The second is that cities have to be made solid. In a liquid era when people, goods, and capital are sloshing all over the globe we have to turn cities into comprehensible places that everyday people can actively inhabit. Vancouver has a particularly liquid quality and not just because I’m being metaphorically cute, but because so many people and so much capital wants to flow through the city. I’m fully in favor of migration and mobility but I’m searching for the kinds of attachments that turn “urban areas” into cities and “urban space” into common places.
I’m not interested in turning cities into villages or collections of villages—I think that’s exactly the wrong way to imagine a city—but cities need to be full of solid, distinct, and comprehensible places. You can have the magic and possibilities of a city while building it around local vitality, self-governance, and neighborhoods. Those things are not antagonistic.
The third core contention this book is that city-building leadership cannot fall to experts, bureaucrats, or planners. People have to make cities by accretion: bit-by-bit, rejecting master plans, and letting the place unfold. Whether it’s our safety, governance, or urban planning, it’s everyday people who can make the best decisions. But for this to be possible, cities need engaged citizens: people who are willing and able to participate in common life—and governance structures that actively encourage them.
In lots of ways what I am calling for has to be an unambiguous leap: a straight-up call for a city organized for a very different kind of social milieu, rooted in an alternative vision of ethics and economic life. It is a vision that will require a certain amount of work, creativity, and antagonism, one that just won’t accept neo-liberalism or global capitalism as de facto arbiters of who gets access to the good life. But it’s up to us to contest and offer alternatives to the market as the allocator of land, housing, and resources in our society. I think there are clear routes to a better future, lots of them existing, some latent, and parts we are just going to have to make up.
When urbanists all over the world talk about what a good city should look like an increasing number of them want to talk about Vancouver. This place routinely tops “most liveable city” lists and is widely admired all over the globe but, as my friend Marcus once said after reading the Economist’s “Liveable Cities” list, “Vancouver? Geneva? Vienna? Why are world’s ‘most liveable’ cities the world’s most boring cities? It’s like a list of the dullest cities in the world.” And he’s right. Those lists are inevitably put together by businesses like Mercer or MasterCard, whose ideological agendas, aesthetic sensibilities and cultural predilections are decidedly suspect.
I live here for lots of good reasons, and there are many things about Vancouver, especially East Vancouver, that I really admire but there is a whole lot to critique too. This is no urban utopia and being smug about our successes doesn’t help. But I do think that Vancouver has a chance—because of its locale, its wealth, its climate, and its youth—to transform itself into the kind of city that supports, not plunders, the social and natural worlds.
There is surprisingly little written about Vancouver beyond guidebooks and some very good historical writing, which is part of my motivation here. I’m hoping to contribute to the literature about a city that is very dear to my heart, and one that is increasingly important to global conversations about what a good city could and should look like. Even more than that, I am writing about Vancouver because we have to think imaginatively about how to live together in cities. Mostly though, I want to talk about Vancouver because it’s my home.
East Vancouver flavors all of these stories for sure. I don’t have an East Van cross1 tattooed on me, but I might as well have one, and I might still get it done. I am all bound up with my neighborhood, and I am occasionally ambivalent or straight up antagonistic (and sometimes kind of embarrassingly xenophobic, actually) about other parts of the city. But that’s not all of it and at least partially affectation. There is plenty about Vancouver that genuinely pisses me off, but I love it here.
So, that’s this book: considering and evaluating contemporary urbanism using Vancouver as a kind of Petri dish, as a place full of possibility, to think radically and realistically about what a viable and libratory city might look like. Following are nine separate chapters, each written from another part of the world that considers a particular aspect of cities and Vancouver specifically. The chapters bleed into one another significantly, but each stands on its own and it should work to read individual essays out of order. At the same time, there is a flow, so the book (with any luck) is a coherent argument for a new kind of urbanism and better city.
I have traveled quite a bit over the past couple of decades and I have noticed that I always tend to think more clearly about cities in general and Vancouver specifically when I’m somewhere else. I’d guess that it is a fairly common experience. You know the feeling: walking around another city and wondering how it has developed, admiring a street, comparing neighborhoods, trying to make sense of certain designs, and thinking about back home.
These essays are drawn together by East Van, but also by my politics and by my visceral understanding of what a good city feels like. I spent one of the great years of my life, just before I moved here, in New York City living on the Lower Eastside, and when I think of what a city should look like my mind often turns to NYC first. But I also think of Istanbul, Montreal, Miami, and parts of many more. Generally speaking, I am in favor of unpredictability, serendipity, messiness, and walkable, dense cities with their histories visible. I am in favor of vernacular and organic planning, an absolute minimum of car traffic, small neighborhoods, street life, street vendors, street music, and street food. I want a self-governed city that can rise beyond disciplinary institutions and governmentality—a city run by citizens, not experts.
It’s more than that, though, and let’s not be too polite about it: the vast bulk of contemporary cities are built primarily by and for greed. When I think of a great city, it definitely doesn’t include huge numbers of very poor, disenfranchised and/or homeless folks. But what city can you think of that doesn’t include a grotesquerie of poverty? Havana maybe? I’ve never been there, and I’ve never been in a city that doesn’t have way, way too many really poor folks.
When I am dreaming of an egalitarian city, I’m not imagining a place where everyone has exactly the same amount of money or privilege. But I’m definitely dreaming of a city that actively undermines inequity, one that doesn’t reify massive capital accumulation, doesn’t allow some people to get fantastically rich on the backs of others. We have to believe in the possibility of a city where the wealthiest only earn and control a small amount more than what the poorest citizens do—not scores and hundreds of times like they do now. The gap between rich and poor has to be kept as absolutely minimal as possible or the fabric of citizenship that binds a city together becomes a facade that can only be maintained with police control.
Right now the wealth gap in Canada generally2 and Vancouver specifically is enormous. In this city “the bottom 10 percent had an average income of $8,700 and the top 10 percent had $205,200 on average. The lowest 10 percent therefore had one dollar to every $23.50 the highest ten percent had”3 and, in 2006, 19 percent of the city was living in poverty.4 The most obvious place to witness this is on Hastings Street, maybe at the corner of Cambie. Look east and you can see the poorest urban area in Canada, the Downtown Eastside: people all over the streets, shooting up openly, huge lines in front of soup kitchens, lots of people running very low on hope. Turn 180 degrees and look west up Hastings and you see gleaming towers, parking lots full of expensive cars, million-dollar, one-bedroom apartments, streets full of hedge-funders, and lots of people running very low on ethics.
This kind of incredible disparity is one of the features of what Manual Castells, Saskia Sassen, and others have called the new “Dual City,” an urban formation precipitated by the new, globalized information economies. Cities have always had different classes living in relative proximity, but in neo-liberal informational