Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

going on. You have to look at the flow of money. The flow of power. Taking the drive for profit and using it to benefit the commonwealth is just not being done in most cities, and it is one way to augment the very limited sources of funds that cities have.

      It’s an interesting answer and Beasley is articulating an innovative approach that in many ways has clearly worked: Vancouver’s downtown has changed radically over the past twenty years and is alive now in ways that it most certainly was not in even recent history. More than 20 percent²⁷ of Vancouver residents now live downtown,²⁸ the core is full of people with cash to burn, construction is seemingly non-stop, and it has a very peculiar but vibrant feel.

      The strategy is widely viewed as brilliant and its successes are being replicated in many spots around the globe, in no small part due to Beasley’s energetic proselytizing. But it so happens that Vancouver and Living First are turning the traditional idea of a downtown on its head, with some interesting repercussions. Most obviously, while condo building continues full-force, commercial development lags far behind. The number of jobs downtown has remained stagnant, and there are very few office or commercial projects being built. The logic is obvious: a developer can turn five times the profit on a condo as compared to an office tower, and the buyers just keep coming, so why the hell would they ever want to stop?

      But more (perhaps) unintended consequences are emerging. Right now, Vancouver has a downtown that is increasingly looking and feeling like a resort town, full of tourists, language students, occasional residents, and those visiting their investment properties. And, in an ironic twist, Vancouver now has a huge number of reverse-commuters, people who live in the city but work in the burbs, and it doesn’t appear that trend will slow any time soon. As Trevor Boddy wrote in 2005:

      We may once have dreamed of taking our place in the list of the world’s great cities, but unless something is changed soon, to preserve and promote our downtown as a place to work, we will instead join Waikiki and Miami Beach on the list of resorts filling up with aging baby boomers lounging around their over-priced condos.²⁹

      The core of the city is dominated (and increasingly so) by condos, a huge number of them owned by people who do not live here full-time. Property has become another commodity for the global elite to invest in, to buy and flip, especially in hot cities like Vancouver and Dubai and Shanghai, and even in new, recessionary economic climates property is the investment that people tend to cling to. As David Beers, editor of the Tyee said to me:

      I totally buy the argument that we badly need density here, but how do you get density without a high-priced sterility? And that’s what’s been built here. I don’t mind that there are some parts of town like that, but I really don’t want every part of town like that. The needle-like towers are able to command a high price because of the view, which then turns them into a global commodity. Now you’ve got to compete with everyone in the globe who wants a view of the North Shore Mountains.

      Thus, people with little attachment and few civic bonds to the city increasingly populate downtown: global consumers rather than citizens who care about the place as more than an investment or temporary stopping point. Along with that development pattern comes an avalanche of low-paid service economy jobs to service that economy: retail, restaurant, security, and tourism jobs with wages that ensure that workers cannot live near where they work. This, as every Vancouverite knows, is perhaps the biggest danger to the city: the incredible housing prices and lack of reasonably priced shelter, sending everyday people scattering. And what happens when oil prices start to rise, air travel drops, and the tourists and condo buyers start to stay home? As I am writing this in mid-2009, the ripple effects from 2008 are still being felt across the globe as luxury condo prices collapse. No one really cares much if a few yuppies lose their shirts, but what happens to the rest of us if/when it turns into a full-fledged rout?

      The repercussive effects of the Living First strategy are hardly obscure; they are being debated long and hard, and as a model it has much going for it. Part of the root issue of its development is the urgent desire to see Vancouver remade as a “real” city. What is being contested is Vancouver’s inherent “city-ness”: are we or aren’t we? And what are we? There is a palpable desire for this to be a great city, a world-class city, and not just among civic boosters or tourism hacks, but also from everyone who likes urbanity.

      And that is really what underlies much of the conversation—what makes for a great city? The Living First strategy replicates the cockiness of Vancouver’s current mood: we want a real city, and we can make it happen right now with energy and money. It is a boomtownish, reverse mirror image of Istanbul’s huzun. As Larry Beasley has said over and over, “You don’t have to wait for lightning to strike. You can choreograph this.”³⁰ I asked Larry about Seaside, the infamous and tepidly bourgeois enclave that is often called the first New Urbanist development. I wanted to press him on the idea that vitality can be choreographed.

      The problem with places like Seaside is that the formulas are all wrong—it’s a middle-class housing formula. What we’ve been trying to do—and I’m not saying we’ve successfully done it—is get the formula for urbanism right. Urbanism is about mixed use, it’s about lining the streets with activities that generate activity, it’s about making people feel safe and comfortable in the public realm.

      I use the word choreography because unfortunately, leaving the three-dimensional reality of the city to the spontaneous development impetus of the development community, under the conditions we have now, leads to a removal of the public realm. We have one group of people creating the private realm and one group creating the public realm, and the ones building the private realm are those with the wealth. And the people creating the public realm never have what’s needed to do the job.

      Take some of the places you and I love. Look back in history and you’ll almost always find that there was one creator. There wasn’t the division between the public and the private realms; there was a kind of holistic attitude that brought attention to the public interest.

      Now, you gotta do this. I was in Sacramento, outside the tiny, struggling downtown and in the absolute effect of private development forces in control. There is no public realm; there is no commonwealth, there is nothing. It is austere to the point of anguish. And it is unbelievably banal. That’s what modern society gives you. That’s what the production process gives you because of where wealth is and where power is.

      That’s what you’ve got to realize. You’ve got to look at a city like Vancouver in contrast to that and ask yourself are we putting the mechanisms in place to lead us where we want to go? And I will tell you that takes great choreography. That took me and all my staff working every single day on project after project, trying to bring as many people as possible to the table.

      In some ways, it is a brilliant response to a city metastasizing in leaps and bounds in population and investment, and it’s a hell of a lot better than letting the city sprawl even more. The city and Beasley have proved that it is possible, given certain conditions, to induce a lot of people to move downtown, something that a decade ago few people in North America thought possible. But is that enough? Is density the holy grail of contemporary urbanity?

      The simple (and highly qualified) answer is pretty much “yes.” The basic formulation suggests that if you can densify, all good things will flow from there: There will be enough population to support public transport, more people will walk and fewer will drive, you’ll get concentrations of services, and urbanity will flourish. If you give people reason to spend time on the street they will. Like Witold Rybczynski, who is an architect, urbanist, and now University of Pennsylvania professor, once said to me, “it has to do with density, above all. This puts a lot of people together in one place, keeps walking distance relatively small, and makes walking interesting.”

      It’s not just simple consumer-choice logic; there