What Does a City Look Like Across Time?
Spacing Vancouver explores how past, present, and future shape how we see our urban spaces—and what gets lost in translation.
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How do we see a city? The question seems simple until you realize the answer depends entirely on which moment in time you're standing in.
Spacing Vancouver's essay "The City in Tenses" unpacks this temporal problem: the past feels like a compressed caricature, stripped of its complications. The future feels like a projection of current fears and desires. The present is the only tense we actually inhabit—solid, permanent, even though it's already becoming past the moment we stand in it.
The piece uses the Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam as a case study. Designed in the 1960s as a modernist utopia—thirteen thousand dwellings in thirty-one hexagonal megastructures—the district was executed faithfully according to plan. But the plan was flawed. Ground-level walkways became unsafe. Parking structures stayed dark. Elevated common areas felt isolating. Within decades, large sections were demolished and replaced not with something more visionary, but with row houses the market understood: ordinary, human-scaled, lived-in.
Brasília offers a counterpoint: a complete rational city built from scratch in the late 1950s as Brazil's new capital, also executed as planned, also protected from modification. The result? A place frozen in time—brilliant as architecture, but rigid as life.
The essay argues that cities exist in three tenses simultaneously, each with its own blind spot. The past and future can only be observed from a distance—distance that turns complexity into caricature. The present is where real life happens. Understanding a city means understanding how all three tenses collide, which one dominates, and what gets lost when we mistake a caricature for reality.