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ISTANBUL, TURKEY PHOTO BY SELENA COUTURE

THE END OF LAWNS AS WE KNOW THEM

Istanbul, Turkey

Even before he won the Nobel Prize, Orhan Pamuk was the best internationally-known writer from Istanbul and famed for his work on the city. He has written a series of novels with a style that is so capable as to occasionally come off as clinical, almost cold in its technical fluidity. It is a tone he doesn’t entirely abandon in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, but it is obvious right away that his complex relationship with the city pushes him into a different kind of emotional territory.

Pamuk roots the book in Istanbul’s sense of huzun, a very particular kind of melancholy he perceives as infused and endemic to the city as a whole and all its inhabitants. More than just melancholy, huzun has a spiritual root appearing in the Koran as a mystical grief or emptiness about never being able to be close enough to, or do enough to honor, Allah. Even that description is inadequate:

To understand the central importance of huzun as a cultural concept conveying worldly failure, listlessness and spiritual suffering, it is not enough to grasp the history of the word and the honor we attach to it.…

The huzun of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its people and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negative.¹⁸

Pamuk points to a new tinge in modern Istanbul, an end-of-empire wistfulness, a collective realization that the city’s best days are behind it. The opulent palaces and mosques and museums and mansions that dominate the city’s architecture are constant reminders that it was once one of the greatest cities in the world, the center of empire, the home of wealth and power.

Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century’s time it would be the capital of the world. The reverse came true: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus ) making it my own.

I can’t imagine saying much that is less true of Vancouver right now. Every part of Pamuk’s description finds it’s opposite here in Vancouver: This is a young city of ebullient and energetic ascension, with all the attendant naïveté and optimism. This is a city with almost no urban past, and one that seems to believe that every day is going to be sunnier and more profitable than the next.

It is surely true that Istanbul is not what it once was, and equally true that the city has exploded in population over the past hundred years: a city that at the dawn of the twentieth century had something like three-quarters of a million residents now has more than fourteen million. The overwhelming bulk of that growth is poor villagers, mostly from eastern Anatolia, crowding the urban edges in sprawling unregulated settlements. They come to alleviate their rural poverty while (ironically and predictably) contributing mightily to the economic woes of Istanbul.

Pamuk is not being melodramatic: there is no question that Turkey in general and Istanbul in specific is struggling more than maybe ever before, with little obvious relief in sight.

To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if its winter every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The Istanbullus of my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens, and oranges of their rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks as if they have done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not—but there is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years.¹⁹

But that’s exactly what I’ve done: it’s winter and I have just flown in from a rich western city, and right now I don’t see what the hell he’s talking about. I am standing on the Galata Bridge looking at palaces and the sparkling, blue Golden Horn and a million boats and ferries and ships all looking like they have somewhere to go. There are shoulder-to-shoulder people fishing, it’s a bright day in early December and I am in reverie. It’s freaking Istanbul and it’s ridiculously beautiful. The calls to prayer crackle from loudspeakers mounted on the mosques looming in the hills, there are people selling stuff everywhere, and beautiful yalis²⁰ crowd up tight on the Bosporus.

I don’t see a pervasive melancholy. I’m a visitor and I fall stupidly in love with the city within days of arriving. The Galata Bridge becomes one of my favorite places in the world. The aesthetic Pamuk calls pale and drab I read as Euro-style. The whole place seems alive with an energy that I am unfamiliar with. Of course, I don’t see Pamuk’s huzun; Westerners like me rarely see it through the haze of orientalism.

But it is true; the inevitable, fatalistic decline of Istanbul is something that in time I hear spoken of very often. Many of my friends have a resigned, good-natured assumption of the city’s slow free-fall into oblivion. “You like it here? Really? Why?” People often speak of the size and chaos of the city as untenable, as impossible to really live in, the city as lost, beyond help, beyond repair, to be temporarily tolerated at best.

The easy shot would be to describe Istanbul and Vancouver as two cities going in opposite directions, one heading down, the other on its way up, waving as they go by. There’s something there, and it does feel like Istanbul’s fatalistic sense of decline is mirrored by Vancouver’s ebullience, punctuated by British Columbia’s cringe-worthy current marketing tagline: The Best Place on Earth.

But I’m not really sure that’s it, or maybe that’s just a part of it. That whole construct seems a little too facile, a little too temporary to sit with entirely. There is a lot to suggest that Vancouver is not really a city in the historical sense, but more akin to a boom-town, and comparing its fortunes to Istanbul is like comparing Las Vegas to London: right now, in any case, they are just two different categories of settlement.

Istanbul can be seen as an urban flow—it has been the capital of three different empires: Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman, and has a collective urban memory measured in millennia—while it remains questionable if Vancouver is really even a real city yet. In all honesty, Vancouver is still a small city of a half million people with another one and a half million sprawled out in suburbs vomiting off to the east. It’s definitely getting closer, but what will it take to make a real city here?

And what is “real” city anyway? I think many of us have a visceral idea: a liveliness, a vitality, a concentrated structural and cultural environment, a density. I asked Frances Bula, who writes about urban affairs for pretty much everywhere, what she thought about the question:

It is true that when I come back to Vancouver from New York or Toronto it often feels like Winnipeg in the middle of winter here. There’s just so little action. It’s not just the size of the city, it’s the volume and diversity of things to do and look at—it’s really diversity that a dense population brings. You have to have a critical mass of people living within a defined boundary. You just can’t have a real city without density. While the downtown is very dense, single-family dwellings dominate the city and we have to find ways to build the liveliness and bustle of downtown in other neighborhoods. There is that feel in some places, but we really need a lot more. It doesn’t have to be miles and miles of super-density, but concentrated high streets, pockets of real density, to focus neighborhoods.

That density or lack thereof has long been the subject of much hand-wringing in Vancouver, but over the last couple of decades that has changed dramatically, at least in the downtown core, and the city has been able to densify downtown in a reversal that has caught the eye of urbanists and planners across the globe.

Did you know that Vancouver has more high-rises per capita than any other city in North America? It’s true, although those skyscrapers don’t really scrape all that much of the sky. The city is considered to have a “mid-rise” skyline and most big buildings in the downtown only have a height of around 90 to 130 meters (295 to 426 feet), with the highest being the newly complete Shangri-La²¹ at 197 meters (646 feet) tall or sixty-one stories.

In large part, these subdued heights are a product of strict guidelines that maintain view corridors in the downtown. The height limits are part of trying to protect sightlines both within and below the high-rises of the surrounding ocean and mountains. Those guidelines allow special sites to exceed the guidelines to add some diversity, but the desire to maintain the views has kept the heights down, even while the actual buildings multiply like bunnies.

That skyline—and the residential density it has ushered in—is the subject of much admiration and what many observers point to first when they talk about why Vancouver is “getting it right.” Vancouver’s now-celebrated urbanism is built around the idea of convincing people to move in from the suburbs, to stop sprawling, and to come live on the downtown peninsula. The strategy is called Living First and is perhaps the signature accomplishment of Vancouver’s contemporary urbanism; it stimulated one local journalist enough to call it, “the greatest urban experiment to take place in Canada in half a century, one that has made Vancouver the envy of city planners across the continent.”²²

The towers that all those people are moving into overwhelmingly take a very particular form: tall, slim, view-preserving glass towers sitting on a podium of two or three-story townhouses that are specifically designed to be welcoming to families. This form, with slight variations, dominates huge swaths of the city core. “There were exactly six of them in downtown Vancouver a decade ago; now there are more than one thousand.”²³

They may be popular but they are not pretty: wall after wall of sterile, glassy towers with upscale, faux-brick townhouse bases on the bottom. Those towers may not be much to look at, but they are a very convenient model for mass replication that keeps everybody happy. The small footprints and number of units ensure high profit margins, the townhouses lure some families back downtown, and the whole thing is designed for density. Very tidy.

It is definitely true that Vancouver’s downtown density has jumped up remarkably, to the point where it is often claimed to have the highest downtown residential density in North America, including Manhattan. That may be a little deceiving, however, because Vancouver’s rate of residential growth is not even keeping pace with the Metro region:

The GVRD [Greater Vancouver Regional District, now Metro] grew by about 13 percent over the past decade, while the city of Vancouver grew by about 8 percent, which means that Vancouver is actually losing its share of growth within the region. Or put another way, the surrounding suburban municipalities are growing faster than Vancouver is.²⁴

But it is true that while the suburbs are booming, the downtown has also been taking on huge volumes of people, which is a major achievement when compared to virtually any other North American city. And the goal of building density in the inner city is a worthy one.

Living First was largely conceived and popularized by Vancouver’s former co-director of planning, Larry Beasley, and his staff who were looking to create “an urban lifestyle that will bring people back from their 50-year romance with the suburbs.”²⁵ The idea is to radically encourage downtown density by altering zoning laws to support condominiums, encourage pedestrian and bike access over automobiles, and to leverage developers for public amenities and subsidized housing in exchange for sweet profit margins.

This collaborative process—offering developers density in return for public amenities and good streetscape design—would become Vancouver’s modus operandi for the entire city core. In 1991, Beasley’s department rezoned much of the commercial core to allow residential development where once only offices, small commercial, small industrial and parking lots were permitted. This “Living First” strategy gave the core a shot of adrenaline. Developers snapped up empty lots, underutilized office buildings and warehouses, converting them all to condos and other residential units. Real estate became a high-energy sport.²⁶

Larry described his thinking like this, after I asked him whether or not Living First and the condo-ization of the downtown core has created a developer’s profit-friendly city where the grail of density has exacerbated a housing crisis and urban inequality:

It’s a peculiar proposition to wish that developers would make less money. That’s like wishing I was the handsomest man in the world or something. We can wish it, but it’s not going to happen. I’ve taken another view. I’m perfectly happy to see developers make money. What I want to see is a significant amount of that created wealth come back to the commonwealth of the city.

So, there is a quid pro quo in this city which is relatively unique in North America saying that it is a privilege to develop in our city and you will make contributions back. Real contributions. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contributions. And this is not just amenities. A lot of the housing we have built for low-income people has been built through leveraging wealth and land from developers. It’s not just about creating a park—that’s part of it because our theory is that the only way you’re going to entice people to come back to the city and create the vitality you’re talking about is to give them something they’re going to want to come to in a free society.

We live in a system where profitability is a driver, and whether I like that or not is beside the point. My point is to say, “let’s take some of that profitability back.” But don’t kid yourself. In Istanbul, in Paris, in Shanghai, in Taiwan, in every city in the world, developers are getting rich. They are exploiting every city in the world, and they are exploiting Istanbul just as much as here. The difference is: in Istanbul they are not putting a nickel back in. They’re telling the government: you manage it. Which is why cities like Istanbul are falling apart, because it’s impossible to manage.

So, don’t look at the choreography of the street as an indication of what’s going on. You have to look at the flow of money. The flow of power. Taking the drive for profit and using it to benefit the commonwealth is just not being done in most cities, and it is one way to augment the very limited sources of funds that cities have.

It’s an interesting answer and Beasley is articulating an innovative approach that in many ways has clearly worked: Vancouver’s downtown has changed radically over the past twenty years and is alive now in ways that it most certainly was not in even recent history. More than 20 percent²⁷ of Vancouver residents now live downtown,²⁸ the core is full of people with cash to burn, construction is seemingly non-stop, and it has a very peculiar but vibrant feel.

The strategy is widely viewed as brilliant and its successes are being replicated in many spots around the globe, in no small part due to Beasley’s energetic proselytizing. But it so happens that Vancouver and Living First are turning the traditional idea of a downtown on its head, with some interesting repercussions. Most obviously, while condo building continues full-force, commercial development lags far behind. The number of jobs downtown has remained stagnant, and there are very few office or commercial projects being built. The logic is obvious: a developer can turn five times the profit on a condo as compared to an office tower, and the buyers just keep coming, so why the hell would they ever want to stop?

But more (perhaps) unintended consequences are emerging. Right now, Vancouver has a downtown that is increasingly looking and feeling like a resort town, full of tourists, language students, occasional residents, and those visiting their investment properties. And, in an ironic twist, Vancouver now has a huge number of reverse-commuters, people who live in the city but work in the burbs, and it doesn’t appear that trend will slow any time soon. As Trevor Boddy wrote in 2005:

We may once have dreamed of taking our place in the list of the world’s great cities, but unless something is changed soon, to preserve and promote our downtown as a place to work, we will instead join Waikiki and Miami Beach on the list of resorts filling up with aging baby boomers lounging around their over-priced condos.²⁹

The core of the city is dominated (and increasingly so) by condos, a huge number of them owned by people who do not live here full-time. Property has become another commodity for the global elite to invest in, to buy and flip, especially in hot cities like Vancouver and Dubai and Shanghai, and even in new, recessionary economic climates property is the investment that people tend to cling to. As David Beers, editor of the Tyee said to me:

I totally buy the argument that we badly need density here, but how do you get density without a high-priced sterility? And that’s what’s been built here. I don’t mind that there are some parts of town like that, but I really don’t want every part of town like that. The needle-like towers are able to command a high price because of the view, which then turns them into a global commodity. Now you’ve got to compete with everyone in the globe who wants a view of the North Shore Mountains.

Thus, people with little attachment and few civic bonds to the city increasingly populate downtown: global consumers rather than citizens who care about the place as more than an investment or temporary stopping point. Along with that development pattern comes an avalanche of low-paid service economy jobs to service that economy: retail, restaurant, security, and tourism jobs with wages that ensure that workers cannot live near where they work. This, as every Vancouverite knows, is perhaps the biggest danger to the city: the incredible housing prices and lack of reasonably priced shelter, sending everyday people scattering. And what happens when oil prices start to rise, air travel drops, and the tourists and condo buyers start to stay home? As I am writing this in mid-2009, the ripple effects from 2008 are still being felt across the globe as luxury condo prices collapse. No one really cares much if a few yuppies lose their shirts, but what happens to the rest of us if/when it turns into a full-fledged rout?

The repercussive effects of the Living First strategy are hardly obscure; they are being debated long and hard, and as a model it has much going for it. Part of the root issue of its development is the urgent desire to see Vancouver remade as a “real” city. What is being contested is Vancouver’s inherent “city-ness”: are we or aren’t we? And what are we? There is a palpable desire for this to be a great city, a world-class city, and not just among civic boosters or tourism hacks, but also from everyone who likes urbanity.

And that is really what underlies much of the conversation—what makes for a great city? The Living First strategy replicates the cockiness of Vancouver’s current mood: we want a real city, and we can make it happen right now with energy and money. It is a boomtownish, reverse mirror image of Istanbul’s huzun. As Larry Beasley has said over and over, “You don’t have to wait for lightning to strike. You can choreograph this.”³⁰ I asked Larry about Seaside, the infamous and tepidly bourgeois enclave that is often called the first New Urbanist development. I wanted to press him on the idea that vitality can be choreographed.

The problem with places like Seaside is that the formulas are all wrong—it’s a middle-class housing formula. What we’ve been trying to do—and I’m not saying we’ve successfully done it—is get the formula for urbanism right. Urbanism is about mixed use, it’s about lining the streets with activities that generate activity, it’s about making people feel safe and comfortable in the public realm.

I use the word choreography because unfortunately, leaving the three-dimensional reality of the city to the spontaneous development impetus of the development community, under the conditions we have now, leads to a removal of the public realm. We have one group of people creating the private realm and one group creating the public realm, and the ones building the private realm are those with the wealth. And the people creating the public realm never have what’s needed to do the job.

Take some of the places you and I love. Look back in history and you’ll almost always find that there was one creator. There wasn’t the division between the public and the private realms; there was a kind of holistic attitude that brought attention to the public interest.

Now, you gotta do this. I was in Sacramento, outside the tiny, struggling downtown and in the absolute effect of private development forces in control. There is no public realm; there is no commonwealth, there is nothing. It is austere to the point of anguish. And it is unbelievably banal. That’s what modern society gives you. That’s what the production process gives you because of where wealth is and where power is.

That’s what you’ve got to realize. You’ve got to look at a city like Vancouver in contrast to that and ask yourself are we putting the mechanisms in place to lead us where we want to go? And I will tell you that takes great choreography. That took me and all my staff working every single day on project after project, trying to bring as many people as possible to the table.

In some ways, it is a brilliant response to a city metastasizing in leaps and bounds in population and investment, and it’s a hell of a lot better than letting the city sprawl even more. The city and Beasley have proved that it is possible, given certain conditions, to induce a lot of people to move downtown, something that a decade ago few people in North America thought possible. But is that enough? Is density the holy grail of contemporary urbanity?

The simple (and highly qualified) answer is pretty much “yes.” The basic formulation suggests that if you can densify, all good things will flow from there: There will be enough population to support public transport, more people will walk and fewer will drive, you’ll get concentrations of services, and urbanity will flourish. If you give people reason to spend time on the street they will. Like Witold Rybczynski, who is an architect, urbanist, and now University of Pennsylvania professor, once said to me, “it has to do with density, above all. This puts a lot of people together in one place, keeps walking distance relatively small, and makes walking interesting.”

It’s not just simple consumer-choice logic; there are all kinds of advantages to densification that may appear ancillary but are really part of the package. More than anything, living compactly necessarily reduces everyone’s footprint. Density means fewer resources required across the board: sharing is caring. In a great essay published in 2004 in the New Yorker, David Owen described living in a “utopian environmentalist community” where he and his wife lived austerely, without a lawn, shopped on foot, and bought few consumer items, in part because they had nowhere to store stuff. The community was Manhattan.

Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two percent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use….

The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings.³¹

There’s not really any way to think about our urban future, either in global or Vancouver-specific terms, without recognizing the need for density. If all of twentieth century, Western urban planning can be thought of as attempt to disperse and decongest Dickensian, Victorian cities, then twenty-first century city building has to be about the reverse: getting people to live more compactly, inducing them to stop sprawling and to stop gobbling up land with highways, 4,500 square foot houses, cul-de-sacs, and their freaking lawns.

The ecological imperative is the stick, but the carrot is cities that are potentially alive, vibrant, complex, and cosmopolitan. That carrot is not a given, however: Blind densification can also mean brutal squadrons of apartment blocks, faceless crowding, or sterile rows of glassy towers. Make no mistake; densification is going to mean lots of people giving a certain amount up—space, lawns that look like putting greens, cars, purchasing power, and lots else—but boo-fucking-hoo. Frankly, density is necessarily the future of this city, and every other one too.

I know that’s a little rough, and probably should be tempered a little. I’m not talking about turning the whole city into Manhattan (as if that were even imaginable within the next century or two). It’s tempting to brand everyone who resists density as NIMBY

BANANAs,³² quasi-pastoralist relics, or just plain selfish,³³ but that’s no good. It is important to understand that density has to be nuanced, that there has to be a wide range of different kinds of spaces in the city, some more dense than others, and that not everyone wants urban vitality and bustle and liveliness. As Frances cautioned me:

Certain people, from both sides of town and all kinds of political persuasions, really oppose density: they want a quieter, less-busy place. This has always been a growing city and will continue to be, so you’d think that people would recognize that and ask, “how should we deal with it, how do we want to shape that?” rather than opposing growth and density itself. Lots of people really love that liveliness, but others really don’t. They find the crowded urban life depressing and scary. We need to find a way to accommodate those people too.

And you need the variation of densities. You need places where you can go to get respite from the noise. You need quiet streets, places that feel restful. Even in New York the traffic is all on the arterials and some of the side streets are very quiet—and that’s important. We want liveliness, but we can’t be assaulted by the city. Even in Shanghai, which is incredibly dense, there are streets and areas that are very quiet. When I lived there, I would ride my bike downtown through some really peaceful neighborhoods with beautiful old houses and it was a restful commute.

And she’s right, of course. The city has to contain all kinds of different spaces if all kinds of people are going to thrive here. All of us want (need) quiet places without traffic, without people rushing around, and protecting those spaces is contingent on our willingness to densify, especially high streets. But, sort of counter-intuitively, it is sprawl, both within and beyond city limits that destroys the capacity to retain those peaceful areas. Endless single-family housing sprawl through the city brings traffic into every nook and cranny, just as suburban sprawl erodes our agricultural base and the character of rural areas.

When Larry talks about ending people’s romance with the burbs, I’m right there and I applaud (for real) the significant progress this city has made in densifying. But there is a sterile, manufactured quality to the density that I am calling into question, and I think it reflects the quality of civic engagement and participation that Vancouver has nurtured.

Part of what I am poking at is the actual form. Glassy towers are just not a big part of my vision of convivial city life, for all the obvious reasons, some of them aesthetic, some practical. And they are not at all necessary for a dense city. As James Howard Kunstler said to me once: “Skyscrapers don’t equal rich cosmopolitan life—Paris has lowish rise, but is very dense.” Towers give you a peculiar kind of density, and not necessarily a convivial one. Often densely vibrant neighborhoods are entirely three or four stories high—think of Brooklyn or London, for example. There are almost no skyscrapers in Istanbul and it is as dense as I can imagine a city ever wanting to be.

As Berelowitz wrote: “Architecturally speaking, it [the podium tower] is a one-liner…. I am more interested in how we use the city than necessarily how it looks. It’s packaged: look but don’t touch. It’s very much about a sanitized vision of the city.”³⁴ Beasley doesn’t dispute this per se, but argues that the vitality will come in time.

This is something I have struggled with all my career. I travel all the time, I am always visiting new cities, and I love their public spaces, filled with people—and I often asked myself why aren’t the public spaces here like that? And you’ve got to realize that part of this is a difference in culture.

In northern cities all over the world, the public realm is not where you hang out because of the weather, and in this culture people are often socializing in other circumstances, not the street or plazas. What I’ve tried to do, contrary to what is happening in many North American cities, is to design the public realm so it can be repopulated, it can be rediscovered. My hope is, and I don’t think this will happen overnight but over generations, that Vancouverites will rediscover how to use the space.

I always tell the story of False Creek North—we designed the whole thing with the Seawall, parks; everything linked and five thousand people move in and there’s no one on the street. And I go, “My God. What have I done wrong? There’s no one on the street. I want street life!” Then a little food store opens and all of a sudden there’s people all over the street because up until then people had been taking the elevator down from their tower, getting in their car, driving to the suburbs where they used to shop, driving back to their tower. They were never outside. But that all changed as soon as local establishments opened.

Right now, one of the criticisms of this city, and it’s a good criticism that I buy and one I don’t feel anxious about, is that it does feel packaged. But you know what? If you were in eighteenth century London, it would feel packaged too. When something is new, it’s just been created—it feels new. And that’s true of all cities, and then they get repopulated. The spaces that you and I love, say in Delhi, they were initially designed as great, government image-making things, and they weren’t populated. But human beings have this way of learning how to use cities and how to take advantage of what’s there. But our job is to make the infrastructure of the commonwealth of the city. In North America, that’s a dead art.

It’s more useful if the question “Is it all about density?” is a little more nuanced. While a more compact city is critical, there are a lot of different kinds of densification, and the nature of that density is contingent on the processes that get us there. In Vancouver, we’re getting a very particular kind of density: a developer-friendly, instant-mix version that is injecting huge swaths of the city with a concentrated, pre-planned density in an incredibly short period of time.

But density without community just sucks. Thousands and thousands of people jammed into faceless little boxes, trying to pay off exorbitant mortgages is not much of a city. The ostensibly public spaces in the new downtown are the opposite of common—they are filled with people rushing around through highly-manicured landscapes without a pause—mirroring the frenzied construction all around them. We really should be aspiring to density, but too often what we’re getting here is a rendition that threatens to undermine the virtues that theoretically inhere in dense urban life.

Interestingly, many of the same things were being said twenty years ago about the West End. Critics claimed that it was being built too fast, that people were being herded into high-rise cages, that it was a faceless landscape of towers. But now, the West End proper is a terrific neighborhood in all kinds of ways, full of vibrant city life. Maybe in twenty years my critiques will seem equally unfounded.

Maybe. But I think there is something different going on right now. First, the building frenzy going on presently is on a whole other level of magnitude. The West End was built fast, but nothing like this. Second, the West End really has a remarkable diversity of building forms. The other day, Selena and I spent an afternoon walking around the neighborhood and there is really a surprising lack of repetition; there are huge numbers of buildings and they are mixed-up very nicely. And the scale is something else. The West End is one whole order of magnitude lower than what is being built now and is mostly made up of five and six story blocks, and that matters. Past a certain height, you necessarily lose conviviality and neighborliness, especially when it is so choreographed.

More than anything, though, density has to unfold, not sprout in a just-add-water boom. Christopher Alexander has often written about the need for incrementalism or accretive growth. His first rule of city building in A New Theory of Urban Design is: “Piecemeal growth as a necessary condition to wholeness.” It’s a principle that’s getting its ass kicked here. It’s possible that this is just the first blast to kick-start a new era of density, perhaps in time this will all settle down. It’s not the speed per se that I am objecting to here, but rather the process of growth that is reflected on the street.

It’s something that Vancouver environmental designer Erick Villagomez echoed when I asked about his thoughts on density:

We need more nuance about the implications of densification. This city was founded by developers and that has remained the core of the city. Obviously developers love density—it makes them a lot of money, as we’ve seen downtown—and although the city has handled it in a relatively decent way in terms of urban design, our densification has been pretty simplistic. Yes, density is important toward reducing our ecological footprint and creating vitality, but it can’t be that alone. If we are going to densify sustainably we have to connect it to many other factors.

Coming from Toronto, it’s incredible how uptight this city is. If you are going to densify toward an urban culture you have to have more faith in people. We have to look closely at the pockets of the city where density and vibrancy co-exit and examine how they thrive. I’m a big proponent of a more traditional city-building approach that looks closely at smaller spaces, of enlivening specific spaces, building from the bottom up, rather than these large scale “revitalizations.” In the bureaucratic management of a large city we’ve lost a lot. Vancouver has always been a top-down city: we need to get to a grassroots, bottom-up style of small-scale local transformations that, in aggregate, will create a better public realm.

An excellent example that Erick uses is a laneway on Commercial Drive that the Vancouver Urban Design Forum worked on. Looking at the hidden value of residual spaces throughout the city and using donated materials and local labor, they changed a thin, half-block stretch of unkempt alley into a lovely little public place through simple means. They replaced the beat-up asphalt with a strip of grass bordered by two permeable paved driving edges and a local community group painted murals on the walls enclosing the space. It is a humble adjustment, but one which has changed that alley.

Predictably, the city fought them on it and asked that it be removed within days of its creation. Local people mobilized, backed them off, and that now-grassy lane remains a small, lovely example of two things: the city’s signature intransigence, and people’s capacity to build a city. It’s not a huge deal, but it is precisely what Villagomez and Alexander point to: a grassroots unfolding of the city, small piece by small piece.

The depth, diversity, and vitality of a city are contingent on its public space and common places: it is where we encounter strangers, debate, the unexpected, and the need for civic engagement. Parks, museums, playgrounds, sidewalks, city squares, outdoor cafes, libraries, markets, sports events, bars, bike paths, theaters: it is what is best about every city, and what makes urban life worthwhile.

More than that, though, the health of public space is closely tied to the health of democratic life: they require one another. A democratic culture requires citizens engaged in dialogue, exposed to new ideas, interacting with people not like them, and confronted by others. That much is obvious. But the relationship is not that simple—you cannot just provide public spaces and boom, you get democracy, nor is it true to say that if you have more democratic discourse you’ll necessarily get more common places. It is closer to the truth to say that there are many different kinds and shades of public space and they inform the kind of political life that exists. We have to look at public space and ask the same questions we would ask of politics: who participates, what kind of activity is encouraged, is it equitably and equally distributed, are users in control?

Istanbul is sometimes described as one of the world’s great cities and it is obvious right away what a densely public place it is. People are everywhere: selling stuff, talking, smoking, taking the ferries, drinking tea, fishing, and walking around. And most of the activity takes place in unofficial rhythms and colonizes space intended for something else: impromptu cafes on street corners, simit sellers in every alley, tea vendors on the sidewalk, fishing off the Galata Bridge.

But let’s not get too romantic here. Part of the reason the streets of Istanbul are full of people is that lots of them have nowhere else to go. People are selling shit in every nook and cranny of the city because they are desperate for some cash. All those guys fishing on the bridge might make a great photo, but many of them are trying to get dinner. It’s important not to aestheticize or exoticize people’s harsh lives—all that vitality is probably a lot more enjoyable for a visitor.

But there are also lots of different kinds of poverty. Who’s richer: the guy fishing on the bridge, smoking with his buddies, and walking home through Beyoglu to his extended family, or the guy who leaves his cubicle, jockeys his car onto the highway, stops at Superstore, buys a bunch of food, and hustles back to his suburban home to eat in front of the TV? There’s lots unfair with that comparison, but the core of it is salient. The point is not to blindly replicate the dense public vitality of other cities, but to be able to recognize it, not as a consumer good but as an expression of something deeper.

Public life in Istanbul is a total mess—and beautifully so. Everyone I know there goes out constantly, almost every night, to drink tea or beer, shop, visit, do business, or just chill out. Public life happens everywhere. Some of it is clearly planned in the ways that I expect, but often it is in an apartment-turned-bar, or at a teahouse set up with some folding chairs in an alley, or a political club on the top floor of a housing block, or a café under a bridge. It is an ethic reflected in the traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, which is predictably nuts and turns almost everywhere into fair game.

The awkwardness of Vancouver’s public spaces, their regulated, organized, and planned character is so evident when you come back from Istanbul (or frankly almost any city outside North America). Our public realm seems to have an antiseptic quality and the only places where a healthy mess seems evident, even vestigially, is in immigrant neighborhoods like Commercial Drive, Chinatown, or Little India.

It’s a tendency that Living First is exacerbating right now. One of the key platforms of the strategy is to extract commitments from developers to include public spaces when they build. It’s the least they can ask for in return for a virtual guarantee of windfall condo profits. Throughout downtown there are little parks, playgrounds, seating areas, mini-squares and proto-promenades that have been built as a kind of graft to the city. Many of them are nice enough, but like so much of the rest of Vancouver’s public realm, they taste pre-packaged, and are about as healthy as twenty-six-cent Ramen packs. And of course they tend to be under-used, or superficially used, because they didn’t emerge from any kind of community need or local desire—they are just one more hoop for developers to jump through in return for those sweet views.

As Villagomez pointed out, one of the reasons much of downtown’s new public spaces are mostly empty is that they are often hidden from whatever sun might be out, left in perpetual shade throughout the year. “More sensitive planning may have created a more varied built form that ensured public spaces receive the most sunlight (a key attribute of successful public spaces) throughout the day as possible. It seems the city has attempted to push all public spaces to the outer edges—especially the seawall—and away from all the real action.”

It is difficult to resist reading Living First in straight-up Marxist terms: as an amelioratory governmental response to a crisis of capital.³⁵ Put less pompously, Vancouver has given the development business a near-free reign here as a way of covering up for the lack of other vitality and activity. The new planning and regulatory efforts have allowed new concentrations of capital and profit generation to emerge while designing in enough social provisions that citizens will accept (and possibly even welcome) the massive profits being reaped by elite developers. That’s certainly part of the picture, but there’s more color and nuance to be added in, more than simple capital-labor contestation. There is a shared cultural response to the challenge and value of public space, and in some ways Living First has morphed into another subtle variant on enclosure, delicately displacing the power of public space into private hands.

All too often, and explicitly in Living First dogma, the creation of new public spaces is being driven by developers working in “partnership” with the planning department, which might explain why so much of the space in this city feels hollow and over-planned. The instrumentalization of public space is antagonistic to non-managed, non-official uses of urban territory: planners want the spaces they design to be used in the ways they have imagined. But a democratic culture relies on non-commodified, genuinely common places. As Lance Berelowitz writes:

A society that allows its true public spaces to be turned into benign venues of consumption and leisure … is in danger of losing the will and the ability to appropriate those spaces as theatres for vital, legitimate political expression. And the role of public space in the metropolitan city’s history is essential to the democratic impulse…. Every society and every city needs its public spaces for the exercise of democracy.³⁶

This speaks to the fundamental difference between public spaces and common places, and this is one of the core themes of this book: how can a city, this city, become a city of common places. Public space, and lots of it, is crucial but we have to realize that we need more than that. People move through public space—but common space is where they stop, what they learn to inhabit, and make their own.

The re-energizing of downtown with residents, pedestrians, and bikes and the commitment to public space is critical, but there’s just no way to master-plan a great city nor can you make it happen just by throwing money at it. But you can prevent one from emerging by insisting on instrumentalizing public spaces and marionetting their uses.

Great cities are built bit by enigmatic bit by a huge number of actors, not by planners or developers, whatever they might want to believe. Great cities have to be inherently democratic projects built in ways that can never be planned or predicted, as products of a vibrant everyday life. I frankly really like and respect Beasley, and think Living First has done plenty of good. As much success as Larry and his colleagues have had, and it is real success, there is a threshold of control that is very easy to cross and in many cases I think this city has leapt it. The contemporary rendition of urban growth is being played out a little differently here in Vancouver, but massive capital accumulation is hardly fettered, it’s just being asked to kick a little into the kitty.