Blindness

I will cringe through every minute of the federal leaders' debate this evening in advance of casting my ballot on May 2nd, even though I agree with Elizabeth May that the broadcast consortium's vexation over competition from NHL hockey is rather rich in light of their cavalier banning of her from the proceedings. After the federal election (the predicted outcome of which I truly fear), I will look wearily ahead to this summer's provincial referendum on the HST (five whole weeks, apparently, to tick off YES or NO to that one). Depending on those results, we may soon be heading to the polls in BC, though Christy Clark had better win a byelection first (she's just confirmed she'll seek Campbell's Point Grey seat, but not when).

But it's this November's municipal elections that I'm already most preoccupied with. Who to vote for now that it seems Mayor Robertson and Vision Vancouver have definitively lost their way, bowing at every level, it would seem, to unseen elites rather than truly representing the citizens who elected them in the first place? I cite as evidence the following:

1. The Olympic Village Boondoggle: According to Gary Mason, in today's Globe, the $40-50 million Vancouver taxpayers are now predicted to be on the hook for re Millennium's default on its loan from the city (and which last week City Hall claimed was down sharply from the predicted $150 million plus we were potentially looking at before the complex went into receivership and a rebranding campaign was launched to sell the remaining condos) is actually more like $230 million once the additional $180 million Millennium has failed to pay back for the land is factored into the equation. I realize the previous administration got us into this mess, but I agree with Mason (of whom I am not normally a fan, and who in general has been a rabid Olympics boosterer) that being less than fiscally honest with residents is repugnant.

All of this raises the question of why Olympic host cities are required to build such facilities in the first place--most always the biggest single expense, and generally leaving a morass of debt and recrimination after the event. Can't the athletes be put up in hotels, or billeted with families? Or erect temporary structures--tents, anyone?--that can be easily removed or converted into container-type social housing after the fact. Surely there has to be a better solution than burdening cities around the world with similar problem buildings on redeveloped land that will be difficult to flog in any market, let alone one following a global recession.

2. The Right to Protest: Word in today's paper that Robertson has asked that a proposed bylaw banning the erection of temporary structures as part of civic protests be revisited and reworked does little to reassure one that this administration hasn't in fact been taking direction from the Chinese government--and specifically on the matter of the Falun Gong protesters whose daily vigil outside the Chinese consulate on Granville Street the proposed bylaw seems expressly designed to target. What a spectacular abrogation of the basic principles of civic democracy! It's enough to make one want to reconsider CSIS Director Robert Fadden's remarks last year regarding Chinese influence over Canadian municipal elected officials.

3. Casinos: I am also not sanguine about today's announcement from Paragon, the BC Place developer that wants to build a major new casino adjacent the sports complex, that it has found a partner in Marriott for the hotel that is also to be part of the project. This is just the sort of 5-star endorsement that makes this Council start seeing dollar signs. Despite the overwhelming community--and police--opposition to the development, I predict that a negative vote next Tuesday is far from assured.

Instead of bread and circuses, why not think more creatively about arts and culture? After tentatively endorsing the Vancouver Art Gallery's move to Larwill Park, Council has been deafeningly silent on Bing Thom's inspired proposal for a new recital hall and performing arts complex at the VAG's current site.

4. Fireworks: More bread and circuses. A final item that caught my attention in today's press was word that the infernal Celebration of Light, the annual fireworks competition held very summer off English Bay, has been given new financial legs, thanks in part to money and in-kind sponsorships from the City. Why? Most West End residents hate the event; it provides license to homophobic louts from the suburbs to get drunk and go looking to bash some fags; and as far as I can see it's largely an empty and pointless spectacle.

Much like the past three years at City Hall.

P.

Olympic Rights Complaints: An Update

This week the Impact on Communities Coalition (IOCC), a local Olympics watchdog, filed two new human rights complaints with the UN. As IOCC chair Am Johal explained in a brief item in The Georgia Straight, the first complaint centers around civil liberties and mostly targets the special Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit, which the IOCC claims has been unduly harassing activists and Downtown Eastside residents. The complaint also alleges that a recently passed omnibus City bylaw restricting assembly and free speech during the Olympics is unconstitutional. As, indeed, it is, and it shocks me that a Vision Vancouver-led council not only allowed such a bylaw to pass, but actively supported it.

The second complaint filed by the IOCC with the UN concerns tenancy protection for renters occupying suites in homes across the city, who are vulnerable to being evicted by owners anxious to make some extra cash during the Olympics by charging higher rates to out-of-town visitors (something that is again being encouraged by the City).

These two UN complaints join a previous one filed by the IOCC, Pivot Legal Society, and the Carnegie Community Action Project in April 2008 regarding the conversion of single-room-occupancy suites in DTES hotels to market accommodation targeted at Olympics tourists. The federal government will have a chance to respond to that complaint in September.

Meanwhile, the women ski-jumpers' attempts to have the ban on their sport by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) overturned by BC Supreme Court was unsuccessful in early July. Although the judge did explicitly state that the IOC's ban was discriminatory, she claimed that as the IOC is a supra-national organization, the women could not rely on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to make their complaint.

There was better news that same month for the BC Human Rights Tribunal complaint leveled against the Downtown Ambassadors. A petition by the City of Vancouver and the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association was denied, paving the way for the complaint to move forward for review.

As I argue in my chapter on the Olympics in my forthcoming book, these rights challenges highlight some of the social groups left behind when host cities harness their particular urban aspirations to abstracted messages of Olympic inspiration: if human bodies can be engineered--via equipment vested or drugs ingested--to go "faster, higher, stronger," then why can’t the places those bodies reside? Of course, the winners and losers that accompany such contests are a reminder that the history of the Olympics mirrors the history of capitalist modernity, from their humble branch plant origins as an amateur sideshow at World Expositions (themselves glorified trading shows) to their steady growth as a powerful global industry run by professional elites, fueled by broadcast revenues and corporate sponsorships, and riven by bribery scandals and competitive fraud. Even the poor return of medals that is routinely cited (as it was again in Beijing) as evidence of Canada’s lack of serious investment in its sports industries is part of this same developmental narrative. Yet as these rights challenges again attest, such fundamental institutional inequities are actually built into the very fabric of an athletic movement based on the cohesion of body and world that has for most of its history done its best to ignore over half of the bodies in the world, not to mention the various social and political movements they have spawned.

Whither sport. Despite its Charter’s principled avowal that "the practice of sport is a human right" (and notwithstanding the noble efforts of former and current Olympians involved in the Right to Play aid organisation), the Olympic Movement remains deeply entrenched within binaries of human difference. Sex and gender are chief among them (as hormone testing and controversies surrounding trans athletes routinely attest), but exclusionary divisions and categories based on race, class, sexuality, age, religion, physical mobility, and geography are just as persistent. Indeed, one of the main arguments in awarding Beijing the 2008 Olympics--that the world’s most populous nation should have the right to host the world’s premiere sporting event--seems slightly specious when one considers that most of the sports showcased at that event were invented by white European men at the height of colonialism. In the corporatized, bureaucratized, politicized spectacle of place promotion that is the Olympics, final medal tallies belie not just the unspoken story of "performance enhancement," but also a long history of the global south, or the communist east, having to beat the West at its own game.

P.

Free Speech Ain't Cheap

As if Vancouverites needed any further evidence of the how far we have collectively sold our souls to VANOC and the IOC with respect to the Olympics. Kudos to Mark Hasiuk at the Vancouver Courier for exposing UBC and making this an issue.

P

What's Happening Here?

The Bid, Plan and Reality Workshop on the 2010 Winter Olympics organized by my colleagues in Urban Studies at SFU took place this past Monday at Harbour Centre, and certainly yielded some interesting conversations. If I was a little disappointed by the unexamined boosterism and general rewriting of civic history by Gordon Price (former city councilor) and Brent Toderian (current Director of Planning at City Hall), I was nevertheless convinced that the members of the first panel—Frances Bula (former Vancouver Sun reporter and freelance urban affairs critic), Nathan Edelson (former city planner), and Jim Green (former city councilor and consultant to the Millennium Group, who are overseeing the construction of the Athletes’ Village)—were sincere (if, perhaps, somewhat naïve) in stating that their support of the Games stemmed from their belief that the event could bring about an end to homelessness in the city. At the very least, as they pointed out, the agreements established between various stakeholders regarding this issue during the bid process (the Vancouver Agreement and the Inner-City Inclusivity Statement, in particular) did at least get the three levels of government (federal, provincial, an municipal) on side on this issue for the first time.

On the subject of how the Olympics do or do not help cities prioritize issues of concern that they are already facing, Professor Andy Thornley, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Visiting Fellow in Urban Sustainability and Development in SFU’s Urban Studies Program this week, made an interesting point: mega-events such as these can be ways for municipal governments to jump-start planning projects—and, as importantly, attract appropriate investment from the private and public sectors alike—that might otherwise get bogged down in years of bickering and bureaucracy. While I’m not sure this was the case regarding homelessness in Vancouver, and while it seems to me that for every victory on that front as a result of the Olympics (SROs saved, low-barrier shelters opened) there continue to be opportunities wasted or eroded, it is sobering to consider how the development imperative has been absorbed into urban governance as a way of advancing at times competing or contrasting social agendas. (In this regard, Dr. Thornley made a point that “Red” Ken Livingstone was on side from the beginning with London’s 2012 bid as a way of advancing his plan for redeveloping the Lower Lea Valley area of the city.)

As for myself and my fellow speakers on the arts and culture panel, Duncan Low (former executive director of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre and current graduate student in Urban Studies at SFU) and Irwin Oostindie (Executive Director of W2), we were far lass sanguine about the benefits of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad as they might contribute to any possible arts legacies for the city. Duncan and Irwin put things much better than I did, but for what it’s worth I include my remarks here. I’d also like to draw readers’ attention to the fact that the SFU Urban Studies Olympics Outcomes Project will be holding another symposium on the 2010 Games this October 22-24, also at Harbour Centre. This time, the urban impacts of the Vancouver Games will be placed in a more comparative global framework, while still paying attention to local legacies. Check out the Urban Studies website for more details. And now for what I said on Monday:

As most here likely recall, Vancouver’s original Olympic bid promised five years of Olympics-related cultural programming beginning in 2006 and leading up to a five-week Arts Festival beginning in mid-January 2010 and running through the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Soon after Robert Kerr was finally appointed as the program director for Vancouver and Whistler’s Cultural Olympiad, in mid July 2006 (with most arts programming in the city already set and prime venues booked), it was announced that this ambitious 5-year plan was being scaled back to three, with the Cultural Olympiad officially beginning in February 2008. Even here, however, the liaison between VANOC and arts and culture groups in the city was less than ideal, and in the confusion surrounding application procedures and deadlines that first Olympiad mostly ended up piggy-backing on previously programmed events. In other words, between the bold goals announced in Vancouver’s bid regarding Olympics-related culture and the struggle to implement a plan to achieve—however modestly—at least some of those goals, a sobering reality emerged to most cultural workers in the city: they could expect a temporary—and, to be sure, much-welcomed—increase in funding in the short term, but on the question of possible longer term cultural legacies and strategies for putting in place more sustainable sources of funding for local artists and arts and culture industries, VANOC has been deafeningly silent.

For me, this question of temporality is key, especially for the ways in which arts and culture are integrated within and/or coopted by the Olympic Movement. As Raymond T. Grant, the artistic director for the 2002 Olympic Arts Festival in Salt Lake City, put it to a meeting of the Whistler Chamber of Commerce in 2005, the organizing committee of an Olympics Games is solely focused on planning for the two-week event itself; in fact, nowhere in the IOC’s charter does it state that an organizing committee has any responsibility to deliver any legacy from an Olympic Games. Now that is not to say that, in formulating its bid, said committee doesn’t trumpet a rhetoric of social, environmental, and cultural legacy; but the reality is that such a future-oriented temporality de facto becomes the primary responsibility of the host city. Which is why we perhaps see a disconnect between how VANOC and members of Vancouver’s arts and culture community approach the “eventness” of the Cultural Olympiad, which we might frame in terms of a (globally) productivist vs. a (locally) sustainable model. That is, whereas the performance model of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad as it has been conceived by VANOC seems to be all about producing or subventing specifically sanctioned events that are confined to the temporal and spatial logic, or governmentality, of the larger mega-event and its influx of tourists they are ostensibly serving, local cultural groups and producers are, I would argue, more concerned about forging more durable associations between producers and audiences joined in mutual endeavor and creative experimentation about what the arts can or should do to stimulate and reinvigorate public debate about how the arts should be funded and managed civically, provincially, and nationally. As Grant put it to his Whistler audience, “the legacy of the Games in Salt Lake City was little more than a photo album to offer to our world visitors. And this despite a $101 million dollar surplus!”

While Pierre de Coubertin, in founding the modern Olympics in 1894, declared culture to be “the second pillar of the Olympic Movement—equal to sport,” it has mostly played the role of second fiddle. This has much to do with questions of visibility and profile, as well as both the expansive definition and unformalized structure given to questions of cultural presentation by the IOC. For example, the budget for culture—as outlined in Vancouver’s own bid book—is meant to cover not just arts festival programming leading up to and during the Games, but also educational programming, the torch relay, and the opening and closing ceremonies. Additionally, the IOC mandates no specific requirements in terms of cultural programming beyond a broadly multi-disciplinary mix of national and international artistic representation of “the highest calibre.” The rest is up to individual organizing committees, and in Vancouver’s case that seems to have translated into a rather ad-hoc approach, one that has for the most part followed Sydney’s lead in closely linking cultural representation and inclusion to First Nations participation and visibility, but that arguably has failed to emulate Sydney in terms of liaising with and soliciting the participation of local performing arts producers and administrators, whether as VANOC board members or as members of the creative team charged with bringing off what, in terms of a media spectacle that, at least since Rome in 1960, is specifically designed for television broadcast, the most important moments of artistic and cultural display: the opening and closing ceremonies.

The Vancouver ceremonies’ executive director is the Australian David Atkins, who produced Sydney’s 2000 Opening and Closing Ceremonies. Leaving aside the grumbling in many quarters about the marginalization of high-profile Quebec talent like Cirque de Soleil, lemieux.pilon 4d art, and Robert Lepage (all of whom were involved in talks with VANOC at one stage or another, and all of whom eventually walked away as a result of creative differences), what struck me when Atkins’ creative team was announced in April of this year was the distinct under-representation of local Vancouver talent. The Choreographic Director, Jean-Grand Maître, is from Alberta (by way of Quebec); the Design Director, Douglas Paraschuk, has spent 21 seasons at Stratford; the Music Director, David Pierce, is from Calgary; the Costume Designers, Dean and Dan Caten, are from Toronto; the Lighting Designer, Bob Dickinson (no relation), and the Sound Designer, Bruce Jackson, are both American. Then again, given that the $20 million the federal government has promised towards the opening and closing ceremonies is apparently contingent on their message “adequately reflect[ing] the priorities of the Government and help[ing] to achieve its domestic and international branding goals” (there is much talk about the ceremonies playing up Canada’s current combat role in Afghanistan), perhaps a Crystal Pite or a Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald or an Owen Underhill is glad to be out of the mix.

It is worth noting in terms of visibility and profile, that starting with the first Olympic Arts Festival, in 1912, and continuing until the Melbourne Games in 1956, the cultural programming was actually competitive—artists, like athletes, competed for medals in various categories of the plastic and performing arts. However, as Beatriz Garcia and Andy Miah note, an expanding international base of artists and disciplines, along with routine problems relating to the comparison and judgment of different artworks and styles (the cultural equivalent of figure skating scandals in the Winter Olympics), led to the decision to substitute the competition structure with an exhibitionary and festival one. This led to a consequent diminishment of the status and relevance of the Games’ cultural programming, a problem that has only been steadily exacerbated by the lack of media coverage given to this programming; with accredited journalists and licensed television broadcast networks totally focused on the athletes and sports events, they rely on pre-recorded segments relating to the arts or local urban colour (in our case expect the requisite exposés of the DTES—already inaugurated by Dan Rather) rather than engaging with the actual cultural amenities and atmosphere of the city itself. This, in turn, creates problems in terms of attracting additional sponsorship funding for arts and culture related events—whether for the temporary “live sites” around the city during the Olympics themselves, which are still well short of their targeted sponsorship goals, of for longer term endowments for financially and socially sustainable legacy projects. Consequently, as Garcia and Miah also note, the Cultural Olympiad has always occupied an historically awkward position in the Olympics organizing committees’ corporate management structures. Organizing committees know they are mandated to address culture in some way, but generally prefer expedient, media-friendly event solutions that broadcast well globally rather than the more difficult, time-consuming, and costly planning and prioritizing of cultural policy and a vision of the place and role of the arts in the city that accounts for the very different needs and expectations of local audiences. Which is why, since Salt Lake in 2002, so much money has been spent on programming around medal ceremonies—this is what will play well on TV.

The idea of the Cultural Olympiad, first introduced in Barcelona in 1992, as a multi-year showcase where art and performance can take centre stage, and where local audiences especially can partake of and benefit from unique programming opportunities, is thus always already compensatory, an understanding of culture and performance as something that needs to be compressed and packaged for quick and easy consumption within a delimited period of time, rather than as a valuable resource that, among other things, is involved in documenting and commenting on the transformation of the social space in which it is produced (including the transformations wrought by a mega-event like the Olympics). To that end, I think it is important to talk about some of the actual performances and exhibitions that constitute the archive of Vancouver’s Cultural Olympiad in the lead up to 2010. It is very likely that all the world (and all that we) will remember of 2010 are those images we see on TV of the opening and closing ceremonies and the medal presentations; but several local visual artists have already begun intervening in this project of civic memorialization to remind us, from a present anterior position, of what, in the future, and what from the past, we may be in danger of forgetting.

To this end, let me very briefly reference a material encounter with the recent urban development history of Vancouver that is, I believe, on display in the year-long poster project undertaken by artist Jeremy Shaw as part of Presentation House Gallery’s contribution to the 2009 Cultural Olympiad. Called Something’s Happening Here, the project sees Shaw employing a similar appropriative aesthetic to an artist like Alex Morrison (whom I talk about at greater length in my forthcoming book). Specifically, Shaw takes promotional materials and souvenir ephemera, along with news articles and archival photographs, associated with Expo 86 to create street-style posters that have been distributed across the city of Vancouver since late February 2009, and that will continue to appear through to the beginning of the 2010 Olympic Games. Something’s Happening Here (the title is taken from an Expo-era poster, but also deliberately recalls the first line of the iconic Buffalo Springfield protest song, "For What It's Worth") is, at the PHG website explains, “intended to open a discussion on how global events like Expo and the Olympics impact on the creation of civic space through an architectural legacy of buildings and monuments, and significantly, how such events live on through a collective civic memory. In redeploying images that invoke a recently bygone era, Something’s Happening Here affects a momentary, recuperative snapshot of Vancouver’s history on the cusp of a new moment.”

As markers of past actions that also serve as announcements of a forthcoming event, Shaw’s posters return us to the question of temporality by materializing time as a span that can be re-enacted. The question then becomes, in this context of mega-events and civic memorialization (where time and space get collapsed, often unthinkingly, through a “once in a lifetime” mentality), whether we want things re-enacted in precisely the same way. And here, I would argue, that Shaw’s posters perform an action akin to the temporal documentation of video art. In other words, they function as evidence, in this case linking, through their very materiality (mounted on construction site walls and street lamps, they will be successively ripped down or plastered over), one showcase event to another by, among other things, asking us to consider what of our city we might in the interim have likewise torn down, or covered up. Or even failed to build.

And here I will use the example of Shaw as a largely photo-conceptual artist to leave you to ponder the deepening quagmire around the future site of an expanded Vancouver Art Gallery. You will recall that Gordon Campbell stunned many in the city when he announced, in May of last year, that in addition to BC Place getting a new roof post-Olympics, the VAG would be relocated to North False Creek, on the site of the current Plaza of Nations. This despite the Gallery’s own stated preference for the former Greyhound bus depot at Georgia and Beatty, across from Queen Elizabeth Theatre; the new site’s lack of proximity to downtown and the consequent public transportation difficulties; and the wisdom of locating an art gallery next to two sports facilities, a casino, a Costco, and several residential towers. Not to mention, as Frances Bula has recently noted in her blog, that Campbell, despite having long ceased to be Mayor of Vancouver, seemed to have vaulted over the city in making a side deal with the development company that owned the property. Flash forward to last week, when it was announced in the news that the Gallery, having done a feasibility study, would likely take a pass on the site, owing to all of the reasons cited above, plus the added costs that would come with building on landfill. Campbell’s original announcement, as so many of his do, made for a great photo-op: look what cultural opportunities we’re creating as a result of the Olympics!

In reality, however, there was no legacy planning or foresight involved here. Had there been, Vancouver would have, from the very beginning, followed the example of Turin, which consciously identified arts and culture as the most significant legacy that would be provided from the Olympics in helping it to make a transition from a post-industrial car manufacturing city to a service-based and creative economy. And they did so not by resting on the laurels of their historical cultural patrimony (something that Vancouver, in any case, could not do), but by consciously rebranding themselves as a contemporary art destination. Vancouver, as a globally recognized centre of photoconceptual production, and as the largest city in a province whose own traditional resource economy has long since collapsed, had the same opportunity. And incorporating a discussion of where and when to re-site the VAG (with its collection of Jeff Walls, and its current exhibitions showcasing the work of Andreas Gursky and Stan Douglas) into the bid discussion from the very beginning would arguably have been a catalyst for the creation and revitalization of an artistic corridor that could have (and could still) take as its starting point the west, rather than the east, side of the Queen E. Indeed, the postal sorting plant at Georgia and Cambie, as many have noted, offers a stunning modernist space that would be able to accommodate, unlike the VAG’s current location, not just a far more sizeable chunk of the gallery’s permanent collection, but also the original large-scale formats of Gursky’s best-known photographs (which have been controversially re-sized for the current VAG show). What’s more, with its relative proximity to the DTES, a new VAG on this site would arguably, in combination with the new Woodward’s development, be a major force in helping to regenerate this area outside of the constraints of a boom or bust, have or have-not real estate market.

P.

London Calling, Part 1

I'm currently in London, and in between my own lecture commitments and rushing about madly to take in as many art shows and theatrical performances as possible (the subject of my next post), I've been looking for visible signs of the economic downturn on the country Gordon Brown and the Labour Party seem daily to be ceding more and more control of. The latest scandal--which crosses party lines, admittedly--is MPs' gross abuses of their parliamentary expense plans, paying down private mortgages, purchasing flats for their university-age daughters, adorning their bathrooms with gold-plated toilet seats, and the like. And all courtesy of taxpayers' hard-earned quid, as the daily UK tabloids like to remind us. Not the most endearing headlines during a recession.

A recent editorial in the Times actually laid much of the blame for the expenses scandal at the feet of Margaret Thatcher, who instead of raising MPs' quite meager salaries in the recessionary 80s (fearing a similar public outcry), encouraged them to supplement their incomes through Parliament's generous claim process. Indeed, part of the feeding frenzy around the current scandal does seem to be tied to a certain amount of collective, and retrospective, soul-searching on the part of Britons of all political stripes and social classes concerning the 30th anniversary of the Iron Lady's historic ascent to power in 1979. Everyone is assessing her legacy, not least in terms of New Labour's own current crisis of identity as it appears to face imminent defeat in the next general election, and as the internal finger-pointing begins regarding the sacrifice of core Labour principles and policies in the party's adaptation of Thatcher's neo-conservative, winner-takes-all economics into the softer balm of neo-liberalism, where the trickle down effect would seem to have more measurable (and visible) indices. Not that that's much consolation to the millions of unemployed across the UK, and one wonders what the Baroness, in her lucid moments, thinks of Brown--the person who absorbed her lessons only too well--nationalizing the country's banking system. She may not be for turning, but the economic and social revolution she inaugurated sure seems to be.

On this trip I've also been thinking a lot about Thatcher's legacy in relation to local politics in British Columbia. This in part stems from my desolation at the election results this past Tuesday, which saw Campbell and the Liberals being returned to a third consecutive majority. Needless to say, there were no Greens elected, and our own riding of Vancouver-Fairview, having been represented by the NDP since the last election (first by Gregor Robertson, and then by Jenn McGinn, who recently won a by-election following Robertson's departure to run for Mayor of Vancouver), went back to the Liberals this time around. The referendum on the proposed switch to a proportional voting system was also soundly rejected. In other words, same old, same old. While defections from the NDP to the Greens from core voters angry over their stance on the carbon tax (like me) may have had some role to play in key ridings where the Liberals were able to capitalize on a split vote on the left, I see in the maintenance of the status quo of BC's current right-wing agenda, a connection to UK politics past and present via the bloody Olympics.

The historical connection concerns the former Social Credit Party of BC, who modeled their vast privitization of provincial lands in the 1980s directly on the blueprint established by Thatcher. The key moment here was of course the selling of the Expo 86 lands to Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-shing's Concord Pacific development corporation, which has resulted in a massive change to Vancouver's skyline, and a form of property enclosure that has contributed directly to the social and economic woes of the Downtown East Side. In the wake of the Social Credit's political self-immolation (much like the UK Tories following their forcing of Thatcher to step down as leader), the once negligible Liberals of BC stepped in to fill the void on the province's political right, and with Campbell renewed for a third term as Premier, the province is poised to repeat the mistakes of Expo 86 in relation to the upcoming 2010 Olympics. 

In this context, I won't go on about the beleaguered Athletes' Village yet again--except to say that it provides a further connection to current UK politics. For in The Telegraph the other day (all that was available at the breakfast table where we're staying, I swear) it was announced that the Brown government was poised to raid its contingency coffers yet again to bail out the similarly over-budget and behind schedule Athletes' Village for the 2012 London Summer Olympics. This because, as in Vancouver, the Olympic Development Corporation's private partner was unable to secure further financing in the current economic climate. Moreover, as with Vancouver this past winter, talk was of the British government assuming full control of the project, leaving London taxpayers' on the hook for the whole of the billion-dollar mega-project. 

Despite this, London Mayor Boris Johnson ("a total twat," as our friend Cathy calls him) remains upbeat, stating in a recent Time Out London interview assessing his first year in office that the Olympics will be a success, and that now more than ever the city needs the spin-off projects, development energy, and general goodwill and pride of place that the Games will no doubt bring. 

I wonder if out-of-work punters from Shoreditch feel the same way? I wonder, too, if BC's citizens know what they've gotten themselves in to in re-electing Campbell and cronies? As with the fall-out from the Thatcher years, it may take several decades to answer such questions.

P.

Olympics Redux

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about the Olympics, something I was reminded of in watching the television and print media coverage of the 15 women ski jumpers who finally got their day in BC Supreme Court. The women have filed a lawsuit against VANOC, arguing that the IOC’s decision to exclude their event from the 2010 Olympics despite intense lobbying efforts constitutes sex discrimination under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that VANOC, as a Canadian organizing committee of an Olympics to take place on Canadian soil, should be subject to the laws of this land. VANOC, however, says its hands are tied, that the decision rests solely with the International Olympic Committee, whose rules appear to trump all others. Indeed, as noted anti-Olympics writer Helen Jefferson Lenskyj usefully reminds us, the IOC, “an autonomous, non-elected body,” abets host cities’ and countries’ curtailment of basic civic rights by insisting that organizers play by their tightly controlled rules, including a guarantee that there will be no public protests in or adjacent to Olympic venues, or any behaviour that might be considered an affront to Olympic values. This reminds us, as well, that while not dismissing or diminishing the severity of the human rights abuses sanctioned by Chinese authorities in the lead up to and during last year’s Beijing Summer Olympics, suspending the rights of public expression and assembly is in fact a de facto aspect of the IOC’s supra-political stage managing of its collective Olympic optics.

Indeed, before pointing fingers it is useful to pause and ask what lessons Beijing might hold for Vancouver, where, as one Chinese student put it to me last year, we take for granted our right to protest as well as our right to disinterestedness. How might thinking critically about the real differences and the complex lines of historical connection in local audiences’ responses to globally mediated sports spectacles like the Olympics foster a politics of place that resists the universalist narratives of development championed by institutions like the IOC? The women ski jumpers’ lawsuit, along with two other rights challenges related to the 2010 Olympics, offer one possible way to begin answering these questions by exposing the performative exclusions embodied within the very category of the human that such narratives are meant to uphold.

The first rights challenge is a United Nations complaint filed against the federal government of Canada, the BC provincial government, and the City of Vancouver by three community-based NGOs working in the DTES. The petition states that all three levels of government are in violation of Section 11.1 of the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (of which Canada is a signatory), which reads: “Parties to the Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living …, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.” Citing a litany of broken promises surrounding the 2010 Games, the claimants allege the governments have failed to provide adequate affordable and habitable housing to the neediest residents of Vancouver; that the homelessness crisis in the city has been exacerbated by development projects related to the Olympics; and that as the homeless population in the city is disproportionately represented by Aboriginals, drug users, and the mentally disabled, this constitutes a systemic practice of discrimination.

The second challenge also concerns Vancouver’s “street homeless” population; submitted to the BC Human Rights Tribunal in July 2008 by Pivot Legal Society, United Native Nations, and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, it alleges that the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, together with Geoff Plant, in his role as Vancouver’s Project Civil City Commissioner, have engaged in a targeted campaign of harassment against this population via their coordination of the Downtown Ambassadors, a roving “public safety” force meant to combat “street disorder” that is directly modeled on a similar “hospitality force” put in place in Atlanta in advance of the 1996 Olympics. The Ambassadors are Vancouver’s more menacing version of Beijing’s etiquette police, patrolling a 90-block area radiating out from the DTES, on the lookout for “suspicious” individuals, including those sitting or sleeping on sidewalks, binning in alleyway dumpsters, engaging in public drug use, panhandling, or otherwise failing to conform “to the behaviour desired by businesses in the area.”

These challenges highlight some of the social groups left behind when urban aspiration is harnassed to Olympic inspiration: if human bodies can be engineered—via equipment vested or drugs ingested—to go “faster, higher, stronger,” then why can’t cities? The winners and losers accompanying such contests remind us that the history of the Olympics mirrors that of capitalist modernity, from their humble origins as amateur sideshows at World Expositions to their steady growth as a powerful global industry run by professional elites, fueled by broadcast revenues and corporate sponsorships, and riven by bribery scandals and competitive fraud. Yet as the women ski jumpers’ lawsuit attests, such fundamental institutional inequities are actually built into the very fabric of an athletic movement based on the cohesion of body and world that has for most of its history done its best to ignore over half of the bodies in the world, not to mention the various social and political movements they have spawned.

Whither sport. Despite its Charter’s avowal that “the practice of sport is a human right” (somewhat ironic giving the IOC’s banning of the philanthropic organization “Right to Play” from the Vancouver Games owing to a licensing dispute with one of its major sponsors), the Olympic Movement remains deeply entrenched within binaries of human difference. Sex and gender chief among them, but also race, class, sexuality, age, religion, and geography. Indeed, one of the main arguments in awarding Beijing the 2008 Olympics—that the world’s most populous nation should have the right to host the world’s premiere sporting event—seems slightly specious when one considers that most of the sports showcased at that event were invented by white European men at the height of colonialism. In the politicized spectacle of place promotion that is the Olympics, where final medal tallies belie not just the unspoken story of “performance enhancement,” but also a long history of the global south, or the communist east, having to beat the West at its own game, gentlemanly competition of the sort envisioned by Pierre de Coubertin is one showcase that has come utterly undone.

Still on the subject of the Olympics, I went to an interesting planning and information meeting at the downtown campus of my university yesterday. It was hosted by members of the Winter Olympics Outcomes Project, a yearlong cross-disciplinary and collaborative inquiry, based in the Urban Studies Program at SFU (and coordinated by my colleagues Peter Hall, Meg Holden, Karen Ferguson, and Anthony Perl, together with their fabulous RA Alix Freiler). The Project is focusing on how the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver will affect, determine, and help shape some of the most pressing questions of social, cultural, and environmental sustainability facing the city, and how Vancouver’s work in these areas compares with that of other Olympic host cities. Activities include comparative data collection and analysis of several “meta-indicators” relating to specific urban impacts from the past six Winter Olympic host cities (including public indebtedness, polarization, public amenities and legacies, sprawl, cohesion, creativity/cultural impact, and local economy); a mini-symposium this June coordinated around the visit and public lectures of Andrew Thornley, an expert on urban planning from the UK, who will speak on related issues facing London in the lead-up to 2012; a larger symposium/conference planned for this fall, placing the Vancouver Olympics within a global context of mega-development projects; a collaborative endeavor with fellow researchers at UBC in the Spring of 2010, to coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics themselves; and a possible longer term research project based on the outcomes of the Games.

It was a very useful and stimulating meeting, and good for me to talk about these issues with urban studies scholars. I also met Duncan Low, former Executive Director of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, at the meeting, and look forward to working with him in the future on issues relating to arts and culture funding and legacies tied to the Olympics. He offered a rather grim and sobering assessment about where the cultural community stands now in relation to various promises made in the original bid, with several companies and organizations actually scaling back their cultural programming for 2010 as a result of receiving less funding than promised, or simply because they don’t think there will be enough of an audience out there to support paid attendance to side events on top of all the free Olympic stuff. Something of a reality check, to be sure.

At any rate, I hope to use this blog site to post regular updates on the progress of the Olympics Outcomes Project’s research, as well as notices of public events, etc. Stay tuned, in particular, for more information about the June symposium, which is scheduled to take place on Monday, June 8th, at SFU Harbour Centre.

And stay tuned, as well, for a further post this weekend relating my thoughts on three dance performances I will have seen by then: Judith Marcuse Projects Earth = Home (I caught yesterday’s noon show at the Dance Centre); Hubbard Street Dance at the Playhouse tonight; and EDAM’s Repose mixed program at the Western Front on Saturday.

P.

Gregor's First 100 Days

Well, he may not have scored a sit-down with Jay Leno, but Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson did at least reach the 100-day mark before Obama. Here's the update he and his Vision Vancouver team put out yesterday on their progress so far:

"We have just passed the 100-day mark since being sworn in to City Hall. These first few months have been as challenging as they’ve been productive. Despite the hurdles thrown at us, we’ve demonstrated that a Mayor and Council who are prepared to show leadership can get things done. Today, I would like to give you a brief report on what we’ve accomplished since taking office in December.

The Homelessness Crisis

Since taking power, Vision has hit the ground running. On our first day in office, we created the Homeless Emergency Action Team. After one week, we were able to secure funding from the Province and the Streetohome Foundation for five new emergency shelters. Over the last 100 days, these shelters have provided a safe and secure place to sleep for up to 500 people a night. Earlier this month, I was also pleased to announce that we’ve secured funding from the provincial government to keep the shelters open for another three months.

Both the VPD and the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association can attest to the positive impact the HEAT shelters have had on reducing mental health calls, aggressive panhandling, and street disorder. The HEAT shelters are working.

The Olympic Village

Dealing with the Olympic Village mess left by the previous NPA administration has been one of the toughest problems we’ve faced. Nevertheless, I’m proud to say that your Vision team has risen to the challenge. As promised, we held an open, public council meeting to reveal the financial situation of the Olympic Village. We were up front with the people of Vancouver about the amount of financial risk the city was exposed to. We hired KPMG to provide an external review of the Olympic Village finances.

Thanks to the quick work of the Provincial Government and the Official Opposition, the City was granted the tools necessary to borrow money to finish the project. The new financing deal we’ve negotiated will save the City roughly $90 million in interest payments. We’re now working hard to make sure the Olympic Village stays on track and is done on time.

Public Safety

Vancouver, as Police Chief Jim Chu said earlier this month, is in the midst of a brutal gang war. The brazen nature of the recent gang shootings and the complete disregard for human life are unacceptable. Gangs do not care about municipal boundaries and we need a strong regional response to deal with them. Chief Chu and I met with the Prime Minister several weeks ago, and we made the case for more police officers throughout Metro Vancouver. Our city is doing its share in terms of funding our police. To fight gangs across the region, we need other municipalities to do the same.

Managing Your Money

The recent economic downturn has put a major strain on the City’s finances. As a Council, we’ve already taken bold steps to cut costs. Since December, we’ve cut $42 million from the City’s budget while maintaining services. We cancelled the expansion of the controversial Downtown Ambassadors program and implemented a hiring freeze. We’re working hard to keep taxes down in the next City budget.

Greening Your City

Vision has pledged to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world. To do this, we’ve reached out to ‘green’ business and sustainability leaders and formed the Greenest City Action Team (GCAT).Whether it’s expanding car-free days or community gardens, we’re making progress, with more to come. GCAT will be working to tackle climate change, increase sustainable transportation, and create green jobs in the weeks ahead."

I'm more or less in agreement with most of this; I just wish we could get past the partisan finger-pointing at the previous administration. Don't get me wrong, I'm the first to lay much of the blame for the Athletes Village mess at the feet of the NPA and former City Manager Judy Rogers (whose severance package topped $570,000 according to yesterday's Vancouver Sun and Globe and Mail). But Robertson has inherited the fallout, and so he should just get on as best as possible in dealing with it.

On the Olympics front, I have just been approached by a group of colleagues in Urban Studies at SFU to join their group studying the outcomes of the Games on Vancouver. Very exciting, indeed, and I shall be sure to share some of our discussions with readers of this Blog.

P.

$1 Billion

That’s the total estimated costs for Olympics-related security in 2010, as finally confirmed by the federal government today. Organizers had originally budgeted one-fifth that amount. I guess this helps pay for all the helicopters that have been buzzing overhead in Vancouver during the past week as part of various “training exercises.” Nothing like going into full lockdown mode so we can all safely watch men and women hurl themselves down mountains or slap a little black disc across the ice. And so what if that means residents and business owners in the line of fire, as it were, have to put their lives and jobs on hold for two weeks or more as perimeter fencing is erected around their homes and stores? It’s all in the spirit of fun and cross-cultural bonding.

It’s exactly one year from today that the whole spectacle begins, and as you can tell I’m starting to get worked up. There are all sorts of celebratory events taking place across the city today, including a torchlight ski extravaganza on Grouse Mountain. I recommend, instead, hauling ass to the counter-torchlight parade being organized by the Olympic Resistance Network at Victory Square at 6 pm: details at www.no2010.com. This follows upon the 2nd Annual Poverty Olympics, which took place in the DTES on Monday. And a talk by Helen Lenskyj, a noted critic of the Olympics industry, on Tuesday (thanks, Myka, for the notice); I quote Lenskyj in my book, but alas I couldn’t go to her talk as I was at another event (see below).

In related news, Gary Mason reveals in today’s Globe that the city seems to have worked out a financing deal with a consortium of Canadian banks that will allow them to borrow approximately $800 million at a reduced interest rate of only 3% in order to pay back Fortress Investment and see that the troubled Athletes Village gets finished on time. This is good news, and while taxpayers are by no means in the clear yet, the situation is looking a lot better than it was several weeks ago. Kudos to Mayor Gregor for his quiet but intense negotiating on this one.

And kudos to City Council for also voting to cancel a plan to extend additional funding to the Downtown Ambassadors Program (DAP). A human rights complaint against Genesis Security, the private firm that staffs the program, and the Downtown Business Improvement Association, which will continue to pay for it in its current jurisdictional mandate, has recently gone forward at the BC Human Rights Tribunal. It alleges that the DAP’s coordinated intimidation of the street homeless population in the Downtown Eastside essentially amounts to a violation of the right to public assembly, and that in targeting some of the most marginalized populations in the city (Aboriginal people, the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill) is fundamentally discriminatory. (Lenskyj has noted that our DAP is directly modeled on a similar “hospitality force” put in place in Atlanta in advance of the 1996 Summer Olympics.) My friend Jamie, who actually covertly trained with Genesis as part of an art project he is working on relating to the DAP, gave a deposition as part of the complaint, and is keeping me informed about its progress. 

In the last post I reported on the rethink at City Hall about cultural programming and funding, and the possibility that we might get an independent Arts Council. Apparently opinion is divided on this issue, both among councillors and arts administrators: check out this item from The Georgia Straight. This is an issue I also will keep tracking. The same item in the GS also reports that attendance at this year’s PuSh Festival exceeded 24,000 and that Club PuSh, in particular, was a roaring success. Hurrah!

On Tuesday Alana and I went to see battery opera’s site-specific piece Lives Were Around Me. We were part of an intimate audience of three that assembled at the Alibi Room at 8 pm (we arrived earlier for a dinner, which was discounted by 10%, a nice surprise). After signing a liability waiver, we began following battery opera’s dapperly dressed David McIntosh east on Alexander Street. McIntosh was a charming, if cryptic, guide (“You can’t believe everything you hear” was the one line he kept repeating); he led us to the Firehall, on Cordova, where we were eventually met by Adrienne Wong (we would also later encounter Paul Ternes), who was more talkative, although no more understandable. This was because the text of the walking tour we were taking of the Downtown Eastside was freely adapted from James Kelman’s Translated Accounts, an abstruse, Kafkaesque novel made up of monologues detailing instances of surveillance, arrest, detention, and torture carried out in an unnamed police state. The effect was deliberately disorienting, forcing us to reexamine a part of the city that has historically been overdetermined with meaning, not to mention over-policed by various state apparatuses invested in the interpretation of that meaning. However, I think in the end the text dominated too much, and that the piece was perhaps overconceptualized dramaturgically, to the point where external intrusions—that is, the very space and community where the event was taking place—seemed to flummox our guide. 

This was most evident at the bar we entered midway through the piece. Like any bar in that part of town, it was filled with a larger-than-life cast of characters, and while a table had been reserved at the back for us (complete with a complimentary beer each) we were sharing the space with Bobby and his friend. We soon learned both just been released from jail and were interested in making conversation, and perhaps more (Bobby seemed to take a particular fancy to yours truly, displaying his tattoos, and offering up multiple hugs). But our guide, while polite with Bobby and tolerant of his interruptions to a point, kept telling him that she had to keep to her schedule, and consequently kept drawing us back to the tale she was telling. In other words, despite the piece being all about looking at/for/through evidence (we later had a tour of the Vancouver Police Museum, next to the Firehall, which was more than a little creepy), the material lives occupying the site in which the performance was taking place seemed ancillary to the abstract representation of various extreme scenarios of livability. To be sure, the juxtaposition of textual site and cited text necessarily prompted me to import other spaces as dramatic referents, some of which made me feel more, some less, vulnerable; none of which gave me any clearer sense of my bearings. But, overall, the performance seemed more interested in exploring the internal psychic excavation of various spatial archives (broadly and very sketchily defined) than it was in precipitating an external bodily encounter with the full repertoire of this particular place’s experiences (on the “archive” and the “repertoire,” see Diana Taylor). Nevertheless, in terms of the latter, the neighbourhood—and Bobby (who resurfaced, magically, at the end of the tour) especially—did not disappoint. Lives were around us. We, too, had an audience. All we had to do was look.

P.