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Noted
Briefs
The news they didn't think was fit to print
By Kevin Potvin
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In the ghetto
It’s not as though Vancouver is the first city to struggle against the growth of a ghetto in its midst. But it does seem to be the only city struggling to avoid the term “ghetto” to describe it. Maybe that’s because the term “ghetto” implies a distinct people being “ghettoized”—originally, Jews in the discarded streets of European cities, and then Blacks in the abandoned streets of American cities.
In our case, it’s First Nations indigenous people in the vacated streets of the downtown eastside. But to call that area of the city a ghetto would be to acknowledge a distinct race of people being ghettoized in it, and this acknowledgement would be anathema to the city that makes a cottage industry of congratulating itself on being the cleanest, the safest, and the most beautiful city in the world (now The Best Place on Earth, as new license plates drably inform us whilst in locked-up traffic jams).
To call an area of one’s city a “ghetto” is to admit a racially distinct group of people are systematically and institutionally discriminated against in one’s city, and while that may be fine for old, ugly, war-torn and riot-ripped cities like Warsaw and Detroit to admit, it isn’t okay for new scrub-faced and beautiful Vancouver that would rather turn its gaze—and that of the visitors we obsequiously try to charm—away.
But the downtown eastside is the identity of this city and that is what we are when you strip the pancake make-up off the hooker on the corner. Take away the mountains, the climate and the sea, and Vancouver is possibly the visually ugliest and socially harshest city in western Canada.
Where’s the vision?
Vancouver’s visionaries are surely the most self-serving visionaries any city has ever been afflicted with. There has to have been more than a billion dollars of new architecture hucked up in Vancouver in the last 10 years, but has any part of that massive investment in buildings produced one iota of beauty? Is there anything of interest, anything of importance, that’s been constructed with any portion of that billion or so dollars?
No. Coal Harbour is a Berlin Wall of shaded glass that is all about the (sometime) residents inside looking out at the mountains and the sea and nothing about anyone in the city looking at the buildings. Make the windows smaller and it could be a prison complex.
The north shore of False Creek is the same thing. The green spaces and parks that looked so perfect ten years ago when first rolled off the back of the sod delivery truck, now, many weeds later, look indistinguishable from the depressing spaces squeezed between poor tenement housing in Mississauga.
At one building along the False Creek seawall, at attempt at making a moment of the space was made—a cascading water fall slips from under the building and slides over sheets of slate to shimmer forward and under the seawall into False Creek. If the water is turned on, that is, and if the whole sculpture weren’t fenced behind industrial-grade steel wires. Take away False Creek and these residences, among the most expensive of new housing in Vancouver, would not look out of place in East Berlin even before the fall of the Wall.
It’s too late now, the building craze is over. And this stuff does not age at all well. In a decade, it’ll be clear what kind of vision our visionaries of today have: uninspired, ugly and dead. There is no difference between the old derelict drunk holding his pants up awaiting his lotto 6/49 ticket at the 7-11 and Bob Rennie awaiting the customers at his new tarted-up showroom beside his next big hole in the ground. Both are strictly concerned for maximum profit in minimum time. No wait, there is a difference: that old derelict drunk probably built something of value in Vancouver back in his day, or at least had a real job.
For shame!
The Mayor of Medellin, Columbia, puts our hand-wringing classes to shame. Here we are sitting in the lap of opulent wealth and beauty staring into the Black Hole of West Calcutta paralyzed for decades by the roiling scenes of poverty and desperation “down there” in the downtown eastside, while in Medellin, not long ago the murder capital of the world and home to the most infamous slum, world-renowned sculptures and architecture springs up like wild flowers in sidewalk cracks.
The Sunday New York Times story of July 15 failed to indicated where Mayor Sergio Fajardo found the funds to build five (five!) luxurious and architecturally interesting libraries, a tram system (free!), an art gallery, a day care, Internet rooms, an auditorium and a science centre in the four years he’s been mayor—all built in the city’s slum. His budget is about the same as Vancouver’s at US $900 million, but 40% of that budget is spent on education, a burden picked up here by the Provincial government.
I don’t think it’s a matter of money or where it’s from. The Mayor has approval ratings above 80%. A Medellin novelist is quoted saying “He is carrying out a redistribution of wealth without a discourse of rage.” A resident of the slum, looking out over the spectacular auditorium, is quoted saying “It looks like an enormous cloud when it is illuminated at night. Such a beautiful thing, right here with us. Who could have imagined that?”
Who can imagine that, indeed, in Vancouver?
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
for no cause, represents no group, serves no master, and considers
problems with no preconceived notions. We hope to afflict the comfortable,
both materially and intellectually, and comfort the afflicted—of
both kinds as well, and we are trying to do both things at the same
time.
Publisher, Editor
Kevin Potvin
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