Ape Rifle

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.