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Vancouver
A sentimental education
By Reed Eurchuk
Will candidates change Vision or will Vision change candidates?
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A number of bright, hard working, and (relatively) young civic reformers have thrown their hats into the ring over at Vision Vancouver. One after another, David Eby, Rob Wynen, Aaron Jaspers, and Andrea Reimer, each with a record as a hard worker on social justice issues, have announced their intention to seek nominations under the Vision banner for various positions in the municipal government.
It’s hard to know whether one should be inspired by their earnest intentions or be left breathless by their naivety. Do they really believe that if they happen to win a nomination at Vision, and then go on to get elected, that they will be able to act in ways that directly oppose the livelihood of Vision’s sponsors? If elected, Eby, Reimer and the rest will be sucked into incremental reformism, where every micro-step forward will be trumpeted as a monumental step toward justice and equality.
In general any step towards more equitable distribution of wealth and more security for the majority of people is worthwhile, but reform can also have a negative effect. Sometimes things have to change in small ways in order that the larger system can remain the same. Reform can be significant, but usually reform means small, symbolic gestures that have the effect of strengthening the status quo. So the city demands social amenities from developers, which is good, but this provides cover for larger developments, greater speculation and a new round of windfall profits. It defrays a few costs for the city, but it does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problems of housing costs, housing insecurity and housing-cost induced poverty.
The process where well-intentioned people join corporate funded, bureaucratically-managed political groups leads inevitably to discouragement. Witness the excitement over Barack Obama in the current US election. A lot of people have high hopes pinned to the man, but behind him stands the same old crew that brought the US the 1990s: redistribution of wealth to the wealthy, foreign wars and increasing corporate power. Joining Vision to gain control of or wrest significant reform over development in Vancouver would be like joining the US Army to advocate for an end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Working within these groups leads to cynicism, exhaustion and disenchantment with politics. Like Flaubert’s hapless anti-hero Frederic Moreau, months or years later they will review their progress: “He had knocked on the door of democracy, offering to serve her with his pen, his tongue, his best efforts; everywhere he had been rejected; people mistrusted him; and he had sold off his watch, his library, and his linen.”
The Rebel Brand, or How to be Real, in Vancouver
A recent issue of Shared Vision includes a fawning portrait of potential Vision candidate Andrea Reimer. Apparently Reimer is a “genius.” Reimer has to share some of the blame for the piece. She provided some of the personal details for the article. The mythology of redemption—the girl/boy “who done gone bad” but has returned wiser and mature—is rampant in the media and perhaps especially in Vancouver. A well-known and now deceased head of a local NGO (out of respect and because he can’t defend himself I will not name him), trafficked in the same mythology in the recent past, loudly trumpeting his dissolute life as a youthful drug addict on the Downtown Eastside. The same man gave regular speeches as Christmas approached to the Board of Trade where he’d absolve the consciences on Vancouver’s wealthy by recounting “Tales from the Dark Side,” that is, of the Downtown Eastside. But this man had graduated from UBC and then gone on to work for years in a provincial government position, prior to setting off for a career in NGO land down on the dark side.
Trading on this sort of rhetoric provides some ersatz Vancouver “authenticity”: she/he “has been there, done that”; “walks the walk, talks the talk” etc. Decoded, it allows a person to dissociate him or herself from the power structure that they are now a part of and to portray themselves as an outsider. This is a common political tactic; even John McCain represents himself as a maverick and a rebel. So the aforementioned NGO head could appear to be other than a social welfare functionary, which was what he was. So a politician can wrap him or her self in the rebel brand, appealing to anti-government sentiment.
Nightmare on Granville Street’s “Entertainment” Ghetto
Sometimes the Letters column in the Courier is worth the price of the paper. I hope you saw Jovian Francey’s damning tribute to the City’s successful efforts to create a sterile “entertainment” wasteland on Granville Street downtown. In Francey’s words, the Granville entertainment district “is only entertaining to 20-somethings who like to find themselves adrift in a sea of stumbling testosterone, or those who consider success to be pumping out an astronomical amount of booze.” Hell is a place where one listens to a bar band crank out endless classic rock at loud volumes while one staggers around in an alcohol-induced daze. No wonder the boys end up pounding on each other at the end of the night.
Blame zoning by laws for the nightmare on Granville Street. In his history of Chicago, The Pig and the Skyscraper, Marco D’Eramo characterizes zoning laws as a “rigid division of the various functions of urban life.” He goes on, “Where you live, you don’t work. Where you work, there is no entertainment. Everything attractive about urban life—the overlapping of functions, the fact that workplace, house, restaurants, shops, cafes and cinemas are all adjacent to one another—is categorically denied.” For D’Eramo, “separation of functions established the segregation of social groups . . . because the place where they met marked an urban border that was at the same time a social frontier and a festering wound. Here, in the very fracture of the social order . . . . social disorganization was at its height.” D’Eramo says that zoning “dictates the geography of the city” and he illustrates how zoning functions to protect the property values of the wealthy and to exclude people of colour and the poor. He then quotes the great French sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote that zoning has “effected a veritable political construction of space,” which “favours the construction of homogenous groups on a spatial basis.” Like Granville Street.
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