Book Excerpt: Matt Hern’s Common Ground in a Liquid City
As most of you know, AK has just released a brand-new book by Matt Hern, alternative-education activist extraordinaire (he edited Everywhere All the Time for us a couple years back) and, as it turns out, kick-ass radical urbanist. I’ll admit to being slightly skeptical about what this book could be when Matt first mentioned it, but after reading the first 10 pages, I was hooked, and so was the rest of the collective. Matt’s writing is down-to-earth, funny, and engaging—much like Matt himself, who I got to meet for the first time at last year’s NYC Anarchist Bookfair. I really can’t recommend this book strongly enough.
Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future makes the argument that a sustainable future has to be an urban future—but Matt’s clear about what his version of the urban future looks like: it’s a world in which resources and spaces are shared equitably, where decisions are made collectively by the people they affect, where differences (of culture, of opinion, of age, color, race, gender, and sexual orientation) are celebrated, and where we learn to live with less, and make the most of the space we have. It’s an image of the urban future that’s antithetical to sprawl, to investment opportunities, to McMansions, and to the whims of global capital. It’s about becoming, as Gustavo Esteva puts it in his praise for the book, “a dweller, an inhabitant, a real citizen—not just a resident, a consumer of residence.”
The book takes Vancouver—Matt’s own hometown—as its starting and ending point, but makes frequent stops in a variety of cities across the globe. They’re all fascinating, but one of my favorite chapters has got to be the one on Istanbul and the concept of population density, excerpted below. This was really the chapter that convinced me that we needed to publish this book. This chapter really exemplifies the methodology of the entire book, which is something that I would term “comparative urban analysis,” i.e., taking one city as a jumping off point for an in-depth examination of a different one, usually in a wholly unexpected fashion. So, for example, using the history of Istanbul’s rise to and fall from the seat of power in the Ottoman Empire as a way to broach a conversation about population density in Vancouver. Sound strange? It is. But what’s even stranger? It works. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do this kind of comparative analysis with varying results (frequently bad ones), but Matt really gets it right.
So, read on below, and then head on over to the AK Press store to buy a copy of the book, or join the Friends of AK Press program right now and get Common Ground in a Liquid City in your January shipment of books! And be sure to check out this short article Matt co-penned for ZNet on the impending Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
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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.
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.
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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.
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 yalis 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 boomtown, 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-La 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.”
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.”
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.
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.” 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.
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 percent of Vancouver residents now live downtown, 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.
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?