I read dozens of riot stories in Europe, but when I came back, one of the impacts I heard about — which I hadn’t read — was the effect on employees who had been in the stores invaded and wrecked.

Not surprisingly, when I called WorkSafeBC later to find out more about that, that agency was starting to see claims come in related to that.

One more piece of fallout from a complex event. I’ve also had the chance to hear a lot of analysis about what led to the riot. (It all makes me think there MUST be some international conference coming shortly about riot prevention, as we read several stories about sports-related violence while we were in Europe, including preparations for a match in Glasgow that had police involved in ensuring that parades were scheduled far apart to prevent opposing groups of fans from clashing.)

I’ve heard everything from 1. Part of the problem was that the bulk of police didn’t come on shift until 4 p.m., when hundreds of people had already been drinking steady for four hours; to 2. Everyone just kept talking riot and whether there would be one in every news story, so that there was almost an expectation there would be one.

I’ll be interested to hear what the Riot Review comes up with amid all this ex post facto theorizing.

In Italy, as my trip and some voluminous reading about it revealed, people don’t see themselves as Italian. Nor do they see themselves that much as Tuscan or Umbrian or Piedmontese.

Instead, their first loyalty is to their city. That’s a legacy of the hundreds of years when Italy was not a country at all, but a collection of powerful city-states that grouped together in shifting coalitions.

Italy, like Canada, is a country that was created in the burst of mid-19th-century nationalism that temporarily reigned. While Canada was created out of a bunch of colonial politicians bargaining for a railroad here, a chunk of money or land there, to cobble together a kind of not-the-U.S. nation, Italy also was pulled together out of a heap of separate states that found themselves almost by accident tied up as a single country.

As a result, there are many in Italy who think the south — a place closer to Africa than central Europe — should really be a separate nation (Quebec, anyone?) and a tendency still to cling to their city identity rather than any “Italian” one. They are Sienese or Florentines or Romans first. The place they want to come back to always is the town or village where their family is from originally. (It’s one of the reasons real-estate prices in even relatively minor Italian towns are so crazy: all the kids want to buy apartments or houses close to where their parents are, which creates huge pressure on prices as they bid against each other plus bands of roving ex-pats who are eager to buy up a crumbling villa or cool apartment in some medieval city.)

Which, of course, makes me think about the mental maps we have in Canada and whether we identify more with our cities than our provinces or country.

Certainly we see our mayors as the embodiment of our cities’ personalities in a way we don’t with our premiers or prime ministers. No one thinks of Stephen Harper as representing the essence of Canadianness. He’s simply a politician who’s who the skill to manoeuvre his way to the top of the political system. And I doubt that people see (or saw) Gordon Campbell or Christy Clark as representing some kind of distilled BC’ness.

But mayors are seen as representing the collective personality of their residents: Gregor, young, good-looking and green, is the embodiment to pop psychologists and media types of hip, Lululemon-wearing Vancouver. Naheed Nenshi’s election in Calgary instantly broadcast a new image for that city: multicultural and cool. Rob Ford turned our picture of Toronto into one of angry, tax-hating suburbanites. Dianne Watts succeeds in Surrey because she epitomizes what Surrey longs to be: somewhat conservative but compassionate; attractive but business-focused, urban but not Vancouver.

Mayors who do reflect their city’s particular demographics can win huge loyalty from people who see themselves reflected in a way they like. But that attempt to mirror the city can also be a tricky trap, because voters may not match the stereotype in the end. Or, because they judge the mayor on such a personal basis, because she or he is judged so strongly on being a good symbol of the city, perceived failings are hugely magnified.

It’s all part of our city-state thinking, where we are constantly trying to understand our own, very local identity and find the person who will broadcast it to the world for us.

Sitting facing the palace of Federigo da Montefeltro in the bright afternoon sun, sipping “water with gaz” and hooking into a rare WiFi spot after my latest two-hour hit of Madonna with Child paintings, not a car in sight on this elegant cobbled street and plaza.

It looks almost like La Citta Ideale, the painting I saw saw inside that depicts an elegant city square, completely empty.

That’s of course been the situation in every historic town and city we’ve visited: Volterra, Siena, Perugia, Gubbio, Deruta, and now Urbino. It’s almost enough to make you buy into the thesis behind this recent NY Times story that one of my faithful correspondents sent me, detailing the way European cities are making life difficult for drivers. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27traffic.html?emc=eta1)

The problem with all of this, though, is that this kind of car obstructionism — here in Europe or even back home in the Americas — is that it’s limited to a very restricted area: the historic and tourist-oriented centers where it almost makes a kind of business sense to ban cars, as a way of enhancing the city as spectacle and resort.

But, as I’ve written before here, the amount of land consecrated to asphalt and the creation of ugly suburbs and sprawling industrial zones is something that Europeans excel at. I’ve driven through areas of Italy on this trip that make the lower part of King George Highway look like the Champs Elysees. Clusters of big-box stores and plastics factories next to a super-highway and a tangle of roads that serve the new suburbs sprouting up around any Italian city that’s not completely dead. The most recent vivid example for me were the valleys that intersect at Perugia, the north-south valley dominated by the E45 highway and the east-west highway that runs through the valley below Perugia.

Of course, Perugia itself bans cars in the centre and, like many Italian cities, even imposes fines on anyone who tries to drive in the zone pedonale (pedestrian zone). But there are any number of roads and car parks around it, to serve everyone who drives up to the walls and then gets out in order to have their pristine pedestrian experience.

What I’m looking to see is the precedent-setting city mayor who doesn’t just make life difficult for cars in the compact and tourist-oriented urban centres that are now the identity-makers for the city, but the mayor who tries to tackle the issues of suburban road-building. I haven’t seen anyone in Europe tackling this in a serious way, except possibly for French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s competition two years ago for urban planners to come up with a way of creating a transit system and urban plan for Paris’s outer suburbs.

In the meantime, I will stroll back through the car-free streets of Urbino, enjoying my pedestrian experience before I retrieve my car from the carpark just outside the city walls and head on out along the superhighway to Fano and the Adriatic, coping with the inevitable traffic around me.

I realize that the riot is two weeks old now and that, for lack of other news, it’s been analyzed to pieces but a small personal perspective on why young people participate.

I was in a small riot in Paris many years ago, when I was a student there. It was on New Year’s Eve, in the Latin Quarter where all the students were. At first, we were in what seemed like a fun, spontaneous street celebration with loads of slightly tipsy young people roaming the streets. One girl went up to a proper French policeman directing traffic and kissed him on the cheek in the middle of the mild chaos.

But it escalated into something more somewhere after midnight. At some point, we suddenly found ourselves running through the streets with the rest of the crowd, as riot police chased us and fired off some rounds of tear gas. We saw kids being bundled up and hauled off in police vans. There might even have been a few fires. And why we did we hang around, running up and down the streets, refusing to leave?

It was fun. All the rules seemed to be suspended and it was somehow thrilling to be playing hide and seek with the cops, sprinting through the streets as they tried helplessly to catch up with us, then gathering somewhere else, only to do it again. We had no sense of what was happening in various parts of the neighbourhood– maybe serious vandalism. But for us, it was just a game where the anonymous cops, people you normally had to be wary of, were suddenly just silly cats to our silly mice.

Would I have felt differently if people had started breaking windows and stealing things? I’d like to imagine that perhaps a more sober inner adult would have emerged, but I’m not so sure. I was 24 and still at the super-clueless stage of my life, doing any number of stupid things that thankfully weren’t then recorded on Facebook or YouTube.

Nor even in the Paris newspapers. I looked the next day for some account of this major brawl between crowds of young people and the riot police, which in Vancouver, even then (1978) would have surely received screaming, World War Two headlines. But there was nothing, not even a brief item. For them, it was just part of what happens in a big city, not even worth noting.

Nothing like seeing a car barrelling towards you IN YOUR LANE to make you appreciate the differences in culture between one country or city and another.

Coming up to almost three weeks now in Italy, we’ve had lots of time to do what is the best part of tourism: ponder what is the same and different about the place you’re visiting compared to the place you come from and think about how it got that way. We’re armed with a pile of books on the Italian national character but also our own observations about the ways in which this place is more rule-bound that Vancouver and Canada and less rule-bound.

For instance:

– Transit. Although there is a system requiring people to buy tickets for the Metro, there isn’t one for the bus and tram system in Rome, which is what is the most heavily used inside the central part of the city (where there are no metro stops). Therefore, as far as I can tell, hardly anyone pays except tourists from the more rule-bound countries and possibly people who commute every day and have passes.

Bus drivers everywhere seem to have eliminated collecting fares from their job descriptions, so it’s up to people getting on to decide whether to buy a ticket from the machine on the bus/tram, if there is a machine. We noticed after a couple of days that no one except us was buying tickets, as we bounced around on the busy system. So we abandoned it too. (An excellent example of how cultural mores spread.) Young friends visiting said it was the same in many European cities they visit. A great way for us to see the city inexpensively, but how do they pay for the transit system?

– Driving. As I said, nothing like a car barrelling towards you in your own lane to make you appreciate the differences. We’ve adapted pretty well to winding roads that take you up through the mountains at a rate of 1,000 metres of lift in a few minutes, city streets that are so narrow that you have to fold in your side mirrors to get through the tunnels and passageways. But we’re still freaking out when we see the way cars/buses/trucks casually cross over the line as they round a turn or come up behind you at approximately 150 k-hr to let you know they want to pass. This is all in spite of endless signs saying the roads are being monitored electronically, warnings about drinking and driving, and more.

So driving means being endlessly alert, even if you think you’re on an abandoned country road because around any corner could be someone who will force you into a ditch or take off your side mirror (first happened to me, second to a friend).

– On the other hand: the rules. For instance, cellphones. You can’t buy a cellphone or buy cellphone time or buy time, not so much as 10 euros worth, from an Internet company without showing your passport and other documentation, which gets photocopied and filed away. Can’t figure out if this is an anti-immigation thing, an anti-terrorism thing, or simply an Italian love of documentation. What can possibly be happening with all those pieces of paper?

– Same with hotels. Every place you stay takes a photocopy of your passport. Oh, and that 11 a.m. check-out time. Don’t even think about being a few minutes late or you’ll be scolded.

ADDED LATER AS I THOUGHT ABOUT THIS MORE:

– Prostitutes. Unlike North America, where most of see prostitutes only in certain parts of certain cities, the prostitutes here work the pull-offs on highways that are big enough to carry truck traffic but small enough not to have controlled access. At first, I just assumed that the women dressed to the nines, sitting on chairs in the little highway rest stops here, were simply another example of how much attention women here pay to looking stylish at all times. But eventually, as I saw a couple leaning on the doors of trucks, chatting to drivers, I realized what the score was and that, in fact, night-club style was not the standard for women traveling the highway. All conducted quite openly in a way that would be unthinkable in Canada.

More later on the role of cities in Italy, once I plough through David Gilmour’s book, and how it compares to the place cities have in our mental maps.

In our week in Rome, we had lunch with a friend of a friend, an Italian who works in government. He’s not originally from Rome, but has been posted there for the past two years.

His assessment of Rome: A nice place to visit, but a hard place to live in. It’s a large city with an abysmal transit system. (Only two real subway lines and a tangle of bus and tram lines haphazardly serving the rest of the city.) Our friend, a senior bureaucrat, abandoned using his car or transit and, like many in Rome, commutes on a scooter.

He did not feel that way about other large cities he’s lived in in Europe, including London. But Rome, to him, is a postcard that does not allow for regular existence.

Vacation travel always prompts thoughts about what it would be like to live in the place where you had such a good time (eating pasta, check; walking around lively, busy streets, people-watching, until 1 a.m., check; visiting markets and churches and monuments, check). Sure, it’s fun when you have all the time in the world. But what would it be like to actually have to get to work every day, pay bills, deal with phone/electrical/rent and so on.

Our friend’s remark reminded me as well of the observation I heard from a young couple I got to know in Paris 35 years ago. They, living in a very chic attic room behind the Rothschild’s mansion on Ile St. Louis, said that Paris was a good city to live in if you didn’t have a lot of money. There were cheap apartments, cheap food, and a way to scrape a living together, as they were doing (he, an American, was a translator of agricultural manuals that I was typing for him; she, French, a restorer of oil paintings).

But it was hard to have an American middle-class life in Paris. That was very expensive and difficult. On the other hand, they felt that it was hard to be poor in big American cities but much easier to be middle class.

So what about Vancouver? I have a feeling that many people who once thought it was a good place to live are beginning to see it as a good place to visit only — stay a week, visit the sites, and then head back to home. The house prices, the sense of the city as a place where the main economic base is the city itself as a spectacle: those give the sense to some that it’s not really a city to live in any more.

I don’t feel that way myself. I’ve lived in the city proper for more than half my adult life. It feels workable to me, a place with neighborhoods and a sense of civic life. But are those of us who feel that way dying out?

I’m in Rome, but we woke up around 7 this morning, typed in “Canucks win” in Google search and spent the next two hours, reading and listening (Twitter, all news sites, CBC livestreaming), appalled.

The question all of us have to have is: How did this happen? All we heard from the police and city was that things had been great up to that point and they expected no trouble. Was that really what they were thinking or was it just positive messaging as strategy?

I heard, among the avalanche of information I surfed through, some comments about how the crowd that night was slightly different and scarier-seeming to people who came downtown. Did that get factored in?

We all want some answers to these questions, I’m sure, as we squirm with embarrassment as our shiny world reputation turns to muck. Is it inevitable, given the human nature of young drunk kids, that this kind of thing will happen with certain events and all you can hope to do is contain it somewhat? Or was there some seriously wrong thinking here?

I note that NPA council candidate Joe Carangi has just sent out a news release blaming the mayor and Vision/COPE councillors for bad planning and so on (attached below). That seems like a simplistic response to me, but we need to understand the conversations the police were having with the city about what could be handled and what precautions were in place.

I’m sure it will take a few weeks to hash out all the answers, but it sounds like many of you were watching closely or downtown last night or helping with the clean-up. Any thoughts, particularly people who were watching things unfold during the day?
[Read more →]

Time to rest up for the campaign season ahead. As some of you know, I’m off to Italy for four weeks, spending all of my time observing urban issues, of course. I see some posters up for some kind of referendum that was voted on Sunday and Monday. I’m on it.

Just out for my first-ever walk around Rome in the balmy midnight air, envious as we North Americans so often are of the lively night life, infinite interesting urban spaces, and here, remnants of ancient Rome that sit half dug up and preserved next to banks and restaurants. (Gelato flavour #1: Pistachio and ricotta.)

If I’m feeling peppy, I’ll do occasional posts.

In the meantime, as I suggested at Christmas, please feel free to post about what’s going on in the city of note. The blog will be monitored for nastiness and long-windedness that discourages others from posting.

Gregory Henriquez and his father Richard are two architects who have marked this city indelibly.

There has been a lot written about their individual approaches to architecture, available for all to read. Ihstead, in this profile, I look at the personal and professional relationship between the two and its effect on Gregory.

http://www.vanmag.com/News_and_Features/Profile_Gregory_Henriquez

So, in what is turning out to be so far a low-energy civic campaign season, Vision Vancouver acclaimed all of its candidates on Sunday after a last-minute bail from one school board candidate.

Rob Wynen, a school PAC chair as well as a long-time parks advocate, switched over from park to school to fill the spot, eliminating the need for a race at park.

That matches the all-acclamation nomination for the NPA the week before.

As well, after a brief speech by Mayor Gregor Robertson to about 250 who hauled themselves out on a sunny weekend day at SFU downtown, the mayor got a 96 per cent confidence vote. (Love to know who the 10 dissenters were.)

Now, it’s off to the hard grind of raising money, scraping together volunteers who aren’t burned out by the federal and provincial races, and finding some issues. If the last couple of weeks (lobster gate last week; jabs over some program to grow wheat on front lawns this week) are any indication, it’s going to be like one of those interminable soccer games where no one scores a goal, but there is endless carrying on over supposed injuries and penalties and a kind of low-bore ankle-biting going on. I await revelations of misdemeanors (arrests for parking tickets; verbal harassment) from criminal records; medical-records details; shocking Facebook photos (not); allegations of dope-smoking in high places, as it were, and more.

In the meantime, all the parties have to get cracking at raising money. My story in today’s Globe (http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/bc-politics/vancouver-parties-gear-up-for-tough-season-of-fundraising/article2059538/?service=mobile) outlines the struggles parties are likely to face, as they raise money while figuring out which rules of fundraising they’ll abide by or not.

(Additional note: Since this came out, I’ve been told by VV that in face their official policy, decided sometime between my interview and when the story was published, is that the party will not accept American donations.)