Dream City

Vancouver and the Global Imagination

Lance Berelowitz

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781553651031
• eBook ISBN:
  9781926685632
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Vancouver, located at the edge of a continent and the edge of national consciousness, has become the model for post-industrial urbanism. Does it deserve the attention? This provocative new book explores the links between the city’s seductive natural setting, turbulent political history, planning and design culture, and the local and global forces that are reshaping Vancouver’s urban environment at a ferocious pace. Filled with historical and contemporary photographs and maps, Dream City offers compelling insight into how buildings, public spaces, extraordinary landscapes, and civic values have merged to form a uniquely 21st-century city.

1
The Elemental City

THERE IS SOMETHING very elemental about Vancouver, a defining characteristic of place that only a few cities have. Like Sydney, Australia, for example. In his 2001 love letter to his home town,⁴ Australian author Peter Carey calls it the city’s DNA. He was referring to Sydney’s underlying sandstone, and how so much about the place flows from that geological fact. “Sandstone shows everywhere, in the buildings of old Sydney and in the retaining walls of all those steep harbour streets.” Carey goes on to explain that because of the sandstone’s sedimentary porousness, rainwater drains so rapidly that it leaches the thin topsoil of nutrients. This, in turn, determines the unique local flora, which has adapted to the scarcity of nutrients by protecting its leaves with deadly toxins, resulting in “the distinctive smell of the Australian bush, the high oil content in the plant life, and the inability of the soil to decompose such fallen leaves.” All of this makes for optimum fire conditions, which, when one happens, “perfumes the very air of Sydney with …” well, you get the drift. Carey is a better storyteller than I am.

What might Vancouver’s elemental DNA be?

In Vancouver’s case it is not the underlying geology from which it derives its elemental essence but rather this formula:

latitude + coastal longitude + mountains = precipitation

To put it another way:

temperature + prevailing ocean winds + vertical barrier = Pacific Northwest rain forest

Almost everything about Vancouver springs from this formulation of geographical facts: the quality of the air, the taste of the water, the light, the smells, the colours of the landscape, the food it grows and eats, the very climate and resulting lifestyle. This is Vancouver’s genius loci. And the city’s urban form has responded to these elements.

The city’s relatively mild, temperate climate is directly related to its latitude (much farther north and it would be wetter and cooler, like Alaska; much farther south and it would be Mediterranean, like Los Angeles), its longitudinal location beside the moderating influence of the ocean (much farther inland and its climate would be more extreme) and the presence of the Coast Mountain barrier (without which it would be much drier).

The air is soft and moist, carrying the warmth of the ocean rather than the Arctic airstream that skims past farther north, only occasionally sideswiping Vancouver with the tips of its frigid tentacles.

The drinking water, so soft and only lightly chlorinated in comparison with that in many Canadian cities, results from it coming directly from watersheds high in the mountains, which catch the rain and allow it to naturally settle and filter.

The light is soft, filtered, gauzy, misty, reflective, moisture-layered, often grey, sometimes blue but seldom the blinding sharp light of the Prairies or the Midwest or the Mediterranean. This is the light of a temperate maritime setting, a diaphanous Turner watercolour.

The natural smells are those of the ocean, of pungent ozone, rain-washed flora, slowly rotting vegetation, fungi and rich deltoid soils.

The urban landscape is preternaturally green, lush, betokening the febrile growing conditions of the rain forest.

There is one other key contributing element to the physical essence of Vancouver, and that is its location on a combination of glacial till, outwash deposits and fertile soils. After the last major ice age (locally referred to as the Fraser Glaciation), the whole area was covered by silty sand and gravel deposits from the several glaciers and rivers flowing out at the base of the Coast Mountains. Much of Vancouver today is built on the rich alluvial deposits from these and other long-shifted watercourses.

This confluence of factors provided the optimum environment to nurture an abundance of food—from the salmon in the Fraser River to the fields of wild berries—which was part of what first attracted human settlement to this place long before the city was founded. Coast Salish First Nation groups had seasonal and permanent settlements all around the area for several centuries before the arrival of European settlers and colonists.

City at the Edge

The Fraser River delta has played an even more elemental role in Vancouver’s emergence.

Here, at 49°17’ north, the last latitudinal minute, as it were, before the continent plunges into the sea, is Vancouver, the most northerly major city in the West Coast littoral. Just to the north and within sight of the city, the continent terminates in a wild farrago of steep slopes, jagged peninsulas and deep fjords, making large-scale settlement and access by land virtually impossible. But the gentle hump of Vancouver’s Burrard Peninisula and its even smoother, smaller doppelgänger that is now the downtown peninsula were created by the inexorable advance of a glacier during the last major ice age just fifteen thousand years ago.

Vancouver’s topography. Eric Leinberger

As the ice receded, it left behind smoothed-out land at the base of the Coast Mountains. The gathering force of the Fraser Rivers waters, depositing its silt and debris, did the rest. Without the Fraser delta, there would be no city here. Vancouver occupies the last available flat land at the edge of the continent: Edge City.

Another sort of edge quality has characterized Vancouver from its beginnings. Significantly, apart from the initial maritime explorers who alerted Europe to these shores, Vancouver was not colonized from the sea but from the land, unlike superficially similar places such as Cape Town or Sydney. It is the terminus, not the beginning, of the modern Canadian story. Its genesis as a city was as the western terminus of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway. It is the last continental stop on a route beginning, metaphorically, in the British Isles, and, geographically, in southern Patagonia, where the Pan-American Highway begins a route that finally runs out of coastal access at Vancouver. Vancouver has always been the city at the end of the line: Terminal City.

Vancouver also has been the locus of a different kind of settlement by an ever-widening diversity of peoples and cultures, particularly Asians, because of its location on the Pacific Rim. It is a city of immigrants. As such, it is becoming the social Petri dish of Canada, leading to a new cultural edginess, one that is much less Eurocentric. Evidence of this cultural shift is easy to find in the city’s pan-Asian fusion cooking scene and Asian festivals, in its leading position as a centre for teaching English as a second language and in its high-profile ethnic minority political activism.⁵

Tile convergence of these two edge conditions, the physical and the cultural, provides the first clues to explain Vancouver’s emergent urban form.

Aberdeen Centre mall in Richmond: multiculturalism in the suburbs. George Vaitkunas photo

2
In the Garden of Eden

VANCOUVER’S NATURAL ENVIRONMENT is a critical factor in shaping the city. Without an acknowledgment of this multifaceted presence, Vancouver cannot be understood or adequately described. Indeed, an entire mythology has been constructed around Vancouver’s relationship with “Nature,” in parallel with the construction of the city itself.

Vancouver’s geographic circumstances have created the abundance of rainfall that marks this city perhaps more than anything else. The Pacific Northwest temperate rain forest with its fertile soils has created a landscape of fecund growth. This lushness, combined with Vancouver’s dramatic setting between mountains and sea, and its convoluted land forms interspersed with water bodies, results in something of an earthly paradise.

That claim has of course already been made for Vancouver’s southern alter ego, Los Angeles. But if Reyner Banhams dictum for Los Angeles— “to produce instant Paradise you have to add water—and keep on adding to it”⁶ —is applied to Vancouver, then Vancouver is already there. Whereas water was all that early Los Angeles needed (and still needs) to grow, Vancouver’s missing ingredient is not water but sun.

To turn the formula around, if the Los Angeles equation for unfettered devel0pment is:

desert + sun + (water) = growth

then Vancouver’s is:

rain + land + (sun) = growth

In Vancouver, you need only add sunshine to bring out its best.

Rain

Vancouver seduces: it leads you along, sullenly taunting you with its seemingly endless grey, introverted days of rain and dankness. Then, just as you feel that you can’t stand it anymore and are about to forsake it for another, the clouds lift, the sun breaks through, smiling beatifically on the land, that seductive mountain panorama reveals itself once more, and your heart is captured all over again …

That’s the way it goes in Vancouver. Ask anyone. The first hint of sunshine brings out the crowds. City residents emerge and gather in suddenly burgeoning numbers along the urban seawall and beachfront walkways, passing each other in happy conversations, using every known mode of self-propelled transportation: on foot, bicycle, in-line skates, skate board, scooter, wheelchair. There is a sudden sense of reinvigoration. The city comes alive.

Vancouverites have many words for rain, such as mist, drizzle, shower, downpour. Rain is the one constant throughout the year. Its presence and quantity are frequently referred to in casual conversations. Everyone knows exactly how many days it has been raining, how much has fallen and when a new record has been set. Even its occasional absence may be remarked upon, as in, “It’s been so long since it rained, eh?” This might be a reference to a two-week interregnum. Longer absences of precipitation are recognized with superficial pleasure and relief, but underlying these is a palpable collective anxiety: there will be a price to pay for all this lack of rain. And there usually is: in dropping water-reservoir levels, increased smog and forest fires. People’s choices about where to live are dictated as much by the rain as by price: everyone knows that it rains way more on the North Shore than in Kitsilano, where in turn it rains rather more than in Tsawwassen. This sliding scale of rainfall levels is a kind of shorthand for a local social geography.

Land

The land of the city is a conjugation of soil, forest and topography. In the spirit of formulas for growth, it might be described as:

land = (soil + forest + topography)

Soil

Vancouver’s soil was deposited by the last ice age, when glacial till was pushed out of the mountains to form the Burrard Peninsula. Over the millennia, the Fraser River spread yet more alluvial soil across the lowlands, creating the sprawling Fraser Valley. The result is soil of unsurpassed fertility.

The dark soil supported a lush evergreen rain forest where the city itself is today. Farther out in the Fraser Valley, the alluvial soil, plentiful water and just enough sunshine support a thriving agricultural industry. Just a thirty-? minute drive past the City limits, numerous roadside farm stalls offer a rolling cornucopia of freshly harvested riches from early spring through late autumn: blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, asparagus, artichokes, lettuce, zucchini, eggplants, beans, peppers, corn, carrots, cranberries, onions, potatoes, pumpkins and more. The Fraser Valley is the city’s food basket. Which makes it all the more dispiriting to have to acknowledge, as local academic Bill Rees has pointed out, that Vancouver consumes far more than it produces on its ecological footprint.⁷

Another sign of fecundity is the mysterious eruption of innumerable wild mushrooms all around the city in the autumn. In sidewalks, on boulevards, in play fields, parks and backyards, numerous species of fungi, ranging from the delicious to the deadly, burst out of the moist ground. Vancouverites have long known about the presence of so-called “magic” mushrooms among others and partaken of their hallucinatory pleasures, contributing to Vancouver’s Alice in Wonderland reputation. More recent immigrants (who often have long experience in these things) now ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Elemental City
• 2 In the Garden of Eden
• 3 In Nature's Way
• 4 The Physica Armature
• 5 Brushes with Destiny Vancouver's Experience with Master-planning
• 6 The Transportation Palimpsest
• 7 The Road Not Taken
• 8 For Sale The (Abridged) Story of Vancouver's Development Community
• 9 A Sense of Place Characteristics of Vancouver's Public Realm
• 10 Urbanists at Large in the Garden City: The Search for an Urban Tradition
• 11 Edge City
• 12 The Domestic Tradition The Search for an Indigenous Architecture
• 13 A Brief History of Zoning
• 14 Hollywood North
• 15 Public Life or Spectacle? The Culture of Public Space
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index