Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

again. They don’t get a ton of visitors, and those that do come only want to look at the ruins. On the other hand, everyone seems to want to come to Vancouver. This is a young city, imagining that we have made something out of nothing, full of a naïveté that, combined with massive infusions of capital and pretty scenery, makes this an attractive place.

      The world is constantly in transition, never faster than now, and what exists now is not what was here before. There is no possibility of “going back,” undoing wrongs, or returning Stanley Park to its “natural” state or anything like that. And that’s fine. We need to acknowledge that Vancouver is a city with a colonialist past and in making a commitment to make things right with indigenous inhabitants we can perhaps find a route to a creative reconciliation with the natural world as well. We have disrespected and misrepresented what was here before the city—Native culture and the natural world—and it is wholly possible that we can do both some justice. As Cease puts it:

      I am very hopeful. Native or non-Native, we have to live with an open mind. That’s how we have survived colonialism over the past 150 years—we have had to come to terms with new realities.

      We want peace but we can’t be expected to give anything more up. Reciprocity works if what you give, you get back. That’s how our people have operated for an eternity. Especially in hard times things come back to you and now it’s Vancouver’s turn to give back.

      That seems foundational as the city moves forward: rooting our future in historical honesty. Vancouver needs to ditch its naïve pose that we are ahistorical—that we are making something out of nothing.

      Let’s make peace with the fact that this is a city, it’s not “nature,” and build on that. I think places like Thessaloniki and Istanbul, which have unapologetic urban histories measured in centuries, can provide some working ideas about how a real, or even great, city emerges, here and elsewhere.

      ISTANBUL, TURKEY PHOTO BY SELENA COUTURE

       THE END OF LAWNS AS WE KNOW THEM

       Istanbul, Turkey

      Even before he won the Nobel Prize, Orhan Pamuk was the best internationally-known writer from Istanbul and famed for his work on the city. He has written a series of novels with a style that is so capable as to occasionally come off as clinical, almost cold in its technical fluidity. It is a tone he doesn’t entirely abandon in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, but it is obvious right away that his complex relationship with the city pushes him into a different kind of emotional territory.

      Pamuk roots the book in Istanbul’s sense of huzun, a very particular kind of melancholy he perceives as infused and endemic to the city as a whole and all its inhabitants. More than just melancholy, huzun has a spiritual root appearing in the Koran as a mystical grief or emptiness about never being able to be close enough to, or do enough to honor, Allah. Even that description is inadequate:

      To understand the central importance of huzun as a cultural concept conveying worldly failure, listlessness and spiritual suffering, it is not enough to grasp the history of the word and the honor we attach to it.…

      The huzun of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its people and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negative.¹⁸

      Pamuk points to a new tinge in modern Istanbul, an end-of-empire wistfulness, a collective realization that the city’s best days are behind it. The opulent palaces and mosques and museums and mansions that dominate the city’s architecture are constant reminders that it was once one of the greatest cities in the world, the center of empire, the home of wealth and power.

      Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century’s time it would be the capital of the world. The reverse came true: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus ) making it my own.

      I can’t imagine saying much that is less true of Vancouver right now. Every part of Pamuk’s description finds it’s opposite here in Vancouver: This is a young city of ebullient and energetic ascension, with all the attendant naïveté and optimism. This is a city with almost no urban past, and one that seems to believe that every day is going to be sunnier and more profitable than the next.

      It is surely true that Istanbul is not what it once was, and equally true that the city has exploded in population over the past hundred years: a city that at the dawn of the twentieth century had something like three-quarters of a million residents now has more than fourteen million. The overwhelming bulk of that growth is poor villagers, mostly from eastern Anatolia, crowding the urban edges in sprawling unregulated settlements. They come to alleviate their rural poverty while (ironically and predictably) contributing mightily to the economic woes of Istanbul.

      Pamuk is not being melodramatic: there is no question that Turkey in general and Istanbul in specific is struggling more than maybe ever before, with little obvious relief in sight.

      To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if its winter every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The Istanbullus of my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens, and oranges of their rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks as if they have done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not—but there is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years.¹⁹

      But that’s exactly what I’ve done: it’s winter and I have just flown in from a rich western city, and right now I don’t see what the hell he’s talking about. I am standing on the Galata Bridge looking at palaces and the sparkling, blue Golden Horn and a million boats and ferries and ships all looking like they have somewhere to go. There are shoulder-to-shoulder people fishing, it’s a bright day in early December and I am in reverie. It’s freaking Istanbul and it’s ridiculously beautiful. The calls to prayer crackle from loudspeakers mounted on the mosques looming in the hills, there are people selling stuff everywhere, and beautiful yalis²⁰ crowd up tight on the Bosporus.

      I don’t see a pervasive melancholy. I’m a visitor and I fall stupidly in love with the city within days of arriving. The Galata Bridge becomes one of my favorite places in the world. The aesthetic Pamuk calls pale and drab I read as Euro-style. The whole place seems alive with an energy that I am unfamiliar with. Of course, I don’t see Pamuk’s huzun; Westerners like me rarely see it through the haze of orientalism.

      But it is true; the inevitable, fatalistic decline of Istanbul is something that in time I hear spoken of very often. Many of my friends have a resigned, good-natured assumption of the city’s slow free-fall into oblivion. “You like it here? Really? Why?” People often speak of the size and chaos of the city as untenable, as impossible to really live in, the city as lost, beyond help, beyond repair, to be temporarily tolerated at best.

      The easy shot would be to describe Istanbul and Vancouver as two cities going in opposite directions, one heading down, the other on its way up, waving as they go by. There’s something there, and it does feel like Istanbul’s fatalistic sense of decline is mirrored by Vancouver’s ebullience, punctuated by British Columbia’s cringe-worthy