Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

is composed of people who are hooked into what Castells calls the “space of flows,” new digitally-based ways of living and generating employment and capital, free-flowing around local constraints and able to move with the same liquidity as their investment portfolios.

      At the same time, there is another economic category of people who are stuck in a Castellsian “space of places,” who do not have the knowledge or skills to profit from digital economies, and these folks are increasingly shut out of the opportunities that neo-liberalism provides. Traditional class formulations have always assumed a certain amount of mobility, that is there is always an opportunity (however slim) for people to move up (or down) the class ladder. In the dual city however, there are separate worlds living right beside each other, occupying the same space but living in isolated realities.

      Right now, Vancouver exhibits all the classic signs of developing into a dual city—a housing affordability crisis festering beside endless condos that no one we know can reasonably afford, people carrying huge amounts of debt, highways packed with people driving because they have to travel an hour from where they work, developers propelling city policy. We need to actively resist this kind of city: we need new strategies and the political will to alter the trajectory that is creating one city for the very liquid rich and another for everyone else. But poverty is not an accident: The very rich and the poor have a contingent relationship. Our way of life demands serious inequality.

      Talking about resisting inequality often makes people think of a very tightly controlled, uptight city, a city where overbearing governments restrict and tax people aggressively in the name of providing services and amenities. I think it is a mythology that a city striving toward egalitarianism must be an excessively regulated, boring city. It’s just not true that a vibrant, living city is necessarily one where the market is god and capital accumulation is what drives innovation and culture. Why can’t cities restrict unfettered greed in favor of local culture? Why can’t we have a funky city without rolling over and showing our soft bellies to the market?

      I think the real issue is how to create an organic, unfolding city—what Christopher Alexander calls a living city; one that isn’t run by bureaucratic planning or rampaging developers but is allowed to unfold, driven by a million decisions made by people on the ground. A city should be the best of humanity: an ethical union of citizens drawn together by mutual aid and shared resources. I know that sounds a little flaky but think of libraries, parks, public transit, movie theaters, patios, coffees shops, bars, beaches, plazas, festivals—everything that makes a city great. All of that is about sharing resources so we don’t have to be walled off by ourselves buying and hoarding our own books and DVDs, hiking on our own property, drinking by ourselves, driving our own cars, isolated, and atomized.

      And that sharing means public space or, better yet, common space. And that’s my definition of urban vitality: constantly running into people who aren’t like you, who don’t think, look, or act like you, people who have fundamentally different values and backgrounds. And in that mix there is always the possibility to re-imagine and remake yourself—a world of possibility that is driven by public life and space, that at its best turns into common places and neighborhoods. That’s what makes a great city, not the shopping opportunities.

      It’s more than that too. Cities are the key to any ecologically sustainable future, a reality that most environmentalists are just coming around to. There’s just no way seven billion people can spread out across the globe. Living densely, shortening the distances we have to travel, reducing our physical footprint, sharing resources, sharing energy is the only way that this thing is possibly going to work ecologically. To make that happen this city—and cities in general—have to become more urban, not less.

      Looking at cities all over the world today though, it’s pretty fucking hard to imagine them as radical generators of sustainability, diversity, and vitality. Globalization, colonialism, and corporate expansionism have rendered the cores of most cities virtually indistinguishable from one another. Downtowns everywhere have the same Mickey Ds and Burger Kings, the same Gap, Prada, Benetton, and Zaras, the same gleaming towers, the same parking lots, the same rhythms.

      And it’s not just downtowns. The Western world’s rush for the suburbs is being replicated all over the globe as urban regions are reconfigured for massive private-car use. Cities are being replaced by massive, megalopolitan stretches of faceless urbanization where it’s impossible to tell where one place ends and the next starts and traditional cities are surrounded by endless expanses of freeways, movie multiplexes, Wal-Marts, industrial parks, gated communities, malls, mini-malls, and mega-malls.

      But you know all this.

      The point of these essays is to give Vancouver and our conceptions of the urban future a hard shot in another direction. Even in the face of the Olympics, the Gateway Project, and an increasingly brazen corporate governance structure—I think we have still have a real chance to remake this city using some compelling, radical urban traditions and examples.

      But that remaking is going to require commitment and discipline. Right now Vancouver, like so many other cities, has imagined itself almost entirely as a vehicle for capital accumulation. The city continues to pour its resources and energy into attracting investment, courting high-end tourists, building infrastructure for developers and international trade and doing anything and everything to pimp ourselves out to the highest bidders. But that strategy is unsustainable by definition.

      I’m not much for futurism and Nostradamus, the Aztecs and Tupac notwithstanding; almost all predictions for the future tend to look pretty foolish. That said, I feel very confident suggesting that an economy based on massive and constant supplies of fossil fuels, huge infusions of capital, and a world-view based on the perpetual growth of consumerism is a losing proposition. We have to reject that juvenile economic and cultural logic and build meaningful ways to live on this land without destroying it. That has to mean reimagining this city as self-reliant and constructing a thoughtful re-localization of pretty much everything. That’s not to confuse re-localizing with parochialism, but it is true that it will mean a constriction of the economy. To my mind, that offers up huge possibilities for alleviating inequity: The logic of neo-liberal growth is what has got us into this spot, and it’s not getting us out. It’s high time to act on the old “another world is possible” line.

      Every city always has the opportunity to re-imagine itself, and these essays are reflections on what a good city could look like, what this city might look like: trying to articulate what an emerging, democratic, and living city might look and feel like.

      An ecological and an ethical city is one and the same thing—we can’t have a “green” city without reimagining our social institutions. And that can’t be made to happen by relying on politicians or planners or developers. They can’t lead, they have to get out of the way and allow the neighborhoods, communities, public spaces, and common spaces that make a great city to become the ongoing expression of a constant series of choices made by everyday citizens.

      That’s what holds these essays together. They are written from disparate places, thinking about Vancouver as an exploration of how to make this place more alive, more democratic, more participatory, and more egalitarian. These cities are enigmatically chosen and are hardly representative of global urbanism—there is nothing from Africa, Latin America, South or East Asia, for example: they are just places I happened to be for a variety of reasons. I am not trying to say much about these other cities—I don’t know enough about any of these places—but I am using them as a route to talk about Vancouver and our collective urban future.

      Lots of the book is critical of Vancouver while much is laudatory and supportive. Some chapters have very clear and specific policy suggestions; other areas are a little more theoretical. I spent almost three years meeting