Vancouverism and its Discontents
Trevor Boddy on two readings of this town
Vancouver Walking
By Meredith Quartermain
NeWest Press, 2005
96 pages, $14.95
Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination
By Lance Berelowitz
Douglas & McIntyre, 2005
256 pages, $40
Over the past 18 months, I have heard American architects and city planners use a new word when they promote the notion of a high-residential density, high-public amenity central city. They call it “Vancouverism.” Our city has also become a verb, and the coinage of our recent urbanism is now in wide international circulation, from local developers “Vancouverizing” Dallas and San Diego to the bizarre simulation of our town in Dubai’s “Very False Creek.”
Canada’s largest city never generated “Torontism.” Not during the media-stroking of the mayor Crombie-era “City that works,” not in the 1990s, when the colonial notion of the “World Class” caught out Torontonians misinterpreting Peter Ustinov’s put-down—“New York run by the Swiss”—as a compliment. There will never be “Torontism” because that city is not a one-liner, but a place that does many things, some of them very well.
Vancouver does one thing well: We build condos higher and denser than any other spot on the continent, and our global reputation is currently being set by these acts. Because of our downtown peninsula’s love affair with tall, thin towers on townhouse bases, Vancouverism is replacing Manhattanism as the maximum power setting of contemporary city building. By some analyses, the average number of people living per hectare in our central core is now higher than that of the famous island in the Hudson.
Vancouverism is evolving a second and more interesting sense: that of the latent character, the subjective quirks of urban identity hidden behind these shiny façades. Call it the theory, or the legacy, or the idea of Vancouver, but increasingly our writers are producing books that capture this precious moment of self-knowledge, as this good-looking adolescent of a city enters a more complicated young adulthood.
Meredith Quartermain’s new collection of poetry, Vancouver Walking, deals with this latter sense of Vancouverism, her word-images evoking our hidden histories and the textures of our streets, especially on the East Side. Lance Berelowitz’s Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination deals with the bricks and mortar and geographies of this town, a rah-rah appreciation of our downtown and our more officially sanctioned westerly zones. Read together, these two books are so complementary in filling out the gaps in their individual conceptions that I wish publishers Douglas & McIntyre and NeWest Press would bundle them as a package, forming the essential-reading publication this city-on-the-move dearly needs.
Lance Berelowitz is a consultant to the urban development industry who came to Vancouver from his native South Africa in 1985, after a decade studying architecture and working in Europe. While he has published the occasional witty public essay along the way, most of Berelowitz’ prior writing has been promotional, whether for individual developers, planning-department booklets documenting their achievements, or in his excellent service as editor-in-chief of our successful bid book for the 2010 Olympics. The first half of Dream City, in particular has a “Gee whiz, aren’t we bloody marvelous” tone, no doubt born of these prior commissions. “Vancouver is the poster child of urbanism in North America” is his opening sentence, and too much of the book varnishes over that poster with multiple coats of gloss.
The range covered by Dream City is huge—too huge—covering geography, climate, topography, patterns of land development, zoning, architectural history, urban design, development strategies and much more, all conveyed in a breezy prose style. Berelowitz’s most original insights are nearly always hidden in sotto voce asides. It reads in some places like an urban geography primer written before the culturalist push of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, and in others like the descriptive writing of 18th-century naval officers—tri-cornered gents like our own Captain George Vancouver, who conquered the world by rendering what he saw into words and maps. Berelowitz re-describes this city brilliantly, but he is averse to interpreting it, and at least one third of the chapters are less-than-essays with only subjects, not themes.
The best books on cities take a position, risk an interpretation, open up an axis of evaluation, whether their view is the radical reading of LA in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, the Tory take of Eric Arthur’s Toronto: No Mean City, the lyrical appreciation of London in Peter Ackroyd’s recent volumes, or the architectural analysis of Berelowitz’ declared model for his book, Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. One of the more tendentious passages in the Vancouver book is an argument that we are a version of LA.
Despite its problems of editorial focus and structure, Dream City is an essential book from whose venturesome spirit other essential books will be written. The extensive photographs by Derek Lepper and maps by Eric Leinberger are workmanlike and worthy, and George Vaitkunas’ design blends words and illustrations with his characteristic low-key flourish. Berelowitz finds his voice and point of view in the last six of his 15 chapters, and they should be read first. He proves himself a perceptive critic of Vancouver’s buildings and public spaces here, seeking the reasons for our built successes and failures, both.
Except for some historical background and profiles of some smart new social housing projects, Berelowitz glosses over the Downtown Eastside and its urban issues, while Meredith Quartermain’s new collection of urban poems psychically never leaves it. The Toronto-born poet passed through the counter-cultural matrix of the Kootenays before arriving here, and has published six previous chapbooks and co-founded Nomados Press.
Like Berelowitz, Quartermain is an obsessive observer and re-describer of Vancouver. Her poems are born of walks around the city, following a variety of tracks from her Commercial Drive-area home through the Downtown Eastside to do historical research at Library Square, then back again, as in this portion of the opening poem, “Thanksgiving”:
“What is the meaning of this
aggregation of filth” —
barns of the mill, hodgepodge of lumber sheds,
slag-heaped bark, steam donkeys’ rusted carcasses
scrapped blades and rubber belting—sawdust spit clogging the sea—
the mill-workers’ dogs, chickens, shithouses, shacks—
Gassy Jack’s saloon and hookers,
Civilization’s broken axes, saws, crockery,
Junked bottles, tins, boots, shoes.
One of Quartermain’s urban meanders takes her through the downtown core to the western reaches of Kitsilano, but it is as if the city Berelowitz praises never existed. She ignores the Lululemon-clad denizens of the West Side, dwelling instead on the British colonial legacy of the street names there, such as Trafalgar and Blenheim. As concise in her language as Berelowitz is prolix, Quartermain follows in the footsteps of Lisa Robertson’s brilliant poetic perambulations of Vancouver urban landscapes. Quartermain’s empathy and visuality usually win out over her nostalgia. She reminds us of a city made in time, filled with citizens as worthy of scrutiny as our currently overexposed planners and developers, as in the opening of “Night Walk”:
west on Keefer Street
past the dark park, the SRO house
heavy-metal whines from a window
to a husky on the porch
rows of bunkhouse doors
single-room occupants
some sunk below the street
The downtown condo gold rush had its flip side in the alley-banked rushes of crackheads. But the Downtown Eastside as we have recently known it—and Quartermain writes it—is ending, largely because it was an artificial political compromise between the left, who saw advantage in its concentration of poverty, and the right, who did not want social housing and the other blunt instruments of the welfare state in their leafy neighbourhoods. Quicker than you can say “Bob Rennie’s your uncle,” the poor, the addicted, and the elderly without RRSPs have started leaving this contested zone, headed more for Langley, Surrey and Nanaimo than any other part of Vancouver.
There are early signs of transformation—not just Woodward’s remade as fine-arts college and mixed-income housing, but the afore-named hyper-successful real-estate agent’s new private gallery and corporate headquarters on Pender Street, plus a Robert Kleyn-designed studio for prominent photo-based artist Stan Douglas. I think all of these are positive developments in all senses of the word, as the Downtown Eastside is too important to all Vancouverites for it to remain a theme park for the addicted.
But there is a more serious addiction in this town, one that is talked about even less than crack or crank or smack. Gallons of it are consumed daily by our city planners, developers, designers and media managers, often after a session of hot yoga, or following a light meal of pickled lotus leaves, or even just sitting around swank coffee tables strewn with international accounts of our urban success.
They are drinking their own bathwater. What bugs me is that they are calling it champagne.
Copyright © Trevor Boddy, 2005