Cultural critic Mark Kingwell writes about Toronto in this quote excerpted from a longer piece in Walrus Magazine, but as one who finds it difficult to answer the oft-asked question “What’s Vancouver like?”, it could easily apply to this place I call not-quite-home:
Torontonians talk about the value of otherness, celebrating cultural diversity in word, but they do not walk that walk. The smug inwardness of our de facto stealth neighbourhoods, the vertical gated communities of condo developments, the lifetime preoccupation with the averted gaze — all this shows city not confident enough to engage with itself. The gravity of downtown is reduced, as so often, to the cash nexus of shopping, democracy soured into a form of narcissistic pathology and sense of entitlement for a few, invisibility for the many. Race and class, poverty and hatred cannot find a point of intervention when the discursive space of the city is limited to surfaces.
What makes a city just? How does one create a just city? In the frenzied build-up to the 2010 Olympic Games, I’m a little uneasy at the increasingly gated nature of Downtown Vancouver, even as we prepare to throw our doors and windows (but not our arms and faces) open to welcome the world.
Vancouver touts its role as Hollywoood North, extols its undeniable natural beauty, and gets more than a little mileage from its image as a clean, well-lighted space for people of different races to settle and do well. It seems, however, when held up against the lens of Kingwell’s analysis of Toronto (and many other North American cities) that Vancouver is every bit as guilty of creating divisions, of turning our gaze inward and upward, of seeing fellow citizens not as extensions of ourselves, but as the other. Here in this place where more mixed marriages occur than in any other place in North America, where First Nations art gilds our International Airport, where we have not one, but several Chinatowns, Little Indias, and at least one Francophone community, people are witnessed but not seen, known but not understood, tolerated but not fully embraced.
If Vancouver is to become one of the world’s truly great cities, this will have to change.
Kingwell continues:
We have a choice before us. We can continue to congratulate ourselves on how interesting and vibrant and creative we — some of us — are. Or we can bend some of that intellectual energy to the hard task of asking what we — all of us — could be. The just city is a process, an emergent property of complexity, not a steady state or final outcome.
So what will it be, Vancouverites? Will we always stand uncomfortably on the edge of greatness?
