Many local architects are also in demand elsewhere. James Cheng, who designed the Shangri-La hotel and condo complex (at 200 metres, Vancouver’s tallest building), is responsible for the Shangri-La now going up at Adelaide and University in Toronto. Peter Busby is often in Abu Dhabi. John and Patricia Patkau are developing a massive project for the University of Pennsylvania. Chinese planners have a particular fondness for Vancouver talent: Bing Thom, an Arthur Erickson acolyte who’s done a dozen notable buildings here, is working on Dalian New Town, a city for a million people; Nick Milkovich has created a 110-hectare community for Weihai’s Golden Thread Hill; and Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden is designing Crystal City, an entire residential and commercial neighbourhood in Beijing. In the hyper-build lead-up to the 2010 Games, Vancouver devised a carefully systematized approach to the built environment that we now export around the globe.

Related Link”Living on the 100-Mile Diet”: the debut post of Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon’s blog series on thetyee.caIndeed, if the measure of an idea is how widely it’s disseminated and how passionately it’s embraced, this city is anything but the kayaking, navel-gazing, pot-smoking Lotus Land of popular imagination. It’s a hotbed of entrepreneurship and creativity. “Doesn’t anybody here work?” a visitor joked one October afternoon as we walked past a surprisingly active Kits Beach. Yes, people do work, all the time — just not in head offices, since we have very few. They launch start-ups, they freelance, they find Wi-Fi spots, they unfurl blueprints at Starbucks. They invent, imagine, concoct. Sure, we have Jean and Alastair Carruthers to thank for Botox, as apt a metaphor for superficiality as you can imagine. But we also have Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon to thank for the 100-Mile Diet, which began as a blog on thetyee.ca and has become shorthand for the global locavore movement (in much the same way that, about twenty years ago, Douglas Coupland’s first novel coalesced the skeptical, cockeyed anomie of the day into Generation X).

Laugh at the clichés, but understand that leading-edge thinking elsewhere is often the norm here. From North America’s only supervised injection site to a police chief who openly supports the idea of making addiction a public health issue, not a criminal one; from UBC’s breakthroughs in sports medicine to the bold social experiment of the Woodward’s development, which combines public housing with high-end units; from inventors like Phil Nuytten, the father of the underwater Newtsuit, to Internet millionaires like Markus Frind (plentyoffish.com) and Stewart Butterfield (flickr.com); from D-Wave’s breakthrough in quantum computing to Saltworks Technologies’ cost-effective desalination system, Vancouver incubates far more than its share of striking new ideas. If the continent is a centrifuge, flinging novelty and eccentricity and experimentation to the margins, then what Portland and Los Angeles and Seattle are to the US — last-frontier outposts of wisdom and wackiness, civic laboratories for new ideas — so, in many ways, is Vancouver to this country and, indeed, the world.

Which is one reason why that hateful phrase “world class” has lately entered the local vocabulary.

The World-Class Thing

Attention, gourmands: heard about our restaurants? Bon Appétit spoke of Vancouver’s “thriving Asian restaurant culture, possibly the most vibrant in North America.” Beppi Crosariol suggested in the Globe and Mail that Toronto may have been overtaken as the country’s dining capital. Pointedly bypassing Toronto and Montreal, culinary titans Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened their first Canadian rooms here. The hell-bent Gordon Ramsay has described Araxi, up the road in Whistler, as “the best restaurant in Canada.” And did you know that Pino Posteraro, chef and proprietor of Cioppino’s in Yaletown, got invited to cook at James Beard House in New York? When you consider the concentration of options, is Vanhattan really such a stretch? We’re world class, right?

“The world-class thing reminds me of Toronto in the ’80s,” says Anthony Perl, the silver-haired head of urban studies at Simon Fraser University. A New Yorker, he came to Vancouver four years ago by way of Harvard and the University of Toronto. “When people start saying that, alarms should go off in city planning and governance minds. They thought they’d invented the answer; if something was done in Toronto, it must be successful. We risk that here — our megaproject mania for highways, SkyTrains to UBC, stuff like that.” UBC president Stephen Toope has announced his intention to create a world-class university.

The food scene is invoked as the pudding in which to find world-class proof, and diverse influences certainly add depth to a cuisine blessed with wonderful local produce and seafood. Vij’s, off Granville Street, was referred to by the New York Times as “easily among the finest Indian restaurants in the world,” and critics who know Japanese food rank Tojo’s, on Broadway, up there with the best of them. From the rough-and-tumble seafood shack Go Fish, to the elegant refinement of West and C and db Bistro Moderne, to the profusion of first-rate Asian spots, there’s no doubting the richness of the culinary landscape; but the microscopic attention paid to it suggests, frankly, a dearth of more substantial topics.

Restaurant criticism here, as in many a burgeoning city, sometimes resembles professional cheerleading (in which, as editor-in-chief of Vancouver magazine, I can fairly be accused of participating) or, on the web, endless amateur nitpicking. So many people spend so much time deconstructing and photographing and blogging about what they put in their mouths that you’d think they were preparing for an exam. Dining has as much to do with fashion as food, of course, each place outdoing the last in lavishness (the plushly expensive Coast) or thrift (the minimum-security Campagnolo), the daily ebb and flow recorded and amplified for distribution by a small army of “experts” — bloggers, reviewers, oenophiles, free-ride artists, all of them one click away from the next BC wine tasting, small plates sampler, or media preview. Dining out is indeed a treat — excellent, diverse, reasonable. But in what world-class city would a chef’s departure from a restaurant make front page headlines, as Rob Feenie’s from Lumière did a couple of years ago? Or would you have trouble hailing a cab at 10:30 at night? Or would Presbyterian liquor laws endure into the twenty-first century?

The professional sports scene also gives the lie to Vancouver’s longed-for status. Consider the anguish occasioned by the Canucks’ failure to go deep in the NHL playoffs each year — compost for untold column inches and endless hours of talk radio. The team’s long-ago brushes with glory (they lost to the Islanders in the 1982 Stanley Cup final and to the Rangers in 1994), and the local reflex of invoking these as moments of sporting significance, serve as inverse reminders that we’ve lacked an NBA franchise since the Grizzlies relocated to Memphis in 2001, and that the nearest Major League Baseball game is a couple of hours down the road in Seattle. The NFL Seahawks remind us that we have only the CFL Lions. The junior hockey Giants and professional soccer Whitecaps do well enough, but we’re talking WHL and MLS here, acronyms that even a sports fan may take a moment to unpack.

Besides a full roster of major-league franchises, Vancouver lacks more basic indicators of civic heft and maturity. Until last summer, when the Canada Line opened, there was no direct public transit route from downtown to the airport. YVR serves up to arriving visitors a brief parody of Northwest Coast culture — Bill Reid sculptures, fake waterfalls, canned bird noises — before depositing them in the midst of unending construction. Pacific Central Station, too, is a tacky interface between this supposedly world-class city and the world. “For lots of train travellers, their first view of Vancouver is seeing people passed out in Thornton Park,” says Anthony Perl. “We should be presenting them with the face of our city; instead, we present them with a very different part of the anatomy.”

He rhymes off a list of shortcomings you won’t find in great cities: no downtown university with an adjoining student neighbourhood; no broad pedestrian promenade; no major civic square. A great city is a world unto itself, defying attempts to break it into its constituent elements. Berlin, Rome, New York: these are urban confabulations, memory vying with amnesia, civic magma bubbling and hardening under the weight of history. World-class city? It’s the world, not the city, that gets to decide. Penelope Chester, the daughter of a French publisher, studied in Paris and New York and Boston and travelled the planet before spending a year and a half in Vancouver working for an international NGO. Now based in Liberia, she liked Vancouver but noted that locals “have an exalted sense of their city’s standing in the world, without much experience of the world to support it.” If the “world-class” discussion teaches us nothing else, it confirms that such assessments — like claims of genius or insanity — are most reliably left to others.