No abstract

Introduction: new industry formation and the environment of the city Within the economic spaces of the contemporary inner city we can discern a complex mix of industrial production regimes, including vestiges of pre-Fordist workshop production and residual Fordist industries, as well as more recent formations of specialised post-Fordist and`neoartisanal' production and labour (Norcliffe and Eberts, 1999). This copresence of differentiated production regimes, allied with the diverse array of technology-intensive creative industries (including computer graphics and imaging, software design, and multimedia), and new divisions of production labour (social, spatial, and technical), distinguishes the`new economy' of the inner city from the dominant office economy of the central business district (CBD), typically the largest complex of firms and employment in the postindustrial metropolis. At a theoretical level there are intriguing questions as to the extent to which the emergence of these new clusters constitutes a reindustrialisation of the inner city or, alternatively, the latest phase in the evolution of the urban services economy.There is a volatile quality to the industrial structure and enterprise composition of these new inner-city industrial clusters (Indergaard, 2003), reflecting in part their role as salient zones of experimentation and innovation in advanced urban economies. But in the early years of the 21st century these industrial clusters are associated with important developmental features of the city, with regard to (1) the restructuring of the space-economy of the metropolitan core, (2) localised regeneration effects, (3) regional growth impacts, driven by input^output relations, (4) export-base implications, and (5) connections with larger generative processes of urban change and transformation (Hutton, 2004a). These are demonstrated by the rise of creative industries which comprise essential features of thè new cultural economy', acknowledged as a distinctive trajectory of contemporary urban development (

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link

Planning and local policies, informed recurrently by theories of transformative urban development, have represented influential (and at times decisive) agencies of change inVancouver's metropolitan core. A commitment to principles of post-industrialism in the 1970s, realised through the conversion of False Creek South from an obsolescent industrial site to a medium-density, mixed-income residential landscape, effectively broke the mould of the mid-century urban core. The seminal Central Area Plan (approved 1991) enabled the comprehensive reordering of inner-city space, exemplified by a post-modern diversity, complexity and interdependency of territory and land use, and a strategic reversal of the employment-housing imbalance in the core. The city has broadly succeeded in asserting public interests as contingencies of change within the core, but these processes have created new social conflicts, tensions and displacements, as well as a glittering and paradigmatic 21st-century central city. In theoretical terms, the Vancouver experience marks a clear break from the classic model of the post-industrial city, the latter typified by a monocultural, office-based economy, extreme spatial asymmetries of investment and development and modernist form and imagery. At the same time, emergent production clusters, residential mega-projects and spaces of consumption and spectacle in the central area present marked contrasts to the spatial disorder and chaotic patterns of 'incipient' post-modernism, underscoring an exigent need for innovative and integrative retheorisation.

The purpose of this paper is to make an argument about the importance of geographical context and contingency in the emergence of the new economy within the inner city. Using a case study of Vancouver, it is suggested, fi rst, that its new economy has emerged precisely out of the peculiar trajectory of the city and is bound up with a staples economy, branch plant corporate offi ces, transnationalism, and mega-project orientation. Secondly, to illustrate the importance of situation and site, the paper focuses on two of Vancouver's inner-city locales: Yaletown, on the margins of the Downtown South, a former industrial and warehousing district now regarded as the epicentre of Vancouver's new economy; and Victory Square, the former commercial heart of the early Vancouver, for many years experiencing disinvestment and decline, but now on the cusp of a major revitalisation which threatens to displace long-established social cohorts.