![\"\"](\"http:\/\/spacingmedia.com\/spacingvancouver\/wp-content\/uploads\/features\/indepth_feature-VAN.gif\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I have been thinking about how I read the city. A plaque<\/a> at Hastings and Hamilton Streets in Vancouver is dedicated to Lauchlan Alexander Hamilton, an employee of the Canadian Pacific Railway who drove his surveyor\u2019s stake into the ground in 1885, \u201cand commenced to measure an empty land into the streets of Vancouver.\u201d This historicized narrative is for me a ridiculous dart: he was not standing on \u201cempty\u201d land. He was standing at a random coordinate amidst thousands of years of experience.<\/p>\n If the reader is complicit in determining a text, so too is she responsible regarding the city. How do<\/em> my movements through Vancouver edit my reading of it? When I moved here from Boston, I used to drive to my boyfriend\u2019s house a few times a week along the length of Hastings Street to Boundary Road where the city ends.<\/p>\n Hastings Street was my track, my route, a spinal line completely different from the curlicues and elbow corners of the streets where I grew up. It plunges through the Downtown Eastside (DTES), where it is lined with brick buildings<\/a> rather than the modern green-tinted glass towers I abhor. I suppose by sticking to my route I was searching for the familiar, carving a groove. Rereading a line. Translating.<\/p>\n As I drove though the neighbourhood decoding and recoding what I saw as a passerby, I began to recognize macro and micro schedules of a community. I read signs. If I noticed a swell of activity on the streets I sometimes understood what could have caused it: the weather, a festival or shelter hours. I absorbed the transition from office towers to blocks of lower buildings giving way to row houses then detached houses, next houses with small yards \u2014 and then I reversed the narrative process of density on my trip back home to the West End.<\/p>\n The DTES is a neighbourhood under pressure<\/a> from developments that don\u2019t serve the majority of current residents. It\u2019s an area that has been through waves of change: at the turn of the last century seasonal labour created cycles of boom-and-bust. In the 50s<\/a> and 60s the DTES was a lively shopping district. After the closing of mental health facilities and the withdrawal of social support in the 70s and 80s, and the influx of cheaper and more potent street herb drugs combined with the spirit plant journeys<\/a>, the neighbourhood became a low-barrier site for people handling mental health, addiction and poverty-related issues. Today it is many things, including an optimistic community that represents itself through political activism and arts initiatives. Addiction is not gone, it have increased and more people than ever before are visiting New Jersey location<\/span><\/a> to get treatment for their addictions.<\/p>\n I believe in Borges\u2019 idea of an infinite number of readings of a text. For the last six years I have spent a few hours each week at the cross section of Main and Hastings Streets where Hamilton planted his first stake and where I write in longhand with a roomful of people. In our writing sessions it is as if we are slowing something down, trying to locate and elongate a moment amidst a rush of change outside.<\/p>\n In 1857\u2019s Fleur de Mal, <\/em>Baudelaire wrote of Paris, \u201cThe city changes shape faster than the human heart.\u201d In Vancouver\u2019s case we can witness the transformation in three minutes and thirty-five seconds. This video, filmed from a shaky bike handlebar, comes closest to one reading I hold. It\u2019s impressionistic yet real-time, conducted from the margins of the south side sidewalk against the flow of traffic so that even the viewer familiar with the area is momentarily disoriented. The background music is a New Age panpipe composition referencing the mythic quest. And when the video concludes it does so with a fade to black, the bike and camera still in motion as if suggesting the trip, and the reading, are never finished.<\/p>\n![\"elee](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/vancouver\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2013\/05\/elee-phone.png\")
When I check the weather on my iPhone the data comes from \u201cMusqueam Indian Reserve 2\u201d rather than \u201cVancouver.\u201d This coded reminder of where I am fascinates me because part of reading is thinking about what is not written. I\u2019m aware of not knowing what the Musqueam people negotiated\u2014or didn\u2019t\u2014concerning the weather station and its labeling. I don\u2019t know what is meant by \u201c2\u201d or if there is a \u201cMusqueam Indian Reserve 1\u201d or \u201c3\u201d that might also hook into the weather app.<\/p>\n