John Xiros Cooper

21 August 2000

Familiar buildings and city spaces are of the utmost importance for the millions of urban peasants who now live their wired lives at the mercy of the Del key. Business and media gurus and that sham baboon in Disney's Lion King tell you over and over again that 'change is good.' But what they don't say is that change is good if and only if you want to live in a state of permanent amnesia.

Today memory is an organ of sense found only among the unwired. For most of us, yesterday's experiences are erased by the stupor we still quaintly call sleep. When the times they are a-changing without let-up, memory goes the way of the appendix. Still there but of little use.

The best way to destroy individual memory is to destroy its material environments. If the places and things around you are perpetually changing, memory begins to falter. But memory, the wise will tell you, is also the dwelling place of your being. When memory dims, your identity dims right along with it.

Perhaps you think that your memory of your own past, and therefore the continuity of your own being, is safe in your own head. Don't be a fool. What's in your head is a shadow, a plague of shadows. Memory is only made real by the environments that surround you. And when they go, it goes with them.

Cities are built spaces and although they surround us with all their noise and motion, their sheer volume and presence, they are also reminders of their own absence. That's to say, that in the city what's here today may very well be gone tomorrow.

And with the disappearance of a favorite building, or space, or the place where you once saw an angel loitering among the living dead, a small part of your memory vanishes. And don't be fooled by the effortlessness of your adjustment. The whole twentieth-century has been basic training for learning to live in your head so that you can't remember what you've lost.

Don't get me wrong, when the familiar vanishes, there isn't some dramatic alteration in your well being. It isn't one more piece of theatrical distress in a life of sustained self-display. It's just a bit of an empty feeling, merely a private awkwardness, no more. There are always those stupid mental images you've been trained to carry around for just such an occasion.

As the old brick walls go down, you grow increasingly senseless. But don't worry, the stupidity is only measured out by small increments. And it is well hidden by the compensatory addition of more smartass remarks to lives sustained by one-liners.

Think for a moment of the silence of real peasants. They have unchanging rural landscapes, hills and streams, soil and trees, forests and paths. You can never imagine any of it not being there. These are the things they know and in them they find themselves. These change of course, but slowly, like time measured by the seasons, or by the rising and setting of the sun, or by the lunar return of the menstrual cascade.

That's why when they want to kill someone, they must do it face to face, for a reason, and with a knife or with bare hands. Real peasants could never conceive of killing people as a stand-in for sex or as light comedy drenched in blood.

The experience of loss in space is difficult to explain because we have no special language to describe it. But let me try. We are the subjects of experiences that do not depend entirely on the action of any one particular specialized sense organ, like sight does the eye, or sound the ear. With what organ do we experience space, or time? There isn't any. Our whole body fits in space, just like our consciousness is in duration. So when a familiar space is suddenly changed our whole being goes blind and deaf for a moment.

Sure, you can remember what a place looked like after it's been 're-developed'. But for a time you don't fit in anymore. The old body, shaped and curved to an old space, is an awkward, ungainly lump in the new arrangement. It's when the traces of the klutz you always knew you were surface again. So your memories pale into pictures, like tourist snaps. If there was nothing particularly important about the place, even the pictures fade eventually, right down to the bottom drawer of your mind.

Which brings me to one of the most nondescript places on earth. I speak of the corner of Broadway and Alma on the border between Kits and Point Grey here in Vancouver. I don't know if you've been by there recently, but that block, like so many others in this ceaselessly changing city, has changed. I've been by that little jog that takes you from Broadway up to 10^th Avenue thousands of times. I'd be lying if I said I ever really dwelt on its beauties, since it had known. But over the course of almost 30 years the Alma jog received my passages, from a variety of residences and moods, from a variety of life trajectories.

Although it's been changing for a while, the biggest shock came last summer with the deep hole where the Alma Street Café used to be. For a moment, I didn't know where I was, even though I had seen the signs of the change coming. When that hole appeared . . . what can I say? . . . it didn't exactly break my heart, good lord I'm not insane. It just made me forget for a moment where I was. I shrugged, made another smartass remark, and moved on.

Now the jog is all different. New buildings have gone up, unfamiliar store fronts, condos, faceless little strip malls. New junk to replace what was, I admit, old junk. But the old junk defined the space of personal memory. I fit in there. Now the corner induces only amnesia and unease.

And that's the problem with our city in general. It encourages forgetfulness. A river runs through it alright, the river of Lethe, and it runs right through every brain in town.

With each change we slip back into the amnesia of bodiless existence. Yes, I know we have our monuments here and there, buildings listed for preservation, protected corners, and so on and so forth. But that's not what makes a city a city. It's all the stuff in between the monuments, where peoples' lives acquire their density, where we stop being transparent style machines and become serious flesh.

After 30 years of to-ing and fro-ing around Vancouver and environs, I wish the city would become familiar again. I wish it were full of real peasants with huge involved families and knives rather than weightless James Barber peasants with Prada bags and ritzy snarls.

I think the problem might lie in the culture of how we build. Investment has a relatively short life cycle. We build cheap, flashy rubbish in order to realize cheap, flashy returns on investment in five years, ten years, whatever. After twenty years, a building has spawned sufficient profit and so can come down whenever the requisite market conditions prevail.

If only we could break the iron grip of this logic. What if our architects and builders, without thinking about it too much, simply believed or assumed that every building they put up would stay up for at least five hundred years? Look at the impact alone on the skill level in the building trades. And you could kiss the leaky condo crisis goodbye.

What if all of us, following the lead of our architects, simply assumed that every building was going to be around for a very long time? What if we then started designing buildings and using materials that we'd want to have in place for our whole lives? And for the lives of our children and our children's children?

Our buildings would have to be beautiful in a whole new way, not just eye-catching. They'd have to be rooted and involving and in living relationships with each other, not just individual erections of poised flash. The young and the haughty casting a cold eye over the designer groceries in Urban Fare or Meinhardt's might finally be able to remember what they ate yesterday.

And you never know, familiarity might spread its blessing to our very souls and, finally, relieve the migraine induced by the dread of being left behind. And there'd be a thousand other benefits I can't even begin to go into.

(John Xiros Cooper teaches at U.B.C. and writes about culture and current affairs from Vancouver)

Finish