"Enmeshed Hybrid City, Vancouver as verb" submitted to ACSA Annual Meeting

excerpt from paper:

I will start this paper by coming clean: I live in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver is a major city within Canada, a minor city within North America, a not-irrelevant city within the West Coast, and a major player in the Pacific Rim. It is a young city that is home to both vibrant communities of immigrants and artists as well as some of the largest real estate developers on the planet. Its downtown has seen a 48% increase of population in the last decade, and approximately one-half of these new homes were built by a single offshore developer.  For this and for many more reasons, Vancouver both fits and defies the description of a ‘metropolitan area’ this paper session seeks to address.  To address the question of the urban value of design I will write from Vancouver; it is a specific place and a thriving city; I believe it has much to offer to the discussion.

This paper seeks to first argue that the notion of urbanity has, like the authors of A Thousand Plateaus, become several.  When we speak of urbanism and the urban condition, we are actually talking about urbanisms and urban conditions. For every Global City there is a Shrinking City; for every new city there is an aging city. Therefore, evidence of civic identity, of experiential and tactile landscapes, and distinct visual identity may come in several forms. What limits our understanding and recognition of the several may be the conventions with which we think city and represent it. The condition of the several also takes place at radically different but embedded scales. This layered, multi-scalar landscape poses a challenge to the representability of the city. In order to recognize the several, we must reconsider the ways in which we perform reconnaissance on the city; this is the first act in any design of value.