The city was there before you were born. It will be there after you die. And it is always changing, adapting, absorbing, and transforming, whether we plan for it or not, whether we want it to or not. The city’s lifespan far exceeds our mortal imagination, as it cycles through multiple human lifetimes, multiple generations. Our predecessors told us their stories, and our descendants will tell theirs.
Time as a Lens
When a neighbourhood changes, we grieve what we perceive as the loss of something original, what we call “authentic”. But as Sharon Zukin argued in Naked City, that longing says more about us than about the place. The city is always changing around us, and what we call authentic is often just the previous memorable or well-documented iteration, not necessarily the history that came before it. The city moves in one direction: forward through time, and there is no original state to return to.
In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames made a short film called Powers of Ten, zooming from a picnic in Chicago to the edge of the observable universe and back again, each step ten times further than the last. A few years later, it became a flipbook. I bought one at a museum gift shop sometime in the early 2000s and have never quite forgotten it. What follows borrows that same logic, applied not to space but to time.
In the 1970s, William H. Whyte mounted time-lapse cameras above the plazas of Manhattan and simply watched. What he captured, later published as The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, was a city in constant, minute motion. People unconsciously tracked the sun across a plaza, shifting slowly, accompanying the moving gap where sunshine struck. Crowds gathered at corners, not mid-block. Space that felt empty at noon was alive by 1 pm. Whyte wasn’t documenting change across years. He was documenting change across minutes.
Timelapse Travel
We will traverse the cross-section of time in the city, from the span of seconds to the arc of generations. Picture a ten-second time-lapse. Fixed frame, fixed duration. What changes is how much time has been compressed into it. The same ten seconds can hold ten seconds, a day, a decade. That is the device.
- Ten seconds = ten seconds – A pedestrian light counts down, 3, 2, 1. Too late. Wait for the next.
- Ten seconds = twelve hours – Temple Street in Kowloon, Hong Kong, assembles through the afternoon, erupts into light and noise by evening, dismantles late at night, and by morning, a delivery truck rolls through an empty street as if nothing happened.
- Ten seconds = seven days – Wall Street in lower Manhattan, packed with workers on Tuesday morning, nearly empty on Saturday afternoon, along with all the streets that feed off its weekday logic, save for islands of activity like Stone Street and the Charging Bull.
- Ten seconds = seven days – Every Sunday, Avenida Paulista in São Paulo closes to traffic. Six lanes of cars on Monday, vendors and cyclists on Sunday, six lanes again on Monday. What began as a tactical experiment became permanent, the same road, reprogrammed once a week.
- Ten seconds = six months – The streets behind Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal disappear under a summer canopy. The same streets in winter reveal a cathedral that was invisible six months before. The city has not changed. The season has changed what the city shows you.
- Ten seconds = five years – A parking-dominated street in Antwerp is cleared, repaved, and planted with trees. People sit where cars once stood.
- Ten seconds = five years – A building on Carrall Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown, boxed in and altered over decades, is restored to its 1904 facade. The city is moving forward through time, reaching back to recover something it had lost.
- Ten seconds = about a decade – A row of street trees on Foster Ave in Vancouver grows from stubs into a canopy that now obscures the buildings behind it. The trees were living while we were living. One day you look up and can no longer see what was always there behind them.
- Ten seconds = about a decade – The Burnaby skyline, seen from the flats of Richmond, grows from a couple of protruding buildings on the horizon into a dense cluster of towers.
- Ten seconds = about a decade – In New York’s Greenwich Village, the buildings haven’t changed. The streets look the same. But walk Bleecker Street across ten years and a mom-and-pop store, a record shop, give way to the usual suspects, a Starbucks, which closes during the pandemic, replaced by a generic phone carrier. No single decision caused this. Change by attrition, and people notice it happening even as it happens. Jane Jacobs had a name for this kind of slow displacement in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: attrition. One concession at a time, until the neighbourhood you knew is gone.
The same neighbourhood, sixty years before, faced something far more consequential, something that could have made that entire Bleecker Street scene not even exist, erasing the neighbourhood’s future as surely as the fading McFly family in Marty’s polaroid in Back to the Future, foreshadowing an alternate timeline where Bleecker Street exists only as a highway exit. A highway was planned through the heart of lower Manhattan, one of many drawn across North American cities in that era, when the belief that the modern city belonged to the car was so widely held it barely needed justification. The plan was halted, in part through the advocacy of urbanist Jane Jacobs, who argued that what planners saw as obsolete neighbourhood fabric was in fact one of the most alive parts of the city.
The Viaduct as Protagonist
The same decade that threatened Greenwich Village with a highway saw Vancouver draw up its own. The plans were vast, freeways threaded through Chinatown, Gastown, and the waterfront. What drove them wasn’t malice but a simpler assumption: what was being built everywhere else should be built here too. Most North American cities of that era have the highways to show for it. Vancouver, almost uniquely, does not. The viaducts are the fragments that got through before the community stopped the rest.
Vancouver’s community organized and fought, and most of it was stopped. But not before a fragment was built. The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts opened in 1972, and with them, Hogan’s Alley, then the heart of Vancouver’s Black community, was gone. The full story of the viaducts, past, present, and future, was documented by Spacing Vancouver in a two-part series in 2011, and remains the most thorough account of this corner of the city’s history.
Those viaducts replaced something older. The first Georgia Viaduct had opened in 1915 and was failing almost from the start, sagging sections, timber propping up the concrete, chunks falling to the ground below. By the early 1960s, the city agreed it needed to go. The community agreed too. Nobody told them that the replacement had grown into something much larger. By the time the full freeway plan was visible, fifteen blocks were already demolished. The viaducts that stand today are the concrete remnant of a vision the city ultimately rejected.
Those viaducts left something else behind, too: shadow. The ground beneath them became lost space, the kind of forgotten spaces that infrastructure creates, and that the city learns to live with and under. Expo 86 animated the cleared ground nearby and left Science World as its legacy. And since then, a mix of transformations, plans, and proposals has been shaping this corner of the city in perpetual suspension between past and future waves of transformation.
More than a century after the first-generation viaduct was built, the second-generation viaducts are on their way to being transformed within a new scheme that includes a park, the third generation. The viaduct is the protagonist here. Three completely different visions of what that piece of infrastructure and city building should be. None of them was able to imagine what the next would decide.
And neither can we; whatever we are building at this very moment, we cannot imagine what the generation after us will make of it.
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Yuval Fogelson is an urban designer, educator, and artist who loves to explore and understand cities. Based in Vancouver, his work spans the built environment, from public space transformations and tactical urbanism to mobility hub networks and digital twins. He is the founder of YF City Urbanism and paints maps as part of Yellow Future City.
