maisonneuve

I’ve been interested in cities for as long as I can remember. My childhood is marked by Lego metropolises on the living room floor, streetscapes doodled in schoolbooks and early Saturday mornings playing SimCity for hours on end. So it only made sense that, when I was fourteen, on a beautiful summer day spent wandering Vancouver’s streets, my uncle turned to me and insisted that I read Jane Jacobs. “Sure,” I mumbled in a teenagerly way and we continued walking. He proceeded to tell me about a Marxist-Leninist bookstore on Hastings Street that had a great urban-issues section. “You should go there sometime,” he added. Later that year, sitting under my family’s Christmas tree, I ripped opened a present from my uncle, revealing a bold mustard-coloured paperback. The title was stamped in bold capital letters: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Below it was a blurb from the New York Times Book Review: “Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning... a work of literature.”