Vancouver, renaissance city

A confluence of money and ideas have arrived in this city, and it’s a rare opportunity

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Florence was Ground Zero for the great sixteenth-century renaissance because some clever businessmen with hordes of new money—the Medici brothers—hooked up with some Arab immigrants with heaps of new ideas, and together they fired up the imaginations of several generations of Italian artist-entrepreneurs, chief amongst them Leonardo Da Vinci.

All such renaissances erupt in particular cities and they always require a river of new money flooded by a river of new ideas. But there is a third critical element required to catalyze the new ideas and new money into a bona fide renaissance, and that third element is so rare, we can count on one hand the number of renaissances that have happened in the entire Western world’s history. That third element is visionary leadership, a leadership capable of recognizing that its city is suddenly blessed with new money and new ideas at the same time, and a leadership that knows what to do to catalyze them into a renaissance. Many times the first two elements, money and ideas, have arrived in one city or another simultaneously, only to see the germinated seed dry up in the barren fields unrecognized and not nurtured.

A generation ago, the two fastest growing and most energized economies were in Germany and Japan. Today, both are stagnant. The two new economies that are taking the world by storm are in China and India. In China, excess capital earned from huge export sales has accumulated so fast and so steeply, they don’t know what to do with it all. They’ve already built the most extravagant Formula One race car track, they have constructed the prettiest opera hall, they have the fastest passenger train in the world, they are nearing completion of an interstate freeway system more vast than America’s, and new high-rise office buildings crowd their skylines, and are mostly empty. The same transformation is now washing over India today. A whole whack of new money in China and India is currently looking for places to land.

That brings us to Vancouver. This city, established and built by Asian immigrants, is today dominated by two ethnic groups: families from China and families from India. Unlike all other cities in North America that were also established by immigrants, immigrants to Vancouver are generally more recent and, with modern technology, stay in closer touch with home than immigrants anywhere and at any time have ever been able to.

In both China and India, however, conditions are not conducive for the creation of new ideas. Neither are notably open and tolerant societies. China remains under the iron-grip rule of single-party communist dictatorship and Chinese society is oppressive with social rules while a bureaucratic straightjacket reigns in all free thinkers. India, though a democracy, is no place to get something new off the ground, as anyone who has ever been there can attest. V S Naipaul called India the land of missed opportunity, and despite huge economic advances there recently, it remains a place where free thinkers are frustrated.

Vancouver, by contrast, has no new money. Even when the first two waves of tree fellers came through the really big money was siphoned off to Toronto or London. This city remains in the mediocre grip of a middle-management culture that is paid well but does not actually accumulate capital. There are no head offices here; they are all in Calgary or Toronto. The only capitalist of consequence this city has ever produced is the lackluster and thoroughly uninspired car salesman Jimmy Pattison, a capitalist who made his billions not in starting any new company or by championing any new idea, but by buying existing companies and fitting them into classic middleman roles. He is the gray model all our other capitalists here aspire to emulate.

Despite this culture of middle-management in its capitalist class, Vancouver has always produced a truckload of new ideas. Not only is Vancouver home to globe-rattling movements like Greenpeace and anti-globalization, but it’s also a world leader in organic food marketing, apartment building co-ops, and alternative fuel transportation. The be-in was invented here, the psychedelic revolution happened here, and not for nothing did the New Age movement find a home here. Derided as a flakey Lotus Land and a laid-back, head-in-the-clouds freak show, Vancouver proudly earned these monikers for its generations of free thinkers who have always found here an openness and toleration. One illustration suffices to capture the spirit of this place: on a recent BC Ferries crossing from the island to the mainland, an official announcement from the bridge was heard to crackle over the ship-wide public address system. “Would those smoking pot on the outdoor decks please move away from the fresh air intakes. Thank you.” Fellow passengers snickered. That was all.

Vancouver has evolved into a city of ideas free floating through a medium of openness and toleration to match anything that erupted in Amsterdam or London or New York in the last half century. With the human bridge Vancouver has to huge and fast growing centers of capital accumulation in China and India, two of the three crucial elements necessary to a renaissance have arrived here. It is only the last ingredient—the hardest one of the three ever to be found—that eludes us now. If Vancouver could also be blessed with a visionary leadership capable of noticing that we have the access to new capital and the eruption of new ideas to maybe catalyze a genuine renaissance here, we might just have in our hands a modern-day Florence. All that is missing is a leadership that recognizes what is happening, and a leadership that knows how to strike that white-hot iron for the short while that it glows.

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