Introduction

Far from remaining trapped in the past, history has a knack of influencing and shaping the present. In Vancouver the presence in the late 1960s of cheap, long-stay hotels, dating from the late 19th century, occupied predominantly by single marginalised men, was still a notable feature of Gastown and DTES. In this sense the two places merged into each other and at their margins became indistinguishable. Many of these hotels suffered gravely from lack of maintenance by the 1960s. The westward trajectory of downtown functions had left commercial buildings crumbling, empty or underused and pushed Gastown into political obscurity. In the mid-1960s massive modernist redevelopment Project 200 proposals called for the bulldozer to flatten much of Gastown to make way for an elevated freeway, offices and apartments. Such redevelopment would surely have confirmed Birmingham and Wood's worst fears and destroyed significant traces of the richness of Vancouver's heritage. It is apparent that the authors of the Restoration Report (Birmingham and Wood et al 1969) were acutely aware of the integral nature of Gastown, Chinatown and DTES, a theme pursued in this chapter.

Lefebvre's astute observation mentioned earlier about historic space and its relationship with cultural consumption and tourism has great pertinence for the examples discussed later, as Vancouver entered the era of post-industrial spatial production through projects and counter-projects on the ground.