Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
we talking about each man living on an island? Properties, our homes, are
not commodities or poker chips. We cannot develop without consideration
of others.' A husband and wife in South Shaughnessy filled out the com-
munitarian case in a letter to Council:
We've raised our family here, sent our children to the neighbourhood schools,
participated in all kinds of community events over the years. Now many of the
people who own homes in the area don't live here. The homes are empty.
These homes are investments, perhaps one of many.You feel differently about
a place when you live there, form friends there, become part of the neighbour-
hood and the community…
We don't mind change but we want to see it fit into the neighbourhood. We
don't like to see good homes with years of liveability in them destroyed if
something not appropriate is put up in their place. We want the area to remain
a liveable and lovely neighbourhood for the families that live here now and
will live here in the future. We want to stress that this is a place to live not just
a place to make money out of.
This coherent testimony presented a social ontology of the neighbourhood
as a primary unit, a place of symbolic not primarily exchange value, a setting
of bonding social capital. Such narratives of neighbourhood as a greater
family home had political legitimacy as the City's past decisions had proven.
Indeed Council had brought to the public hearing two alternate downzoning
motions with reductions in outright house floor area of either 25 percent or
10 percent. In each case the objective was to discourage demolitions.
The sentiment and symbolism evident in such testimonies merged into a
sense of grief among those who felt neighbourhood changes were irreversi-
ble. A Scottish couple who had lived in the area for 35 years despaired of a
satisfactory future: 'We're old and we're going out. This is the end of an era.
As soon as we leave, the house will be sold and knocked down and another
box will go up in its place' (Griffin 1992). A furore had broken out with the
felling of two mature sequoia trees following a Kerrisdale home sale in 1990,
generating a full page of letters to the editor of the
Vancouver Sun
(Ley
1995). Most striking had been the elegy written by the former owner of the
house, an extraordinary public effusion of topophilia, love of place, together
with grief, akin almost to the loss of a family member and an apology to
neighbours. It read, in part:
My decision to sell the house was precipitated by impending retirement. It
was taken with a strong sense of foreboding, given the recent fate of similar
houses and trees in our city.
Part of me has died with the trees. I bitterly regret what has happened. The
two amputated stumps remain as mute grave markers to what has been
destroyed.
