Seven Oaks Magazine.

“The postmodern city is a place where different semiotic systems are juxtaposed, instead of a place where culture unfolds or accumulates through time. Even the most historic cities become contemporary ‘theme parks,’ where the material heritage is renovated, put in quotation marks, and made to serve the uses of the present.” - Paul Delany from “Vancouver as a Postmodern City”

Cloverdale is a small suburban town that is prodding the rural-urban frontier. Scanning Cloverdale Town Centre: Land Use and Urban Design Concept Plan (2000), it is clear that contemporary urban planners intend to redress the streetscapes and architecture of the Town Centre to reflect a suggested character-theme: Cloverdale will appropriate an historic narrative as a burgeoning rural railway and agricultural village, which will be reflected in the “simulated railway tracks imprinted in the sidewalks,” the operation of a streetcar along King Street, and the proposed “revival of the ‘Interurban Rail’” (page 57).

Is this historical mimesis? Mockery? Memorial? Cloverdale’s railway-themed streets may pleasantly remind residents and visitors of the Great Northern Railway, but its attempt to emblematize history through miniature representation seems to result in an imprecise representation and seeming mockery of the past, perhaps to the point of caricature. In “Generic City,” Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas warns that “thinning” the past into a faint version of itself exhausts authentic (or successful) identities to the point of near obliteration, revealing that Cloverdale’s aim to reappropriate a preferable image of the past will likely result in a tourist-ridden public realm that only engages with an inauthentic historical narrative.

Destination Cloverdale: Tourist Town? Cloverdale’s resurrection sounds more like the creation of Rural Disneyland complete with spatially subdivided thematic zones – Heritage Gardens, Station Square, Turntable Square, Hawthorne Square, Clover Valley Marketplace and Junction, Clover Place, Discovery Square — and precogitated walks, such as The Station Walk and The Village Walk. The streets are invaded with visual souveniers, images of what conceivably used to be unique, but is now paraphernalia. The Town Centre is a commercial centre intended to promote the consumption of history. Visual simulacrum? Cloverdale becomes a concentrated representation of rural, small-town existence, an overdetermined copy of the unrecognizable original: history is diluted.

Easily digestible representations compose reality, yet these representations reconstruct an historical reality that is completley distanced from anything authentic. Cloverdale is not an historic rural enclave amidst the sprawl of suburbia – rather, it is the visual production of a mythic past or ideal fiction of a place that never existed. It is attempting to represent both the rural and urban simultaneously, to be both historical and modern, and encapsulate at once the past and the future. Still, it is dubious whether these elements can exist except in dialectical tension. Cloverdale’s history is rurally grounded, true, still as a contemporary place its utopianistic reading and reproduction of the past means an artificial (or inauthentic) entity is fabricated. Cloverdale as Artifice? Cloverdale perpetuates a false reality, a representation grounded in a reversion to and reappropriation of a specific version of the past.

Cloverdale “Renovates” History. Urban planners and their well-funded entourage of bureaucrats and developers abuse historical imagination to attract consumers, noting that the present is organized around images that act as containers for cultural and symbolic capital. The economic incentive to preserve the past cannot be overlooked. Cloverdale is pervaded with pleasant and quaint images of small-town living and the rural community, including numerous heritage sites, agricultural remnants, and antique shops. Street names also conjure images of the small town, a tradition that is proposed to return within the confines of the Town Centre after the annihilation of the impersonal numeric system and the consequential rewriting-of-the-overwriting of Cloverdale’s forgotten street names: to be clearer, 56A Avenue is once again Robinson Avenue, 57 Avenue returns as Melrose Avenue, 58 Avenue renames itself Bond Street, 176A Street becomes King Street. This clever “resemanticization,” as Koolhaas would term it, harkens back to a history that few remember but can probably inaccurately imagine, prompting comforting visions of community. Language refers to history, yet the sterile, predictable historical narrative iterated is one of convenience, one that merely reinforces, rather than examines or critiques, ideology many already (wrongly) believe is true, thus forgetting that, like ideology, culture is manufactured by us.

Historical narratives are digestible when they are oversimplified, illustrated by representations of Cloverdale that reinforce it as a railway hub or agricultural town; diluted narratives gloss over controversial or unpleasant aspects of history, thus dangerously removing them from the collective imagination and abusing their absence for economic gain. Reshaping Memory, Owning History. Urban planners may intend to create a strong historical image of Cloverdale, one that will be eagerly consumed, yet, as Koolhaas details, by focusing its identity upon essentialized qualities it becomes detached from what it really was, a break that precedes the point where all authenticity is haphazardly evicted and a relentlessly manicured fiction moves in. Cloverdale’s reified identity as an agricultural and railway town is fabricated by urban planners, rather than created organically by the community as a collective; furthermore, asserting the prominence of this illusory identity means that Cloverdale is exiled from anything authentic, while simultaneously reproducing and maintaining images of a fictionalized centre – literally, the Town Centre. What becomes the real? If the storied version of Cloverdale is consumed as truth, does it surrender its underlying status as fiction?

Fiction parades as Fact. What is the role of architecture in perpetuating Cloverdale’s refurbished identity? City architecture is more than an amalgam of lucrative construction projects according to Aldo Rossi, who argues that buildings are “urban facts” that house history in their painted walls and wooden doors. In a similar vein, Dolores Hayden believes that landscapes hold social history, indicating that cultural identity is partially place bound: public memory marks the landscape with the stories of those who create and inhabit space. Referencing Henri Lefebvre, Hayden notes how space cannot escape the social relations that saturate it, for “‘it is not only supported by social relations but it is also producing and produced by social relations’”. The public realm cannot be ignored, but its influence upon or participation in its own understanding of the historical narratives that comprise the meaning of place seems to have been pacified. Has the social role of the public transformed from creators to consumers of space? Architecture is a holding cell for urban collective memory, explains Rossi, yet Cloverdale’s splattering of heritage sites are juxtaposed with blocks of bland condominiums. How do these grey plastered towers and claustrophobically clustered houses contribute to the (non-homogenous, un-generic) identity of place? Has the city become so widespread, as Koolhaas argues, that it has arrived in the country, or are we confusing the urban with the suburban? Cohabitation? Will the past be exhausted, destined to stand (abandoned) next to Harvest Landing or McLellan Mews like Cloverdale’s first town hall at the corner of 60th Avenue and Old McLellan Road? Koolhaas questions how the identity of a place is negotiated, and ponders how “anything contemporary – made by us – contributes to it,” noting that identity is traditionally “derived from physical substance, from the historical, from context, from the real” – that is, not from the fiction developers and planners pretend is authentic.

Cloverdale is saturated with images that appropriate and reproduce a simplified and pleasant version of history, reinforcing the absence of an accurate (muddy) historical narrative centre; authenticity becomes ‘authenticity’ because the ‘past’ these images are preoccupied with is actually fictional, Koolhaas posits, regardless of whether it is permitted to parade as legitimate: the ‘past’ merely pays lipservice to the past. Reproducing the past as ‘past’ is the industry of the present. Similar to Disneyland, a place without an authentic history becomes what Koolhaas terms generic, existing to reproduce and perpetuate images and stories it has affected or created. However, when an historical narrative is told ad nauseum or images of the past are relentlessly repeated in the present, the authentic referrent is lost. Nostalgia is replaced by nausea.

Social Imagination? The image is a rigorously maintained entity, but who evacuates authenticity or controls its consumption? Those who live in a space create meaning, but not under conditions of their own making, thus calling into question whether resistance to “historic mediocrity” – the manufactured and controlled version of history – is likely. Will residents consume, like tourists, the idealistic proposed image of Cloverdale, or will they become frustrated, as Koolhaas predicts, by the “endless repetition of the same simple structural module”? Cloverdale intends to showcase its Town Centre through two guided walks – The Station Walk (North-South Axis) and The Village Walk (East-West Axis) – that lead the individual through the commercial core and its residential pockets. Walking is “an elementary form of this experience of the city,” according to Michel de Certeau, where the walkers (Wandersmanner) participate in the creation of meaning by spontaneously trekking through the urban terrain without specific aim or intention. Cloverdale is “pedestrian-oriented” (Cloverdale Town Centre, page 61) in design, yet it does not evoke – as de Certeau’s notion of the Wandersmanner or Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive propose – an organic experience that involves wandering aimlessly through the city without precogitated direction. An understanding of place is determined by how it is experienced; in Debord’s view, it seems that meaning accrues naturally over time through varied and random experiences, yet as soon as meaning is commodified or ascertained, time becomes static. “The street is dead,” yet some irony permits that “the organic is the Generic City’s strongest myth” (Koolhaas 1253). The linear streets are the life-blood of the city, the hub of its activity, but this conception of bustling energy, perhaps some sort of rural vivacity, is a ruse. Experiencing Cloverdale involves following determined walks that reveal determined narratives and determined images the same way during each use; the walker is intended to encounter Cloverdale’s main “urban spaces and activity nodes” (Cloverdale Town Centre 63) within a nine-block-by-five-block space, participating in a sedated experience (of consumption) that de-values active participation in meaning (or even myth) making. Nothing is permitted to be random.

The walker experiences a controlled version of Cloverdale because the generic city is authored by developers not citizens, held together by the private not the public realm; however, if the past is something intended to be preserved by pedestrians, the monotonous flow of their feet along the streetscape and sidewalks “destroy the object of their intended reverence” (1253). Overexposure to sameness results in the denigration of its previous historical or symbolic significance: the absence of variety signals the emergence of boredom. Passively consuming a narrow (and constantly identical) understanding or version of the past does not leave room for imagining the future, for the ‘past’ does not evolve beyond its existence as a stagnant (still) image. Cloverdale’s preoccupation with redressing the past results in the generic production of the ‘past,’ an image that lacks contemporary relevance. Cities and Towns “flourish / perish unpredictably” (1255), yet it is likely that in the case of Cloverdale, thenovelty will wear off.