Vancouver’s Veneer
A planet hurtles past a solstice towards perihelion, and Port City rejoices.
It is a place where skyscrapers sprout from mist. Garish projections fulfilling prophecies written into fiction decades past. Architecture akin to its siblings on similar coasts, in form not function, leering over paved grids. Scaffolding and circuitry facilitating stop-start processions of suits and skirts, vagabonds and ragamuffins, the listless and the determined. A concoction of noise, purpose, and energy.
The chilled holiday haze settles and departs hastily, sandwiching daily showers and windstorms. A humid, wintry alchemy that sustains a world of mirrors – darkened and drenched facades extending above soaked streets. The buildings floating on fog awash in dull greys punctuated by neon. The city’s translucent wrapping a liminal, reflective space dividing polluted skies above from frenzied avenues below.
It is an amalgam of engines, passages, and stages. Everyone descends upon its storied stations to perform or spectate. All roads, waterways, airways, and thought-streams lead to Port City, a frequented corner of an ever-rotating globe; an abstract geometry. Where people walk, drive, fly, train, and float around, taxied between physical, cultural, and economic portals. ‘Skipping town’ a regular and expected exercise, an offering on the cornucopic menu.
Where currents of currency surge parallel to accompanying atmospheric rivers, creating magnetic conditions for those benefitting from disaster capitalism. Where every couple of weeks, the volatility of coastal systems in the Anthropocene invites the lesser-talked-about cousins of more extreme environmental events, who cause regular havoc elsewhere, buttressed by a collective disregard of existential threats. (Recent instances here and here.)
It is the center of bureaucracy and bazaars. Port City is prosperity incarnate. The import and export of power as central to its raison d’être as the cargo carried by orbiting container ships.
Most envy life within its metaphorical walls; their visits and occupation testing its quality. A desired livability sought but not as often maintained. Urban entertainment, business, ceremony, and influence that demands time, energy, money, and attention. A gateway for those who can pay for the privilege; a site of tiered transience. For those who call it home, it evolves with too great a pace. Restless through time, its movement establishes a corridor unplanned yet resolute.
Port City’s imagery is phantasmagoric and dialectical. A blend of inside and outside, opulent and downtrodden, kitschy and innovative, new and old.
Its sidewalks glide seamlessly underneath arcades as metro entrances and parking lots popcorn into existence. Artwork commissioned and not adorns alleyways and alcoves, graffiti and murals ceding larger displays to profit-driven endeavors. All public spaces are commercial before they are communal. Billboards, posters, lights, steel, and glass. Tents, sleeping bags, cardboard, and wooden shacks. Individuals and edifices apparent and ignored.
Port City’s community squares are also battlefields. Places where undercurrents breach social barriers to surface and validate alternative ways of being. Where protests ignite against the status quo, demanding a greater share in collective wealth and justice.
A hub of interaction, diplomacy, and science. Occasionally the source yet often the filter of proffered solutions. A clinic where experiments are formulated and trials run. Its residents hold outsized importance, lab rats and consultants whose opinions and behaviors inform policy beyond borders. The world looks to Port City for answers as it abides inequality, inequity, and segregation. Headquarters of history and hypocrisy alike.
And what of the tides whose gentle spells carry treasure to its shores? In shifting teals, gloomy greys, and sunburnt orange – a sight to behold under any circumstance. Manmade beaches and parks aligning an ocean’s waters a subtle reminder of a habitats at stake. Industry – in the forms of vessels, cranes, machinery, and mineral stockpiles – an encroachment into what was once sacred. A growing presence within a segment of existence constrained by unforgiving expanses above and below.
This is where friends, families, and acquaintances congregate. With regularity but not as often as they once did.
By night and by day, Port City is everything. A fantasy where pretenses trump realities. A muse welcoming engagement.
Port City is whatever one wants it to be.