Urbanist, eh?

You know, the one thing I had looked forward to was the socially validated title that would have been the reward for the time/effort/money invested in the Masters in Urban Studies. I could have, without any hesitation, called myself an ‘urbanist.’ I would have been the beneficiary of a title; like some wretched newspaper mogul, I could, in effect, buy a title.

But, in the final analysis, I probably fare better than Lord Black of Crossharbour. For one thing, not having a Masters costs way less than a flaky title once reserved for some toadying lick-spittle. My sanity, my money, and my opportunities seem at least as broad without the official title as with. Although I don’t own a tux, unlike Lord Black who owns several I’m sure, and at least one will be in a lovely vertically-oriented black and white striped pattern, I still get invited to fancy places like the Vancouver Club. And, I have not had to sit and watch a roomful of mature adults labour for marks, with a prof who reads other people’s articles as lecture notes. And he read them without any attribution.

Opportunities seem to have multiplied in the last few days. New York is on the agenda for February, and there is an urban education san pareil for those so inclined. Walking from the Empire State Building, to Washington Heights, or Soho to Marcus Garvey Park, exposes any interested observer to an unbelievable range of human experience. The black Bentley silently idling at the curb, the driver’s elegantly gloved hands poised above the door handle, one walks to see sidewalk vendors selling ices, their muscled arms scraping each new sale into a paper cone. The same planet, same city, different worlds.
Remember to look up.

And hope that the lights stay on. In the richest economy in the world, in one of the most populous cities in the country, the rate of power outages is a testament to the greed of unrestrained capitalism. Consolidated Edison is not the least bit worried about delivering electrical power, as a corporation they are solely interested in generating profit, and their shareholders like it that way. Or they like it that way until they are personally affected by the failures caused by shoddy, cost-cutting, maintenance of the power grid.

Ride the subway, talk to people, watch the cops, the drug dealers, the endless (or so it seems to an unarmed Canadian) number of people with guns. Cops, drug dealers, Customs agents, the zillion guys riding around in big, black, SUV’s, all the while protecting somebody really important. I suppose. Private security, public insecurity, all armed and dangerous. Talk to Albert, between pulls on a heavy-handled wine bottle.

All this is ‘being’ an urbanist. In the city that inspired Jane Jacobs I can trace a different path; a path, perhaps, informed by her work. But my own path need not quote Jacobs. I have no need of the re-assurance, or valorization, that referencing her work is supposed to confer on my work. For my work, my life, is not as an academician. My own internal urbanism, much removed I must add from being ‘urbane,’ is founded on a realization of my class consciousness, my intellect, my wide-ranging and eclectic interests.

This non-urbane urbanism draws on hundreds of books on various aspects of ‘the city,’ and all that goes within. It is an urbanism that draws, through good luck, on the opportunity to work with Karen Jamieson on a dance piece. It allows me to work, hopefully, with a wonderful playwright on a theatre piece.

I am free to examine the construction of bridges; they ’show, don’t tell,’ a lot about a city’s history, economics, connectedness with the world, a moment literally frozen in steel. Architecture interests me, and again, I’m free to focus on those very specific aspects that interest, beguile, annoy, frustrate, or alarm. Courthouses, CPTED , the often banal results of City requirements for ‘public amenity’ space in new or re-development all draw my critical attentions. And I can allow those attentions to go wherever I please.

The freedom of working outside the structures imposed by credentialism is already liberating,  and freeing in ways not explicitly anticipated. The freedom, and responsibility, of following my own muse seems somewhat akin to the glamourized ideals of ‘adulthood.’ I have the freedom to act as I please, constrained only by my desire to critically engage other individuals in/with the topics I choose.

Ultimately success is, in some way, marked by my ability to encourage others to to engage with the material I produce. People do not have to agree with what I say, or write, but they have to find the argument engaging enough to be worth the time required to read and reflect on what I have put out. Success is engagement.

If I am correct and people’s willingness to read what I write is a measure of success, then the reader confers the appellation ‘urbanist’ in ways beyond the Academy’s purview. And my ego is just involved enough to enjoy twisting the Academy’s collective nose.

Urbanist, eh?

Autodidacticism

An autodidact is a person self-taught in a field of interest, the field is irrelevant; the training is suspect, and the individual often lives with a continuous low-level anxiety of being ‘found out,’ of being determined to be lacking in some way important to the field of interest. Indeed, Pierre Bourdieu, who I have mentioned in earlier posts, makes this point explicitly in his book ‘Distinction,’ well worth reading. Worth reading even if you don’t like French theorists…

As someone who has spent much of my life as an autodidact Bourdieu’s words struck home, an insight that cut clear of the general level of academic theory that masquerades as knowledge in the academy. The failings of the autodidact are as often failings of omission, rather than commission – of not reading widely enough, of not engaging with critical works in a lively, timely, and active way – and thus, often, only re-affirming the position already established. Sounds very much like pundits, academic or otherwise, on any side of any issue.

But the realities of being an autodidact have been brought home again with my decision to withdraw from the Masters in Urban Studies at SFU. For while the title wouldn’t actually get me a coffee, the theory was that the degree would lend some small legitimacy to my comments on urban affairs in general. No ‘advanced’ degree, no legitimation.

But Jane Jacobs didn’t have an advanced degree. Nor do most politicians. Nor, I suspect, do most small business owners. Eric Hoffer, an influential American philosopher and writer, finished high school. I think. Plato, Socrates, Johnson (as in Boswell’s ‘Life of…”), and I suppose thousands more managed to engage their intellectual faculties to great effect without ever getting a ‘degee’ in general, let alone an advanced degree at a recognized institution.

This is not to say there is no value in the effort expended to gain the degree. What it is meant is that the social value of the degree, the intellectual value of the degree, and the ‘rent’ rendered to gain the degree do not necessarily reflect any broad-based ability to work outside the unbelievably narrow confines  of academic disciplinarity.

Jacobs is like the most widely read urbanist in history. She had an undergraduate degree. Thousands of academics have drawn on her work – they have referenced her in quotes, using her authority to stake knowledge claims for their own work – and they have probably had hundreds of thousands of undergraduates read ‘Death and Life of Great American Cities’ to establish in their students minds not only Jacob’s importance, but their own. How many academics, anywhere, can claim the breadth and depth of importance, that Jacobs achieved by writing a polemic as an interested amateur?

Jacobs was, relative to her time, an autodidact. She had no ‘training’ in urban planning. She had no training in statistics, sociology, anthropology, architecture, traffic, engineering, economics, or any of the other ‘disciplines’ that may have, just maybe, qualified her to take on Robert Moses, and American urban planning in general.

And, yes, I’d like my brain surgeon to have ‘accredited’ training. But I’d also like my fellow road users to have some training – they are far more likely to kill me than any surgeon. I like to know that the pilot in the 747 has some training, though I’d like to think she also has thousands of hours of experience as the ranking officer on the flight deck. And I’m really hoping my electrician is up-to-date on the electrical code. The difference in all these examples is that the training is practical, empirical, hands-on.

I recognize that most of these people can be autodidacts, though it is pretty tough I think to learn to fly the 747 pretty much on one’s own, and I suspect that the social stigma related to being an autodidact is diminished, if not totally removed. I know from personal experience that many people are amazed that I can ‘fix’ stuff, and that is almost entirely self-taught. How many bicycle 3-speed hubs did I have to work through before I felt I could repair virtually any of them, given available parts? But the critical thinking skills necessary for the ‘advanced’ degree are equally necessary to dismantle, diagnose, and re-assemble, virtually anything we try to repair – that’s why we need editors on occasion.

Perhaps the single most important perspective I gained while doing my undergraduate degree was that, in the end, the degree didn’t matter. But I had to have the degree, in hand, in order to have the authority to say so.

And, I think, if Jane Jacobs can do it, if Robert Hughes can do it (with no degree at all), if those thousands of individual, autodidactic, intellectually-minded individuals can do it, so can I.

A very trying day

People are vastly amusing; their foibles, predilections, prejudices, and joys can provide endless fodder for those around them. People is plural, individuals can be equally interesting, though as often as not they may be too close to our own position for comfort. And, when it is our own behaviour that is on display, we are wont to deny the broader experience – I am smarter, stronger, more depressed, angrier, hurt, or joyous than any other person in history.

So this is my look at a very trying day.

It is the beginning of classes for students enrolled in the SFU Masters in Urban Studies this evening. Up until half an hour ago I was scheduled to be there, enrolled in what appears to be an interesting course, taught by a competent professor, and probably sharing the room with equally intelligent students. But I had to make a decision, soon, and I decided that I was no longer going to be there this evening.

There are multiple, plausible, reasons for leaving. But I am reminded of a comment by a friend of my uncle’s, who served as a police officer in Vancouver for nearly a decade if my memory serves. When he decided to quit, and as I recall, he had damn good reason to quit, people he knew all wanted to know ‘why are you quitting?’ He was annoyed because no one asked him why he started. And my reasons for starting were at least as interesting as my reasons for quitting.

Once upon a time a Bachelor’s degree was virtually a guarantee of a ‘good’ job, one that probably included the corner office, a secretary (paid half as much, for twice as much work), and a level of cultural capital that made the effort worthwhile. All this was still true even in the early 1970s, though with the expansion of the ‘educated class,’ the writing was on the wall.

With thousands of newly minted BAs in the workforce, inflation set in, and soon enough a Masters was taking the social and workplace role once held by the baccalaureate. A perfect example of this is the level of qualification held by college instructors. When I started at Langara Community College in January 2000, I was exceptionally fortunate to have, as an instructor, Cynthia Flood. She held a BA, had started teaching sometime in the Dark Ages (probably the early or mid 1970s), and if my experience was indicative, was an excellent instructor.

Today’s new hires at Langara, who still teach the same stuff (essentially first and second year ‘transferable credits’), appear to all have PhDs. The shiny new PhDs are still teaching the same subjects, the same books, to the same students. But with so many PhDs in the job market, why hire someone who ‘only’ has an MA? Inflation hits far more in academia than mere marks.

After Humanities 101, written about elsewhere, I wanted a BA. I wanted to prove that I was not only intellectually capable, but that I could still focus on something long enough to see it to fruition, something that with depression was becoming a less, and less, familiar experience. And I did finish. Not on the ‘Dean’s List’ by any stretch, but missing the ‘first class average’ (80% if memory serves) by about one measly percent. And, unlike those students I knew who did get the ‘first class average,’ I didn’t work quite as hard as they did. I knew what I had to do to get 82% on a paper, 84% was an aberration, and in the entire 4 years only a couple papers were less than 80%. But tests! So, with lots of ‘good’ marks, tests sort of took the wind out of my sails.

And then what? You have the BA. But everyone has a BA. In at least one census tract in Ontario 35 or 36 % of residents have a BA. That is better than one in three people, which starts to make BAs look like belly-buttons, everyone has one.

And then I was broke, no job on the horizon, no money in hand. And I could always get a student loan for the Masters of my choice…

And SFU was promoting the Graduate Diploma in Urban Studies up the ladder to the Masters in Urban Studies.

And a marriage, of sorts, was born. I applied, wrote the obligatory letter explaining why I would be a good candidate for the program, had good enough marks to get in, and was accepted.

And the student loan came through.

Now, don’t think that this was a purely mercantilist move, it wasn’t then, and is only portrayed that way now for the effects of story telling. But, with money in hand, and a legitimized reason for reading every damn thing I could get my hands on about ‘urban’ stuff, I felt set.

A couple courses. People asking me ‘why’ I’m there, some inside the program, some outside the program. Unlike my BA, which one just does ‘because,’ the Masters still seems somewhat optional – especially when one hits 50 – and my answers were always a little flip, a little too ‘off the cuff.’ And I started to refer to the program as my hobby – a relatively cheap hobby in the long run, and one with some social cachet – but my hobby nonetheless.

Almost everyone else in the room had ‘really good reasons’ to be there. Their employer was paying, or they would get a significant raise once the Masters had been officially conferred, or they could get job ‘X,’ rather than the tawdry job ‘Y’ they had right now. But they all had a really good reason for being there. And I just wanted to do it because cities interest me; the way buildings are built, the way communities within cities develop (or fail), the way cities compete with one another for resources, and the way cities allow competition within themselves all intrigue me, just because I’m curious about them.

But while some of my colleagues were curious, some were not. And, while some of the courses were good, some were not.

And, repeating the pedagogical errors taught in undergraduate schools, too many of the courses place high value on ‘group projects.’ I suppose that there is some argument for learning to work together, damn, I’ve heard a few of them, and I still don’t believe most of it. I missed kindergarten, I don’t play well with others, and I don’t like being responsible not only for my problems, but theirs as well.

After a group project in a senior-level undergraduate course was done, and the course marks posted, the prof asked me how I felt about the course in general, and the project in particular. I suggested that his salary, currently received, should be his maximum salary. His actual salary should be based on the productivity of his junior faculty colleagues – his income is dependent on the work produced by people over which he has no control. His response? That was the end of that version of group projects. And, I thought, that was the end of group projects for me as well.

But SFU’s Masters in Urban Studies has too many professors who, amongst other foibles, like to base a significant percentage of my mark, on the work done by other people. Or not done, as the case may be. And, I’m not actually ready to blame others for their lack of work, I’m terrified that their mark will be lowered by my errors of omission, or commission. The terror does me in.

I have nightmares, real, live, frighteningly vivid nightmares all centered around group projects. I sweat them when I’m asleep, and I sweat them when I’m awake, and they gnaw at my guts. I hate them.

And tonight’s class? Group projects. Depending on how you count, 40 to 50% of my final mark, based on group projects. And I hate them.

The thesis, when one gets there, is supposed to be an extended, intellectual, argument that is properly developed, supported, illustrated, presented and defended. Wonderful idea. No one but me seems to notice that it is, most emphatically, not a group project. The author is supposed to develop and present a body of work essentially on their own; in light of that, the continual imposition of ‘group projects’ seems of little pedagogical import.

Although all this came to a head today, in all honesty it has been building at least since the first week of July, when course registration opened.  I stalled as long as I could. I suffered through the agonies of nightmare, depression, angst hoping that if I was just positive enough, all would pass.

One would hope, and I did, that once the decision to leave the program had been made, a great mental weight would lift. Hopefully I would be freed of the weight of expectation, of anger, of fear. But that didn’t happen. Things will, I hope, lighten over the next few days.

I also hope that my ego will allow me to explain, in greater or lesser detail, to friends and acquaintances, what I’ve done, and why.

It has been a very trying day.

Out on a limb

Well, this is a tough one.

Class.

Sounds like glass. Breaks like glass as well, along clearly defined fault lines, and under predictable conditions; the ‘energy of fracture’ revealed along economic, social, cultural, ethnic/racial, educational, and other markers of human social worth.

Francis, a Malaysian acquaintance <http://fh2o.blogspot.com/> has written quite interesting and pointed posts on people who fit in entirely different places in Malaysian society than himself. He writes about people he encounters with respect, integrity, and a certain humility. And those qualities make his writing special.

When putting pen to paper, or typing furiously on a computer keyboard, Francis is aware of the economic and social gulf that exists between himself, and the people he writes about. He realizes that these people will probably never have the opportunity to read the words written about them, they may not be able to read English, they may have no idea how to connect to the internet, and they may not even know they have been the subject of public attention. And that separates Francis from those he writes about.

But I’m interested in what separates his readers from the people he writes about. I’m interested in the people that Mike Davis (Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, and several others) writes about. I’m quite often interested in the ’subjects’ of writer’s work. But I’m far more interested in the relationships between the readers of the work, and the ’subjects.’

In ‘Planet of Slums’ Mike Davis’s focus is on the unbelievable degradation in which several tens of millions of people, predominantly though not solely in the equatorial or sub-equatorial world, live in – often over generations. In a world a century and a half further on, we are seeing, again, and again, the recreation of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England,’ by Friedrich Engels (1845).

But one could argue that Engels’ was a world different than ours. We argue that we are more technically advanced, more concerned with ‘efficiency,’ more aware of the health dangers of urban overcrowding, deprivation, and degradation than any society before our time. You could argue that, I can’t.

Engels’ world existed about 161 years ago. It was the most technically advanced ‘world’ of its time. A very few years before Engels’ book, Darwin publishes ‘The Voyage of the HMS Beagle.’ In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe publishes ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue,’ the first modern detective story, and in 1843 writes the first mystery story – ‘The Gold Bug’ – as we know them now. The first ‘fax’ machine was demonstrated in England by Alexander Bain. And these are mere snippets of a world undergoing, perhaps, an unprecedented acceleration in the production of knowledge, technical, scientific, and social.

This was not, as some of my student acquaintances believed, a period only dimly removed from the caves at Lascaux.

Engels was simultaneously drawn to the plight of the urban misery of the working class, and revolted by it, and his work may still be the best descriptions of unbelievable filth, working, and living conditions written. Though I’ll entertain suggestions on that statement.

Now, one hundred and sixty-one years later, Mike Davis is trying to draw our attention from the fate of today’s urban underclasses in the developed world (of which he has written well and often) to the plight of those tens of millions of people outside of London, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, New York, Vancouver. And that is where I get interested again.

Mike Davis, like any writer, has to engage his audience. The ‘writer’ needs to tease, to cajole, to interest, inform, and to illuminate a world that is uncomfortably different from the world his readers actually inhabit. Not one single resident of a shanty town in South Africa is likely to read this blog, let alone Davis’ ‘Planet of Slums.’ Nor are residents of slums in Manila, China, India, Malaysia, or any other nation likely to read, or to have even heard of, Mike Davis.

So the target audience is comfortably middle-class, well-educated, literate, socially-engaged, and isolated from the bloody grim realities of life on well under US $1/daily.

Hell, in Vancouver, even the poorest on welfare get more than US $1 a day! Actually, they get an astounding US $5 (after the ‘rental allowance’ of Cdn $325 is subtracted from the initial Cdn $510/month), to live in some of the most expensive places (particularly when compared by the square foot) in Canada. But, I digress.

How do people who have probably never gone hungry imagine digging through garbage for something to eat? How do people, living in houses with several bathrooms, conjure up an image of literally walking through shit in the street? And, apart from those who insist on living in ‘Hurricane Alley,’ or the tornado belt in the US, or riverine flood plains anywhere, think about the odds of having your house disappear in flood, fire, or earthquake?

My guess is that the vast majority of readers, whether of Engels, or Davis, or hundreds of others,  are spectators in a consumer society. While comfortable in their condo, or sitting on beach, or reading in the bath they are removed, viscerally, from the grinding realities that the authors work to portray.

These readers are the people on whose behalf downtown business associations hire private security, to protect the Disneyfied presentation of retail consumer goods. The people reading about the slum dwellers are engaged in a form of pornography: only slightly removed from the televised disaster-porn of the last tsunami, or the cover of ‘The National Enquirer,’ these people are protected by class from the realities of those they read about.

Like my post regarding the ‘World Urban Forum, and why I’m not there,’ http://citylover.wordpress.com/tag/urban/ these people are functionally, socially, and culturally insulated from the actual, lived, reality that is the subject at hand.

But Engels and Davis are engaged on another project as well. Both authors are offering an indictment not only of a ‘foreign’ middle class, but of an extremely powerful ‘local’ middle class as well. One of the discussions I overheard while the WUF was on in Vancouver was concerned with the local (in this case Ghanaian) middle class gaining access to housing intended for the poor; through political connections, ‘business as usual,’ graft, corruption, and human venality class won the day. Again and again Davis offers criticism of the ‘usual suspects,’ The World Bank, powerful foreign-aid lobbies, neo-conservative forces. But, every time he accuses the ‘rich and powerful’ foreign interests, he also shines a light on the local middle and upper classes as being guilty parties in the continuation and worsening of the conditions of slum dwellers around the world.

And our local middle-class readers?

I suspect that they will read the books, think thoughts, and then with every available grace, engage that which is theirs by right. They won’t think of not flying to Hawaii, Florida, the Mexican Riviera, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. They won’t think of not buying a holiday/retirement property that not long ago was unsecured land, squatted on by a generation or more of local inhabitants. They won’t take the time to inquire exactly how our foreign aid money is spent, nor will they ask the Swiss (for instance, I’m sure there are others equally blind to the source(s) of wealth) just how did all that money get stripped out of a country whose annual GDP is equal to the bank deposit of some newly-retired klepto-politico. They won’t do these things because it is difficult. And may reveal awkward, and difficult, truths.

Some of those truths are revealed in the class perogitives that are truly cross-cultural. The well-heeled, the well-educated, know that they are worth more than others. That’s just the way it is. And the well-heeled ‘over there’ share much in common with the ‘well heeled’ over here. The handbags, the cars, the watches, the medical treatment that one flies somewhere to obtain, the airline tickets to the same destinations all reveal the commonality of class expectation, nearly world wide.

Our middle class has many of the same class-interests as their middle class. And, as long as that is the truth, well, one can observe, but taste dictates a modesty and delicacy that proscribes such untoward behaviour. I mean, one mustn’t interfere.

Class has its prerogatives, and its obligations, remember.

And that’s where I go out on a limb.

Fade, to grey

I remember, succinctly, wandering through a city where there were a vast array of delights – to appeal to a vast audience, or, indeed, multiple differentiated and inter-woven audiences. Store fronts in a cornucopia of colour, texture, and allure, all different. Even the ones that never did do the ’seasonally appropriate display.’

There were high-end goods, in the boutique stores located within hotels, and in the commercial areas often nearby. There were, I understand, a wide variety of retailers who catered to the needs, and tastes, of Vancouver’s creme de la creme.

There were, as well, run-down thrift stores for those whose budget might not quite stretch beyond hamburger. And, in a time before the American ‘Value Village’ chain of thrift stores entered the Vancouver (and, eventually, most of its suburbs), thrift store shopping was a vile, dusty, and often demeaning experience. The staff was often volunteer, often not well treated, and prone to dismissing the clientele as below their own economic and social status. Hrrumph indeed.

Car lots, department stores, a seemingly infinite variety of odd stores – often staffed by equally odd proprietors. But each was different; the car lots, mostly flogging used iron, seemed to settle in to their own, individual, specialty – leaving room for the competition next door. The Woolworth’s, Woodwards, Army and Navy, Eaton’s, Hudson’s Bay, Hamilton Harvey, and Sears each carved out their own niche – not entirely unique, but differentiated sufficiently to serve those who felt ‘at home’ in the store.

The little retailers, as well as commercial and wholesale suppliers, were much the same. Harkley and Haywood sold to one set of sportsmen, their competition across the street, to a slightly different set. And both stores felt completely different inside, even when they stocked the same items. Wholesale suppliers in many ways harkened back to an earlier version of retail, before ’self serve’ became the norm in retail shops, and the staff could display any variety of interest in your particular problem.

What many of these firms shared was their scale. Most, though certainly not all, were ’small business.’ Yes, there were a few chains, and the wholesalers tended to have multiple branches, but in many businesses a long-time customer could hope to know most of the staff they might ever encounter.

Some of the most interesting places that I remember had a staff of one.

The owner. The proprietor. The boss. Department head. Shipper/receiver. Mail boy/girl Friday. Chief cook and bottle washer.

Max, at a tool store on Powell St., whose business I never knew under any other name but ‘bum boat’s,’ and even that was probable wrong. He sold an amazing array of small mechanic and machinist’s tools; layout, measuring, cutting tools kind of poured out of miscellaneous boxes, buckets, and shelves. And he had the most extensive assortment of files I have ever seen. And each file remained protected by heavy wax paper until you bought it.

Frank at the Eagle Grill, two doors down from Bumboat’s, was the local greasy spoon cafe. A early morning coffee, two eggs, over easy, bacon. Then off to work in the shipyard. Also locally owned. Which was fortunate, becasue that way the owners were right there watching it go deeper and deeper into the hole.

(An aside. Anyone have any idea why wordpress once in a while placed ‘a early’ where it is right now, and, equally strangely, fails to wrap a sentence?)

There was the little luggage repair shop on Broadway. In fifteen years of walking past every couple months I never once saw anyone in the store; no staff, no customers. And, equally mysteriously, was the little shop next door. It had some obscure, and not very descriptive name, shared the lack of visible sources of cash flow, and had a small lathe and milling machine essentially front and centre. No idea what went on there. Ever.

But the city seemd to have many of those businesses, scattered hither and yon, one assumes providing at least a subsistence level existence to the owner. The second-hand shop on E Hastings, owned and operated seemingly forever, by Mr. Price. I often thought I was the only customer, ever.

Now we seem not to have room for those businesses.

None of them would ever have seemed ‘up to date,’ and today when ‘current’ means something less than 15 minutes ago, they would be relics. But they wouldn’t have the currency of relics, rather they would seem musty, a tad old-fashioned as though they smelled of old ladies.

Walk along any thouroughfare in Vancouver, or Los Angeles, or perhaps even in Kuching and those stores are virtually gone. In their spaces now stand newer, hipper, more up-to-date shops that can attract younger, cool-hunter, consumers.

The old places, in their old spaces, are gone.

‘I’m sorry, the manager isn’t in today; she is in the suburban store, and I’m very terribly concerned about your problem, but I’m not qualified, certified, enabled, password-bearing, old, or intelligent enough to attend to any difficulty such as you have presented here today. And thank you for asking.’

We have turned our retailers, and ourselves, effectively into breeders of humanoid Golden Retrievers; they (we) never grow up. Obsequious is their middle name, confusing service with servile, and most consumers are lapping it up, while simultaneously attempting to decode the answer to their question.

And it is so difficult to fight. Only the biggest of bookstores has the economic clout to tell magazine distributors that they ARE sending back the non-current issues, and they DO expect a credit. That ability allows the Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca/com to actually stock special-interest magazines that small retailers can’t afford to have languish on the shelves for months, growing ever more dust-laden. So how do you buy that magazine without going to the big-box version of bookstores?

Your corner, independent, hardware store (if such a thing even exists in Canada anymore) can’t buy a container load of socket sets, or lawn furniture, or whatever other fool thing is in the hundreds and hudreds of 40′ shipping containers that flow through the Port of Vancouver with Canadian Tire’s logo emblazoned on them. But I’d rather do without than deal with the sub-par staff that collect lousy paycheques at Canadian Tire. Not only helpless, but hopeless. So where do I go to buy a 3/8 drive, 17 mm socket? And will the service be any better?

And ‘North American’ names are certainly no assurance that the product, staff, or service will be either locally produced, or any better quality than that stuff supposedly made out of recycled cars…

So, can we, or indeed, are we interested, in restoring an earlier urban fabric in ‘Western’ cities; and I must note that I have actually witnessed an accelerated version of this shift in Kuching, Sarawak. In two years the changes to the intimate street structure in many parts of Kuching has changed, and it is changing in ways familiar to, if not identical to, North American urban centres.

Are we actually prepared to spend more, get less (at least in sheer physical quantities), slow down, talk to people, walk?

I’d like to say ‘Well, by golly, now that you ask, why yes, I think we will slow down, engage, chill a bit.’ But I’d be lying.

The current animated movie, ‘Cars,’ challenges this very ideal. I won’t say anymore, other than ‘go watch the movie,’ and then watch where you buy your groceries, your tools, your clothes. And I think you’ll leave the little village behind, even if the movie did bring the odd shine to your eyes.

But, if we actually want that vast array of delights, for multiple and varied audiences, we have to change. And we have to accept that the ’seasonally appropriate display’ is, perhaps, unnecessary. The cornucopia is complete, without it, the colours true and vibrant on their own.

And, another thing…

There was a time when skilled tradespeople held a social position that reflected their economic value to society. This can be seen, often, in the marketing of suburban developments – particularly in North America, though I suspect that diligent research would turn up evidence of similar practices in Australia and New Zealand as well.

An example, in Vancouver’s case, is the Dunbar area. Originally the area was promoted as a streetcar suburb (and there was a bag of money exchanged, privately, o have the existing streetcar line extended long before there was a viable customer base for it) for ’skilled tradesmen and office workers.’

Well, a ’skilled tradesman’ at that point in Vancouver’s development would have been  a journeyman machinist, a first-rate millwright, perhaps a ships engineer first-class. And an ‘office worker’ would have been the manager of a downtown branch of one of the major banks of the day, or perhaps a successful insurance or real estate salesman. On either side of the class divide, economic relations were expressed in the value, and location, of real property – the home.

The merchants of fear, insurance agents, are ‘professionals,’ wear a suit and tie, and wouldn’t know what a machinist does if she was doing in front of them. And bank managers seem to have virtually disappeared, along with many of the small-branch locations that once dotted the landscape, much the same as gasoline service stations have disappeared. But, in an inflated real-estate market, everyone wants to be an agent – and aims for their chunk of the commission – and while I wouldn’t want to slander the crowd, I’m still looking for an honest, up-front, reliable real-estate agent.

Machinists have largely become invisible. First-rate millwrights are hard to find. And ships engineers don’t much exist here anymore, because there aren’t many ships here, anymore.

But when you find that millwright, and her 3/4″ drive, 80mm socket, you can rest assured she doesn’t live in the same part of town that the members of the degree-bearing service industry live in. She has been priced out, kicked out, down-sized, degraded, and ignominiously denied her place.

How did all this happen?

I don’t know, but here are a few clues.

WW II. That’s World War Two. North American was essentially unscathed by the war. None of our physical plant was damaged. Nothing was bombed. Nothing was flattened. Indeed, rather than the adversity of war-inflicted damage, there was a perverse prosperity. This prosperity built, not only the literal tools of war – guns, bombers, ships, airplanes, engines, electrical doo-dads, – but it built the infrastructure to produce the tools of war as well.

And after the war, daddy?

North America, generally, experienced a long economic boom that lasted, arguably, until the oil-price shocks of the early 1970s. Granted, there was a period of post-war economic stagnation while the re-tooling, re-marketing, and re-formation of a civilian, consumer economy got under way. And North American industry had nearly endless numbers of machine to produce the goods – and the US military had enough tooling literally mothballed to fight at least one whole war on its own – for that emerging consumer-driven society.

What it needed was people to buy, and people to make, stuff.

And the people, many thousands of them, came from Europe. They knew how to make stuff, they had the skills, the experience, the ideas. What they did not have were the machines, the money, the markets.  And, ‘after the war’ is not the very narrow range of years, lets say late 1945 to 1950, but rather two, or perhaps three, decades after the war. All those years that North Americans were buying new houses, new cars, new appliances (remember the Amana RadarRange?, the height of post-war consumer culture, in your own kitchen), and new kids…

North America, and I should say I am really only writing about the United States and Canada here, has a long history of importing people. Need cheap labour for your Ford plant? Import them. Need cheap labour for the Canadian Pacific Railway? Chinese in the West, Irish further east, all imported, and all cast off when no longer needed. But industry needs another kind of labour – it needs skilled tradespeople. People who can make jigs and fixtures. People who can repair the assembly line, fast, when something breaks down. And those skills were on fire-sale from Europe.

Like it or not, Canada and the United States offered a better standard of material life than most, if not all, places in Europe. Want a big car? Want the prestige of driving a 1958 Buick? You’re not getting it in 1958 Germany (and that’s West Germany for those born after 1989), and only the really wealthy were going to get it anywhere in Europe. But you could buy a 1958 Buick for a couple thousand dollars, when a good toolmaker was earning $2.50 or more an hour. Makes that Buick attainable.

So, North American business learned that they could import ’skill,’ rather than having to invest in the creation of ‘native-born’ skill. That, in one move, devalued skilled labour. And the process went on. I worked with several men over the years who, having learned their trade in Europe, couldn’t believe that companies in North America were shirking their responsibilities.

With the post-war expansion of universities came a concomitant expansion of the university-educated social elites, and their necessary devaluation of not only manual skills, but of ‘practical’ education; university graduates would not deign to such lowly levels, unless perhaps, they had a civil engineering degree. And, indeed, I once heard several engineering professors at UBC (in ‘The Barn,’ no less) discuss ways to differentiate their ‘product,’ from that of BCIT. Practical applications, and real-world skills, were on their way out of the neighbourhood.

And the social devaluation of ‘manual’ skills was reproduced in the public schools system. A friend of my father’s was assigned to ‘manual training,’ not because his language and mathematical skills were not up to par, but because his last name ended in ‘ko,’ literally branding him as sub-par, both intellectually and socially.

In the very early 1970s, when I had to choose between ‘academic’ and ’shop’ streams in the educational system, I could not take both ’shop’ courses, and ‘academic’ math and language. Could not. Full stop. And never the twain shall meet.

Kids in ’shop’ were consigned to the dunce chair, figuratively, if not absolutely literally. But, you know, I had way more fun making zip guns, hash pipes, silencers (didn’t work all that well, I hadn’t learned the value of sub-sonic rounds at that point), and backyard bombs than I ever would have had parsing a sentence.

But the social, and physical, divides were growing. That streetcar suburb slowly marginalized its lower-earning residents. The taxi driver who bought a house on 25th Ave was literally ostracized by his neighbours. If he parked his taxi on the street, after his 12 or 14 hour shift, they called the City bylaw enforcement. He stuck it out, and one day related this story, and more. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that one of his class-warrior neighbours may have been my Uncle Ed.

But that class war goes on, it separates people who make (for a living) from those who consume. Evidence of this divide is easily at hand, and obvious. Ask the woman who has a corner office, on the 48th floor, if their daughter could marry a plumber? Odds are the answer is an outright ‘No!,’ although she might hedge and say ‘whatever makes her happy.’ Just ask Mom if she is going to pay for her daughter’s wedding to the guy who drives the old van, ‘Fred’s Plumbing and Heating’ plastered on the side. ‘Fred’s’ is only in the area to fix our plumbing, not to get his pipes cleaned.

And the class divide grows.

Further notes on an urban condition

Sprawl. It rolls off your tongue, that long ‘essss’ sound leads into a pouty ‘rawl,’ rhymes with ‘all,’ and being a soft weasly sound obviously can’t be taken any too seriously.

Yet the university bookstore shelves are filled with books about sprawl. There are books about American sprawl, books about Canadian sprawl, and I understand from a source in Oz, that there are books on Australian sprawl as well.

By and large the books are written and presented as well considered, culturally appropriate, studies of the causes, effects, and future(s) of automobile-oriented, low-density, single-family-dwelling development. You know, the two or three thousand square foot (200 or 300 square metres (really roughly)) houses now common in most areas of North America, and seemingly in Oz as well.

These are the houses we all love to hate.

We decry their boxy stature – and the all-too-often calls to cultural values expressed in Jeffersonian and Italianate gingerbread ornamentation – all supplied by Wal-Mart. We bemoan their footprint on the ground; houses that occupy every last inch of the available property, as if we were wanted to mow the lawn. The kitsch chandeliers, the combination tub/sauna/whirlpool/breadmaker, and the endless variety of rooms all make us weep with their trailer park expressions of class and grandeur.

We wouldn’t think of living in anything quite so tacky.

Rather, we point to the tree-lined streets of the city. Taking pains to sound inclusive, we demonstrate the ease of city living; things are not only ‘happening’ here, but you can get ‘there from here.’TM Urbanites like ourselves are always positive in our representations of the urban environment in which we live, and try to expand the mental, social, and cultural habitations of those unfortunates who live in ‘the suburbs.’

Is it just me, or is there an unspoken aura of Marxist class relations embedded in all this? And, don’t get me wrong, I accept the notion that capitalism does a pretty good job, most of the time, except when capitalists run unfettered through the streets.

(Oh, for some of you, the ones who think ‘hoi polloi‘ are the creme de le creme, fetters are leg-irons, like those ones they clamp around the ankles of the condemned as they are lead to their execution.)

The problem with this presentation of sprawl, and this opinion is based on my own false consciousness I’m sure, is that it suggests an unimaginable work-life for the suburbanites.

The critics, whether they are popular press like Kunstler, or any of a wide variety of academic models, want to assume that everyone who lives in an obviously wastrel habitation, can earn their living in the same way as the critic.

Doesn’t everyone sit at a computer, putting great thoughts on paper, sending an e-mail with attachments at the end of the day? I know, some work with video! And some, a select few, work with numbers, or letters, or drawings in .dxf format. So couldn’t they all live ’in town,’ just like us?

But, you know, some people actually make something. Something physical, tangible, real. They make something that has heft. Or something that is special because of its lack of heft.

They weld. Or they sew. Or they assemble tiny little bits of unidentifiable origin into something bigger. Like a circular saw. Or an airframe. Or, God fucking forbid, a gun. These people, some of them at least, see things in three dimensions. Male or female, young, old, or somewhere in-between, ‘retired’ even, they actually imagine something tangible, and then make it.

Some avoid the initial problems of visualization, leaving those difficulties to a designer, an engineer, a draftperson (daft person, I still prefer draughtsman, with the Old English ‘man’ as in ‘hu man) and engage with the real difficulties of making what someone else has imagined. And, having made enough of the things that other people ‘imagined,’ I’m very cognizent of the difficulties encountered in the realization process.

And, in addition to the people who make things, there are people who supply the people who make things with things to make things with so that people who have no idea how to make things can have things made by people who can make things.

But most people who decry the ticky-tacky stucco McMansions think all things come from China, or if the thing is really expensive (and unimaginably overpriced) and bears the brand of LV, TAG, or their social equivalents, perhaps Europe.

And when you actually poke the anti-suburbanites, asking if they would permit a zoning change in THEIR community that would allow, perhaps, someone to make things, the answer far more often than not, is not on your life.

So, the suburbanites, in addition to moving their domiciles into the hinterland, have moved their jobs. Don’t kid yourself, they don’t commute to ‘the’ city, they commute from one suburb to another. Occassionally they traipse through the dominant urban agglomeration to actually get where they’re going, but as often as not, they don’t.

You won’t find a major warehouse facility in a city like Vancouver. With a population of about 602,000, in an urban area of approximately 2.2 million, there is no automotive warehouse; ie Ford, Honda, General Motors. But, perhaps, we should expect that absence.

But try to find affordable ’shop’ space; a few hundred, or a couple thousand, square feet where you can make things.

You know, the kind of ‘things’ that require people to do things to other things, to make things, that may or may not resemble the raw material things. And you might need employees, those people who live in tacky suburban boxes because they can afford to. They might need parking, because they tried transit, but three transfers in the rain, with a loaded bus zooming past, is not quite the way they want to start the day. And, their employer, who pays them reasonably well to actually make tangible stuff, wants them at work, and on time. And skip the double-tall, dry, skinny, extra-foam, caramel coffee.

Make mine black.

My hands used to be black at the end of the day. My coffee was invariably cold by the time I finished it, a thin film of cutting oil on top, and metal chips blued by the heat of machining added an interesting aftertaste from the bottom of the cup.

But the shipyard is gone; more a victim of short-sightedness than of off-shore competition. And the residents in the area, who work from ‘home offices,’ would try to take the head of any politician who thought a new shipyard would conform to the waterfront’s identity.

The bicycle-parts manufacturer moved most of their work off-shore, it would have cost the whinging urbanite a couple dollars more to have the parts made here. And even the suburbs couldn’t shave those few pennies in location cost.

And, with the jobs that have survived the suburb shift, go their employees. Being human, and considering themselves equal to home-office pencil-pushers, those employees want the same amenities as the squeaky clean urbanites.

They want a McDonalds, they want a Wendy’s, they want a half-dozen big-box retailers so they can save money buying the same schlock that their urbane cousins can get in the underground malls. And the retailers are only to happy to provide. And they, too, want to keep their up-front costs down – so they build single story, slab-wall, pull-up, instant commercial buildings. And slap on some utterly inappropriate architectural frippery, essentially downtown trailer park.

And the city-dwellers bemoan the suburbs. And the suburbs thumb their noses at the elitists (as they see it at least) in the city.

The city won’t, or can’t, find ways of providing jobs (other than the so-called ’service sector’ jobs that are either crap, or a very few that are ‘corner office’ with a view) that are actually in the city. The suburbs are filled with people, and politicians, who all want their piece of the pie, and they all want someone else to pay for it, and no one wants anyone who makes things, out of other things, on their block.

So the people who make things, for people who have no idea how to make things, buy the newly-paved lot – the one with the building on it, in which they can make things. And, they get lines painted on the new aspalt, so their employees can park their cars, paid for by making things, on a lot, paid for by things made, for people who order coffees, and waste ink. And the sprawl goes on.

Condenser of loneliness

Condenser of loneliness

I’ve been away for a while – lost in swampy mess of depression, trying to find my way out, while presenting an artificially constructed presence to those around me.

My social skills essentially evaporate, my tolerance for other people is diminished, and my patience for their attitudes and activities rapidly shrinks to near zero. Just finding the mental space to write indicates some form of return to normalcy, and welcome it is.

While out on my own as it were, I am fortunate in being able to ‘fake’ engagement with my fellow citizenry, often amazing my self in the fluidity and competence with which I pull off a fraudulent engagement. Almost like serial marriage.

The obverse of this situation however is a grim and dismal examination of the society in which I find myself. I watch, critique, and criticize those people, events, and social realities that exist for those who will see them.

The breakdown of the vaunted Canadian ‘social contract’ is vividly displayed in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side; human misery openly displayed, the mentally ill and physically handicapped left to fend for themselves. The drug dealers, which no one will openly proclaim to be illegal immigrants from Central America seem to have an unnatural affinity for an ethnic food restaurant in the neighbourhood.

The open dealing of drugs must be countenanced by police and politicians – they certainly do nothing to curtail the open flaunting of the law. While the Supreme Court of Canada worries its tiny minds over whether a certain act on the part of police will bring “the law into disrepute;” I can only surmise that the top jurists in Canada have never actually had to live within this tangled morass called the Downtown East Side, nor have they actually ever had their comfortable middle-class lives challenged by the authority of the drug dealers to enforce territorial claims. And the Vancouver
City police seem happy enough in their own tiny little boxes, living in Delta, or Surrey, anywhere but my neighbourhood.

But the police seem to miss a vast array of other events, all part of collapse of the social contract.

They miss the four cars parked on Wall St, in Vancouver’s Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood, that all carry Alberta license plates. And they have all had Alberta plates for years. They also seem to miss the unlicensed, 36-foot, motor home. I guess because it is parked on the sidewalk it isn’t their ‘beat’ so to speak.

Then again, I’m not sure what the police actually consider to be ‘their’ beat. They seem to miss, again and again, the guy on Wall St (the house directly across from the ‘solo’ tree in the park, where stolen goods get stashed, to be retrieved by the guy in the house. Again, and again, and again.

But this is a middle-class community, and everyone knows that members of the middle-class don’t do anything illegal. And they certainly seem to be willfully blind to what their neighbour does on Wall St.

And, as I walk my routes through the messier parts of the city I see other, even more disturbing, evidence of the collapsing social contract Canadians have had for the last couple generations.

There have ‘always’ been working girls, members of the world’s oldest profession, even if some of them masqueraded as members of genteel society in Victorian English novels – hidden in plain sight, they were trying to ‘marry up,’ though one had to be careful not to be entirely too forthright about the process. But today’s street workers are never going to ‘marry up,’ if they marry at all. And I’m not all that convinced that marrying is all that good a deal at the best of times. But that is probably not half as important to these women as getting another fix, another hit, another trick, and a long way down the list, another meal.

In the last few months I have noticed something I never saw before; something that may have existed, out of sight, out of mind, out of my mind at least. Groups of women, usually two, three, or four, huddled around some temporary shelter – a reminder of how close Vancouver’s homeless are to the residents of favelas or barrios the world over. And, almost always there is one guy, just one lone male.

Is it easier to huddle together, out of society’s sight, with some lone male to offer some supposed security, than it is to maintain the façade of normalcy?

What does society owe these women? Does it owe them decent housing, a sense of self-respect, God-forbid perhaps it owes them the ability to ply their trade in peace and quiet. If only this peace and quiet would include the sense of safety that the crème de la crème deserve in Vancouver, and the sense of privilege that the crème claim as a matter of course.

There is no one sleeping in the doorways of businesses on Vancouver’s ‘West Side,’ the good citizens of Point Grey don’t go to sleep at night with the homeless camped (or passed out) in their ‘upper 10th Ave.’ doorways. God, the Mayor (“better a cripple than a woman” a woman said with some scorn) would be all over the police force if such a transgression were to slip past the donut-eaters on patrol.

But, if you live in the Downtown East Side, the police (who, remember don’t live anywhere near the area) just shrug.

So, about that contract, eh?

It seems the contract, fraying a bit at the edges, only applies to the rich (the modestly middle-class can go fuck themselves, they can’t buy enough influence at City Hall). It seems the middle-class, essentially a creation of the post-war economic situation moderated by a grim remembrance of the Depression, is nearing its own end, sliding in to irrelevance nearly as fast as the urban poor.

It also appears that Vancouver’s police have once again become virtually unanswerable to the vast electorate, who, in return, view the police with ill-concealed distaste, remarkably resembling something you might have stepped in.

And, watching the performance of police, it doesn’t take long to realize that they are solely interested in defending their own tiny bit of turf. I don’t see any action at all on the drug dealers, most of whom have been standing at the corner of Hastings and Columbia for years. And, interestingly, both the police and the dealers enjoy the Mexican food on Cordova St. So they can’t say they haven’t seen one another around.

The Canadian federal government seems unwilling, unable, or impotent when considering what do, broadly speaking, about a variety of ills. The last minority government, formed by the Liberal Party of Canada, was headed by a guy whose riches were protected in offshore havens. The current minority government, headed by the Conservative Party (they dropped the ‘Progressive’ part of ‘Progressive Conservative’) is run by Stephen Harper, a cloned albino spawn of the Fraser Institute, our very own home-grown right-wing think-tank bunch of self-righteous neo-conservatives.

Neither the last Government, nor this one, seems prepared to ‘just’ legalize illegal drugs. Tell the police to go to hell. Tell the trial lawyer’s association to go to hell. Legalize dope. Take the money so saved, probably billions of dollars in policing, prosecution, incarceration and spend a tiny fraction of it on dope. Give the dope away, for free, trading it for a fingerprint.

And make dealing dope so prohibitively expensive that no one even thinks of bootlegging it – and for those who do give free enterprise a shot, put them in the joint (jail, eh) until Hell freezes over.

Addicts know what they are getting. Ambulance crews know, with some assurance, what the ‘subject’ of their call may have ingested. The hospital has a fighting chance of countering intentional overdoses – if we decide that intentional overdoses are something we want to counter.

The dealers are out of a job. The theft of anything that can be sold for $5 will drop. The cost of doing ‘business’ will plummet for a vast array of small, and large, businesses that currently lose huge sums of money to small-scale theft and pilferage to shoplifters and smash-and-grab theft. The auto-glass business will, unfortunately, suffer as cars get broken into far less frequently, the dope being free rather than paid for by grabbing some tourist’s camera out of their car.

And those working girls, huddled under a couple ratty old pallets? Well, the dope is free. If the dope is free the decision whether to turn tricks changes from an imperative, driven by one drug hunger or another, to some other set of decisions.

And, perhaps, with their time freed up a bit, the police would look after the guy on Wall St., and maybe, just maybe, they could turn their attention to the people who exit a parking garage at Cordova and Columbia just after shift changes at, coincidently, the local police station. Just part of the ‘social contract,’ eh?
And, ‘condensor of loneliness’ is from Robert Hughes 1990 ‘Nothing If Not Critical,’ page 229, in reference to cities through history.

World Urban Forum, and why I’m not there…

Vancouver is currently hosting the World Urban Forum. This will put Vancouver on the map. All these exalted individuals will love Vancouver, they will love the scenery, the people they meet, they will all want to come back – with their friends, colleagues, and families, and they will do what people at conferences do. Pass out business cards, make contacts, act like fools at the hotel bar, wish they were home, and make money by being here.

I’m not taking part, even though I could have had ‘free passage’ to virtually all the events, seminars, colloquia, meetings, discussions, and (I suspect) admission to one or more of the hotel bars.

Heresy is not a position easily taken, but my suspicion is that the delegates from Ghana are not going to get much out of this meeting that will serve their fellow citizens all that well. Endless yammering about the precious ideas of North American urban advocates, things like ‘New Urbanism,’ or the social implications of gated communities are not going to translate well for people living in Accra (the Ghanaian capital) or even further removed, those citizens living in Tamale, way up north. With just over 22 million people, some 30% of whom are living in poverty, and an unemployment rate in excess of 20%, I’m not sure that Celebration, Florida is really part of the conversation.

And, yes, I know that the theme of this iteration of the World Urban Forum is, you guessed it, poverty. And my suspicion is that the Ghanaian representatives are staying in decidedly down-scale digs, probably university housing. Just a hunch. But these conferences are about ‘power players,’ so the Ghanaians will probably go home with no real answers, no real solutions to the problems that plague their urban dwellers.

The answers for virtually all urban problems can, at best, be presented schematically. Different geographies, different cultures, different legal, political, and social realities suggest that the solutions must be local. Jane Jacobs’ ideas may be great, Howard Kunstler could be on the right track, but they and all like them are appropriate for a particular place; and their ideas may not actually be what would best serve everyone in that place. Virtually anyone theorizing, writing, working in the North American context (and being published,’ listened to,’ in general terms ‘attended to’) is writing and working for a middle-class audience – and offering up solutions palatable to a middle class audience.

Do we really want to solve the problems of urban poverty? The problems of urban blight (a slippery notion at the best of times), of overcrowding, of reduced services, of reduced hopes and expectations?

Do we really want to attend to the immense problems created not only by absolute poverty, but by relative poverty as well? If we provide 25 square metres of housing (about 269 sq. feet) for a family of four, as some Hong Kong housing developments provide, do we condone the 185 sq/m (2000 sq/ft) condo for one or two people?

If we tax the rich, alway a popular suggestion, they send their money elsewhere. Like Canada’s last Prime Minister, whose corporations had their head offices off-shore. The benefit to the Prime Minister was that his companies were not paying Canadian taxes. So he could collect wages off the backs of people without enough money or guile to follow his example. Just look at all the professional sports stars whose country of residence is Monaco, or its tax haven ilk.

The poor, by definition, have nothing to tax.

So the work of relieving world urban poverty falls to the middle classes, both at home, and abroad. But those members of the ‘middle class’ who live in largely poverty stricken countries try to hide as much of their money as possible, not seeing any reason whatsoever that they should contribute to the country’s social and economic restructuring. And the middle-classes in richer countries object strenuously to the idea that their tax dollars should prop up foreign aid. The proof of this statement is in the financial records of donor nations.

So the aid money works, as often as not, to send people to conferences held in developed countries, with fancy hotels, with well-paved streets, and a reasonably large and nominally well-functioning middle-class. If we can’t tie foreign aid to arms sales, we can suck some of it back by hosting conferences. And, even if we have the conference in a ‘less developed country,’ (what used to be termed ‘third world,’ even if the original political origins of first, second, and third world have been forgotten), middle-class shareholders do alright because the event will, perforce, be held in a Hilton or its local equivalent, thus sending the profit back to the original funding class.

And, while it is easy to take pot-shots at developed countries, the less developed play a role as well. On my recent trip to Malaysia I met a fellow traveller on a 747, high above the Pacific. A member of a church group from South Africa, he and another fellow had been to a congregational gathering in Los Angeles. And they stayed in a mid-range hotel. And while I’m sure they picked up some hints on saving souls in South Africa, the money spent on flying two guys literally around the world, could probably have saved more than a couple temporal soles…

I think we have problems that are of a completely different kind than those we have had in the past. We have returned to, or at least seem headed there very fast, an income distribution model that resembles feudal Europe, or China of the 15th century. An income distribution that gives some nearly unprecedented wealth, in amounts that are nearly impossible to spend in any ‘rational’ way, but that deprive vast numbers of the population of anything that might be considered a reasonable income.

In addition to the income disparity, what seems at present an intractable situation, is the absolute growth of populations. With approximately 3.2 billion people living in urban environments humans now have over half the Earth’s population living in cities, some in vastly better conditions than others. And the people that have migrated to cities, all over the planet, are there not because they have any particular love of cities per se, but because there is a greater opportunity to make some kind of income than there was where they lived previously. And that is why people have moved to cities for thousands of years.

And while the delegates at the World Urban Forum will blather on about urban poverty, the expansion of slums, favelas, and barrios or their local-language equivalents, no one dare suggest that there are, plain and simply, too many people. And most of them want, as soon as they know of its existence, the same stuff I have. And they deserve it every bit as much as I do.

My ‘house,’ the building I live in, provides what most Canadians would deem miniscule living space. And there are, about, 100 units of housing in my building. And I’m going to pull a number ‘out of a hat’ regarding the amount of concrete in my building – just a guess – at about 100 tons of concrete. And every ton of concrete produced, releases 4 tons of CO2, so my building (at a guess) is responsible for 400 tons of greenhouse CO2. And then there are some billion people that need housing, perhaps in concrete, so maybe 400 billion tons of additional greenhouse gases. And what’s the answer to that?

And that’s why I’m not there. I don’t think the answers to Vancouver’s problems are going to be found in Dhaka, Tel Aviv, or Sibu. I’m even less sure that the problems that beset cities of 15 and 20 million are going to be found in Vancouver, regardless of who populates the place. It’s not that I think I don’t have the answers, it’s that I don’t think there are answers.

After I wrote this column the BBC carried an interesting article on one of the participants of World Urban Forum.

“Jockin Arputham criticised the forum’s location and delegates who he said were more keen on writing reports than ending poverty.

Thousands of experts, politicians and activists are meeting to discuss the world’s growing urban problems.

“We are very, very critical about this kind of conference,” said Mr Arputham, president of India’s National Slum Dwellers Federation.

“The amount of time and money spent on this World Urban Forum – how many consultants have been employed for carrying out this kind of conference?”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/5100660.stm

Published: 2006/06/20 22:58:41 GMT