Vancouver Geomancy

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Something I've been toying with as I wander these streets in July is the idea, as new-agey as it sounds, that the physical environment determines the character of neighbourhoods and regional relationships, and that this is manifested in distinctive patterns of energy. This includes not only the geomorphological processes at work, but also the processes of commerce: the relationships between cargo and consumer; work/home, rich and poor. The processes, both ephemeral and tangible, that shape this little fishing village turned yuppie resort.

How, for example, did Strathcona and the West End succesfully dodge gentrification, while Coal Harbour and Yaletown were consumed almost whole? How is it that the DTES came to be, in all its violent glory, while Kitsilano/Shaugnessy, and Kerrisdale bask in somnambulant bliss? How can we shape these historic, geographic, economic, and cultural forces to create a more livable city?

Of course this idea is nothing new. Feng Shui, as we all must surely know by know, is the reason for example, so many Chinese-Canadians choose to live in Richmond, as they see it as the tail of the dragon, a safe place to live. Dominican and False Dominican alike wandered from door to door in mediaeval Europe. The Situationists International, inspired by the likes of Walter Benjamin and other flaneurs made it political, and scrawled slogans on walls like "To wander is to live", and "The new beauty will be of situtations, proverbial and lived". The Vancouver School of artists became acutely aware of these aforementioned relationships, searching for "difficult beauty" in the city's wide open spaces. Meanwhile, today's digital photographer can find themselves immersed in the urban tapestry, recording every slight twitch of the city's restless legs.

Vancouver is unique in its utopian newness, as forces were at work to shape the city before it even was cleared of timber. Competing landowners wrestled over the direction Vancouver was to develop; a group of Victorians saw eastward expansion to the capital of New Westminster and towards the former proposed site of the CN Terminus in Port Moody, while the CN was given most of the what is now downtown peninsula and West End as a bribe to build the Terminus on the new Granville Townsite. As the book Unfinished Business testifies, "the effect is a persistent and primordial tension between the expanding forms of the built environment and the natural plane of the horizon" that can be deduced from street photography throughout time which in turn "inform our historical understanding of a city's relationship to the frontier, but also allude to the formation of social types and urban perspectives".

My hope is to do something similar to what Jeff Otto O'Brien is doing, but in text form. For example, there is a great walk that runs from Stanley Park, along Coal Harbour, through Gastown, Chinatown, Cracktown, Sportsland (under Georgia Viaduct), Hogans Alley, Prior Street, Strathcona Community Gardens, and finally the railway tracks. You get a real cross section of emotions, if you are open enough, from the chaos of tourist filled Gastown to the utter tranquility of Strathcona. Stay tuned.