces receive the most sunlight (a key attribute of successful public spaces) throughout the day as possible. It seems the city has attempted to push all public spaces to the outer edges—especially the seawall—and away from all the real action.”

      It is difficult to resist reading Living First in straight-up Marxist terms: as an amelioratory governmental response to a crisis of capital.³⁵ Put less pompously, Vancouver has given the development business a near-free reign here as a way of covering up for the lack of other vitality and activity. The new planning and regulatory efforts have allowed new concentrations of capital and profit generation to emerge while designing in enough social provisions that citizens will accept (and possibly even welcome) the massive profits being reaped by elite developers. That’s certainly part of the picture, but there’s more color and nuance to be added in, more than simple capital-labor contestation. There is a shared cultural response to the challenge and value of public space, and in some ways Living First has morphed into another subtle variant on enclosure, delicately displacing the power of public space into private hands.

      All too often, and explicitly in Living First dogma, the creation of new public spaces is being driven by developers working in “partnership” with the planning department, which might explain why so much of the space in this city feels hollow and over-planned. The instrumentalization of public space is antagonistic to non-managed, non-official uses of urban territory: planners want the spaces they design to be used in the ways they have imagined. But a democratic culture relies on non-commodified, genuinely common places. As Lance Berelowitz writes:

      A society that allows its true public spaces to be turned into benign venues of consumption and leisure … is in danger of losing the will and the ability to appropriate those spaces as theatres for vital, legitimate political expression. And the role of public space in the metropolitan city’s history is essential to the democratic impulse…. Every society and every city needs its public spaces for the exercise of democracy.³⁶

      This speaks to the fundamental difference between public spaces and common places, and this is one of the core themes of this book: how can a city, this city, become a city of common places. Public space, and lots of it, is crucial but we have to realize that we need more than that. People move through public space—but common space is where they stop, what they learn to inhabit, and make their own.

      The re-energizing of downtown with residents, pedestrians, and bikes and the commitment to public space is critical, but there’s just no way to master-plan a great city nor can you make it happen just by throwing money at it. But you can prevent one from emerging by insisting on instrumentalizing public spaces and marionetting their uses.

      Great cities are built bit by enigmatic bit by a huge number of actors, not by planners or developers, whatever they might want to believe. Great cities have to be inherently democratic projects built in ways that can never be planned or predicted, as products of a vibrant everyday life. I frankly really like and respect Beasley, and think Living First has done plenty of good. As much success as Larry and his colleagues have had, and it is real success, there is a threshold of control that is very easy to cross and in many cases I think this city has leapt it. The contemporary rendition of urban growth is being played out a little differently here in Vancouver, but massive capital accumulation is hardly fettered, it’s just being asked to kick a little into the kitty.