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It created a tension between those who saw wilderness and beauty as resources to be exploited, and those who saw them as treasures to be protected. It made us mindful not only of our own urban geography, which too often resulted in a cautious and often uninspired cityscape, as Morris correctly noted, but it made us call into question our own personal landscapes as well.

In other areas of Canada, the idea of what constituted The Good Life was never in question. Here, it was all up for debate. How best to live one’s life? Was it with a low carbon footprint, or a convertible? Was it a downtown freeway, or the preservation of neighbourhoods? Was it tankers, or salmon? Was it preservation, or change? Was it suburbanization, or densification? This dynamic gave rise to extremes — this is the city that gave birth to both Greenpeace and the Fraser Institute — but both extremes had their eyes on the same thing, and that was the future.

Not an idealized future, but a livable, urban one. These kinds of questions are run-of-the-mill in cities around the world now, but before I came to Vancouver I had never before experienced such an obsessive degree of civic introspection. But then, I came from Ontario.

Metro Vancouver is not the same city, physically or characteristically, that Morris saw 30 years ago. It’s bigger. It’s doubled its population. It’s a city of greater extremes than it used to be, both financially and demographically. It is not, as too many believe, past its due date. The young will not abandon it. The population will grow, not shrink. People are flocking here, not fleeing it.

But it has had its coming-out party and must now grow up. It is at a crossroads and must decide what kind of city it wants to be.

It threatens to become like a hundred other North American cities — another Toronto, another Dallas — but, as its geography has been compelled to do in the past, it can go its own way and forge something unique. I despair of the former. I believe in the latter.

pmcmartin@postmedia.com

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