Customer Reviews

A Thousand Dreams

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This book is a must-read for any individual who has an interest in social justice and who is concerned about Canada's vulnerable homeless populations. I am sure that anyone from a large city will be able to recognize a Downtown East Side in their own city. The book details the history of Vancouver's Downtown East Side and offers ideas for solutions for similar situations. The most frustrating issue is how hard it was for harm-reduction services to be implemented. Conservative governments are far too focused on punishment, where they should be working on the issues that result in people ending up homeless and drug-addicted. An easy read, but gripping.

This is a book that is full of contrasting images, emotions and stories, which is fitting since it's a story of city of extremes: Vancouver. Vancouver has multi-million dollar glass condo towers within blocks of the poorest postal code in Canada. The most affluent in our society, next to the most destitute. A Thousand Dreams contrasts stories of despair with those of hope, anger with happiness, frustration at the pace of change and celebration at the change that has happened, a neighbourhood forgotten and a neighbourhood community that grows stronger and more united.

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is the dirty not-so-secret-secret of the city. An area that everyone has an opinion about, but few actually do anything about, or know enough to make an informed opinion about those that live there. That is where a book like A Thousand Dreams comes in. It's a fantastic history of the creation, formation, fall, and attempted rejuvenation of the area known as the Downtown Eastside. From the very beginning when it was the centre of the commercial city of Vancouver, to now where it is the centre of the drug and HIV world in the city.

The history is complex, heartbreaking, but also one of resilience, of community coming together to support each other and make change (however glacial). The book details the housing crisis; Expo 86; the introduction to the streets of heroin, cocaine and finally crystal meth; the introduction of harm reduction policies; the welfare cuts of the Liberal party; the ignorance of the federal Conversatives regarding Insite--the safe injection site; and finally, the last chapter details some solutions for the future.

However, since Larry Cambpell, who the history follows for a long time as he was BC coroner and then mayor, is a writer of this book I wondered at times whether certain information was biased or filtered coming in. This was heightened when the 2010 Olympics was just brushed aside as a topic (Campbell was the mayor that won the Olympic bid after all) of concern for Downtown Eastside residents. To his credit, he did portray the more unflattering sides of himself occasionally, and talk about how he was wrong in certain ways of thinking, such as his evolution into agreeing with the policies of harm reduction and seeing drug abuse as a health problem and not a criminal one.

Overall, this is an excellent book on the Downtown Eastside. If you are interested in learning more about the area, then I urge you to pick up this book.

The authors of this work have done a real service to Vancouver as its citizens take stock of city in the weeks and months after hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. What will undoubtedly be another boost to its world-class status and competitive position among the globe's most livable and sustainable cities should be the provocation to understand better what this Pacific Rim city wants to be and needs to be if it is going to overcome the striking contradictions that still beset it. Inspired by the poem from which its title derives, the authors may perhaps intend those "thousand dreams" to be understood ironically--that is, to symbolize the dreams and visions of Vancouver that need to be represented in the fashioning of a 21st century Vancouver that accommodates all of its citizens' circumstances and needs .

In so many respects, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside--the book's focus--is the meeting place and fulcrum of Vancouver's future. Having served as the original center of the city in its pioneering days, it has been marginalized by the successes of the "Living First" downtown strategy of replacing commercial growth with high-tower residential development partly reflected and partly complemented by the mega-projects ensconced around the False Creek inlet. In this sense, the book's subtitle would have better encapsulated the crucial role of the Downtown Eastside not as "the fight for its future' but the struggle for Vancouver's heart and soul and thus the whole community's future. The Downtown Eastside is a microcosm of what Vancouver still is but denies and what the Downtown Eastside must become if Vancouver is to achieve what it truly wants to be.

Campbell, Boyd, and Culbert's socio-history does much to overcome the myths of this often forgotten or neglected segment of Vancouver. Among others, they show how in the context of sometimes horrific conditions, the Downtown Eastside maintains the vestiges of a community and shows surprising resilience in the social relationships and aspirations of its dwellers. The authors combine their abundant talents and experiences as politico, criminologist and journalist to produce an always poignant, often gritty, and profoundly realistic picture of the halting progress and frequent retreats in urban policy to rehabilitate this polyglot community of inhabitants whose present still bears the traces and tokens of its glorious and celebrated past. In the process, they inject themselves and their autobiographical experiences in understanding and participating in the daily drama of the Downtown Eastside without distorting the historical and public record. Sweeping aside the sterility of law-and-order nostrums for treating the fallout of homelessness, drug use, and the HIV epidemic in this neighborhood, they gradually turn to grassroots efforts to emulate and build upon more successful and humane practices of harm reduction imported from the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany--practices and policies that strive to redeem the humanity of its many inhabitants and recognize a sense of dignity in the lives of Downtown Eastside citizens who by choice and circumstance have come to reside there. As they negotiate the travails of living amidst poverty, inadequate housing, mental illness, increasingly lethal drugs, and the looming threat of gentrification and "urban removal," these often courageous men and women seek after the roots of rebellion and affirmation among their local poets and within the neighborhood's organic leadership ranks who continue to work to fashion creative means of protest of the Downtown Eastside that is and celebration of the Downtown Eastside that must be.

The lingering question posed by this book is where the citywide leadership will emerge to confront and surmount the structural bases of the Downtown Eastside and in so doing translate those thousand dreams into urban realities worthy of Vancouver's world-class reputation and utopian promotional scripting.