Vancouver's suburban involution

Contemporary urban theorists are deeply suspicious of city-inspired models and ‘schools’, but policy elites, investors and journalists harbor few reservations. One of the more prominent new contestants in the evolving locational tournaments for urban ‘model’ status is ‘Vancouverism’, an ensemble of planning and design innovations for high-density downtown living that is widely regarded as an antidote to suburban sprawl. Vancouverism may represent the eclipse of conventional forms of metro-fringe suburbanism, but it does so by privileging and centralizing neo-suburban modes of development, cultures, esthetics and lifestyles. In this way, Vancouver has not so much transcended suburbanization as it has ingested its cultural and political–economic logic.