Within the next decade or two, two-thirds of humanity’s seven billion persons (and counting) will be urbanized—often housed in megacities of millions of human inhabitants. Every day on the Asian continent, 137,000 persons migrate from the countryside to cities, and every year, the country of India “needs to build the equivalent of a city of Chicago … to provide enough commercial and residential space for its migrants.”¹ Already, 76 percent of the North American populace is urban—80 percent of Canada, when it is factored outside U.S. statistics; fewer than 2 percent of the population of North Americans in...

We know that we will soon be moving to the other edge of the continent, and we want her to have the enchanted memory of skating at night under the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. After waiting in line for two and a half hours, my daughter Sarah, along with her friend and my partner Jeff, take to the skating rink. I make my way to a glass concourse at rink level that should allow me to build my own memory—that of watching my daughter set against the jeweled night lights of the city, dusted with the twinkle of...

Global cities, economically disconnected from nation-state and bioregion, are the architectural outcropping of economic globalization.¹ Not all cities inhabited by millions of human bodies will be counted as global cities; global cities bedazzle with their culture production, skyscapes of human architectural genius, and consumer markets nestled into the basin of nature’s womb. Think of Vancouver, gateway to the Pacific, with its emerging vertical downtown of glass-walled condominiums, packed in the downtown core at a density to rival that of Hong Kong (an architectural phenomenon itself calledVancouverism²), mirrored in its oceanic basin and dwarfed by its backdrop of mountains. This...

China Mieville, in his recent novelThe City and the City(2009), imagines a city split by something of a demilitarized zone. While the inhabitants of these cities flow through each other, while the cities inhabit shared space, persons in Beszel and Ul Qoma each have their own language, gestures—indeed their own maps of the city, their own distinct names for spatially identical zones; and, most intriguingly, they have learned a way of “unseeing” each other. The DMZ has, in other words, been articulated by distinguishing persons’ speech, their body carriage, their enculturation of the body, their psyche. If...

To encounter somatic and cognitive variations among the human community can leave some persons anxious, uneasy, queasy. In particular, “a disabled body is supposedly a body in pain,” explains disabilities theorist Tobin Siebers, and pain, he continues, “represents for most people … an affront to human dignity.”¹ Cultural ideologies, including religions, have borrowed the power of such affects to prop up transcendental projects such as wholeness, perfect knowing, and purity of practice or doing. Instead, I’ve proposed meditatively breathing through pain, our own and that of others, taking in and breathing out all that we might fear so as to...

“The Winter Market,” a short story by Vancouver-based cyberpunk author William Gibson, does not create the image of Vancouver that sells either tourism or real estate. Published initially in the October 1985 issue ofVancouver Magazine,¹ Gibson’s science fiction short story imagines the now-popular public market of Granville Island (an artificial island created by dredging and dumping), tucked under the steel spans of the Granville Street Bridge, as a postapocalyptic urban industrial wasteland. As Nickianne Moody notes in “Untapped Potential: The Representation of Disability/Special Ability in the Cyberpunk Workforce,” far from suggesting biblical and now green hopes for a city...

Cities appear on the human horizon as enticing as a hive for honeybees—as places where the intermixture of human energies, especially ideational and aesthetic, might tumble, bumble, entangle, and synergistically catch. “Each urban moment can spark performative improvisations which are unforeseen and unforeseeable.… Each urban encounter is a theatre of promise.”¹ This creative, bustling stew allows us to spark ideas one off the other, makes spontaneous relationships, creativity, entertainment and education possible.

Urbanism thus also suggests a human disposition toward a preferred loose weave of social relations. Cities, after all, inherently open us to relations beyond “kith and kin”...