The distinctive economic structure of Vancouver (based on what economists call “dynamic services”), and its ability to keep [12] growing without producing anything obviously visible or substantial, seem a striking example of Fredric Jameson’s “late capitalism” in an urban setting. However, there are contradictions in Jameson's claim that postmodern culture is specific to the latter days of the capitalist system. It does look plausible that postmodernism and post-industrialism should be two names for the same thing: a historic shift from the processing of material things to the processing of mere representations of things or “simulacra” in Baudrillard’s term (Rose). Yet any assumption that postmodernism is an evolutionary stage - a product, for example, of the transition from “Fordism” (mass production industrialism) to the dominance of financial capital and the media - re-legitimates the traditional Marxist model of base determining superstructure, and of one mode of production determining its successor. The spirit of postmodernism is opposed to grand narratives and teleologies, and it registers the change from a historical scheme (phenomena are ordered sequentially) to a spatial one (phenomena are juxtaposed, without any claim that they are being driven by a causal logic). Postmodernism is not “going” anywhere, most of its adherents would say; nor would they view it as the prelude to a final stage of capitalism (whose day of judgement has been, since the events of 1989, deferred indefinitely). (n. 10)
The Marxist model of development assumed that each country would progress through a sequence of modes of production, with some countries in the lead and others bringing up the rear. But this theory has been undermined by the globalization that is the most striking feature of contemporary economic systems. The division of labor has now been spatialized, rather than evolving sequentially within each country (Soja). Postmodern Western cities possess every stage of capitalist development, from family workshops to arbitrage specialists, and every class, from the homeless to the super-rich (A. Paris). What used to make sense as a historical series now has to be viewed as a simultaneous crazy-quilt of disparate economic practices, as the evolution from lower to higher folds backward on itself. The takeover of CBS by Sony, for example, disrupts conventional hierarchies: of software over hardware, of services over industry, and of the U.S. over Japan. Los Angeles shows most dramatically this mixing of levels of development; the “highest” or “latest” modes of production (such as the mass culture industries) may [13] have been established long before the recent growth of sweatshops dependent on illegal immigration from Central America (Mike Davis, City). In the middle range, Fordist industries like auto assembly and steel mills are being shut down; further reductions in defense industries will reinforce the tendency for Los Angeles to move, simultaneously, both “forwards” and “backwards” from Fordism. For all major U.S. cities the unionized industrial working class is shrinking, as these cities revert towards the function - and ideology - of being a pure marketplace.
In Vancouver one sees less of the acute economic and ethnic polarization evident in cities like Los Angeles. Canadian social democracy, tentative as it is, limits the extremes of poverty and wealth taken for granted in the U.S. Primary industries, which are more unstable, are situated outside Vancouver; their importance is signified only indirectly, through warehouses, terminals, docks, grain elevators. Vancouver's first, and still important, raison d'être has been as a transfer point between Interior producers and overseas consumers. On this foundation was built a tertiary sector of financial and administrative services to resource industries. In the nineteen-eighties there was rapid growth of more autonomous tertiary activities such as tourism, retailing, management of Asian capital, high-technology industry, entertainment, advanced education, and health care. The two largest employers in Vancouver are the University of British Columbia and Vancouver General Hospital; both serve the entire province in some degree, but they also draw wealth from the Interior into the metropolis. (n. 11) Until the nineteen-eighties it would have made sense to speak of Vancouver’s “base,” in the Marxist sense; but this base was in the Interior, not physically present in the city. In human terms, the base was visible only as a reverse displacement, of those disabled loggers and miners who were no longer wanted in the Interior and ended up on the Downtown East Side.
The urban recession of the early nineteen-eighties was still closely linked to the slowdown in the lumber industry, even if its most obvious symptom was a rapid decline in real estate values. But since then, there have been clear signs that the Vancouver economy is both uncoupling from the rest of the province, and becoming more dynamic. In 1984, Greater Vancouver had 48 percent of the province’s jobs; by 1991 it had 55 percent (Craig Davis, “Uncoupling”; “Two Economies”). Vancouver is becoming [14] more insulated from difficulties in the primary industries of the Interior, and real estate held its value even as forest industries reported record losses for 1991. One could speak of the city consolidating its own base, except that there are no obvious material signs of the process - only secondary manifestations like downtown condo towers and the sprouting of postmodern facades along West Broadway. Vancouver still lacks major corporate headquarters, or world-leading enterprises like Seattle's Boeing and Microsoft. (n. 12) Yet from 1986 to 1990 Vancouver's population grew as fast as Seattle's, and the growth rate of the two cities ranked fourth among North American metropolitan areas. In 1989, about half of all new jobs created in Canada were in Vancouver. (n. 13)
But what, precisely, was the engine of growth? In 1980, the fifty biggest public companies in B.C. employed 179,000 people; in 1992, they employed 67,000. The giant corporations of the mass production era are melting away, while cities teem with the nimbler enterprises that are taking their place. In popular mythology, Vancouver’s recent growth has been driven by an exodus from Hong Kong. But of the 60,000 people who moved to Vancouver in 1989, only 5,000 were from Hong Kong; two-thirds were from other parts of Canada. (n. 14) How, then, was it possible for Vancouver to keep up with Seattle and outstrip all but three other North American cities over the past seven years? Part of Vancouver’s success may be credited to its relatively vital and efficient downtown core. The American preference for suburban living, facilitated by the Interstate highway system, has resulted in Seattle being four times the area of Vancouver, though it is only twenty-five percent larger in population. Vancouver has more people living downtown, better public transport, less ethnic tension, and a lower crime rate; all these factors make it more of a European-style city than a North American urban sprawl. The re-segregation of American cities since 1970 suggests that a huge investment in urban infrastructure has simply been written off, and that a high price is going to be paid for making central cities largely dysfunctional.
Another explanation for Vancouver’s boom is that it has uncoupled from its Interior and become more of a Pacific Rim city, drawing nourishment from its direct links to such centers as Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo. In a [15] sense, these cities have sited pockets of their own expansion here - as in Richmond’s mushrooming Asian shopping center. Vancouver’s most important piece of infrastructure for the 90s, by this reasoning, will be the opening of its third airport runway in 1996. (n. 15) Looking at less tangible factors, finally, we could argue that Vancouver’s recent growth has come from a self-reflexive belief in itself; it succeeds, postmodern style, more because of its image as a place “where the action is” than because of any evident material cause.
Vancouver was successively a city of brick, of wood, and of concrete. This was scarcely a logical progression, and the modernist principle of “truth to materials” has not had very happy results here - in spite of the claim, attributed to Arthur Erickson, that “concrete is the marble of our time.” The city’s most recent style, postmodernism, tries to make a virtue of the stylistic incoherence around it. Canada is said to have two indigenous architectural forms, the Chateau-style railway hotel and the grain elevator (admired by Le Corbusier). Vancouver has good examples of each (the Hotel Vancouver and the Alberta Wheat Pool), along with examples of just about everything else, from Cotswold cottages to Japanese temples. It also has a form no-one else can boast, the Vancouver Special. What it most significantly lacks is a central freeway, so that it has escaped the strip-and-tower cityscape of most cities of the American West.
Any Vancouver architecture is bound to have a strong relation to the natural setting. Nonetheless, the junction between the built and the wild environments is often jagged and discordant. There is a similarly ragged line between historical layers, probably because such styles appear in Vancouver as pastiche or nostalgia - the mock-Tudor, the colonial bungalow, and so on - rather than as the expression of a particular social class, technology, or sense of proportion. Nothing in Vancouver corresponds to, say, the Edinburgh New Town, the Gardens District of New Orleans, or Chicago of the Sullivan period. Eclecticism and discontinuity were features of Vancouver architecture long before postmodernism came along to raise them to the level of aesthetic principles, the properly self-conscious way of looking at the city (Venturi). Now, of course, they are [16] programmatic, as in Tudor Manor (1311 Beach Avenue) where the vertical lines of a half-timbered Tudor facade are extended to a rocket-ship tower, or the green-glass false roof of Cathedral Place (925 West Georgia) acknowledging the real verdigris of the mock-Chateau across the street.
For good or ill, postmodernism is having a profound effect on the way Vancouver looks and the experiences it offers. The arrival here of the postmodern in the early eighties encountered only token resistance from the local architectural establishment; and the high rate of building since then has given postmodernism every chance to propagate itself. In the past decade, there has been a greater transformation of Vancouver’s downtown than of any other major North American city. Despite rearguard actions by Erickson and others, modern architecture - in the strict sense of form expressing function, and no more than function - has been excluded from an urban process whose landmarks have been Granville Island, Expo 86, and the ongoing redevelopment of the north shore of False Creek.
The changing of the guard in Vancouver architecture stands out in a comparison of the two branches of Simon Fraser University: the Burnaby Mountain campus, which is the most imposing monument of late modernism in Canada, and the new downtown campus at Harbour Centre on West Hastings. In Burnaby modernism prevails absolutely, because the campus, like almost all new foundations in the sixties, was built in the spirit of the Ivory Tower, withdrawing itself from the disorderly and materialistic city. (n. 16) There was no mediation, at SFU, between the designers’ abstract idea of a university - as megastructure and [17] machine for learning - and the carrying out of that idea in glass and concrete. Regardless of the revolution in architectural values since 1965, almost all later expansion has been faithful to the original scheme. The massive new West Mall extension by Arthur Erickson is defiantly anachronistic, a piece of sixties brutalism replicated in defiance of the contemporary spirit; it can be relied on to make the experience of being at SFU even more overbearing and monolithic. Modernism has demanded consistency with a fixed idea and has shunned any potential play of difference between styles, such as one would see in almost any campus founded before World War II. (n. 17)
SFU Harbour Centre, which moved to its present home on West Hastings in the late nineteen-eighties, is another story altogether. No grand sixties vision of reform inspired it; its conception was in an impure conjugation of tax shelter, real estate development, and the university’s desire to open up a new “market” of adult learners downtown. (n. 18) Because the campus took over the lower floors of an existing office building and retail center, there is nothing in the structure to identify it as a university from the street: the pedestrian’s eye does not move up to ivied walls or a campanile, but to a revolving cocktail lounge shaped like a flying saucer. Inside, one encounters a standard postmodern decor with pink tiles and neo-deco detailing; more noticeable is the unabashed commercial sponsorship of everything, from the Belzberg Library to the Fletcher Challenge Theatre. The provincial government grant to this campus is only a token amount relative to the Burnaby campus; without support from the private sector and an imperative of “cost recovery” for course offerings, SFU Harbour Centre could not even exist. Yet in spite of its oddities, Harbour Centre is quite an agreeable place to visit; whereas Burnaby Mountain epitomizes the ability of modernist architecture to depress the spirits of those who inhabit it. The Burnaby campus is redeemed, if at all, by its spectacular setting - yet its architects have consistently failed to exploit the light and scenic grandeur of its site.
Architecture has always been the art most dependent on patronage. The modernist patron was often the state, with predictably heavy-handed results. However, the rehabilitation of the marketplace under postmodernism produces its own architectural vices. What does seem sure is that state-commissioned monumentalism will not be much in evidence during this decade [18] in Vancouver, so that the architecture we get will represent commercial values in a blatant way. The grandiosity of state patronage may still be evident in cities like Paris (La Défense, or the new Opera House and Bibliothèque de France); even, on a smaller scale, in Ottawa and Montréal. But such monuments are expressions of a centralism that has been alien to B.C. politics. Nor have locally-commissioned federal projects, like the CBC building or Canada Place, (n. 19) projected any strong image of central authority to the provinces. Meanwhile, it is hard to imagine looking around in mid-decade and seeing any architectural monument to the NDP administration that took office in 1991. What we will have as a legacy of the 90s can be seen sprouting now, in the apartment towers at the north end of the Granville Street bridge and along Pacific Boulevard; similar new districts, built on reclaimed land, will soon appear at Coal Harbour and east of Canada Place. Throw in the new sports arena and Moshe Safdie’s Public Library and there is Vancouver 2001 - but the object of worship will be a pink candycane rather than a black slab.
Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was the prototype of the specifically modern city. Before Amsterdam (and its predecessor, Venice), great cities were typically places of worship, strongholds, or administrative centers, and commerce was secondary to these functions. Amsterdam was primarily a port and marketplace; but the idea of the market was extended beyond material goods to such intangibles as finance, expertise, information, and belief. The Dutch republic was the first to accept the principle of religious tolerance - pluralism, in modern terms - as a settlement of the post-Reformation wars of religion. This tolerance nourished both the cultural humanism whose greatest figures were Rembrandt and Spinoza, and the economic liberalism that made Amsterdam the financial and publishing capital of the world until the Napoleonic wars. It was in Amsterdam that Locke published his Essay on Tolerance, and that Descartes, Spinoza, and Voltaire published books not safe to publish anywhere else in Europe. Amsterdam’s welcoming attitude to immigrants and those fleeing religious persecution contributed to the quadrupling of its population between 1610 and 1650, and [19] to its becoming the most cosmopolitan city of its time. It was also a quintessentially bourgeois, self-governing city, free of the aristocrats and absolute monarchs who elsewhere claimed power by right of inheritance.
Amsterdam represents the city as market and port, like Venice, New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Shanghai. Such cities illustrate the ecological principle that the greatest variety of life-forms will be found at the boundary between different habitats. They are cities of the edge rather than the center; their opposite is the inland imperial capital - Beijing, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow - whose purpose is to unify and impose order on their hinterlands. Vancouver belongs, of course, to the first kind of city. Lacking a major administrative or political function, its reason for being is to be situated where four zones intersect: the Western Canadian hinterland, the U.S. and Mexican West Coast, the North Coast up to Alaska, and the Pacific Rim. It is not a bullseye or spiderweb city that extends uniformly to all points of the compass, like Paris or Berlin, but a city where fault lines pile up against each other.
George Bowering’s essay in this collection was originally called “A Word in Edgewise,” suggesting the importance to the Vancouver imagination of both literal and conventional boundaries. Vancouver marks the end of the settled coast, but it is a head cut off by the 49th parallel, which hinders any merging of the Vancouver/Seattle conurbations. The city’s Asian communities make it another kind of end-point, an enclave or beach-head where the cultures of the East “come ashore” on North America. The end of the coast highway North of Powell River, and the mountains blocking the Fraser Valley at Hope, create the notorious “end-of-the-line” feeling in Vancouver - experienced, according to one’s mood, as navel-gazing, liberation, or claustrophobia. Then, there is the extraordinarily sharp juxtaposition of the city and the wilderness, often without any buffering by transitional zones like suburbs or farmland. Finally, there are the sightlines that constantly remind us of boundary-effects: the skyline of modern and postmodern highrises in the downtown core, the ridgeline of the North Shore mountains, and the shorelines winding everywhere through the cityscape. The coming together of so many visual and social zones creates an urban experience of invigorating complexity. Still, with the city’s [20] population growing at about thirty percent each decade, there is a danger of it overwhelming its physical setting. (n. 20) Neil Smith observes that as great cities develop beyond their initial “natural advantage,” they transcend geographical determination: “The present reality of New York City, such an impressive symbol of the productiveness of human activity, has long since outgrown any naturalistic explanation based on bedrock or physical accessibility” (103).
In comparing Vancouver to Amsterdam, San Francisco, or Shanghai, what claims are we making about its cultural significance? Is it presumptuous to hail Vancouver as a vanguard city of postmodernism, given its arrested development in many fields of endeavor? Richard Rogers notes that the urban revival in Europe has largely been driven by second-tier cities “competing to outdo one another in the quality of their public transport, urban parks, galleries, opera, orchestras, schools and universities”; and he credits the revitalization of Glasgow and Birmingham to their being “among the first British cities to capitalize on the importance of culture in the economy of the post-industrial city” (xiii, xv). Open architectural competitions have been crucial in fostering a new generation of brilliant international architects. Vancouver is notoriously indifferent to the aspirations of other cities, and disinclined to architectural or any other kind of competition; yet the competition for the new Public Library stirred more public interest in architecture than had been seen for years. (n. 21) Is it too much to hope for new galleries, museums and theaters of equivalent stature?
This book is certainly not a commercial for Vancouver's continued growth in mere business-as-usual fashion, and the essays are diagnostic as well as celebratory. Nonetheless, the Vancouver of the future may develop by discontinuous leaps and changes of scale. In our emergent postmodern condition, where we have come from may not be a reliable guide to where we are going. Postmodernism is not - or not yet - an orthodoxy to which everyone who thinks about contemporary culture must subscribe. Yet postmodernism is a more grandly inclusive intellectual enterprise than most of its rivals and predecessors. Systems like Marxism and psychoanalysis achieved universalism by marginalizing vast areas of human activity, declaring them non-essential or things soon to be transcended. The irony of [21] postmodernism is that it begins by denouncing “totalizing discourses” from somewhere on the fringe, but ends up claiming to be more adequate than universalism as an account of everything that's “really” going on. One way out of this dilemma is to continue the critical, disjunctive and discrediting work of originary postmodernism - to make sure that postmodernism never tries to paper over the cracks in its own facade. Another is to be sensitive to the provisionality of “Vancouver” itself: a city that somehow sets us adrift at the end of the road, and of the continent - but that therefore asks us to pay the best attention we can to these mountains and waters, these buildings, these citizens, this time, this place.
Notes
10. Of course these claims, too, can be deconstructed. It is almost impossible not to associate postmodernism with a specific phase or period of Western culture; and for postmodernism to be fashionable, in the way it currently is, implies that it is timely. Phrases like “the end of history” are afflicted with a similar aporia.
11. About thirty percent of VGH admissions are from outside the city of Vancouver.
12. Until recent cutbacks, Boeing had nearly a hundred thousand employees in Greater Seattle, making it at least ten times larger than any single Vancouver employer.
13. Actual growth in population was twelve percent over the five years, and it has continued at a similar rate in 1990-94. The population of the Lower Mainland region in 1994 is about 1.8 million. Sources: Greater Vancouver Regional District; Edgington 1990: 18.
14. Edgington 1990:18-19. For immigrants from foreign countries, Hong Kong did rank first in 1993 as a source country, and all of the top five countries were Asian.
15. Opposition from local communities makes it unlikely that Seattle-Tacoma Airport can be expanded in the foreseeable future.
16. Two other potential sites - downtown New Westminster and Granville Island - would have produced a very different university culture.
17. There are minor exceptions to this conformity at SFU, such as the Diamond University Club and the Applied Sciences Building.
18. An existing office building had a large amount of vacant space; by donating this space to the university on a long lease it could gain attractive tax rebates. In a wider perspective, it was hoped that a new campus would revitalize the area to the East, including Gastown, Woodward's flagship department store, and the Downtown East Side. So far, these hopes have not found much fulfilment.
19. Originally the Canada Pavilion at Expo 86.
20. Not to mention deliberate efforts to destroy the original site. False Creek once extended to Clark Drive and was several times larger than it is now, and landfill in Burrard Inlet continues apace.
21. Simon Fraser University was, of course, the outcome of a competition; and whatever its disappointments it has style and a sense of place - in contrast to the mere agglomerations of U.B.C. and the University of Victoria.
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