the little glass paradise

 the little glass paradise

I'm sitting outside a coffee shop in Vancouver on October 4, watching people.

And wow.

Vancouver has changed.

Maybe COVID changed it. Maybe I just haven't sat in one place and really watched the city like this for a long time. But yesterday and today, I've been noticing things I might normally just walk past.

Families with little kids riding electric bikes. People from all over the world. People who seem to have good jobs and money. Expensive bicycles. Expensive cars. Older people with really nice walkers.

Everyone moving through this strange, shiny version of Vancouver.

I'm sitting here in a neighbourhood of towers.

There are beautiful little rosemary and lavender bushes. A few trees. The sun is lovely, and when you're sitting directly in it, it's actually quite warm.

But step into the shade and it's chilly.

And I keep looking around.

Cobblestone. Pavement. Glass. Concrete. Towers.

Not much green.

No green walls that I can see. No green roofs. Not much soil. Not much canopy.

It is a little glass-and-concrete paradise that somebody has carefully designed.

And it really is nice.

That's the strange part.

I'm not sitting here complaining about how ugly it is. It's beautiful in its own way. People are enjoying themselves. Children are laughing. People are drinking coffee. Bikes are everywhere. The landscaping is neat and intentional.

But I'm wondering about the future.

Because summer must be very different here.

What happens when the sun beats down on all this pavement and glass for days?

What happens when the heat doesn't go away at night?

What happens when we get another summer of wildfire smoke?

What happens when extreme rain arrives and there isn't much soil or green space to absorb it?

And what happens when the big storms get bigger?

We keep building upward.

Glass towers. More towers. More pavement. More people packed into smaller spaces.

And I understand why. Vancouver needs housing. People need places to live. We can't pretend cities are never going to grow.

But are we building cities for the Vancouver we used to have, or for the Vancouver we're going to have?

Because those may be two very different cities.

I keep thinking about the little things that actually make a city resilient.

Trees.

Shade.

Soil.

Gardens.

Green roofs.

Rain gardens.

Places where water can actually soak into the ground.

Places where people can sit without baking on concrete.

Places where birds, insects and other little creatures can still exist.

Green isn't just decoration.

Green is infrastructure.

And then there's the human side of it.

Sitting here watching all these people, I can't help noticing how different everyone's lives must be.

Somebody has the expensive electric bike.

Somebody has the expensive car.

Somebody is carrying a designer coffee cup.

Somebody is pushing a walker.

Somebody is raising children.

Somebody is working upstairs in one of these towers.

And somewhere else in Vancouver, someone is trying to figure out where they're going to sleep tonight.

That's Vancouver too.

I have spent enough time outside in this city to know that climate change isn't an abstract concept.

You feel it.

You feel the heat.

You feel the smoke.

You feel the rain.

You feel the cold when you don't have a door to close behind you.

So I'm sitting here in the sunshine, enjoying this little urban paradise while I can.

And I'm wondering:

How will this place feel in twenty years?

Will these towers still feel like little glass paradises?

Or will we look back and realize that we forgot something incredibly important when we built them?

Nature.

Not as an ornament.

As part of the city itself.

Maybe the future Vancouver needs to be more than taller.

Maybe it needs to be greener.

And maybe the real measure of a successful city isn't how expensive its buildings, cars and bicycles are.

Maybe it's whether people — and the living world around them — can actually thrive there.