There’s been a lot of talk in these parts about how damaging and disastrous the Olympics are shaping up to be. Most of this talk seems to really be centred on the immediate problems of traffic, road closures, security threats (real and imagined), cost, and so on.  Holding the Olympics here required us to make a deal with an organization who’s ideas about democaracy and civic participation are, to be polite, considerably different than our own. I think the only way to tell whether the Olympics will really be worth it is to look at the whole idea of this kind of big event and what we can get out of it in the long term.

I grew up here in Vancouver before Expo 86 and I’ve learned some things about our economy, urban culture, and civic social life since then and how they differ between the late 70’s/early 80’s and now.
Vancouver was a very provincial city well into the 1980’s. Historically, the wealth we created was sent away in the form of profits for outside interests who controlled our economy. These interests were sometimes European but usually from Montreal and Toronto. You can contrast this with Chicago. Chicago is not much older than Vancouver but it was much more the centre of its own economy and therefore the wealth generated there stayed there. If you ever travel to Chicago, it shows. The art and architecture are both examples of a city that was able to, to some extent set the terms for its own future.

Vancouver culture and social life was a curious mix of old time pioneer excess and the constricted mores of the Presbetyrians who ran the place for most of the 20th century. While we had some successful cultural phases (mid-century modern architecture and late 70’s punk are two that come to mind), none of them were enough to create our own urban culture or change our economic or cultural position within Canada.

After Expo 86 we began to see ourselves as a post-industrial metropolis and we had some ‘world-city’ currency to capitalize on it. Although some of our most significant land and housing development since then has been carried out by national and international development countries, we’ve been able to dictate, at least to some extent, the form of that development in a way that helps us achieve some of the goals we’ve set for ourselves. “World city” is a misunderstood term but there is a reasonable stable academic understanding of it. By most measures, Vancouver is a 3rd tier world city. We’ll never be New York or Tokyo (1st tier) or even as important as Toronto (2nd) but expo 86 allowed us to be visible to others around the world on our own terms, not based on what Upper Canada thought we should be or be seen as.

Big events let us create an image of ourselves that we can purvey to outsiders. We can use a big event to define ourselves to the rest of the world. Image and perception are, in some ways, quite important. They are a way to tell people around the world what we think and what we stand for. These messages are not short term but are something we define over longer periods of time as we mature. These are not necessarily commercial messages, either. Both the short-term irritation of the Olympics (and having to deal with the authoritarian IOC) and the mid-term hassle of financing the Olympics (assuming the doom & gloom debt predictions are true) could well be worth the cost if we are able to use the attention and opportunity of this event to continue to build our own urban culture and economy in a way that we think works best for us.

This opportunity to communicate what we think our city is to the rest of the world is critical to Vancouver because we can not rely on our own nation to communicate our message our way. Essentialy, we never get an even break from our nation or the cultural & economic “empire” we live in if we rely on them to communicate to the world about us. The message will always be delivered on their terms and from their perspective. Canada’s messages to the world are intrinsically linked to Toronto’s vision of itself as Canada’s Primate City and any message they send about the rest of the country is conflicted by that vision. In addition, we are, an odd outpost on the edge of the American cultural and economic “empire” and their messages about us continually seem to reflect that.

Even the original history of British Columbia and Vancouver Island reflects this conflicted and inaccurate National imagery. The Hudson Bay Company (the original colonizer of Vancouver Island), under the Governorship of James Douglas was a surprisingly progressive entity that seemed to respect and, in some ways, promote the diversity of the early inhabitants (both colonial and native). This history is nothing like that of the colonialists who took over central and eastern canada and yet “national” histories of British Columbia do not seem to understand or convey this fact.

One obvious example of what can be acheived when we are able to disseminate our image of ourselves to the world is the ‘Vancouver model” of urban development which was the result of the aforementioned land and housing development carried out by international companies who were willing to adhere to, at the time, unique requirements for urban development in North America.

In the future, we may look at the current campaign to make Vancouver the “Greenest City” as another example of this successful city-building. Only time will tell if this will have the same impact as “Vancouverism” or whether it will be something else that comes along in the next few years.

There is one last, very important, reason that we need a big event to help us communicate with the world. Our “Vancouver Experiment” in urban development isn’t finished and we need continue to travel our own path to solve the remaining problems.

The basic North American land-development model is based on cheap land and a low overall metropolitan population. The result is a housing system based on single-family dwellings and a transportation system based on the private car. We’re at a mid-point in the evolution to a better urban model which should make us a better city for the future. Our better urban model should help us withstand the end of oil, allow us to build an inclusive, safe, peaceful urban culture, and attract economic activity that lets us pay the bills. But we’re suffering from the fact that we’re not finished. We don’t yet have enough well-functioning urban neighbourhoods so housing is way too expensive. We aren’t the most expensive city in the continent but our current housing stock isn’t sufficient with these current land values. We need to continue to “urbanize” our inner suburbs (which includes much of the City of Vancouver) so that there is housing and community for all. Our Metropolitan population itself is now too large for our low overall housing density so our transportation system doesn’t function properly. This is exacerbated by our land characteristics (our buildable land is hemmed-in by water, mountains, and the border) so relying on car travel from the suburbs creates too many choke points and the suburban density does not support mass transit.

We have to keep going to make sure that the benefits of ‘Vancouverism’ are available to everyone who’s here and the only way we’ve been able so far to do that is to get our message out to the rest of the world so that we can ensure that our terms of engagement with the rest of the world, whether cultural, economic, or social, are based on our values.

Wow. The Olympics Propaganda war is in full swing.

On one side this: From the Guardian.

And on the other, this : From the NY Times

As I reported last post: I was expecting that I’ll have to eventually get a new phone contract to allow the family the perception that they are in constant (potential) contact with me.

However, I’ve reached a temporary setback.

We have a FIDO “couples” plan. But only one phone on it at the moment because I removed my old phone last summer. But I didn’t change the plan because I wanted be able to add a phone back on to it. And so I called them and asked to do that.

Not so fast. To add a phone to this “existing” couples plan, that has only one phone on it, triggers a new 2-year contract. I’ve been a FIDO customer for 9 years. I don’t owe them any 2-year-contract. Ever again. But, says the customer rep, you can change the existing plan to a “legacy” single-number plan (with no fixed term contract) and add a new no-contract phone (as a separate account, I assume). But then we lose the pooled minutes and the legacy plan has too many minutes on the wrong phone. I told the nice pleasant customer-service rep that if I have to start new plans or new 2-year-contracts it triggers the necessity for me to research the other phone providers (including new ones coming this year) because I can’t assume that what Fido is forcing me to change to would be best for me. She told me I’ll have to do that homework.

Damn. Looks like I’m back to square one. Ever since Rogers bought Fido, my phone company has been an obstacle who acts like they’re out to screw me.

At the end of December I bought a Nokia N810 on Ebay.  Among other things, it’s perfectly set up as a wifi-voip mobile phone. I’m getting used to saying “call me at xxxxxxxx”, then having people say, “oh, you have a new cell phone”, and I say, “it’s not really a phone but you can call me and when I’m in a wifi zone, I’ll call you back.”

Some people are intrigued and ask me more about it, but some people really don’t get it. The whole “not a phone but you can call me” is just too weird, I guess.

Anyway, it’s turning out to be very useful but one of the values of a cell phone (that family can call at any moment and have, in their minds, a reasonable expectation that I’ll answer) is a little bit lost on them. The fact of the matter is, however, that when they phoned while I was on my way home from work I wouldn’t likely hear or be able to reach my phone and it would go to message anyway.

That said, it’s pretty much a given that I’ll get a phone too, at some point in the near future. I’m just hoping not to give out the cell number to anyone but those who really have to use it (re: family).

It’s amazing but little old “ditchmond” actually has real bike lanes with a little curb between the cars and the bikes and a smooth transition from roadway to bike lane and back. this all on their prime street: No. 3 Road. Why couldn’t Vancouver do this on Cambie instead of the minimal painted lanes they just put in?

I’ve been riding transit more than usual this fall and it’s been mostly the “Canada Line” subway from Oakridge to Georgia St. and back with occasional stops at most of the stations along the way. It’s a bit of love/hate thing. They’re “real” metro cars, I suppose. Reasonably comparable to the cars on the new line in Munich, for example. There’s been lots of talk. Everyone says it’s scandalous that the station platforms are too short so they can’t expand but that’s a red herring. Modern train systems can run with very short intervals between trains. That’s how they’ll up the capacity.

No, it’s not the short trains, it’s the crappy, cheap, unfriendly station designs that basically say, “you aren’t worth spending the money on”. Look at this metro station in Lisbon. Now *that* is what metro stations are supposed to look like. Lisbon, in little old poor-cousin-of-Europe Portugal can build grand metro stations that tell the passengers that they’re worth something. Us? No, we get the cheapest possible small cramped station with the least possible exits, several of them with no adequate bus transfer zones and no alternate exits on the other side of the street (even though there are *emergency* exits on the far side, but no exits that people can actually use).

To top it off, translink had the brilliant idea of re-routing the busses from South Delta and White Rock so they dump all their passengers onto the Canada line at rush hour. Brilliant, the service is immediately full without  attracting any new transit riders and no cars have been taken off the street. Thanks, BC Liberals, for ramming this through!

I ain’t no kind of design guru but this wordpress theme is really good:

http://basicmaths.subtraction.com/

Very clean and neat and to the point. Hmmm. Even makes me think I might want to change my themes, almost.

Thanks to Jon for tweeting this.

I just handed back my iphone. It belonged to work and I changed jobs and I don’t get to keep it. So, now I’m without a cell phone for the 1st time in ten years. Will I survive?

I’m not sure. However, when I got the iphone in June I kept my old cell number by porting it to a voip provider who have very cheap, pay-as-you-go rates. This provider has a feature that emails me everytime someone calls and leaves a voice mail and, in fact, the email contains the voicemail as an attachment.

So, I’ve carried a wifi-enabled handheld device for years. In fact, at the moment I’ve just re-commissioned my old Palm Lifedrive and that device can usually connect in a wifi cafe and see the emails. Whether it can listen to the attachments, I’m not sure, but there’s also a voip app for the lifedrive which lets me actally make calls. But at the moment the lifedrive microphone isn’t working well and the audio from my calls is inaudible.

Anyway, there’s more work to do on this front and who knows, if I get this all sorted, maybe I won’t need no stinking cell phone!

We’re not the only ones with problems accommodating bikes on our bridges. Here’s an article from the New York Times illustrating the bridge, bikes and pedestrians problem is pinching the Brooklyn bridge.