Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

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      The depth, diversity, and vitality of a city are contingent on its public space and common places: it is where we encounter strangers, debate, the unexpected, and the need for civic engagement. Parks, museums, playgrounds, sidewalks, city squares, outdoor cafes, libraries, markets, sports events, bars, bike paths, theaters: it is what is best about every city, and what makes urban life worthwhile.

      More than that, though, the health of public space is closely tied to the health of democratic life: they require one another. A democratic culture requires citizens engaged in dialogue, exposed to new ideas, interacting with people not like them, and confronted by others. That much is obvious. But the relationship is not that simple—you cannot just provide public spaces and boom, you get democracy, nor is it true to say that if you have more democratic discourse you’ll necessarily get more common places. It is closer to the truth to say that there are many different kinds and shades of public space and they inform the kind of political life that exists. We have to look at public space and ask the same questions we would ask of politics: who participates, what kind of activity is encouraged, is it equitably and equally distributed, are users in control?

      Istanbul is sometimes described as one of the world’s great cities and it is obvious right away what a densely public place it is. People are everywhere: selling stuff, talking, smoking, taking the ferries, drinking tea, fishing, and walking around. And most of the activity takes place in unofficial rhythms and colonizes space intended for something else: impromptu cafes on street corners, simit sellers in every alley, tea vendors on the sidewalk, fishing off the Galata Bridge.

      But let’s not get too romantic here. Part of the reason the streets of Istanbul are full of people is that lots of them have nowhere else to go. People are selling shit in every nook and cranny of the city because they are desperate for some cash. All those guys fishing on the bridge might make a great photo, but many of them are trying to get dinner. It’s important not to aestheticize or exoticize people’s harsh lives—all that vitality is probably a lot more enjoyable for a visitor.

      But there are also lots of different kinds of poverty. Who’s richer: the guy fishing on the bridge, smoking with his buddies, and walking home through Beyoglu to his extended family, or the guy who leaves his cubicle, jockeys his car onto the highway, stops at Superstore, buys a bunch of food, and hustles back to his suburban home to eat in front of the TV? There’s lots unfair with that comparison, but the core of it is salient. The point is not to blindly replicate the dense public vitality of other cities, but to be able to recognize it, not as a consumer good but as an expression of something deeper.

      Public life in Istanbul is a total mess—and beautifully so. Everyone I know there goes out constantly, almost every night, to drink tea or beer, shop, visit, do business, or just chill out. Public life happens everywhere. Some of it is clearly planned in the ways that I expect, but often it is in an apartment-turned-bar, or at a teahouse set up with some folding chairs in an alley, or a political club on the top floor of a housing block, or a café under a bridge. It is an ethic reflected in the traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, which is predictably nuts and turns almost everywhere into fair game.

      The awkwardness of Vancouver’s public spaces, their regulated, organized, and planned character is so evident when you come back from Istanbul (or frankly almost any city outside North America). Our public realm seems to have an antiseptic quality and the only places where a healthy mess seems evident, even vestigially, is in immigrant neighborhoods like Commercial Drive, Chinatown, or Little India.

      It’s a tendency that Living First is exacerbating right now. One of the key platforms of the strategy is to extract commitments from developers to include public spaces when they build. It’s the least they can ask for in return for a virtual guarantee of windfall condo profits. Throughout downtown there are little parks, playgrounds, seating areas, mini-squares and proto-promenades that have been built as a kind of graft to the city. Many of them are nice enough, but like so much of the rest of Vancouver’s public realm, they taste pre-packaged, and are about as healthy as twenty-six-cent Ramen packs. And of course they tend to be under-used, or superficially used, because they didn’t emerge from any kind of community need or local desire—they are just one more hoop for developers to jump through in return for those sweet views.

      As Villagomez pointed out, one of the reasons much of downtown’s new public spaces are mostly empty is that they are often hidden from whatever sun might be out, left in perpetual shade throughout the year. “More sensitive planning may have created a more varied built form that ensured public spaces receive the most sunlight (a key attribute of successful public spaces) throughout the day as possible. It seems the city has attempted to push all public spaces to the outer edges—especially the seawall—and away from all the real action.”

      It is difficult to resist reading Living First in straight-up Marxist terms: as an amelioratory governmental response to a crisis of capital.³⁵ Put less pompously, Vancouver has given the development business a near-free reign here as a way of covering up for the lack of other vitality and activity. The new planning and regulatory efforts have allowed new concentrations of capital and profit generation to emerge while designing in enough social provisions that citizens will accept (and possibly even welcome) the massive profits being reaped by elite developers. That’s certainly part of the picture, but there’s more color and nuance to be added in, more than simple capital-labor contestation. There is a shared cultural response to the challenge and value of public space, and in some ways Living First has morphed into another subtle variant on enclosure, delicately displacing the power of public space into private hands.