liveable cities

Back in 2002 Melbourne and Vancouver tied for top place in The Economist's 'World's Most Liveable City'  survey. Then in 2005 Vancouver pipped Melbourne to take first spot (Melbourne fell to a still respectable second but there was still a lot of teeth-nashing to be heard in Victoria).

The travel section of Melbourne newspaper the Age (and the SMH) a fortnight ago featured a story entitled, 'Vanbourne or Melcouver? Which is more liveable?' (and featured the gorgeous image reproduced to the left). The feature conceded the superiority of Vancouver overall (though the writer was a guest of the Canadian Tourism Commission, Air Canada and the luxurious Wedgewood Hotel so he could hardly say otherwise). While mostly singing Vancouver's praises (and why not--it looks and sounds a great place), the key critical moment in which parochialism couldn't be repressed was a comment on the proliferation of Starbucks' cafes in the city. They are here to some degree in Melbourne, but usually they are pleasingly empty.

There is something interesting in the way that the title of the piece suggests the notion of the two cities as twins; as belonging to a new global subset of particularly kind of cities (the 'livable' rather than the 'first' or?). Also, while the title poses the question of rivalry it also hints that each city's identity is bound up in the other through the hybridization of names.Or is it alluding to that rhetoric of homogeneity in the wake of globalization?

Comments

[row4seatd]

In defense of our proliferation of Starbucks, though semi-indefensible, we are a neighbour to Seattle and have had Starbucks for as long as there have been Starbucks. Next to Seattle, we're probably the most developed Starbucks market there is. For a while there, before it became cool to hate on Starbucks, it was like one of our own had made it all over the world. That feeling still lingers and there isn't the degree of Starbucks loathing the rest of the world shares.

Just a bit of local insight.

[whitebait]

Hi row4seatd. Thanks for the comment and local take on Starbucks (and really liked your recent post about the smells of Vancouver). Am very interested in that partial twin city thing that Vancouver has with Seattle (well, I maybe wrongly reading that into your comment about how Vancouverites(?) cultivated some feeling of ownership for Starbucks despite the national border?). Your comment just goes to show that even the most global of organisations like Starbucks needs to be understood through the local context - well, that is how I justify th enormous amount of time I spent in them in Tokyo despite my generic loathing that I perform in Melbourne.

[row4seatd]

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Seattle was Vancouver's cool older brother for all the obvious reasons. Like, oh, Nirvana and say Pearl Jam, not to mention Mudhoney and God knows what other grunge things that have been lost to the sands of time. That was the same time we got Starbucks and the two were totally and inextricably intermingled. At the time Starbucks wasn't a mega-global-multi national. It was a cool Seattle coffee chain at a time when all things Seattle were cool. We had Starbucks. No one else did and it was from Seattle. And that was all the cool we needed. Flash forward 15, 16, 17 years and Starbucks is McDonald's and grunge is dead and gone, but for anyone over 30 in Vancouver we still remember when Starbucks was cool and "ours." Things have long since changed.

Now, we're Seattle's cool not-quite-American, not-quite-European sexy exchange student. Our streets are full of Americans digging on our "liveable" downtown core (it is liveable. I live in it), buying our condos, smoking our obnoxious, overcranked pot and wondering how their city got to looking so grimy when ours got to looking so modern and sleek. Even our bands are better than theirs.

Culturally, within their respective countries, the two cities couldn't be more different. In the US, Seattle is the end of the world. The kind of place you go when you're trying to escape something or maybe want to work at Microsoft. In Canada, Vancouver is the only major city that doesn't get snow (or much of it) in the winter. It's the most desirable place to live from a liveability standpoint. Maybe not from a career, financial standpoint, but definitely from a quality of life perspective.

I've met Aussies who've been to Vancouver (the place is packed with them). To a person, they describe Vancouver as halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Natural surroundings like Sydney with the size of Melbourne.

[whitebait]

Thanks for this great elaboration! Much appreciated and great thinking fodder for the project I'm doing with a colleague. You provide a great example of how those relations of rivalry and desire/aspiration for another city other shift over time. As well as meaning different things generationally (I would have never thought of Starbucks as the historical other to grunge). And I understand that those same Americans are filming their television shows and B-Grade flicks in the gleaming streets of V. - there is a good academic piece on this somewhere ...

The ways of describing these city relationships fascinate me - twins, siblings, exchange students etc. There was a great quote a couple of years back from the current Melbourne mayor (then councillor) about who gets to be a sister city:

'Melbourne also has relationships with Boston and Thessaloniki but none with capitals. Why not New York, Paris, Tokyo or Rome? Keen to continue the romance metaphor Cr So says every man looking for a lover knows that there are some women out of their reach. "Its like romance. You know your limit. You know there are some people you fancy who will knock you back".
(Age, 6 Mar. 2004: 9).

[row4seatd]

No worries. Cities and why they are how they are fascinate me. Happy to elaborate.

The film industry thrives here because it's easy to make Vancouver look like a hundred different things. In a lot of ways because it's such a young city and it's identity is still being formed. The housing in my neighbourhood was all built to plans imported from California in the teens and twenties, so it looks a lot like LA around here (different trees, more moss). Same with our suburbs. Could be anywhere in North America in the 1960s-70s. Even our Chinatown was assembled by British architects using photos of Guangdong and applying British design aesthetic. If you put the buildings in China, they'd be like, "What the hell is that?" We're a mishmash. A natural-born movie set.

What's new about us is our downtown core. All built since the 80s. You see a piece of it in the photo at the top of your entry. What gives me the feeling that it might actually be "Vancouver" is that it's being replicated in Dubai and named False Creek in honour of its Vancouver namesake. I'd interpret that to mean someone saw it, thought "hey, that's unique" and decided to build it somewhere else in elegy. The way streets and towns in both Canada and Australia are all named for people from the UK. Testament to what's viewed as significant. False Creek must be significant. Looks like a bunch of glass condos to me.

There's a quote from Douglas Coupland (Canadian author, Generation X, Microserfs, All Families are Psychotic) that paraphrased goes, "Vancouver is the largest city in North America that has yet to be what it will be." He's bang on. We're an attractive, gangly fourteen year old girl you look at and think, "Man, send me a picture in ten years."