Vancouverized
Douglas Coupland's City of Glass (2000), Lance Berelowitz's Dream City (2005), Charles Demers' Vancouver Special (2009), and Timothy Taylor's Foodville (2014)
The SkyTrain, Vancouver’s current rail transit system, first went into service 40 years ago. Several promotional shorts made in the run-up to its opening are available to view on Youtube, the most elaborate of which is “Goin’ to Town.” Produced not long before the opening of SkyTrain’s first line, itself scheduled not long before the opening of Expo 86 world’s fair, the film captures both the aesthetic of its historical moment and the mild but relentless tone of Vancouver boosterism in the twentieth century and early twenty-first.
“It seems as though the city and the people who are the city have bloomed to fulfill a new sense of destiny, to greet a beckoning capacity for urban maturity and share it with the rest of the world,” intones the consummate eighties-informational-video narrator over the final shots of the skyline at sunset. “The measure of a city must be the freedom of people to move and interact within it. The extent to which the city makes them happy and safe while doing so is the measure of its greatness.”
Well, that’s a measure of its greatness, in any case, and one that sounds pleasing but upon reflection curiously unambitious, much like the principle of “peace, order, and good government” often cited as central to Canada’s confederation. Also telling is the fact that the closing narration doesn’t mention Vancouver by name; “the city,” incidentally, was also how the cast of the contemporary Toronto-filmed cop drama Night Heat invariably referred to the show’s setting.
That may owe to SkyTrain’s having been designed as less an urban than a regional transit system, meant to serve suburbanites more than downtowners. (Hence, one supposes, the title “Goin’ to Town” rather than “Goin’ Around Town.”) The same priority was evident in the design of San Francisco’s BART system, whose name, after all, stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit. BART had opened nearly fifteen years earlier, in the early seventies. The Washington, D.C. metro made its debut a bit later in that decade, but for various political and economic reasons, North American cities in the eighties turned away from subway systems and toward light rail.