SpongeG
06-03-2007, 10:43 PM
interesting article about vancouver
Cash and culture - a match made in a Great City
Ifeel a particular variety of civic bullishness in the air lately. Let's start with the Big Story (big for those of us involved in publishing, anyway).
Last week, Douglas & McIntyre, the Vancouver-based independent publisher founded in 1971, announced that a group of investors had bought a controlling interest in the company.
Rich folks from the outside world have bought into publishing before, of course. Still, this acquisition was notable because of what sort of money came calling.
Led by Mark Scott, formerly an investment banker with Scotia Capital, the investors are all Vancouver-based and include Rod Senft and David Rowntree, principals at Tricor Pacific Capital, a successful private-equity investment fund in the city.
Private-equity investors. Read: high priests of finance who buy assets with a fairly strict view of making money.
"You don't make profits, you go out of business," Mr. Scott tells me, simple and cool. He loves books, he explains, making the purchase a good fit. But this admission may only make publishing insiders silently hope that he loves books enough.
D&M co-founder Scott McIntyre seems pleased to provoke this reaction, in any case. "I had a lot of intrigued phone calls," he tells me with a satisfied chuckle.
Satisfied, and deservedly so. Mr. Scott's interest is a vote of confidence in D&M, particularly given that he will not be content with the status quo, but plans to expand.
Yes, you read that correctly: An independent Canadian publisher will now be drafting an acquisitions strategy.
But Mr. Scott also attributes a significant part of his confidence to Vancouver itself. This is the place where he chose to set up shop after years in Hong Kong. "I'm here and I'm not moving. Our head office is here and that's where it will stay."
Vancouverites should take note, our town not exactly being a magnet for corporate head offices. But we should note also that Mr. Scott's confidence is directed toward a project in Vancouver's creative industries. Because here is where Mr. Scott and his investors are synchronized to a broader bullish sentiment.
Those of you attuned to urban planning in this town may sense this already.
Perhaps you've even read the remarkable document that is currently making the rounds. The Power of the Arts in Vancouver: Creating a Great City was published in January of this year, a collaboration between Vancouver City Savings Credit Union and Pier Luigi Sacco, an economist from the University of Florence.
Mr. Sacco's basic point is that the creative industries in Vancouver hold the key to the city's future, both economically and socially. We depend on these sectors not only for the pleasure of their output - art, theatre, books, movies and so on - but for the mindset of innovation that they cultivate, which we in turn need in order to be competitive in the global knowledge economy.
Further, we depend on creative output to shape our civic character, that sense of shared personality you encounter in places such as Montreal and New York that is, admittedly, still germinal here.
That part of Mr. Sacco's argument makes for pleasant enough reading. Like all good consultants, he goads mildly and flatters convincingly. But in a chapter titled Vancouver as a Dual Cultural City, Mr. Sacco derails spectacularly and makes, inadvertently, his most important point.
In this chapter, Mr. Sacco maps the physical sites of culture in our city - dance studios, annual festivals, art galleries - and (surprise, surprise) finds the vast majority of them to be situated on the east side. Behold Vancouver's dualism. A town split between "... the east city, which is culturally active but relatively low-income, and the west city, that is economically affluent but culturally limited."
Culturally limited? Ouch. But stand by, it gets worse. Evidently disgusted with stroller moms and high-end bakeries in West Point Grey, Mr. Sacco then revises his appraisal of everything west of Main Street to "culture-free," even going so far as to assert that Vancouver has two "ground zeros." One is at Main and Hastings (where, by Mr. Sacco's reckoning, residents are experience-rich and object-impoverished) and the other at Robson and Thurlow (where the situation is reversed, but the poverty equivalent, only cultural not material).
The symmetry of this formulation must have looked pretty good on Mr. Sacco's whiteboard at some point. But intellectually speaking, it's a sophomoric quip and wants for explanatory power. Specifically, the notion fails entirely to explain how this city, or any city, is actually lived.
Artists working on the east side (myself included) do not necessarily lay their heads down to sleep in those same neighbourhoods. Neither do the creative experiences enjoyed on the east side necessarily remain there. They travel home with those who experience them. Some east, some west. Some - gasp - to Richmond.
Still, Mr. Sacco forges onward to his most misguided, destructive conclusion when, of his notional east and west cities, he suggests that "there seems to be no feeling that the two parts ought even to communicate between themselves, let alone be part of a common vision of social and cultural development."
This is just wrong. And to illustrate how Vancouverites can and will act differently than Mr. Sacco proposes, we need only return to the purchase of D&M.
Mr. Scott, living with his vast book collection in his restored Arthur Erickson house in West Vancouver, comes from what is surely the most westerly point in the affluence matrix of our west side.
D&M, by contrast, whose Quebec Street offices don't even make it on to Mr. Sacco's map at all, apparently lie in so easterly a position as to leak out of the visible east side altogether.
Did they meet? Did they cross the "perfect spatial separation" between east and west (as Mr. Sacco describes it) and in so doing reflect a broader, more popular optimism in our own commercial and artist future?
They did indeed. Mr. McIntyre and Mr. Scott met at a book club. And it's those sorts of meetings - between our east and our west, our creative and our investing classes - that will yet be critical to realizing the upside of our bullish feelings, the happier aspects of that Great City.
Timothy Taylor is a novelist and journalist based in Vancouver. His latest book is the novel Story House
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070521.LTAYLOR21/TPStory/National
Cash and culture - a match made in a Great City
Ifeel a particular variety of civic bullishness in the air lately. Let's start with the Big Story (big for those of us involved in publishing, anyway).
Last week, Douglas & McIntyre, the Vancouver-based independent publisher founded in 1971, announced that a group of investors had bought a controlling interest in the company.
Rich folks from the outside world have bought into publishing before, of course. Still, this acquisition was notable because of what sort of money came calling.
Led by Mark Scott, formerly an investment banker with Scotia Capital, the investors are all Vancouver-based and include Rod Senft and David Rowntree, principals at Tricor Pacific Capital, a successful private-equity investment fund in the city.
Private-equity investors. Read: high priests of finance who buy assets with a fairly strict view of making money.
"You don't make profits, you go out of business," Mr. Scott tells me, simple and cool. He loves books, he explains, making the purchase a good fit. But this admission may only make publishing insiders silently hope that he loves books enough.
D&M co-founder Scott McIntyre seems pleased to provoke this reaction, in any case. "I had a lot of intrigued phone calls," he tells me with a satisfied chuckle.
Satisfied, and deservedly so. Mr. Scott's interest is a vote of confidence in D&M, particularly given that he will not be content with the status quo, but plans to expand.
Yes, you read that correctly: An independent Canadian publisher will now be drafting an acquisitions strategy.
But Mr. Scott also attributes a significant part of his confidence to Vancouver itself. This is the place where he chose to set up shop after years in Hong Kong. "I'm here and I'm not moving. Our head office is here and that's where it will stay."
Vancouverites should take note, our town not exactly being a magnet for corporate head offices. But we should note also that Mr. Scott's confidence is directed toward a project in Vancouver's creative industries. Because here is where Mr. Scott and his investors are synchronized to a broader bullish sentiment.
Those of you attuned to urban planning in this town may sense this already.
Perhaps you've even read the remarkable document that is currently making the rounds. The Power of the Arts in Vancouver: Creating a Great City was published in January of this year, a collaboration between Vancouver City Savings Credit Union and Pier Luigi Sacco, an economist from the University of Florence.
Mr. Sacco's basic point is that the creative industries in Vancouver hold the key to the city's future, both economically and socially. We depend on these sectors not only for the pleasure of their output - art, theatre, books, movies and so on - but for the mindset of innovation that they cultivate, which we in turn need in order to be competitive in the global knowledge economy.
Further, we depend on creative output to shape our civic character, that sense of shared personality you encounter in places such as Montreal and New York that is, admittedly, still germinal here.
That part of Mr. Sacco's argument makes for pleasant enough reading. Like all good consultants, he goads mildly and flatters convincingly. But in a chapter titled Vancouver as a Dual Cultural City, Mr. Sacco derails spectacularly and makes, inadvertently, his most important point.
In this chapter, Mr. Sacco maps the physical sites of culture in our city - dance studios, annual festivals, art galleries - and (surprise, surprise) finds the vast majority of them to be situated on the east side. Behold Vancouver's dualism. A town split between "... the east city, which is culturally active but relatively low-income, and the west city, that is economically affluent but culturally limited."
Culturally limited? Ouch. But stand by, it gets worse. Evidently disgusted with stroller moms and high-end bakeries in West Point Grey, Mr. Sacco then revises his appraisal of everything west of Main Street to "culture-free," even going so far as to assert that Vancouver has two "ground zeros." One is at Main and Hastings (where, by Mr. Sacco's reckoning, residents are experience-rich and object-impoverished) and the other at Robson and Thurlow (where the situation is reversed, but the poverty equivalent, only cultural not material).
The symmetry of this formulation must have looked pretty good on Mr. Sacco's whiteboard at some point. But intellectually speaking, it's a sophomoric quip and wants for explanatory power. Specifically, the notion fails entirely to explain how this city, or any city, is actually lived.
Artists working on the east side (myself included) do not necessarily lay their heads down to sleep in those same neighbourhoods. Neither do the creative experiences enjoyed on the east side necessarily remain there. They travel home with those who experience them. Some east, some west. Some - gasp - to Richmond.
Still, Mr. Sacco forges onward to his most misguided, destructive conclusion when, of his notional east and west cities, he suggests that "there seems to be no feeling that the two parts ought even to communicate between themselves, let alone be part of a common vision of social and cultural development."
This is just wrong. And to illustrate how Vancouverites can and will act differently than Mr. Sacco proposes, we need only return to the purchase of D&M.
Mr. Scott, living with his vast book collection in his restored Arthur Erickson house in West Vancouver, comes from what is surely the most westerly point in the affluence matrix of our west side.
D&M, by contrast, whose Quebec Street offices don't even make it on to Mr. Sacco's map at all, apparently lie in so easterly a position as to leak out of the visible east side altogether.
Did they meet? Did they cross the "perfect spatial separation" between east and west (as Mr. Sacco describes it) and in so doing reflect a broader, more popular optimism in our own commercial and artist future?
They did indeed. Mr. McIntyre and Mr. Scott met at a book club. And it's those sorts of meetings - between our east and our west, our creative and our investing classes - that will yet be critical to realizing the upside of our bullish feelings, the happier aspects of that Great City.
Timothy Taylor is a novelist and journalist based in Vancouver. His latest book is the novel Story House
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070521.LTAYLOR21/TPStory/National
