‘Livable’ Vancouver could be more ‘lovable’

One person’s idea of a livable city is another’s hellhole. For everyone who sees Copenhagen as one of the world’s coolest bicycling meccas, there’s someone who views it as dull as a seven-dayold Danish. They’d far prefer a night out in Detroit.

I myself welcome last week’s news that Vancouver is hanging on to its ranking by London’s Economist Intelligence Unit as one of the world’s most livable cities.

But I have to acknowledge the EIU’s selections are based on such unexciting criteria as “stability,” “health care,” “education,” “culture and environment” and “infrastructure.”

I mean, we’re not talking about vibrancy or dynamism ... or even friendliness, which is one of the traits I admire most. And it’s why I’d probably love surfing-mad Florianopolis, Brazil, rated by Conde Nast last month as the most friendly city on Earth, and positively hate Newark, N.J., ranked by the upscale travel magazine as its most unfriendly.

Vancouver wasn’t included among either Conde Nast’s top 10 friendliest or unfriendliest cities.

But last year, the Vancouver Foundation did an exhaustive opinion survey across Metro Vancouver and found we’re, well, super standoffish, with one in four people finding it hard to make friends and one in three being lonely.

That surprised me, because I thought the trademark aloofness of our No Fun City was confined mostly to the City of Vancouver, not the Lower Mainland as a whole. But a couple of recent letters in the Langley Times had me rethinking that.

In one, Walnut Grove resident Mike Major wrote that his wife had told him none of the folks to whom she’d said hello during her Sunday run had returned the greeting. He had experienced the same thing during his own runs and bike rides. And he wondered whether people had simply “given up being nice.”

Major, a 32-year-old welder, later told me he thought it was less a matter of geography than a sign of the times: “I think we’re not connected any more.”

Certainly, people in Metro Vancouver appear to have become “disconnected” from each other — for a variety of reasons, ranging from their preoccupation with their iPhones to the prevailing culture of entitlement.

I believe we need a total attitude change. And I think that, if Vancouver’s politicians and high-priced public servants spent as much effort ensuring their Metro-area municipalities were welcoming and neighbourly as they do in trying to make them eco-dense and carbon-neutral, everyone would be immeasurably happier. I also think Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and his pedal-crazy Vision peloton should forget about Vancouver overtaking Copenhagen as the world’s greenest, coolest city and focus instead on turning Terminal City into its warmest and most people-friendly.

At least they should consult frankly and fully with ratepayers before they ram through divisive bike lanes and highrise towers and embark on hostile takeovers of long-serving community centres.

Yes, superficially, Vancouver may be one of the world’s most livable cities.

But, thanks largely to political arrogance, it’s got a long way to go before becoming one that’s genuinely lovable.