Reading from Thomas Merton's essay, The Street is For Celebration:
"A city is something you do with space. A street is a space. A building is an enclosed space. A room is a small enclosed space. A city is made up of rooms, buildings, streets. It is a crowd of occupied spaces. Occupied or inhabited? Filled or lived in? The quality of a city depends on whether these spaces are "inhabited" or just "occupied".
The character of the city is set by the way the rooms are lived in.
Can a street be an inhabited space? This may turn out to be a crucial question for a city, for a country, for the world. There is a close relationship between what goes on in the street and what goes on in the buildings. For instance: suppose the street is an impersonal no-man's land: a mere tube through which a huge quantity of traffic is sucked down toward the glass walls where business happens. Suppose the street is a tunnel, a kind of nowhere, something to go through. Something to get out of ... When a street is like a tunnel, a passage, a tube from someplace to someplace else, the people who "live" on it do not really live on it.
...
A city is something you do with space. The first cities of the North American continent were centres for celebration. These were the early Mayan cities of Guatemala and the Zapotecan city of Monte Alban in Mexico. Very ancient cities of around 500 and 300 B.C., contemporaneous with the city states of Greece. The first Mayan cities and the Zapotecan centre of Monte Alban were not the capitals of empires. They did not have armies. They did not have kings. They did not conquer anyone. Fighting, if any, was on a small scale. The city was not built by war and conquest. Money did not exist. The city was built by the people, not for a king, not for a clique of generals, but for themselves;
it was their place of celebration."
"A city is something you do with space. A street is a space. A building is an enclosed space. A room is a small enclosed space. A city is made up of rooms, buildings, streets. It is a crowd of occupied spaces. Occupied or inhabited? Filled or lived in? The quality of a city depends on whether these spaces are "inhabited" or just "occupied".
The character of the city is set by the way the rooms are lived in.
Can a street be an inhabited space? This may turn out to be a crucial question for a city, for a country, for the world. There is a close relationship between what goes on in the street and what goes on in the buildings. For instance: suppose the street is an impersonal no-man's land: a mere tube through which a huge quantity of traffic is sucked down toward the glass walls where business happens. Suppose the street is a tunnel, a kind of nowhere, something to go through. Something to get out of ... When a street is like a tunnel, a passage, a tube from someplace to someplace else, the people who "live" on it do not really live on it.
...
A city is something you do with space. The first cities of the North American continent were centres for celebration. These were the early Mayan cities of Guatemala and the Zapotecan city of Monte Alban in Mexico. Very ancient cities of around 500 and 300 B.C., contemporaneous with the city states of Greece. The first Mayan cities and the Zapotecan centre of Monte Alban were not the capitals of empires. They did not have armies. They did not have kings. They did not conquer anyone. Fighting, if any, was on a small scale. The city was not built by war and conquest. Money did not exist. The city was built by the people, not for a king, not for a clique of generals, but for themselves;
it was their place of celebration."
Strathcona is one of my favourite neighbourhoods in Vancouver. Last Saturday I spent a few hours sauntering around (in the snow) trying to document the feel of the place and was reminded of the above essay by Thomas Merton. In my opinion, Strathcona is a place of inhabited celebration.
I was visiting a friend a few month's back whose 3 year old daughter is given the task each morning of selecting what she what she wants to wear for the day. For many months now she won't go anywhere without her tutu. There can be little jeans, or tights, or another dress underneath, but none of those alternatives replace the layers of fabric and colour that sit on top. The tutu seems to free her to dance those little legs through the day with dramatic movements and a toddler's elegance. Her tutu is for celebration. Strathcona feels similar to me, dressing up in color, adding layers of personality and flair to the commonplace. It's celebration, really.
And this community has a lot to celebrate. Stratchona has withstood multiple outside attempts at dismembering it. A plan for urban renewal in the 1950s saw the loss of 15 city blocks, including the flattening of Vancouver's only neighbourhood with a strong black community, Hogan's Alley. Thanks to the strong community opposition led by Mary Chan and others, the development was halted and Stratchona was safeguarded from being bulldozed and built over. Years later the community rallied again to put and end to the proposed freeway that was to run through China Town and Strathcona, the remnants of which are seen by the Georgia Viaduct today.
But you don't have to know the history of the neighbourhood to sense the resiliency that lives here. You just have to look. The palette of bright colours that live among worn planks and peeling paint tell a similar story. The neighbourhood is full of texture, interesting artifacts, gardens and green space, and vibrant public art. You get a sense of the people that live here just by walking through. It feels like theirs. Like their place of celebration.
I was visiting a friend a few month's back whose 3 year old daughter is given the task each morning of selecting what she what she wants to wear for the day. For many months now she won't go anywhere without her tutu. There can be little jeans, or tights, or another dress underneath, but none of those alternatives replace the layers of fabric and colour that sit on top. The tutu seems to free her to dance those little legs through the day with dramatic movements and a toddler's elegance. Her tutu is for celebration. Strathcona feels similar to me, dressing up in color, adding layers of personality and flair to the commonplace. It's celebration, really.
And this community has a lot to celebrate. Stratchona has withstood multiple outside attempts at dismembering it. A plan for urban renewal in the 1950s saw the loss of 15 city blocks, including the flattening of Vancouver's only neighbourhood with a strong black community, Hogan's Alley. Thanks to the strong community opposition led by Mary Chan and others, the development was halted and Stratchona was safeguarded from being bulldozed and built over. Years later the community rallied again to put and end to the proposed freeway that was to run through China Town and Strathcona, the remnants of which are seen by the Georgia Viaduct today.
But you don't have to know the history of the neighbourhood to sense the resiliency that lives here. You just have to look. The palette of bright colours that live among worn planks and peeling paint tell a similar story. The neighbourhood is full of texture, interesting artifacts, gardens and green space, and vibrant public art. You get a sense of the people that live here just by walking through. It feels like theirs. Like their place of celebration.