Hat-tip to vancouvercondo.info (as always) for bringing this FT article to our attention. As you will see, it begs to be archived, for the chronological record. It is an absolute must-read for anybody who has ever puzzled over a ‘Best Place To Live’ list: ‘Liveable v Lovable’, by Edwin Heathcote, 6 May 2011. Do read it.
[For the record, we love Vancouver, and rate it as one of the roughly 200 ‘second-tier’ cities in the world where one can make a home for oneself. NYC, Paris, London it ain’t, and RE pumpers who use that argument as a rationale for our unsustainable prices are misguided. – vreaa]
Extracts from the article:
Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in. It is almost never filmed as itself. That is because, lovely as it is, it is also, well … a little dull.
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Vancouver’s boringly consistent topping of the polls underlines the fundamental fault that lies at the heart of the idea of measuring cities by their “liveability”.
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The lists are made by well-travelled academics, researchers and journalists for corporate, media and creative executives on generous expense accounts as well as other academics enjoying grants and stipends. Most of these people are profoundly concerned with things like well-designed street furniture, a proliferation of eye-wateringly expensive artisanal retail, boutique hotels with good (English-speaking) service and environmentally friendly mayoral policies. Certainly these are all things which help but they skew the polls to a particular type of European or marginal Pacific city. What they also do is to strip out all the complexity, all the friction and buzz that make big cities what they are.
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“I’ve been to Copenhagen,” (Monocle’s Number 2) he tells me “and it’s cute. But frankly, on the second day, I was wondering what to do.”
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“These surveys always come up with a list where no one would want to live. One wants to live in places which are large and complex, where you don’t know everyone and you don’t always know what’s going to happen next. Cities are places of opportunity but also of conflict, but where you can find safety in a crowd.
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“Sure, Vancouver is beautiful, but it’s also unaffordable unless you’re on an expense account and your company is paying your rent.”
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Yet it is proven again and again that the biggest cities are in fact the greenest. Their density, the close proximity in which people live and the minimal amount of land they occupy – compared with largely suburban Vancouver, for example, makes for a far smaller carbon footprint. Mumbai is probably the greenest big city there is – slums like the million-strong Dharavi use minimal land, energy and water.
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The most beautiful cities become monuments to their own elegance, immobile and unchangeable. They cannot accommodate the kind of dynamic change and churn that keeps cities alive. In London, New York and Berlin, it is their very ugliness which keeps them flexible.
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Of course, the ultimate difficulty with these surveys is that tastes are individual. I find London infuriating but –with the possible exception of New York – couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather live. … No city means the same to two people so how on earth can we measure them?
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And, some Vancouver pertinent opinions in the comments section:
Van-PT 9 May 11:20pm – “I completely agree with this article, Vancouver is a good place to live but by no means is it a great place. I live here and try to travel extensively to get my fill of culture,fashion and people who are intelligent and worldly. Vancouver is safe, expensive and extremely boring, the people are very small minded and horrible dressers. What Vancouver does offer is an outdoor paradise which is almost unparalleled in the modern world. The sad thing is that if you cannot afford to enjoy the natural beauty here you are in for one boring, soggy time.”
bill 9 May 8:14pm – “Vancouver and Munich are great places if you have a great job, but they are not very dynamic and don’t offer the opportunities that other cities do.”
Bruce McLeod 8 May 5:33pm – “Sorry, pal, Vancouver is best. Your choices are excellent places to VISIT.”
Cboy 8 May 4:12am – “NY and London rule. I was in Vancouver recently for the first time in 20 years and it was beautiful, dowdy and boring. Still a 2 day town.”