Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
wealth assembled by middle class residents in the final years of colonial
government was frequently tied to the highly orchestrated market in land,
where state-mandated scarcity led to a housing bubble that was sustained
until 1997. Li Ka-shing's portfolio expansion to Vancouver in his purchase
and redevelopment of the massive Expo site, not only placed Vancouver on
the investment map, but also helped to over-determine property as a press-
ing priority for those who discovered the city as a place to live and/or invest.
The idea of land was embodied in the cultural repertoire of migrants and
investors who came to Vancouver, creating an extraordinary property market
for a decade after 1986, described with some hyperbole by Katharyne
Mitchell (2004: 3) as 'the hottest real estate in the world. It was a city on
fire'. A significant element of the social construction of “Hongcouver” was
the pre-eminence of housing inflation and property deals in the popular
imagination, together with their mood swings of exhilaration and anxiety.
The Vancouver property story should direct more theoretical attention to
off-shore capital in the land markets of global cities, not least because the
geographical switching of international investors can produce exaggerated
boom-bust cycles in even mature urban economies. The old idea that mainly
local and regional processes and actors drive the property market must be
set aside in global cities. This is not to say that local actors are unimportant,
for the hard work undertaken by Vancouver's business elite and their aca-
demic consultants demonstrated that globalization was a project that was
achieved through the power of persuasion.
Resistance by some Vancouver residents in elite districts to overseas prop-
erty investment was the most publicized aspect of the reception of new
immigrants in the early 1990s. The infamous 'monster house' conflict drew
much commentary from local business interests, out of town media, and
critical academics who spoke from the same page in a language imputing
race and racism as driving the controversy. The convergence of views among
those who were seemingly detached (media, scholars) and those who were
highly partisan (the property sector) created an ironic alliance. I argued that
all three sets of critics were oversimplifying much more complex relations
where well-established unease with off-shore commodification, with rapid
growth, together with a strong sense of topophilia, love of place, intersected
for some Vancouverites with prejudicial views concerning cultural differ-
ence. Such intersectionality in interpretation provides a fuller and more
satisfactory account than a one-dimensional theorizing from critical race
studies. A multicultural landscape compromise ended the dispute and,
despite continuing in-migration of wealthy immigrants from East Asia,
politicization disappeared.
So in these two respects, education and land, among others the fusion of
the transnational social field into the cultural formation of 'Hongcouver'
took shape after 1986. This outcome demonstrates that Canada's multicultural
