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.

What does ‘to create’ mean?

As I have written here before I question the devaluation of ‘manual’ skills; I object at some visceral level to the unstated assumption that those who engage in manual work, for the sake of argument the making of ‘things,’ are incapable of reason. And don’t get all up in arms. Remember that what people learn, supposedly, in an ‘arts’ education, is the ability to reason.

The ability to reason is the rationale for an humanities degree.

If reasoning is the result of four years of education, then the implied truth is that only the educated are capable of reason. And, by and large, those who make ‘things’ are utterly devoid of those four years of education that would allow them to reason.

So, as wonderful a person as your tailor may be, she is incapable of ‘reasoning’ solely because she lacks the appropriate training. Your plumber, by default, can only ‘replace’ things because without the training that would allow him to rationally analyse the situation, he is unable to determine the root cause of the problem. And your automotive technician is likewise disabled.

All those poor, uneducated, slobs. Incapable of reason, they are denied full participation in society, and the educated will have to accept the responsibility of their welfare.

One of the difficulties I have with this proposition is the act of creation; the process actually whereby an individual (because I hate ‘group projects’) wants to make ’something.’ It might be a simple thing, fried eggs, not normally noted for the depth of intellectual rigor necessary to fulfill the process. Or it might be the design and construction of a house, a telescope (just check on the role of amateurs in astronomy sometime), a quilt.

All of these projects require endless decision making. Competing needs, desires, facilities all need to be weighed, and the appropriate actions taken so that the end result actually fulfills the original need.

But, as we have seen, the people who sully their hands in the physical creation of ‘things’ are regarded as, at best, slightly stupid by a society that wants to know first off what you ‘got’ your degree in. And why would anyone consign their children to a role held to be only slightly above bovine in modern society?

So there are any number of reasons to avoid the trades/crafts areas of the work-world.

A couple of readers suggested this article , by Jay Leno, and his appreciation of manual skills. While Leno’s article strikes close to the same target I aim at, there are a couple small matters to address.

The first is easy. Jay Leno has buckets of cash. Buckets. And he likes to spend some of that cash on cars, some of it on accurate restorations of vehicles to ‘as new’ condition, and some of it on exceedingly well done creative re-interpretations of the original – think really high-end hot-rods. To give Leno credit, he is willing to spend money on his hobby. I expect that he demands quality results for that money, but he, unlike many, is prepared to spend. And having buckets of cash gives him lots to spend.

The second, and somewhat more difficult idea, is that of ‘cultural capital,’ which again Jay Leno has. Cultural capital bestows upon its bearer forms of power similar to those of cash, but often in ways not immediately obvious to the viewer – whether buyer or seller in the marketplace of ideas. But, to keep it simple, if we assume that Jay Leno has cultural capital, it makes his proclamations worthy. And that worthiness must be examined for its truth claims.

If Jay Leno says good machinists are great people, and wonderful to have, it means that they are great and wonderful if you can afford to have them. As hobbyists go Leno is special, he not only can afford, but does afford. And that alters his relationship with the ‘idea’ of the creative, critical thinking, machinist.

But if you are struggling to get your three kids through school, you’re driving a beat up old Holden V-8 with bald tires, and you still believe that your kids will do better in the workplace lottery than you, I suggest your first advice is to ‘get an education.’

Buying in to the accepted wisdom, fostered by baby-boomers in most of the developed world, that an education (meaning four years of university) is the only way to become a rational thinker (and therefore employable) it is unlikely that parents are going to tell their daughter to become a plumber. She might make way more money as a plumber, but she won’t be half as acceptable as an elementary school teacher.

Hey, just as an aside; ever notice that you have to go to an accredited ‘education training facility’ to teach kids in elementary or secondary school, but any fool with a PhD can teach at the university level? Without any proof, or practice necessarily, in the classroom.

So, those that make ‘things’ tend not to be educated in the ‘university’ sense of the word. And that means that the things they create are not accorded the same value as those things designed, perhaps, by people accounted as being capable of critical examination and analysis. So, what happens when people with ‘education’ create?

Well, some of what they create reflects the nature of the institution they attended. Some learn to parse sentences, probably in English. Others learn to parse ‘lines,’ perhaps in ‘C,’ or ‘C++.’ Some we call ‘writers,’ some we call ‘computer geeks,’ or if we are feeling particularly warm and fuzzy, IT staff.

Others will, perhaps, sit at a computer and draw buildings. Those people we call architects. Some people will sit in front of their computer and draw (?) the scenes and characters for any variety of computer games/images/movies. I don’t know what those people are called. Others will sit with like-minded people and plot and scheme various political or financial plots. Those people we call stock-brokers, politicians, and worse.

The difficulty is that most of these people need the uneducated masses to translate their words, drawings, computer code, stock deals, and various political schemes into real, tangible, results.  Without the masses, wherever they may be located geographically, to actually produce the required end result, the only thing that has been produced is intellectual property. Perhaps.

Intellectual property is a wonderful idea. I actually make a small part of my living from writing. But without the people who, in multiple steps, transform my written work in to a product that other people are willing to pay for, the intellectual property part of the deal is actually pretty insignificant.

So who actually creates? What does it mean to create something?

Does the customer create, by creating a demand for something, like Jay Leno’s need for car parts otherwise unavailable? Does the machinist create the part, in response to a vaguely formulated need expressed by the customer? Does an engineer, or draughts-person, create the piece by acting as an interlocutor between the customer’s needs, and the machinists abilities? And, what role does cultural capital play, in the valuation not only of the ‘thing’ made, but in the customers role in wanting it?

These things we purport to value we often fail to support. We think manual skill is great, but we are unprepared to actually pay for it. We all want our gun/camera/car/boat/suit/bicycle/personal water craft/stereo/computer/microwave to be repairable – that is, ultimately what we are asking for – but we are unprepared to actually pay someone else what we expect to get paid for our own work. And that is only part of the difference between Jay Leno and most hobbyists.

Leno is prepared to pay others for the skills they exhibit in the intellectual, and physical, creation of something he wants. In this particular role, Leno is lending cultural capital to the idea of the ability to create, but I don’t think it is enough. The need for others to create is not strong enough amongst us; we want, but are unprepared to acknowledge the value of creation for our interests.

We are not the creators we are looking for, unfortunately.

My thinking, my keep

I was a machinist, once. Then a bicycle builder, mechanic, rider. There were other loves to be sure; kayaking, then rowing. Once in a while running seemed to be the thing to do. Jobs, most of which I didn’t like, and even if I did like them, I certainly didn’t want to keep doing them.

Humanities 101, at UBC. A great thing. I did an undergraduate degree, in four years, finishing when I was 48.

I started a Masters, which I’ll continue, so degree in hand (and a couple dollars) I’ll be able to get a coffee.

Right now I have a great job. I fix stuff, primarily gross building systems, that other people in their madness, destroy. I build, and rebuild, walls, doors, locks, plumbing, electrical, security, and a vast array of other systems. The hours are great. The money is not too bad.

And then I start thinking about machinery, machine tools in particular, again.

Ever meet a real addict? The person who can rationalize whatever their addiction is, to whoever is around, at any time or place? They make jumping off of bridges, with a parachute, sound almost reasonable. To the real addict it doesn’t matter if you understand, they just want you to agree.

A lathe, and a milling machine, would be useful. I could make widgets. Or heat-treat some stuff. Or use the DRO (digital read-out) for laying out bolt circles. But I’d have to get some CAD (computer assisted drawing (or design)) software, and learn to use that as well. And it would have to be three-phase, because 3 phase machinery vibrates less, which makes accurate work more readily practical. And I’d need some space. Grade level, you know, makes getting the stuff inside easier.

But I’d need some extra stuff to, you know, to make stuff. This machine, that machine, and at the end of the day, you know, I’d have something tangible in my hand, to show for my labours.

Nuts.

Almost certainly a formula for frustration, anxiety, collapse.

I kid myself that this stuff would ‘only have to pay for itself,’ I try to rationalize. That lightens the load a bit. But there is so much of it to get. And there is so much of it to store, to care for, to keep warm, and dry, and safe.

A blog I read regularly http://duncanmargetts.com/blog/ shares some of my views on life, though certainly not all; nor do I share all Duncan’s views, but he is almost always an interesting read. He thinks about stuff, primarily ‘more’ stuff, and makes reference to Epicurus. Philosophy, from the ancient Greeks, to blogs about cities and stuff.

But Epicurus wanted to be satisfied, not sated, and in my particular case I’m headed not even for ’sated,’ but, ultimately, dissatisfaction. Because the promise held out in machinery is false; the dreams of realization through multiple-start threads, bearing fits, and accurate work are phantasms.

Oh, I can do the work. I can even do the work on machinery less accurate than the end result. But the promise held out is one of tangible, physical, ‘real’ work at the end of the day.

And in these types of dreams, the end of that day never comes. It’s always tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but never now.

But, fixing stuff, as it comes, fulfills a dream. There is a tangible result at the end of the day; the building still stands, the security cameras still see, the staff have one more room in which to bed down some lost and lonely soul, and I know that I have done the best I can with what is at hand.

And the making of something from scratch?

I do that here. I sit down, with only the vaguest notion of what I’m going to say, and if at the end you’re still reading, I must have created something.

So, tomorrow, I’ll fix stuff. And, I’ll enjoy fixing it as well as I can, under the circumstances. And I’ll continue to write, here, and once in a while, in search of money.

And I know I can make my pen pay its keep.

Just a friendly reminder…

I just thought I mention a couple things before I go on to the next post, the next idea, the next adventure in urban life.

These posts are written and published in a hurry. And the hurry is intentional. I want the immediacy of the written word to be evident, the concerns, foibles, and strengths of the writer to out front and visible.

These pieces are not written ‘for sale,’ to a magazine perhaps, nor are they written in response to some academic demand for the production of yet another work of no import to anyone but the marker. I assume they are important to whoever marks them, otherwise why would they request that I invest hours of effort in them?

That immediacy is, perhaps unfortunately, evident (at least to me) when I re-read them. I notice spelling mistakes (not many), I notice grammatical slips that could be polished out, and once in while (notice the missing ‘a’ there) I drop a word in my haste.

But what is published is what is on my mind. There is little or no equivocation. The reader does not have to parse every line of text to discern the ’real’ message. It is, pretty much, WYSISYG.

But I am open to suggestion. I’m open to requests for clarification, elucidation, expansion, and detail.

Just a friendly reminder.

What is your price?

I have written here previously about my take on civil society, and the negative changes that I see at the individual, and urban, levels. And I’m off on that tangent again this evening.

Imagine yourself as a graduate student at a respectable university, married (or at the very least living with someone), a two year old child, marginal funds, and a need (real or imagined) for a new computer.

Got that firmly fixed in your mind?

Now consider your priorities. Rent. Food. Tuition (probably fully funded as a PhD candidate). Bills. Computer.

The computer comes in last, at least in the model I’m presenting here, because in reality most of us can live with an out-moded piece of junk for just a little while longer.

One day, while talking to a colleague, or a friend, or some guy in a bar, you hear that you can get a brand new machine for half price. In the original box, with all the original documentation, the whole nine yards.

What do you do?

Do you assume that there must be something wrong with this proposal, and walk away, your wallet firmly under control?

Or do you hesitate momentarily – knowing there is something wrong – but somehow start to weigh your needs (and God knows you need that new computer) and determine that you’re interested in the possibility of saving some money?

You get a phone number. You call, nervous. The guy on the other end is very reassuring, he can get you what you want, lets say for half price.

Damn. A new MacBook Pro is way out of reach. But only half price. And in the original box.

Yes! I’ll take it. When can I get it?

Tomorrow. The coffee shop in the village. Cash.

And that’s where I come in to the story.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop in the village.

The guys with the laptop show up, coffee cups from some other caffeine dealer prominent in their hands, staking out a couple chairs on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop where I sit. Attitude flows off these guys like water, and surrounds them, a moat.

But it also hems them in, it identifies them as people of interest, to people like me.

And then the graduate student shows up. On a bicycle. A ladies bicycle. With a toddler.

They exchange pleasantries, he shows the wad of hundreds to prove he is actually going to put out. They, well one of them, produces the brand new laptop. “The box is factory sealed, everything is inside” he says.

“I have to get a coffee, I’ve never done this before,’ and he goes to buy his alibi.

There is an exchange of money.

The two younger guys leave.

The graduate student opens the box to look at his new toy, his daughter momentarily otherwise occupied. “We have to go home now.” And he tries, with difficulty, to load his daughter, and his new computer (with everything in the box) on to his (actually his wife’s) bicycle.

But the store where this computer came from always puts tamper-proof tape on boxes. It’s yellow, as I recall. And it was not on this box.

Now there are a couple scenarios that are possible. One is that the two guys are students at the university just down the street, and that they bought the lovely new bauble at the student price, re-selling it for half the difference between the regular, academic, price and the ’street price’ of the new MacBook Pro. And that would mean that my ‘graduate student’ is not a graduate student, or he could have got the machine for the academic price. The second, and more distasteful possibility is that the two guys stole the laptop, or recieved it from someone who stole it (probably ‘to order’), and moved it the the guy that bought it.

Not being privy to the exact amount of cash handed over (though it was all hundred dollar bills as far as I could tell) it is very difficult to determine which of the two possibilities it may have been.

But it raises several, serious, questions. But the one that interests me, is what was the guy’s price? His ‘price,’ is the difference between the legitimate, legal, price and what he paid.

For this argument let’s say he paid 50% of list, which as I understand, is high – even for ‘to order’ thievery. That makes his ‘price’ 50% of list. He is prepared to, essentially, be a thief for 50% of the list on that laptop.

He is prepared to countenance theft, albeit someone else’s actions, to save himself a few hundred – perhaps a thousand – dollars. The actual amount is dependent on the legitimate sale price of the laptop, and is nearly irrelevant, because it is his willingness to collude that primarily bothers me.

For a few hundred dollars, give or take a bit, this guy is prepared to be a thief. That few hundred dollars is his price, and now that we know his price, we know him.

I have spent enough years in, and around, the university campus to have a fairly good handle on ‘who’s who,’ educated guesses based on age, marital status (including evidence of children, and their ages), mode of ‘appropriate’ transport, a gaggle of little clues that indicate whether I am about to lip off to a professor, or a donut-eating, Segway-riding, campus security goof. And, by extension, what graduate students and, (God-forbid) junior faculty look and act like. This guy is right in there. The wife’s bicycle doesn’t scream money, no suspension forks here, nope. The baby-seat is still in good enough shape to be on the first kid. And he rode to the coffee shop in the village, along with child, knowing that he would be lugging his nice new computer home – so he doesn’t live very far away.

Very few tenured faculty either have kids in baby seats, or live quite that close to the coffee shop. Yes, some do one or the other. Not many do both.

So, in one afternoon, I find a thief. So what?

I am not one to point the finger, wagging it in your face, and hypocritically asking that you behave – all the time – in ways I have not always behaved.

What I am asking, I suppose, is what next? And why, and who, and where?

If thieving the laptop is ok, at least today, what is ok tomorrow? Can we steal a co-workers paycheque; we can surely use the same arguments to justify that action that this guy used on himself, I need the money (or the cash saved, amounts to the same thing) more than my co-worker.

What about our (rather than his) obligations to society? Do I report him? Do I positively identify one, or both, of the two guys who ’supplied’ the computer? What about you? Will you rat out one of your fellow grad students, the guy with a wife and kid, who just got a killer deal on a new MacBook Pro?

I did. And I’ll hear from the store security, looking for more details, for times, and places, and descriptions. They’ll ask, unsure, whether I’ll ‘co-operate with the police?’ I will.

Because I know my price.

What is your price?

Who I think I am, 2

I live at V6B 8P6, which if Googled tells you (with a bit of work) that I reside in one of Canada's most challenging communities; one rife with disease, despair, poverty, hopelessness. Poverty, drug addiction, HIV-AIDS, and mental illness strike a large percentage of the populace.

What the statistics don't show are the people who are poor, perhaps, but coping with a world beyond their means to challenge. They may (or, indeed, may not) lack education, but many lack any sense of entitlement to anything better. They often lack the language or political skills to successfully prosecute change.

But there are pearls here; there are people who have not only read Socrates, Poe, or Gans, but are prepared to argue as an intellectual need those positions that they support or disagree with. There are people who, counter to every expectation, refuse welfare. They scrounge, they collect beverage containers for the deposit. Some gather scrap metal, one makes sandwiches at home and sells them on the street. A few roll cigarettes – and then sell them in ones and twos – the same as the drug dealers evident on so many corners.

But my community is also facing changes. Directly diagonally across the street from where I live a long-standing building will be demolished, and then rebuilt. And, for the heritage fans, don't panic. Much of the 1906-1908 building (the original, not the 9, 10, or 11 additions) will be rebuilt as subsidized space for non-profit organizations, giving them a space alongside Simon Fraser University's 'School for the Contemporary Arts,' two significant (but un-named as yet) retail anchor tenants, two hundred social housing units, and 4 or 5 hundred market-priced condominiums, as well as some additional retail space.

Is it the transgressor, gentrification? Or is it a renaissance? One and a half blocks from where I sit was once the location of City Hall. The site of the redevelopment, Woodwards, was itself the antithesis of what the area has become. Perhaps this is the phoenix rising again from its ashes.

This is the link to the fancy marketing website (no, I don't get a dime, and couldn't afford a spot anywhere but the basement…) http://www.woodwardsdistrict.com/

And, enough of this image of 'who I am.'

Who I think I am, 1

This is the cycling enthusiast and alternative transport person that lives within my head. The bike is an old English 'butcher's bike,' and the photo originally appeared in an article published in Velovison, about 'alternative' uses of bicycles in Vancouver.

Although I am an ethusiastic cyclist I only average in the range of 3000 – 4000 km/yr, and at an average speed of 22 km/hr, I'm enjoying the scenery.

This is one of several identities that I manifest in recurring fashion. These identities will be remarked upon in the near future, as much to practice posting to the blog, as to inform potential readers about the authorial voice.

first things first

From V6B 8P6

This is the inaugural post on this newly created blog. All comments are the sole responsibility of their author – whether they belong to the registered ‘owner’ of this blog – or to others of unknown provenance.

My primary focus here will be on the complex relationships that exist between individuals living in an urban environment, and the environment itself.

These relations may include, but are not limited to local politics, architecture, public space considerations, recreation and leisure activities within an urban context, and other such theoretical or empirical ideas I wish to explore.

My primary focus will be on Vancouver, and the immediate metropolitan area that surrounds the city proper. There will be reflections on places I have been both within British Columbia, and ‘away.’ New York and Kuching seem an odd pair, but no more unusual than Prince George, BC and Sibu, Sarawak let’s say.

Reader feedback is appreciated – though that suggests that somewhere out there someone will actually read this.

V6B 8P6
March 9, 2006 18:55