| Summary: | Downtown Vancouver is becoming a spectacular place. Reflecting dominant trends found in
many restructuring Canadian cities, its landscape has become increasingly aestheticized,
privatized, consumption-based, and regulated. Since the late-1960s, boosters have worked to
strengthen Vancouver's position in the international scene by staging it as a world class city,
an inviting and exciting destination. To attract desired publics, downtown has been framed as
the alluring gateway, the spectacular centre, the glittering jewel of Vancouver. Making this
convivial centre—which I call Happyland—has involved remaking and reimaging downtown
to 'upgrade' its perceived 'decay'. Like many North American central cities in the 1960s,
with the advent of suburbanization and general economic decline, downtown Vancouver's
role as the major shopping and entertainment centre of 'respectable' citizens seriously
waned. New landscapes took shape as into the marginalizing spaces new publics made their
places and inscribed their cultures. Parts of downtown became widely stigmatized as
degraded and neglected, as taken over by 'undesirables'. Thus, making Happyland has
largely been about 'civilizing' downtown—involving not only dramatic redevelopment, but
also heavy marketing and increased policing.
I read the remaking of downtown—Robson and Granville Streets in particular—by
analyzing the changing landscape, local media, City decisions, place marketing, and the
voices of various actors from multiple sources, including personal interviews. While the
dominant narrative celebrates an urban renaissance, I argue that downtown is being purified,
whereby a tightly scripted order is being fixed in which certain people, cultures, signs are
'out of place' and subjected to increasing levels of regulation. In particular, street youth have
been identified as 'pests' who 'spoil' the desired clean, ordered, happy image. I see the demonization of street youth as reflecting wider relations of power. I argue that the narrative
of Happyland, the dominant public culture being fixed downtown excludes other narratives,
experiences, visions. Street youth narratives—from personal interviews and their own
writings in a local 'zine—are testimony of this diversity. I argue that for this city and society
to be truly inclusive and livable, as the rhetoric claims, such voices of citizens have to be
given space and validity. === Arts, Faculty of === Geography, Department of === Graduate
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