Situating the New Economy: Contingencies of Regeneration and Dislocation in Vancouver's Inner City

46(5&6) 1249–1271, May 2009 Situating the New Economy: Contingencies of Regeneration and Dislocation in Vancouver’s Inner City Trevor Barnes and Tom Hutton [Paper first received, December 2007; in final form, September 2008] Abstract The purpose of this paper is to make an argument about the importance of geographical context and contingency in the emergence of the new economy within the inner city. Using a case study of Vancouver, it is suggested, fi rst, that its new economy has emerged precisely out of the peculiar trajectory of the city and is bound up with a staples economy, branch plant corporate offi ces, transnationalism, and mega-project orientation. Secondly, to illustrate the importance of situation and site, the paper focuses on two of Vancouver’s inner-city locales: Yaletown, on the margins of the Downtown South, a former industrial and warehousing district now regarded as the epicentre of Vancouver’s new economy; and Victory Square, the former commercial heart of the early Vancouver, for many years experiencing disinvestment and decline, but now on the cusp of a major revitalisation which threatens to displace long-established social cohorts. Introduction: The Inner City as A scattering of deteriorating single-family Palimpsest or Tabula Rasa? working class housing lay on its northern fringe, owned originally by Canadian Pacifi c In the mid 1980s, Yaletown was a down-on- Railway workers employed in nearby railway its-heels warehouse district on the south side maintenance yards and the roundhouse, of Vancouver’s downtown peninsula. It was and the closest to haute cuisine in the district home to fork lift trucks and lorries by day, was the Homer Café diner. prostitutes and their customers by night. The No more. In a prescient article written in principal jobs in the area were related either to 1988, at the advent of Yaletown’s regeneration, wholesaling or to the world’s oldest profession. Robert Jankiewicz wrote that Yaletown Trevor Barnes is in the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z2. E-mail: [email protected]. Tom Hutton is in the Centre for Human Settlements, School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, 227–1933 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6T 1Z2. E-mail: [email protected]. 0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online © 2009 Urban Studies Journal Limited DOI: 10.1177/0042098009103863 11249-1271249-1271 UUSJ_103863.inddSJ_103863.indd 11249249 22/27/2009/27/2009 112:01:092:01:09 PPMM PProcessrocess BBlacklack 1250 TREVOR BARNES AND TOM HUTTON once on the way to becoming a seedy collec- in Yaletown and other similar locales within tion of decaying brick warehouses and light Vancouver’s inner city. industrial plants, is catching the eye of cre- However, with regeneration often comes ative professionals looking for alternative dislocation—certainly for former Yaletown workplaces, as well as the real estate devel- warehouse and sex workers. Yet the shadow is opers needed to prepare the space for them (Jankiewicz, 1988, p. 24). longer, and especially when the effects of other Vancouver inner-city districts experiencing That space has now been utterly transformed, regeneration are also taken into account such even earning Yaletown its own entry in as Victory Square, Gastown and False Creek Wikipedia (“one of the most successful and Flats. Especially adversely affected has been signifi cant urban regeneration projects in the Downtown Eastside that sits in between North America”).1 On one of the many web- these sites of new economy regeneration sites now dedicated to the area’s culinary offer- (Figure 1). ings, 15 sub-categories of food and dining are The Downtown Eastside is the oldest resi- listed as available for the gastronome.2 The dential neighbourhood in the city, serving as original working-class housing has been a classic zone of transition during the fi rst either demolished or refurbished as boutique half of the 20th century. Since the end of sites for various design services and is giving the Second World War, it has been home to way to a landscape of high-rise condomin- Vancouver’s most economically marginalised ium development for the ‘hip, young, single, population. It contains the census tract with and professional’. Yaletown is the “paté” in the lowest per capita income in Canada and the city’s inner-city residential “sandwich” Ley and Smith (2000) found from 1970 that (Jankiewicz, 1988, p. 26). Finally, and most it consistently suffered multiple forms of de- germane for our purposes, Yaletown is now privation (there are about 140 separate social one of the centres of Vancouver’s ‘new eco- agencies and non-profi t organisations oper- nomy’. Its service sector employees are at the ating in the neighbourhood). In addition, vanguard of the city’s creative industries. In 30 per cent of the residents are intravenous 2006, 26 per cent of the jobs in the area were drug users and, just off its central intersection, in computer system design, architecture and Main and Hastings Streets, is North America’s engineering, and advertising, and another fi rst government-sanctioned safe injection 8 per cent in motion picture and video indus- drug site. Inner-city regeneration prompted in tries, information services and software pub- part by new economy activities has increased lishing (City of Vancouver, 2006, information pressures for gentrifi cation in the Downtown sheet 1:2, p. 2). Eastside, decreasing the supply of affordable Yaletown is just one of the sites in a larger housing, as well transfi guring its physical geographical pattern of regeneration within landscape in accordance with the dictates Vancouver’s inner city and partly produced of the new regime. Protests by Downtown by the emergence of a robust ‘new economy’. Eastside community activists around housing Such regeneration, of course, is not only the are now a permanent urban fi xture taking result of the agglomeration of creative indus- the form of tent cities, illegal squats, street tries (Scott, 2006). There are other factors at marches, petitions, defacement of city prop- work, but, as we will suggest, in Vancouver at erty, community plays and a Brechtian style least they have operated in concert, forming opera Condemned (Blomley, 2004). They are all an interrelated assemblage, producing the signs of an endemic process of dislocation. remarkable economic, social, cultural and The purposes of our paper are twofold. The physical alterations that are now so evident fi rst is to describe particularly the process of 11249-1271249-1271 UUSJ_103863.inddSJ_103863.indd 11250250 22/27/2009/27/2009 112:01:112:01:11 PPMM PProcessrocess BBlacklack THE NEW ECONOMY IN VANCOUVER’S INNER CITY 1251 Figure 1. Location of Yaletown and Victory Square in Vancouver’s central area regeneration within Vancouver’s inner city in Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilisation (1998). and predicated upon the flourishing of a General processes create pervasive (or struc- new economy since the late 1980s. Yet, as al- tural) change, but these forces are mediated luded, there is a dark underbelly, a dislocation, by local factors, including path dependency, which we will also discuss. The second is to and concentrations of leadership, entrepre- make an argument about the importance of neurship and talent. These dynamics of urban contingency and geographical specificity development were played out, for example, in shaping Vancouver’s changing inner-city in the Italian Renaissance, as seen in the con- landscape. Clearly, there are general pro- testation for primacy between Florence and cesses of inner-city transformation involv- Siena (and for a while Pisa) and, more recently, ing the new economy that can be theorised between such cities as Toronto and Montreal and conceptualised (as in Richard Florida’s in the Canadian context, Melbourne and (2002a, 2002b) creative cities thesis, or Allen Sydney in Australia, and Los Angeles and Scott’s (1996, 1997, 2000, 2006) framework for San Francisco in California. Geography still understanding cultural industries). Precisely matters—as we shall illustrate for Vancouver. how such transformation occurs, the ante- The paper is divided into four sections. cedent conditions and their subsequent First, we review briefl y some of the conceptual causative relation, and the exact form of the literature on the new economy and inner- outcome, will depend, however, upon the pe- city urban change. Our argument is that culiar historical and geographical features the literature is insuffi ciently sensitive to the of the city itself, a point stressed recurrently role played by local urban exceptionalities. 11249-1271249-1271 UUSJ_103863.inddSJ_103863.indd 11251251 22/27/2009/27/2009 112:01:112:01:11 PPMM PProcessrocess BBlacklack 1252 TREVOR BARNES AND TOM HUTTON Consequently, theories that have been put much to what cannot be generalised as to forward—we focus on writings by Allen what can. Scott and Richard Florida—require modifi - Allen Scott (1996, 1997, 2000, 2006) and cation when deployed in actual cities such as Richard Florida (2002a, 2002b) are perhaps Vancouver. Secondly, we discuss the speci- the two most well known theorists of the fi cities of the Vancouver case, arguing that, urban new economy. Both recognise that in order to understand the rise of the new place is central to its understanding. So, Scott economy, we need prior knowledge of the (2000, p. 319) “insist[s] above all” on the cen- various peculiarities shaping the city. We trality of “synergies that lie at the intersection focus on four: its post-staples character, its between agglomeration processes [of the post-corporate structure, the centrality of new economy] … and the cultural meaning transnationalism and its mega-project civic of place”. While Florida (2002a, p. 6) says, mentality. These features in combination “place has become the central organizing unit make Vancouver different from other cities, of our time, taking on many of the functions uniquely contorting its new economy and the that used to be played by fi rms and other or- consequences.

Load more