Tracing Histories in Oppenheimer Park

22 Pages·2012·12.53 MB·English

JuliaAoki
Tracing Histories in Oppenheimer Park:
An Exercise in Cognitive Mapping
ABSTRACT
The following is an exploration of personal memories and historical narratives
in Oppenheimer Park, a highly politicized park in the Downtown Eastside of
Vancouver. Cognitive maps of Oppenheimer Park-maps drawn from memory
by regular users of the Park-were collected via postcards in the summer of
2008. With attention to Fredric Jameson's invitation to trace the relationship
of individuals to broader social space, the purpose of this paper is to identify
Downtown Eastside historical narratives-often marginahzed or obscured in
popular representations of Vancouver's history-through the pathways, figures
and landmarks indicated in the visual renderings of Oppenheimer Park, and to set o!
those histories against broader processes of spatial reproduction. The interpretive
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analysis of the collected images brings to the surface the social histories embedded
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within the Park and postcards in a meaningful way without smoothing over or
reconciling the conflicting, multiaccentual significations that refract the historical
and social landscape.
nEsuvE
Ce qui suit est une exploration de souvenirs personnels et de r6cits historiques li6s
au parc Oppenheimer, parc hautement politisd du quartier Downtown Eastside
de Vancouver. Les cartes cognitives du parc Oppenheimer - des cartes trac6es de
m6moire par les habitu6s du parc - ont 6t6 recueillies iL partir de cartes postales
durant l'6td 2008. En rdponse i f invitation de Fredric Jameson de retracer la
relation qu'entretient findividu avec un espace social plus vaste, lbbjectif de ce
travail est d'identifier les r6cits historiques du Downtown Eastside - souvent
marginalis6s ou obscurcis dans les repr6sentations populaires de l'histoire de
Vancouver - i travers les chemins, les formes humaines et les points de repdre
figurant dans la repr6sentation visuelle du parc Oppenheimer, et de d6finir ces
histoires par rapport i des processus plus globaux de reproduction spatiale.
Llanalyse interpr6tative des photos rassembl6es fait ressortir de fagon significative
les histoires sociales enfouies dans le parc et dans les cartes postales sans gommer
ni r6concilier les significations conflictuelles, multi-accentuelles qui rendent le
paysage historique et social plus complexe.
Just north of False Creek's terminus in Vancouver, a transition occurs in the
landscape that marl$ a division between the west and east sides of the city.
The division is multivalent and constellatory: from west to east is an economic
ffansition from a space of capital circulation to one of little economic investment;
a social transition from wealth to explicit and often racialued poverty; and a
discursive ffansition from a normalized and ideologically bourgeois Vancouver to
a "deviant" and marked space of concentrated homelessness, disease, prostitution
and addiction. As a pedestrian walking from my West End apartment to my job
in the Downtown Eastside, I have also experienced it as a subjective transition,
one informed by media representations, historical and familial narratives and
personal experience.
In the summers of 2004 and 2005,I was an employee of the Powell Street
Festival, a Japanese-Canadian festival that takes place in Oppenheimer Park,
which is situated in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES).1 During that
time, my personal meditations on the DTES were informed by the historical
significance of the organization for which I worked and the representations of
the space that circulate through the news media. My relationship to the space
-o!.1 was localized and circumscribed by the purpose and paths of my daily activities,
p which were predominandy related to preparation for the annual two-day festival.
q 'also
But my feelings toward the space were shaped by the dehumanizing and
3o pathologizing representations of the DTES that find their way into local news
reports. In these reports, the landscape and its residents are often represented as
diseased and infectious objects of fear that need to be contained and controlled
(Shore 2006; Steffenhagen 2006). Through my everyday spatial engagements,
my knowledge of and affective attachment to the landscape in and around
Oppenheimer Park grew and often challenged the previous assumptions about
the area that I had gleaned from these kinds of news reports. My experiences in
Oppenheimer Park and the surrounding neighbourhood are the entry point into
this papert investigation of the multiple histories of significance to Downtown
Eastside communities, particularly in relation to the broader practices of image-
building and branding by the City of Vancouver in its efforts to attract foreign
investment arid tourism-related capital.
I developed myresearch questions out of the fractures in the narratives that guided
my understanding of the space. What community groups or organizations have
a social, political or historical investment in Oppenheimer Park? What historical
narratives inform these groups'understandings ofthe park or are evoked through
their interactions with the park? How do these narratives interact with and deviate
from the images and histories that broadly circulate in and beyond the city?
The park is a site of meaning making wherein various groups and individuals
inscribe themselves onto the space through spatial and memorialvingpractices.
These everyday engagements with the park include social gatherings, organized
sport, community meetings, protests, food distribution and festivals. As collective
and individual practices in the space shift, so to do the meanings made in the park.
The control of movement-through environmental design and surveillance-is a
way in which city and private interests impose normalized standards of behaviour
from which occupants and loiterers deviate. Downtown Eastside residents who
occupy and sleep in the park are in effect acting out practices associated with
dwelling rather than practices of movement and transience that are normally
associated with parks. Needles and razorc discarded in the park point to drug
use, which falls outside legally constructed norms. The park is also located in an
area in which various cultural collectivities take an active interest in the space
(the park, built on unceded Coast Salish land, is the site of Vancouver's former
Japan Town and is a block away from Chinatown), and as a result it is often a
location for cultural meetings and movements. My street-level interactions in the
park and the DTES were the catalyst for my investigation of the parlis cultural
significance. I was determined to integrate these interactions into my research
process even though the ephemeral nature ofquotidian spatial practices posed a
methodological challenge. o
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My research into competing historical narratives in Oppenheimer Park was p
primarily text- and image-based. To guide me loosely toward those narratives, I
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collected visual representations ofthe park by circulating blank postcards to park
users, who were invited to document their perceptions of the space by drawing
a map on the postcards. Multiple sites of social significance are identifiable on
the returned postcards and a complex layering of historical narratives can be
extrapolated. The task I have set for myself is to allow for the multiple narratives
to surface in a way that disrupts any singular, linear narrative of the space, while
simultaneously recognizing the social, political and economic limits imposed on
those narratives.2 Structures of spatial production and representation constitute a
dominant, image-based "concept city"that suppresses the complex of asyrnmetrical
social relations through which it is produced. Drawing from the work of Kevin
Lynch (1960,1990) and FredricJameson (7999), I interpret the postcards I
received as tracings of movements through the park that are intimately tied both
to personal experiences and memories, and to the wider power relations that
produce a public social space. Although these discussions cannot be exhausted in
a paper of this scope, I briefly ad&ess some of the political and economic forces
that have been exacted on Vancouver's landscapes, including policies of service
withdrawal and increased surveillance and policing. Such practices operate in
tandem with image production and urban branding in the service of tourism and
real estate. In Vancouver, this kind ofbranding by the city and private interests
Fig. 1. Po*card dis*ibuted
to residents in and around
Oppenheimer Parh in July
and August 2008.
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glsr}{rs*ea*rd
fOgax e$&il.g
Or'rSrIHtarr,rrrIElr,er l3ll:l{!lor{'6'..r{- S??sSr **:llst*o,*r N&i W€6t,
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often takes the form of sweeping imagery of natural landscapes and Aboriginal
iconography.
Three of the landmarks that are represented in the postcards are also discussed
-l here as points of entry into local spatial practices and historical narratives. Within
o! the DTES community, Oppenheimer Park is understood in a nuanced way: it is
p a place where poverty, homelessness, illness and addiction are surely present, but
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it is also a place where coffee is provided in the morning, where various activities
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are organized and where, in the summer of 2008, a tent city was erected to protest
the ticketing of people sleeping in the park. The park fieldhouse, a facility run
by the city through the Carnegie Centre, organizes various activities, facilitates
the dispersal offood for local non-profit organizations, and provides a space for
people to socialize. Physical interaction with the space provides park users with an
understanding of the social and political conditions in the DTES that is far more
textured and nuanced than the one represented in mainstream media.
The Postcard and the Cognitive Map: Developing a Methodology
In July and August of 2008, I distributed one hundred postcards to people
temporarily living in the park, people who frequent the park and residents in
housing around the park. As an exploratory project, the distribution of the
postcards was largely dictated by meetings (some mediated by park staff, many
accidental) that occurred during my time spent in the park and, as result, no claim
of statistical significance or objectivity can be made. One side of these postcards
was blank and the other included postage, a PO box address and an invitation:
"Please draw a map of Oppenheimer Park on reverse and mail postcard" (fig. 1).
The fifteen cognitive maps that were returned provide graphic representations of
sites of memory that have personal and collective significance. As Lynch's (1960)
work on cognitive maps tells us, landmarks, focal points, edges and paths provide
insight into how space is personally navigated as well as how environmental
design, cultural habituation and communal histories influence the ways that space
is understood.
Lynch used cognitive mapping to gain in-sight into how people perceive the
spaces with which they engage. He found variations,limits and distortions that are
indicative of real cultural, social or physical barriers of access to different parts of
the city. Lynch asked residents of Boston (and laterJersey City and Los Angeles)
to draw maps of the city and then he compiled and contrasted those maps to
demonstrate how inequalities of access within the city produce limited or skewed
understandings of space. Limits on spatial access produced by environmental
design, legal regulation and discursive habituation are identified in the varied
representations of personally memorable features of a city (Hayden 7995: 27).
Lynch's later work also points to the intersection of collective subjectivities such
as class, race and gender with limits to spatial access, knowledge and memory.
As an urban planner, Lynch's primary interest in cognitive mapping was the
potential prescriptive improvements to urban spaces that it might help to identi$r.
He worked with the intention of identifying and categorizing repeatable urban
spatial qualities that give a city its sense of place. However, his work is recuperated
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into a socialist project by Fredric Jameson, who champions the cognitive map as !t
a means of accessing the progressive potential of our historical epoch, that of the p
postmodern aesthetic.
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ln Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (7999),
Jameson
describes a shift from the modern historical period, for which a truth-seeking
depth model of analysis is appropriate, to a period of superficial cultural forms
that can be readily examined as a series of surface appearances. The period of
modern cultural forms is predicated on the existence of an autonomous subject
who projects an outward expression and whose intentions can be discovered
through ffaditions associated with the depth model such as hermeneutics and
psychoanalysis. In the period ofpostmodern cultural forms, the subject is displaced
by the series ofrelationships between textual expressions.The fragmented subject
is spread among a series of colliding texts and visual expressions, or, in more
extreme versions of this postmodern turn, is altogether lost or perhaps never
existed atill(74-75).
At the end of Postmodernisrn, after exploring the aesthetic distinction between
modern, rationalist cultural forms and postmodern, fragmented cultural forms,
Jameson briefly turns to the visual logic of maps. He draws an historical
distinction between pre-cartographic and cartographic representations. Prior
to the advent ofnavigational technologies such as the compass and the sextant,
spatial representations took the form of subject-centred itineraries. Itineraries
would indicate the successive landmarks encountered by explorers in the course
of their travels, but they did not indicate the relationship of those landmarks to
a geographic totality. By Jameson's assessment, it was in the 15th century that
navigational technologies would advance geographic representations beyond
the movements of an individual toward an external totality. Consequently, a
collectively recognized cartographic convention would emerge that:
at once involves what we would today call the nature of representational
codes, the intrinsic structures of the various media, the intervention,
into more narve mimetic conceptions of mapping, of the whole new
fundamental question of the languages of representation itse[, in particular
the unresolvable [...] dilemma of the ffansfer of curved space to flat charts.
At this point it becomes clear that there can be no true maps. (1999: 52)
"True maps"-maps that claim to represent geographic totalities-are no longer
possible in the postmodern era. Cognitive maps, however, do not operate in a
simplistic, one-to-one relationship with the spaces they represent. They are pre-
cartographic in that they represent itineraries or personal navigations through
space rather than empirical representations of a singular, Euclidean space.
Jameson is interested in the ways in which individuals might (re)insert themselves
{ into objective representations of space through cognitive mapping. This practice
o is a partial return.to itineraries that would, when set against representations of
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totalities, illuminate the individual's subject relation to wider social relations and
p
h make evident the rift between subject-centred experiences and reified, widely
circulated representations ofspace.Jameson does not offer specific directives for
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recouping the subject-centred itinerary. In fact, his briefdetour into the topic of
interventions through spatial representations is inconsistent with his otherwise
descriptive essay. He does suggest that cartographic totalities and subject-centred
itineraries are convenient metaphors for social totalities and subject-centred
social experiences, and one would assume that map making is not tire extent of
his project. For Jameson, cognitive maps are spatial manifestations of Althusser's
broader definition of ideology as "the representation of the subject's Imaginary
relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence" (qtd. in Jameson 1999:
51). The representations in cognitive maps are personal and subject-centred, yet
still correspond to social realities. My project is an attempt to answer Jameson's
invitation to trace the relationship of individuals to broader social space; the
Oppenheimer maps reveal rifts in Vancouver's rationally functioning image-
system, a system that suppresses deviations from a constructed social norm, even
as its production relies on asymmetrical social relations.
In the Oppenheimer maps, the social realities to which the drawings correspond
are not consistent with the dominant, or rationally functioning image of the
city. The landmarks that are depicted often thoroughly disrupt urry r.rih closed
urban vision. This disruption is not achieved in an intentional or organizedway.
Rather, the very act of rendering one's quotidian movements as an image requires
a proliferation of information that exceeds that which can be contained by the
rationally functioning city. Linear history and Euclidean space are consequently
distorted. These hand-drawn renderings of memory recorded on the postcards
resist generalizabiity. Accuracy of scale or visual correspondence is sometimes
forfeited in favour of action. Human figures lie in sleeping bags or line up for
food in front of the park clubhouse. These details of movement are digressions
that prevent a singular reading of the landscape. Personal experiences in space
disrupt the closed narrative, be it the socio-cultural narratle of poverty and
illness that dominates the DTES or the historical narratives that are
"mbedded,
with different levels of obscurity, in the landmarks of the park. My intention is to
bring the social histories embedded in the park and postcards to the surface and
to set these histories against broader processes of spatial reproduction without
smoothing over or reconciling the conflicting, multi-accentual significations that
refract the landscape.
The "Concept-City" and its Deviations
It seems appropriate that the story of the park's namesake, David Oppenheimer,
is a story of shifting landscapes, of a struggle to define a vision for the city of
Vancouver. David and his brotler Isaac immigrated to Canada in the 1880s and o
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quickly established a successfi.rl wholesale grocery business. As their business D
greq so did their investments in the landscape of Vancouver, which included Nq
infrastructure such as tramlines and street railways. Both brothers ventured into
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politics, although it w-as David whose political success resulted in a mayoral tenure,
which lasted from 1888 to 1891. During this time, David's political and business
interests aligned. Much of the infrastructure built during his term serviced the
areas in which he and his brother had invested, specifically what was then called
the East End. Their signi-ficant landholdings on rhe east side of the city benefited
from the city market (later City Hall) that was built on Westminster Street, but
disputes broke out over the construction of subsequent civic buildings because
the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) held a different vision for Vancouver. As
the owner of large amounts of property on the west side of Vancouver, the CPR
lobbied to construct civic buildings in the West End. Despite the best efforts of
David Oppenheimer, the east-west disputes were largely won by the CPR, forever
changing the landscape of the city (Snyder and O'Rourke 2007:86-87,211).
The history of the Oppenheimer brothers provides a double lesson. First, urban
landscapes are sites of contest where political and economic efforts significantly
infuence the shapes that cities take. Second, the historical and symbolic value
of space is imbricated in these political and economic struggles. When the
Oppenheimer brothers lost the batde over the city centre, their significance to
Vancouver's history was largely obscured. The most prominent of their influence is
embedded in the landscape of the city is a small patch of green in the Downtown
Eastside.
The chosen medium of my project, the postcard, is a direct reference to the
tourism industry which has functioned to visually abstract and obfuscate the
social histories embedded in Vancouver's geographies. Postcards often depict
sterile and ahistorical images of landscapes and landmarks and are intended to
be purchased by a mobile, privileged tourist class. Like all fetishized spectacles
of capitalist exchange, the sweeping natural landscapes common in Vancouver's
tourism advertisements are without history or memory, an historical absence
heightened by the noticeable lack of human presence in these images. Iconic
images of the mountains, forest and oceans that surround Vancouver suggest
an enduring quality outside of the productive and reproductive shifts of urban
social relationships. This view; or vantage point, is circulated as a stand-in for
material existenci and everyday activity in the city. In this way, the tourist image
of Vancouver.is a device of forced forgetting that implies a social position of
leisure from which to view the city and omits the social histories outside of this
privileged place of seeing.
Because the DTES in general is on the threshold of gentrification-with
o both business improvement associations and developers looking to exert more
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infuence at policylevels in recent years-attempting to map narratives of the area
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5 at this juncture is particulady important. As forces of gentrification roll over the
;
neighbourhood, some symbols of cultural significance may be plucked from an
existing reserve and mobilized at the expense of others, effectively threatening to
erase or obscure alternative histories from public memory. Although this choice
may be part expediency and pragmatism (to recognize the numerous histories
that circulate through space would surely require a significant amount of time
and resources), the process of choosing and mobilizing histories is caught within
existing networks ofpower. Corporate members eftourism lobbygroups,business
improvement associations and other representatives of the tourism industry
form an exemplary nexus that controls Vancouvert historical narratives because
these organizatrons have a vested interest in obscuring poverty and drug use
from Vancouver's public image. This process occurs through the circulation of
promotional images as well as through tactics of surveillance and control.
Since the 7970s,the increase in revanchist practices coupled with the withdrawal
of social safety-nets has been particularly signfficant to urban landscapes in cities
all over the world as they are situated within a global political economy.Internal
beautification and policing practices work in tandem with external investment
and development processes that result in gentrification. For example, the broken
windows'approach adopted by New York in the 1980s, which considers the
visibility of petty crimes in a community to be an invitation to more serious
criminals, led to increased criminalization and aggressive policing practicesl
subsequendy, these strictly policed areas were considered safer for investment
capital and new housing developments. The dismanding of social programs and
increased revanchist practices that seek to attract inward capital flows occur in city
centres everywhere, although these processes are not exacted in the same ways and
with the same effects in disparate geographies. Capital flows interact with local
geographies, visual and material cultures, as well as political-economic dynamics.
Jeff Sommers summarizes three political-economic trends that have followed
from these broader global trends to infuence Vancouvert social landscape. First
is the redevelopment and repopulation of the downtown core, evidenced in the
increase in middle-class residents and the densification of the area through
skyward-reaching condos. Second is the de-industrializatton of Vancouver's
economy and the move toward consumer services and tourism. The third trend
influencing Vancouver's social landscape is the restructuring of the federal and
provincial governments, which has effectively reduced or dismanded various social
safety nets and programs (including the National Housing Strategy) and opened
local markets to international competition (Sommers 2003: 25-26). Capital
investment in the limited space that makes up Vancouver's downtown core has
resulted in a swollen property market that is now looking for relief by migrating
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eastward. As the gentrification juggernaut rolls toward the eastern horizon,
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a "property frontier," in the words of geographer Nicholas Blomley, encircles !
the DTES. Consequently, "these changes in the land market have prompted a pI
heated debate around the future of the area. Some development interests seem
37
prepared to acquiesce at the 'disappearance' of the low-income residents of the
neighbourhood, while others actively promote it" (Blomley 2003: 35). Certainly
under the leadership of former Mayor Sam Sullivan, whose term spanned 2005
to 2008, much has been done to restrict the movement of low-income residents.
Lea&ng up to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, which were
held in Whisder and the Greater Vancouver Area, the civic government of
Vancouver implemented newlegislation and amendments that effectivelyregulate
the movement of the visibly poor, a demographic that is highly concentrated
in the DTES. These by-laws are exemplary of the city council's and Tourism
Vancouver's concerted efforts to project Vancouver as a world-class city. One such
policy is the 2004 Safe Streets Act, which restricts what is described as "aggressive
panhandling" and the actions of "squeegee kids." More recendy, the Solid Waste
By-Law was amended to remove large waste-disposal bins from the downtown
area,with the effect of reducing the number ofDowntown Eastside residents who
search city dumpsters for empty bottles that can be returned to recycling depots
for money. The success of these programs, which have been debated in the media
to varying degrees, depends on and contributes to representations ofplaces and
people as "deviant." Both policies restrict the movement of Vancouver's poorest
residents and promote the notion that individuals who rely on collecting botdes
or panhandling are transgressing social norms. The divide between Vancouver's
"rightfirl" citizens and the visible poor is also widened by constant surveillance of
DTES residents by privately hired, but often publicly subsidized, security guards.
These strategies of spatial regulation contribute to a constructed Vancouver
subject, one who is unnamed, normal, safe and threatened by a feared external
object.These political-economic interests are thus very much caught in an uneven
plane of discursive practices. Coding the DTES in away that would advance the
interests of organizations that have the resources to disseminate representations
of space to a wide audience garners support for the political or economic aims of
these organizations.
Culture is a highly contested terrain in urban centres due to its symbolic value. It
is an agent of identity creation for a city; urban centres differentiate themselves
from one another in order to attract the global mobile tourist class and its
attendant wealth. Cultural symbols influence global flows of capital as well as
cities'internal social organization As Sharon Zul<tn writes, culture is "a source
of images and memories, it symbolizes 'who belongs'in specific places" (1995:2).
Because culture functions as a symbolic force for identity creation-which is a
means of producing and bolstering the service economy-the internal structure
of a cityt cultural landscape is not the unadulterated product of grassroots
-{ cultural production. The culture-scape of a city is a dynamic, contested fusion of
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! capital and cultural symbotsm. A city's landscape maybe conceptually configured
p6 according to the internal identities ofvarious districts, all with their own symbolic
forms of differentiation. As an instrument for achieving the economic interests of
38 developers, representations ofspace can contribute to the coding of"normal"and
"deviant" spaces. In his recapitulation of historical representations of the DTES,
Blomley is unequivocal about the category into which the area has been placed:
Powerfrrl interests have discursively produced the landscape since its very
inception. Long coded as a place of dubious morality, racial otherness,
and masculine failure, after World War II the area became labelled
Vancouver's "skid road," a pathological space of interlocking moral and
physical blight. Unrelenting images of deviance, disease, and broken bodies,
were increasingly framed by prevailing understandings of poverty, gender
and indigeneity.The Downtown Eastside has become a space ofradical
otherness, a zone that one senior city staffer describes as 'ho longer part of
our city." (Blomley 2003: 34)
The coding of space as deviant is reliant on a constructed spatial norm. The
construction of "normal" and "deviant" necessitates the privileging of time over
space, creating "essential" and "eternal" characteristics unconcerned with the
contingencies of space. Constructing a spatial norm at the urban scale might be
characterized as the construction of a "concept-city."
Working in the constructivist tradition, Michel de Certeau likens the city to
language, which he considers "the most immoderate of human texts" (1984: 92).