Spectacular by nature

Inside Vancouver’s tourism-industrial complex

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Tourism as industry

Touted as the world’s largest industry, tourism claims its place as one of the few bright spots in Vancouver’s economy. In 2004, Vancouver’s downtown boasted almost 13,000 hotel rooms in 82 properties, an increase in capacity of 45% since 1984. The industry claims to generate 73,000 jobs directly and indirectly in greater Vancouver, and a further 22,000 “induced” jobs. Arlene Keis, CEO of an industry-associated group dedicated to promoting careers in tourism, estimates that 84,000 new jobs in tourism-related industries (especially cooks and food and beverage managers) will open up over the next ten years. In a recent article in the Vancouver Sun, it was claimed that “tourism generates $7.8 billion of value to the Greater Vancouver economy: 74% of BC’s $10.6 billion tourism economy.” Take these figures with a grain of salt; there is more than a bit of self-promotion going on here, and the message is, You need us.

Tourism industry representatives occupy key positions in all three of the downtown Vancouver elites’ dearest organizations: the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association [DVBIA] and, of course, Tourism Vancouver. And even after suffering a few slower years, which the industry blames on 9/11, SARS, and last year’s forest fires, all the major economic projects downtown, other than pure real estate speculation, revolve around tourism: the Convention Centre, the RAV line, and the beginning of preparations for the Olympics.

Why has tourism become so central to Vancouver’s economy? For many reasons, including the weakening of the role of forestry for Vancouver since MacMillan Bloedel was sold to Seattle-based Weyerhauser and the onset of the interminable softwood lumber dispute. In the larger picture, cities in North America and Western Europe have shed millions of jobs in production-oriented industries (auto, forestry, resources, textile) to areas outside downtown because of sky rocketing land values. More recently, jobs have gone to developing countries because of incomparably lower wages paid there. Where once cities focused on finding a niche within a system of production, now many Western cities promote themselves as locations for consumption. So, tourism dovetails effortlessly with Vancouver’s other large consumption-oriented industries: real estate speculation and development, entertainment industries (sports, clubs, art and film industries), and retailing.

Tourism as idea: the city as spectacle

The concept of the “spectacle” “points to a massive internal extension of the capitalist market,” writes T J Clark, renowned art critic. It is “an attempt to regulate . . . the sphere of the private, personal and everyday” life, previously outside the marketplace. This regulation does not occur negatively, through prohibiting acts, but positively, by promoting a life lived vicariously through images and commodities. Hal Foster claims the “spectacle operates via our fascination with the hyperreal, with ‘perfect’ images that make us ‘whole’ at the price of delusion, of submission.”

In the competition for tourists, the city attempts to brand itself by selling an image to the world. “In this marketing war,” writes Christine Boyer, “style of life and ‘livability,’ visualized and represented in spaces of conspicuous consumption, become important assets that cities proudly display.” These “illusionary environments of simulation,” Boyer goes on to write, “provide the decor of our acts of consumption.” In a city of smiling happy shoppers, poverty, panhandling, homelessness, basic human pain and confusion get airbrushed out. For Jean Baudrillard, rather than a false representation of reality, this simulation is itself a defining characteristic of the consumerist urbanity, the city as spectacle. “Disneyland,” asserts Baudrillard, “is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but are of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.”

Tourism: Development is politics

Farfetched? Maybe, but concrete examples of how these concepts play out are close at hand. Look at Expo 86, widely seen as having created an international image for Vancouver, a marketing event that catapulted Vancouver to the status of a “world class city.” Preparation for Expo 86 accomplished many things. It cleared out the remaining blue-collar manufacturing plants along False Creek. It led to the “cleaning up” of the raunchy Granville and Davie streets. It set in motion the creation of that most faux of simulated neighbourhoods—Yaletown. And, paradoxically, it correlates with the process leading to the quarantined area at Main and Hastings.

Tourism Vancouver, the Board of Trade and DVBIA have monotonously banged the drum for the drug war, for the Safe Streets Act, and for welfare capitalist adventures such as the Convention Centre and the RAV line, where taxpayers foot the bill for projects that largely benefit only the previously mentioned life-style related industries. Tourism Vancouver’s Vice President, Walt Judas, told the Sun that “We get convention delegates who report they are quite shocked at the open drug use downtown, and stoned people walking the streets make them feel unsafe.” Now we can glimpse where poet Jeff Derksen was going when he wrote, in Transnational Muscle Cars: “Tourism as a method of state control for both the tourists and the hosts.” Or, as TheProvince newspaper put it in an editorial, BC is “increasingly dependent” on tourism, “and if we want to woo tourists to BC we will have to put our very best foot forward. We must ensure,” the editorial, goes on, “our towns and cities are the safest, cleanest and friendliest places in the world to visit.”

“Spectacular by Nature,” the motto of Tourism Vancouver, promotes Vancouver as a world-class city situated in a sensational natural setting. Mountains, beaches, the sea, rivers, forests, art galleries, theatre, high-end retail outlets, and world class hotels: Vancouver has it all! You can ski in the morning and sunbathe on the beach in the afternoon. The motto unconsciously incorporates ideas of spectacle and commodification of nature at the same time as it wraps it all up in a seductive package for tourists. The simulated city of the consumer fantasy and the lived reality of Vancouverites can’t co-exist without friction. How that friction plays out is what is making the watching here so interesting.

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