Temporarily Urbane - Podcast

We are temporary. We are urbane. And this is our podcast, in which members of the SFU Urban Studies community pick up the mic to talk cities once and cities future, the urban lives we live and dream about and the people, ideas and options the city has left behind, misplaced, misguided. A lot of the time, we talk about the city of Vancouver, whether it is because we can never imagine leaving this city, can never imagine being able to afford to stay in this city, whether we lament seeing Vancouver being drained of all its temporary life-force or whether we see Vancouver gathering steam to join the ranks of the more eternal cities of the world.  

Our statistics tell us that Canada has undergone a complete reversal, since Confederation, from a nation in which nearly 85% live in rural areas to one in which that kind of percentage lives in cities. This is not a temporary phenomenon. Urban areas are expected to absorb more than 100% of the world’s demographic growth in coming decades and take up double the space on earth. About 4 out of the 8 billion people on the planet today live in cities; but when the global population expands to more like 9.5 billion by 2050, cities will have swelled to 6.5 billion people.

Loving a city enough to identify with it is a complicated thing. Being Canadian, in one way or another, makes it even more complicated, as we as a mixed bag of people are pulled to the north, pulled to the south, pulled to the wild, pulled to the suburbs, pulled to equivocate. Loving a city like Vancouver when you realistically can’t say how long you can afford to stay, even with a graduate degree in Urban Studies, is an even more complicated emotion.