Urban Nightmares and City Landscapes
A persistent gripe of mine may be the dearth of scholarly monographs on Canadian urban politics and political economy (compared, say, to municipal government or urban geography). I often find it difficult to find books which are current, concern Canadian cities primarily, and engage the interdisciplinary, critical core of contemporary urbanism; work that fulfills these criteria but can also be comprehensible to undergraduates is definitely rare.
Indy Dreams and Urban Nightmares helps fill this gap. Mark Lowes tells a compelling, digestible story concerning the political and discursive contest on the notable public space in Vancouver in early 1997. Lowes’s book is definitely an examination of the effort to relocate the Molson Indy Vancouver (MIV) an annual, major-league “motorsport event” from False Creek to Hastings Park in northeast Vancouver.
Hastings Park has long been developed and commercialized, however in late 1996 the town approved a Restoration Plan returning the park substantially to green space. Facing opposition to a racetrack in the park, MIV’s corporate promoter, Molstar Sports and Entertainment, threatened to leave Vancouver, then offered to create a park restoration fund, and lastly orchestrated a several hundred-member “official volunteer organization” which involved in grassroots lobbying on behalf of the MIV. However, “extremely hostile and vocal collective opposition” within the Sunrise-Hastings neighbourhoodthe same forces advocating the park restoration convinced Molstar to keep the race in False Creek.
Lowes grounds his study in theories of the ideational and material dimensions of mass consumption of/in spectacular urban public spaces. He attempts “applications of these theory” by “tell[ing] a story” about the example available, relying heavily on the work of Richard Gruneau, David Whitson, David Harvey, Neil Smith, and especially Sharon Zukin for his framework. Lowes doesn’t have pretensions to theoretical or conceptual development, but puts his borrowed theoretical framework to good use.
An issue with Indy Dreams and Urban Nightmares is lack of critical distance from the key concept “community” that’s heavily employed by the anti-Indy forces and the author. This problem dominates Chapter 4, which opens by asking “Why was the local community at Hastings Park so successful in fighting the promotional campaign waged by Molson Indy proponents?”. It then proceeds on the assumption that the community exists; that place-based, interest-based, and sentiment-based community coincide in Sunrise-Hastings; and that community is definitely an unalloyed normative goodtellingly, the index heading “Community” says “see also Citizenship.”
Lowes admits that community “does certainly not imply that everyone…has to think alike”, however the concession is perfunctory. It betrays any deep recognition of the possibility of dissensus, as once the MIV sponsors believed the volunteer group represented a ‘pro-Indy silent majority’ in the community” as the anti-Indy side criticized it as “not…authentic community-based support”. Lowes inadequately examines incompatible states ownership from the term community or even the community itself, failing even going to say what percentage of the pro-Indy volunteers lived in Sunrise-Hastings (or to include substantial interviews together). The “older working-class residents and newer, somewhat more affluent community builders” in this gentrifying neighbourhood have been demonstrated to have “united” against the MIV , though Lowes doesn’t explore this issue or demonstrate the way a cross-class coalition operated locally activist organizations.
The effectiveness of the case study is showing how each side invoked the rhetoric of community, civic goodness, and volunteerism within their campaigns, and how both campaigns spoke to the larger Vancouver public. Lowes also reminds us from the insidious nature of community understood as community of consumers of images, identities, experiences, and goods; whether the political community utilized by the opponents also requires unmasking remains to the readers’ imaginations. Left unanalyzed, unfortunately, is precisely why Molstar finally capitulated Lowes devotes about six sentences to this crucial issue. The book, then, cannot answer the question driving most from the story that’s, what are the conditions of successful political resistant against the dominant knowledge of the urban public good.
Probably the most apparent use for this book is in the classroom. It’s eminently readable brief, much less theoretical, engagingly-written, and centred around a compelling example. Lowes does a great job of presenting and applying abstractions like “public culture,” which for college students could be more mysterious than we professors sometimes realize.
