Ape Rifle

Lions’ Gate Bridge
Vancouver, British Columbia

Canada Place
Vancouver, British Columbia

Stanley Park
Vancouver, British Columbia

Coal Harbour
Vancouver, British Columbia

Downtown Vancouver is what happens when a spectacular mountain-and-ocean setting collides with limited space, Olympic anticipation and lots of foreign money. The central city’s skyline is a highrise wall of upscale condominiums- many indistinguishable from one another with their window facades and pastel hues - punctuated by jagged shards of hyper luxurious hotel/residences. What open space remains is occupied by cranes and concrete skeletons promising more of the same. There is little doubt that, like so many other post-industrial urban transformations, central Vancouver is changing into a peninsula playground for the well-moneyed. And a stunningly beautiful one at that; truth be told, I could barely put my camera down.

Standing on the waterfront of Coal Harbour on a crisp day, with the Rockies in the background and a brand new skyline fronted by a harbour of expensive yachts, Vancouver pulls off what many lesser locales can only allude to in conceptual drawings and real estate promotions. It almost seems too good to be true.

And, of course, it is. A potent mix of natural beauty and sleek architecture in a city is usually enough to keep most visitor’s attention away from less pleasant realities; but in Vancouver, it quickly becomes apparent that this city of glass also cast some dark shadows.

Amidst the towers, Starbucks and humming electric buses wander a large number of bundled beggars pushing shopping carts, and of jittery, hollowed-eye messes mumbling to themselves. On your way to a morning meeting in a suit? Make sure not to step on the sleeping man covered in a dirty blanket. The guy passed out right in front of one of the main transit stations with his pants half off? Move around him with a nervous glance like the rest of the crowd.

Of course, this is no different than other large North American cities, but perhaps the contrast in Vancouver is all the more disconcerting due to the city’s tremendous beauty and cleanliness. This jarring duality of urban life also has an acute physical embodiment in Vancouver, with Canada’s most notorious skid row and drug addict hub located a short walk east of the sprouting five-star skyscrapers. With the Winter Olympics on the way in early 2010, however, it is fairly certain that the plight of this neighbourhood and its denizens will come under intense media scrutiny (well, at least for a few weeks).

But in the new reality of urban inequality, when wealth can build tremendous skylines to overshadow the less fortunate, it is difficult not to get intoxicated by the architecture of affluence and its promises of a prosperous post-modern city. Vancouver, nestled in between the Pacific and the Rockies, comes very close to perfecting this mirage, but the vagrants huddling in the shadows with syringes are a sore reminder that skylines and cranes don’t solve social problems.

An America in decline has become quite the popular narrative in the press these days, particularly since China’s successful staging of its Olympic extravaganza. Don’t bother asking how a few extravagant Chinese song and dance shows herald the demise of a country thousands of miles across the ocean- I don’t get it either.

In a recent New York Times op-ed column, Thomas Friedman throws in his two cents from Beijing by contrasting the ragged infrastructure of New York City with the gleeming new city of Shanghai:

Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

Yes, if you drive an hour out of Beijing, you meet the vast dirt-poor third world of China. But here’s what’s new: The rich parts of China, the modern parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Dalian, are now more state of the art than rich America. The buildings are architecturally more interesting, the wireless networks more sophisticated, the roads and trains more efficient and nicer.

Friedman’s reference to one of New York’s airports, in particular, strikes a chord. Earlier in the summer, I had the (mis)fortune of transiting through JFK on my way home from a two-week holiday in Turkey. I arrived in a customs area that could only be described as a basement overlooked by renovation since the 1970s, mauled as it was by massive overcrowding and understaffing. I gave my luggage away to curt and shouting staff (and, likely, to chance) only to see it tossed into a giant jumble of bags which, apparently, was the ‘transfer hall’. And then it was on to the departure gates through a haphazard network of patched-together hallways, frayed lounges and temporary passageways. The departure area was again severely overcrowded, with weary families camping out on grimy floors. The detritus of travel consumption was everywhere. Garbage cans looked seldom emptied, and the bathrooms weren’t much better.

I distinctly remember thinking: this is a major gateway to one of the ‘richest’ countries in the world? In comparison, the airport I had just left in Istanbul was positively gleaming, orderly and staffed to the hilt with politeness and courtesy.

But unlike Friedman, who uses the comparison as a rallying cry to prevent the undevelopment of American society, my thoughts went down a different path. At JFK, I was reminded once again why it is such a bad idea to slot the complexities of our world into neat little descriptive categories like “developed” or “developing”, “rich country” or “third world”.

Mainstream thinking has long been dominated by a conceptual division of the world into ‘rich’ or ‘poor’, ‘developed’ or ‘developing’. Along with these have come ready-made assumptions about the expected state of each country: ‘rich’ meant industrialized, clean and organized, while “poor” meant dirty, shabby, rural and chaotic. Unfortunately for those who cherish their stereotypes, the world in recent years has been especially busy destroying such easy categorization: there is tremendous wealth and grinding poverty to be found, well, pretty much anywhere.

You can find a dishevelled road just as easily in New York City, Mozambique or China. You can find lavish, sumptuous living anywhere in the world; likewise the destitution of those tossed to the margins is easily seen in any society. China might indeed be “poor”, but I see more homeless people on the street here in Montreal than I ever did in the Middle Kingdom.

When I was navigating the craziness of JFK, I didn’t think “man, the US is devolving into a third world country”. Rather, I thought about how every country and society is such a complex mix of lifestyles, economic conditions and competing realities that categories like ‘developed’, ‘developing’, ‘rich’ or ‘third world’ are now, as they probably always have been, completely ridiculous and counterproductive to understanding the world around us.

The tower of the Olympic Stadium fading to the background

Unable to fly thousands of miles to show my Olympic spirit in a temporarily sanitized Beijing, I’ve had to settle on reading a timely little book titled Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning and the World’s Games, 1896-2012. Included in there is a chapter on the 1976 Games hosted by my hometown and current locale, Montreal, which are now mostly remembered for the debacle of a stadium, poor planning and financial disaster- basically the model for subsequent Olympic hosts not to emulate.

Born four years after the event, my Montreal has never included any tangible Olympic spirit (although my taxes undoubtedly have). The legacy of the Games seems now reduced to an architecturally impressive yet largely useless tower brooding over the landscape, spending its waning days primping for the cover of Lonely Planet guidebooks. Each subsequent Games somewhere else in the world offers Montreal the chance to, once again, lament the wretched legacy of our own and how they reflect the city and province’s cultural/political/economic defects. Run of the mill, really.

The Olympic Cities chapter on the Montreal Games, however, offers up a refreshing perspective in its closing paragraphs:

Finally, there is the uncomfortable question: ’so what?’. True, the Montreal Games were an urban catastrophe which few other cities have had to endure, but apparently, the city survived without too much difficulty…the city’s cultural, economic, social and even political scene is thriving and, with four major universities, Montreal has become one of the leading academic and research centres in North America, while the downtown area would be unrecognizable to 1976 visitors. Anglos and Francos still do not mix much, but are happy to have two cultural scenes to choose from. In fact, none of the positive things now associated with Montreal- its multicultural flavour, its four-month all-out festival period, a vibrant and cosmopolitan artistic scene - can in any way be associated with the 1976 Olympics.

In these late days of August 2008, it might seem unfathomable to imagine a city thriving despite its Olympic host status rather than because of it. But even with all the political, cultural and economic capital invested in these current Chinese Games, it is inevitable that the uncomfortable question- ’so what?’ - rears its head following the closing ceremonies. It will be fascinating to see whether these Olympics were really as defining a moment as every pundit and his/her mother claims them to be. I have a sneaking suspicion that Beijing might well thrive in the long run in spite of its Olympic transformation, not because of it. Because any city defined by a two-week sporting event is nary a city at all.

Istanbul is not a city designed for the automobile, to say the least. With its dense, old urban fabric and hilly geography, you could almost imagine the first settlers musing to themselves, “gee, this place is going to be a real scene after the invention of the combustion engine”. And what a scene it has become all these years later, like so many other massive urban beasts the world over, with millions of vehicles bursting the city’s seams.

Steep, narrow and winding roads become major thoroughfares with a predictable outcome- a performance of narrow misses, precarious turns, grinding brakes and puzzle-like gridlock. While attending an event with a rooftop terrace overlooking just such a street, I was treated to hours of vehicular contorsion.

5:35pm

When there is open road in Istanbul, only one option is available: go fast. Forget that there is most likely someone right around the corner.

5:55pm

Traffic starts to build up in both directions thanks to cars parked in a rather unfortunate place.

7:28pm

Things get dicey as cars coming in opposite directions start to block each other from turning. Cue blocked lanes up and down the road in both directions.

7:46pm

Lots of close calls and gear grinding gets the traffic flowing.

11:08pm

A big van gets involved and really starts causing trouble. At this point several people got out of their cars to direct traffic and walk further down the road to tell people to back up and make space.

11:14pm

The big van continues its attempts to escape this nefarious corner. Some people get out of their taxi for a breather while they wait.

Anamur

Istanbul

Parliament Hill
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada