Salon.com > Jeff MacIntyre http://www.salon.com Sun, 19 May 2013 01:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Destination: Vancouver http://www.salon.com/2006/10/30/vancouver_3/ http://www.salon.com/2006/10/30/vancouver_3/#comments Mon, 30 Oct 2006 11:55:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/10/30/vancouver The first thing to know about Vancouver, British Columbia, is that it resembles the last, if not no other, place on earth. A sinewy swoop of land framed by mountains and water, it's the final terminus of the North American frontier, half post-industrial pan-Asian metropolis and half primeval nature. The beacon city of an implausibly clean-scrubbed future in an environment echoing its native people's history, Vancouver looks like the glimmering set design for a dreamy, what-if alternative to "How the West Was Won."

Visiting Vancouver is like simultaneously taking a step forward and back. In its near-future, Vancouver boasts an uncharted, wet-lab urbanity that has inspired author and Vancouver resident Douglas Coupland to call it "the city of glass." Its past, the deep native roots in the region, is also present, right from the international arrivals terminal. Air travelers are greeted by a dramatic installation, festooned with the First Nations iconography of totems, masks and canoes, echoing the aboriginal people's distinct sense of place. Now the native Vancouverite's reverence is for land value, the product of a generation-long development boom instigated by the transition of Hong Kong to China and the waxing of Asia's economies. Vancouver is today among the select handful of world centers -- think Geneva or Sydney -- recognized solely by its livability: a happy accident of freeway-forbidding geography, Canadian social engineering and the best lessons of urban development.

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