In the view of art and architecture historian Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, any chance for a community to reflect on the nature of its built environment, as is happening now with the CBC-driven Think Vancouver: Think Waterfront project, serves as a necessary reminder that a city is not so much a group of physical structures as it is an idea. And Windsor-Liscombe, head of UBC's department of art history, visual art, and theory, is currently behind yet another effort to explore this fact: a yearlong series of public lectures at UBC's St. John's College called Living Out the Metropolis, intended to help lay the mental groundwork for the World Urban Forum that will take place here in June 2006.

"We're trying to bring into the discussion of the World Urban Forum a number of things," Windsor-Liscombe explains when reached by the Straight, "and one of them is that the city is as much in our heads as it is around us. The city is imagined, it's written, it's experienced. And all these things are, frankly, as important as some of the more technical sides of planning, such as where you put the roads."

No better example of how urban environments rest on a shifting foundation of theory is Vancouver's waterfront, which for decades was an arena where competing ideals about what purposes our city was meant to serve, what values it was meant to embody, struggled to hold sway. Here, Windsor-Liscombe observes, the powerful but waning influence of modernism, focused on the individually owned automobile, collided with newer approaches to urban living.

"One of the very interesting things about Vancouver is the whole freeway debate, and the defeat of the kind of misunderstood version of modern-movement urbanism, which was always about trying to have a more orderly and efficient organism," he says. "There were plans, even before the Second World War and certainly after, for various kinds of freeways. And the one that became the real point of argument was Project 200," a massive redevelopment plan devised in the mid-1960s "that would have separated most of the waterfront from the older Vancouver city core by an eight-lane highway" through Chinatown and, eventually, along English Bay.

It's a proposal that now appears unconscionable. At the time, however, it had a certain modernist lustre that seemed to reflect the thinking of such architectural innovators as Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra. And it shaped the waterfronts of many North American cities, notably Seattle, where its effects, the professor says, have been "fairly devastating". Its eventual rejection here, by a coalition of citizens, community leaders, and planners, signalled the emergence of a new concept of the urban landscape.

"If you go to Albuquerque or Detroit, they're very schizophrenic," Windsor-Liscombe notes. "You work downtown and then nothing much happens there, apart from occasional crime, because the whole city has been built around the individual, private transit system."

Vancouver, on the other hand, has over the last two decades "avoided that, thank goodness. And part of that avoidance has been the recovery of the once-industrialized waterfront and bringing it in for recreation and as a pleasant and very inventive form of more densified urban living."

This is nothing less, he argues, than an attempt to create "a new kind of city" based on "rehumanizing the superb natural advantage" that Vancouver possesses.

"What's happened with the downtown core is pretty remarkable," he says. "And while being careful to recognize that there are some things that still could be improved, it's quite an achievement."

One way of placing this accomplishment in its full historical context is to read Windsor-Liscombe's "The Ideal City," a 45-page paper on ideas of utopia. You can download a PDF copy of the paper, which served as the launching point for the Living Out the Metropolis lecture series, at www.finearts.ubc.ca/faculty/intros/intro_wliscombe.cfm. Further details about the four remaining installments of the lecture series itself are available at www.stjohns.ubc.ca/. The next talk takes place on March 14 at 5 p.m.