In 2002, Richard Florida published his theory of the creative class asserting that the economic future depended on a creative class of citizens who generated wealth through their creative potential. That same year, Vancouver hosted the inaugural Creative City Summit – a gathering of artists and cultural workers facilitated by the host city’s municipality and the Creative City Network of Canada (Creative City Network of Canada, n.d.). Since its inception, the creative class concept has inspired a growing number of cities globally. The City of Vancouver itself has become more attached to the concept by participating in the World Cities Culture Forum. While the economic benefits of the theory are clear, growing literature is concerned with inequality implicit in its design. In this paper, I intend to explore the history of the creative city and argue that it is an evolution of the process of neoliberalism. To explore the linkage, I will argue that the creative class concept relies on the concept of the spectacle, as discussed by Guy Debord. Following this discussion, I will explore both the harms presented by this theory and Vancouver’s relationship with the creative class concept. To conclude, I will look at the efficacy of third places, and especially libraries as third places, to offset the harms arising from neoliberalism and creative cities. I believe the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) Central Branch – referred to as Vancouver Library Square (VLS) – functions as a third place that is essential to help offset harms associated with the ongoing neoliberalization of cities with particular respect to creative cities and to facilitate communities capable of being resilient to these harms.

The Evolution from Neoliberal to Creative Cities

Neoliberalism as a Process

In their articles, “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’” and “Neoliberalism and the Urban Condition”, Neil Brenner & Nik Theodore (2002; 2005) argue that neoliberalism is a process that began to take hold in the late 1970’s to early 1980’s predicated on the belief that unregulated and competitive markets with minimal governmental oversight were the key to economic prosperity following a period of recession (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). In practice, the process of neoliberalism is instrumental in reducing the role of the state in industry affairs by reducing taxes on corporations, minimizing state regulation of industries and taxes imposed on corporations, working to privatize the public sector where possible, and both fracturing organized labour and mitigating social welfare programs (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). Neoliberalism, as a process employed, is not conceptualized as an end-state or even universal model; instead, neoliberalism is seen as a highly contextual ongoing process that results from two intertwined moments of creation and destruction (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). The moment of destruction refers to the endpoint of an existent institutional arrangement dissolved via market reform initiatives while the moment of creation refers to the implementation of a new arrangement centred on economic growth resulting from a competitive market-oriented economic policy (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). While the process of neoliberalism is dependent on certain fundamental principles, the realization of the process is highly dependent on the context within which it is implemented and, therefore, allows for a great variety of forms at sites undergoing neoliberalization (Brenner & Theodore, 2002).

While the realization of neoliberalism varies with place- and scale-dependency, there is a particular intensity in the process of city-scale neoliberalization. This intensity is due, in part, to cities serving as neoliberal laboratories for policy experiments including “place marketing, enterprise and empowerment zones, local tax abatements, urban development corporations, public-private partnerships, and new forms of local boosterism to workfare policies, property-redevelopment schemes, business-incubator projects, new strategies of social control, policing, and surveillance, and a host of other institutional modifications within the local and regional state apparatus” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002, 368). This is especially true as cities struggle to adapt to shifting economic conditions as economies undergo deindustrialization, socio-spatial polarization, and forms of globalization (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Brenner & Theodore, 2005). Despite being context-dependent, Peter Brand (2007) identified seven principles defining the variable neoliberal process: these include the elevated status of city-scale in the global economy including competition between cities, multi-scaling of government, reorganization of government to integrate management techniques from private sectors, the promotion of enterprise culture and new forms of urban governance, a restructuring of labour markets, privatization and marketization, and the rise of the service sector and culture economy (Brand, 2007). With this in mind, we will be looking at the overlap between cities undergoing neoliberalism and their evolution into what has been termed creative cities. Before addressing creative cities, I would like to briefly discuss the mode of transformation shifting neoliberal cities to creative cities. The phenomenon I believe responsible is the spectacle as defined by Guy Debord.

Debord’s Spectacle and the Rise of Images as Mediating Forces

In his book, “The Society of the Spectacle”, Guy Debord (1994) laid out his theory of the spectacle as a societal force responsible for collapsing society into a normative image of itself defined by ongoing economic subjugation in the pursuit of capital accumulation to the point of social relationships being mediated by the spectacle’s image. Functionally, the spectacle describes a process of economic self-development where citizens have been coerced under its influence into an ongoing and perpetuating loop of wage labour production referred to as augmented survival (Debord, 1994). Augmented survival effectively replaced need-oriented, primary production, undertaken to satiate necessary elements of survival, with wage-oriented production by which a wage is collected to facilitate survival needs (Debord, 1994). In this way, under augmented survival, economic commodities produce themselves irrespective of the need for labourers to extract a wage from the economic system to facilitate both survival needs and accumulation desires imprinted on them by the spectacle’s image (Debord, 1994). While the concept of the spectacle serves to illustrate how economic development has become a self-evolving image mediating the lives of citizens, it also shares similar features at a city scale as discussed in the prior discussion of neoliberal cities. For example, while neoliberalism seeks to replace institutional arrangements with new practices arising in the private sector (Brenner & Theodore, 2002), the spectacle seeks to supplant the relation between people and capital leading to a destruction-creation cycle of its own (Debord 1994). Debord argues that the once-dominant religious view of the human condition has been dismantled and our latent residual faithfulness has, instead, been deformed to align with the technological and materialistic modes of modernity (Debord, 1994). This subversion of once beyond-worldly aspirations into the realm of the commodity transforms it into something that at once appears as part of the world but somehow eternally out of reach (Debord, 1994). This creates an endless pursuit of capital accumulation in the name of the spectacle that atomizes citizens by driving them inward (Debord, 1994). While the role of the commodity was once a covert aspect of the economic system, it now serves as an overt force exerting dominion over post-industrial spaces mediating social relations through the presentation of images (Debord, 1994). Understanding the neoliberal drive to replace institutional arrangements with private sector practices, and how Debord’s theory of the spectacle embodies its own destruction-creation moment that facilitates the dominion of the commodity over post-industrial spaces, we can turn our attention to how neoliberalism and the spectacle intertwine to give rise to the creative city.

Florida’s Creative Class and its Consequences

The concept of the creative city was developed by Richard Florida in the early 2000s to describe post-modern, post-industrial cityscapes that were evolving to attract a “creative class” of citizens who possessed the creative capacity to generate valuable intellectual property (Florida, 2002). In the creative city, there are two classes – the creative class, composed of a super-creative core and creative professionals, and a service class (Florida, 2002). With the declining agricultural and industrial sectors, Florida notes that not all workers are suited for the creative class and, instead, may be relegated to the service class; in the creative city, the service class exists to service the requirements of daily life for the creative class casting those in the service class in a supportive, or secondary, role to the creative class (Florida, 2002). The creative city is shaped to cater to the creative class by offering enhanced cultural amenities including art districts, converted industrial spaces, diversity initiatives, and other such strategies implemented to craft an image of creativity that retains the creative class and, hopefully, draws more in (Florida, 2002). The pursuit of attracting the creative class generates a competition amongst cities of who can best implement creative city policies and ideals giving rise to an elevated status to city-scale initiatives and also flattening the world by exporting a shared series of values internationally to cities that would be participating in the creative city challenge.

In the creative city, three values – individuality, expression of merit, and diversity and openness – are emphasized as being crucial to the creative class (Florida, 2002). These values create the ideal character of the caliber the creative city strives to attract and retain. On individuality, the caricature of the creative class citizen is a non-conformist whose eccentricities put them, traditionally, in opposition to normative organizational policies and practices (Florida, 2002). Beyond pushing against the status quo, the creative citizen also embraces the concept of meritocracy (Florida, 2002). It is crucial to the self-image of creative citizens that their success results from the choices they have made and the labours they have undertaken regardless of the true nature of their successes (Florida, 2002). Finally, the creative citizen is someone who strives for diversity and openness so much so, in fact, that it was proposed as a metric for gauging the standing of cities as creative (Leslie & Catungal, 2012). In this way, creative citizens want to be seen as non-conformists, but when the city is designed to appeal to this desire, non-conformity becomes a fantasy instead of a reality. Similarly, the creative citizen wants to be viewed as deserving of their station and achievements by viewing their success through the lens of a meritocracy and champions of diversity who strive to make the creative city an inclusive place for all. In a further section, we will assess the consequences of this mythmaking, but for now, what is important to keep in mind is that the creative city structure is organized in such a way that a caricature is deployed as a normative tool for citizens to follow and as a marketing tool to recruit new creative citizens.

Like neoliberalism, the creative city is an economic regime aiming to develop a new order in the strategic ruin of established institutional arrangements. The creative city is born in a moment of destruction described by the falling rates of agricultural and industrial workers, as cities shift to post-industrial economies, and a corresponding moment of creation in which these workers are absorbed into either the creative class or the service class. Primarily, it seems, these workers tend to end up more often in the service class leading to a socio-economic polarization (Leslie & Catungal, 2012). Further, and interestingly, private property was extricated from the dual classes of the creative city. The creative class instead strives to own immaterial intellectual property whereas the service class, at best, can hope to find ways to act creatively in their position (Florida 2002; Leslie & Catungal, 2012). Under the creative city model, the best a member of the service class can strive for is ascension to the creative class through innovating their role in the city, while members of the creative class are discussed as being content with the cultural economy while abstaining from land ownership, the population is reduced to a commodity itself. With the potential for landownership in the city extricated from the dialectical comparison between the creative and service classes, the population becomes an image of the creative ideal where the dominant creative class is drawn to the city for the aesthetics and amenities offered, generating an economic benefit sustaining the service class, but the creative city itself is part of an endless competition between global creative cities, each striving to be the most appealing, to attract the commodified creative class. The nature of the connection the creative class has with any creative city is ephemeral and contingent on the caricature of the city and its population – no real ties are forged as all are mediated by the spectacle.

Intractable Harms in the Evolution from Neoliberal to Creative Cities

The Harms of Neoliberalism and Creative Cities

As discussed, the nature of the citizens within the creative city is ephemeral and, at its core, largely untethered from any deep connection to a particular city beyond the immediate reaction to its amenities with an essential separation between individuals. In the chapter, “Metropolis and Mental Life”, Georg Simmel discusses the contrasts between rural and urban life and the effects each has on the psychic life of citizens. In the chapter, he explains that the vast amounts of stimulation a citizen receives in the city fuels a more intellectualistic approach to understanding socio-economic conditions and interpersonal relationships that is distinctly rational whereas those living in rural conditions prioritize emotional relationships (Simmel, 1903). The consequence of a more intellectual approach to understanding life in urban conditions is an inability to sufficiently respond to the vast amount of stimuli encountered resulting in what Simmel (1903) referred to as a characteristically blasé outlook. Further, this loss of emotional capacity, in addition to the density of people in an urban setting, manifests an intense loneliness for citizens in cities (Simmel, 1903). As a result of this loneliness, Simmel (1903) speculated that citizens would be driven to differentiate themselves from the formless crowd in an attempt to receive validation. Simmel (1903) states that “This leads ultimately to the strangest eccentricities, to specifically metropolitan extravagances of self-distantiation, of caprice, of fastidiousness, the meaning of which is no longer to be found in the content of such activity itself but rather in its being a form of ‘being different’ – of making oneself noticeable. For many types of persons these are still the only means of saving for oneself, through the attention gained from others, some sort of self-esteem and the sense of filling a position” (18). This quote by Simmel touches on one of the core principles established by Florida (2002) – that members of the creative class strive to be seen as individuals and to embody the caricature of the creative class sold to attract this class to a particular city. Further, creating the caricature of the creative class puts citizens in dialectical competition with this non-existent entity instrumentalizing their loneliness, and perceived lack of individuality, into creative endeavours that further the global creative reputation of the creative city and ties their self-worth to advancing this regime.

Issues arising in cities are not just limited to isolation and loneliness, however. In their article, “Social Justice and the Creative City: Class, Gender, and Racial Inequality”, Deborah Leslie & John Paul Catungal argue that gender and racial inequality are implicit elements of the creative city (Leslie & Catungal, 2012). Beyond individuality, which we discussed in the previous paragraphs, the other two components of Florida’s theory are the concept of meritocracy and diversity (Florida, 2002). On the concept of the creative class meritocracy, Leslie & Catungal (2012) highlight that insufficient consideration has been provided on examining how race and gender affect perceptions of merit within the creative city and further includes implicit assumptions affecting social justice in creative cities. The effects of hierarchical order in creative cities fail to account for how racial minorities and women face high barriers of entry to creative fields, remain economically disadvantaged, and have to operate under a hierarchy composed of masculine norms (Leslie & Catungal, 2012). Looking at the composition of the service class, women were found to be disproportionately concentrated in service class jobs with a gender pay gap exceeding the geography-based pay gap between creative cities (Negrey & Rausch, 2009 as cited in Leslie & Catungal, 2012). Similarly, racial minorities and immigrants often find themselves in low-paying service class jobs; the concept of creative cities is predicated on the assumption that workers can flow freely between creative cities and uproot their lives to relocate to where their industry settles. However, this assumption ignores the migratory limitations on immigrant workers affecting their ability to relocate (Leslie & Catungal, 2012). Further complicating the issue, immigrants seeking to work in creative fields may face regulatory obstacles from professional bodies affecting their ability to gain accreditation to practice their trained profession restricting them to the service class (Leslie & Catungal, 2012). This relegation of women and racial minorities to low-paying service jobs in creative cities demonstrates the problem with its dependence on economic polarization – implicit biases are dictating who will be economically disadvantaged. Despite acknowledging the reliance on economic polarization and noting the trend of rising inequality in creative cities, Florida has offered no substantial consideration to resolve this tension.

From the preceding discussion, the creative city is an evolution of neoliberal processes seeking to fracture institutional arrangements to create new economic regimes. The evolution depends on creating and imposing an image of the creative city – and the creative class – on top of the urban landscape. The use of this image is two-fold: first, it is used in a global sense to advertise the city and demonstrate the creative capacity of the city. Secondly, it is used in a normative way by providing citizens with an image to measure themselves. On this second point, we discussed how competition against a caricature had the tendency to isolate citizens from their neighbours and produce a drive to individuate themselves amongst their peers in pursuit of satiating their self-esteem, a critical component of Florida’s conception of a creative class citizen (Simmel, 1903; Debord, 1994; Florida, 2002). Further, we discussed the implicit flaws of the caricature of the creative class as well as how these flaws produce material harm to, disproportionately, women and visible minorities despite diversity and openness being an amenity offered by creative cities (Debord, 1994; Leslie & Catungal, 2012). Though Florida’s response to these harms was to shift the burden of solving them onto the creative class, the blasé outlook characteristically arising in cities does not inspire hope for empathic solutions (Simmel, 1903; Peck, 2005). Ultimately, the caricature of the creative class transforms social relationships in a city into a competition against a constructed identity that makes it impossible to measure up to. In neoliberal terms, the implementation of the creative class caricature is the moment of destruction facilitating a looping cycle of creation that subverts inner-city relationships and atomizes the population for economic benefit. Having established these principles and consequences, we can turn our attention to Vancouver’s relation to these concepts.

Vancouver’s Relation to Neoliberalism as a Creative City

The City of Vancouver participates in several key gatherings such as the Creative City Summit, of which they hosted the inaugural summit in 2002, and the World Cities Culture Forum (Creative City Network of Canada, n.d.; City of Vancouver, 2019). The City of Vancouver published two policies – “Culture|Shift” and “Making Space for Arts and Culture” – establishing the need for bolstering the creative sector for, principally, economic reasons going so far as to call culture the “fourth pillar of sustainable development” (City of Vancouver, 2020). The impetus for this reprioritization stems from the United Nations' recognition that cultural and creative industries are some of the fastest-growing sectors globally (City of Vancouver, 2019). Research provided by Hill Strategies in the “Culture|Shift” report found that the creative and cultural sectors were responsible for 2.7% of British Columbia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 4% of total employment (City of Vancouver, 2020). Looking at national trends, the Conference Board of Canada found that arts and cultural workers were responsible for 7.4% of the GDP (Conference Board of Canada, 2007 as cited in City of Vancouver, 2019). Both provincial and nationally, the arts and culture sectors outperformed traditional industrial sectors in GDP (City of Vancouver 2019; City of Vancouver, 2020). Beyond this, British Columbia’s artist labour pool grew by 74% and the cultural labour pool grew by 79% in the five years preceding the “Making Space for Arts and Culture” report (City of Vancouver, 2019). This led to the conclusion that “Vancouver’s cultural sector attracts talent across all industries, and contributes to some of the fastest growing parts of the knowledge economy” and that the “Culture|Shift” plan ought to “leverage the potential of Vancouver’s cultural ecosystem and cultivate a rich, place-based identity, the plan uses partnerships to connect the creative capacity that exists in and around the sector” due to the fact that the cultural and creative sectors are “critical to economic prosperity, not only for the cultural sector but also for the economic prosperity of all industries” (City of Vancouver, 2020, 13; 15). This would entail changes in funding policies and altering regulatory barriers to facilitate enhanced cultural vitality (City of Vancouver, 2019; City of Vancouver, 2020). Vancouver will, once again, be the host city for the Creative City Summit in 2024; given Vancouver’s participation in the national Creative City Summit as well as the World Cities Culture Forum, it is clear the City is committed to exploring how the creative and cultural economy can be bolstered locally (Creative City Network of Canada, n.d.; City of Vancouver, 2019).

There are several parallels between Florida’s (2002) creative class thesis and Vancouver’s priorities for growing the creative and cultural sectors. Perhaps most telling is the City of Vancouver’s statement in the “Culture|Shift” policy stating that growing these sectors enhances the economic prosperity of all industries in the city and develops “more adaptable and experimental business [environments] from which more dynamic and more original products emerge” (City of Vancouver, 2020, 15). However, it is challenging to consider how Vancouver might grow the creative and cultural sectors while sufficiently protecting citizens from the implicit harms entrenched in Florida’s theory. Exploring the relation of the harms discussed in relation to Vancouver, the “Culture|Shift” policy explicitly states that diversity is an ideal city characteristic to enhance as it correlates to thinking that drives innovation, a line of thought consistent with Florida’s emphasis on diversity as an essential element of a creative city (City of Vancouver, 2020; Florida, 2002). While the “Culture|Shift” policies emphasize the City’s commitment to equity across demographics, which is good, little thought is given to the down-the-line effects after overhauling these sectors (City of Vancouver, 2020). For example, it was reported that Vancouver artists have a median income of $22,000 annually while female artists and cultural workers earned 25% less than their male counterparts as of 2015 (City of Vancouver, 2020). Given the cost of living in Vancouver, bolstering the creative and cultural sectors as a means to elevating other sectors can, foreseeably, only elevate the cost of living as it becomes a more desirable place to live by creative city standards. It seems implausible that these policies provide an ongoing pathway to make those working in the cultural economy self-sufficient to the point where their work, en masse, can support them proportionally with the rising cost of living associated with a creatively blossoming Vancouver. Moreso, these policies seem to instrumentalize artists and cultural workers in a mutually beneficial way where their work enhances Vancouver’s creative image while Vancouver provides them with enhanced opportunities to practice their crafts even though they may still be relegated to working in the service class to support themselves. Given Vancouver’s trajectory to undertake neoliberal regimes to facilitate the enhancement of its creative city image, it is important to look at ways to offset the intractable harms discussed earlier in this paper. Central to this, is the development and protection of so-called third places like the VLS.

Generating Community and Resilience

Third Places as Sources of Mutual Support

In their article, “Closure of ‘Third Places’? Exploring Potential Consequences for Collective Health and Wellbeing”, Jessica Finlay et al. (2019) provide a review of the health benefits offered by third places. These health benefits – such as diminishing isolation and alienation – serve to directly address the harms imposed on citizens under the neoliberalizing effects of implementing a creative city regime (Finlay et al., 2019), Given the harms potential suffered by citizens as Vancouver enhances its cultural and creative economy, it is crucial to provide spaces where the community can come together with a low-to-no cost barrier of entry and form connections. In this way, ensuring the existence of third places – places beyond a citizen's home and workplace that facilitate social engagement and community building – is essential (Finlay et al., 2019). Third places, and especially libraries acting as third places, provide all citizens with a safe environment in which they can occupy and utilize services offered (Finlay et al., 2019). An overview of library-specific third place benefits is provided in Bob White & Marie D. Martel’s (2021) article “An Intercultural Framework for Theory and Practice in Third Place Libraries”. White & Martel (2021) note that, currently, a shift in how libraries are perceived is occurring with their value as a book and information repository shifting towards a place where people can gather and connect so much so that they have been described as the “New Third Place” despite sharing overlapping traits to work and home activities (Putnam, Feldstein, & Cohen, 2003 as cited in White & Martel, 2021). As a new third place, libraries are able to facilitate eight social benefits including the production of meaningful interactions, consolidation of shared identities, reduction of the perception of ontological categories responsible for othering citizens from one another, reduction of social distance, creation of a shared sense of identity and belonging, facilitating social trust, dissolving discomfort associated with perceptions of diversity, and producing social capital (White & Martel, 2021). In this way, third places help combat societal issues such as isolation, lack of access to education, and sociopolitical polarization (Finlay et al., 2019). Understanding these benefits, we can now turn to VPL’s policies to see whether the principles established in their plans could reasonably produce the benefits to social capital discussed.

The History and Construction of VPL’s Central Branch

The History of VPL

Vancouver’s first library – Hastings Literary Institute – was established in January 1869 by the manager of Hastings Mill on behalf of the mill’s employees (VPL, n.d.a). The Hastings Literary Institute served the mill workers for, approximately, 17 years until the Great Fire of Vancouver in 1886 (VPL, n.d.a). Following the fire, books from the Hastings Literary Institute were transferred to the newly formed Vancouver Reading Room, located at 144 West Cordova Street, in 1887 (VPL, n.d.a). Approximately seven years later, in 1894, The Vancouver Reading Room moved to an, approximately 4 m² room located at 151 West Hastings Street. In 1901, Andrew Carnegie, an American philanthropist, provided a $50,000 donation to the City of Vancouver to fund a new library; the new library – the first VPL – was designed by George William Grant, constructed on the corner of Hastings and Main Street, and opened to the public in October 1903 (VPL, n.d.a). This iteration of the VPL remained until 1957, at which point a new VPL was constructed at 750 Burrard Street and would remain open until April 1995, closing in advance of the current VPL Central Branch’s opening (VPL, n.d.a). In 1990, a referendum ballot was distributed to Vancouver Citizens asking, among other things, whether a new central library branch was needed; the results of this referendum indicated that 69% of the population supported the expansion initiative (VPL, n.d.b). A two-phase competition was held to select the architect who would design the current iteration of the VPL Central Branch (VPL, n.d.c). Interest was received from Architectural firms ranging from local to international; ten were selected for interviews (VPL, n.d.c). In 1991, three teams were identified, and each was given $100,000 to produce a pitch for the VPL Central Branch (VPL, n.d.c). In August 1992, the pitch provided by Moshe Safdie & Associates with Downs/Archambault and Partners was selected as the winner of the competition (VPL, n.d.c).

The Architecture of VLS

The current iteration of the VPL Central Branch, named VLS, opened to the public in May 1995; VLS occupies one, approximately, 12,700 m² legal lot located at 350 West Georgia Street in Vancouver’s Downtown core (City of Vancouver, n.d.). VLS was built to resemble a Roman Coliseum which, despite being unconventional, was the public favourite (VPL, n.d.a). The central building is a nine-floor rectangular building; VPL always occupied the first seven floors while the Provincial Government leased floors eight and nine for twenty years before being taken over by VPL during the 2018 expansion (VPL, n.d.c). The exterior of the central building is encapsulated by a multi-floor colonnade with patron areas to study (Safdie Architects, n.d.). The southeast portion of the colonnade is offset and elongated to reach the southwest boundary of the property creating a guiding flow to the entrance of the building (City of Vancouver, n.d.). The foyer of VLS is occupied by a glass-roofed atrium with commercial shops on the ground floor designed to subtly transition visitors from the outside into VPL (City of Vancouver, n.d.). Though the initial design included a public rooftop garden – which would have been Vancouver’s first public rooftop garden in 1995 – this feature was not added until the 2018 expansion under the guidance of the original landscape architect, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (The Cultural Landscape Foundation, n.d.). The conversion of the eighth and ninth floors added a grand reading room, several bookable meeting rooms, a dedicated exhibition space for topics of local interest, and an 80-seat theatre (VPL, n.d.a; VPL, n.d.c). Over 20 years later, VLS remains an architectural landmark of Vancouver, often being voted as residents' favourite civic building (VPL, n.d.a).

VLS as a New Third Place

A review of VPL’s “Strategic Plan 2020-2025” identifies four strategic priorities: learning and creativity, shared spaces and experiences, belonging and connection, and organizational strength (VPL, 2022). Learning and creativity establish the VPL’s commitment to providing the community with learning opportunities that cater to a wide range of demographics through programs and collections in seventeen different languages (VPL, 2022). The second priority, shared spaces and experiences, acknowledges the VPL’s unique position as a free public place; moreover, they acknowledged the loss of communal public spaces and the negative effect these losses have on the community (VPL, 2022). Despite this, VPL asserted their commitment to providing a free and welcoming place, accessible to all citizens, that strives to facilitate socially resilient communities (VPL, 2022). In belonging and connection, the third priority, VPL established the reduction of social isolation through the reduction of barriers-to-entry of the VPL, engagement with diverse cultures, and cementing VPL as a space for conversation and understanding (VPL, 2022). VPL asserts that fostering conversation and amplifying diverse voices is a foundational role the library can fill in realizing an equitable city (VPL, 2022). Based on patron responses solicited, VPL concluded that newcomers, seniors, and marginalized communities suffered the most from social isolation and sought ways to target these demographics to help offset these harms (VPL, 2022). The final priority, organizational strength, aimed to ensure VPL, as an institution, was able to identify and respond to community needs in an ongoing and consistent fashion (VPL, 2022). Central to this final priority was the prioritization of synchronizing their efforts with the City of Vancouver’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Framework” (VPL, 2022). In this way, VPL at VLS is a central nexus point connecting a variety of residents and providing a free-to-access space offering resources for learning and cross-cultural connections to offset the harms of isolation and alienation residents are feeling.

Conclusion

In this paper, we reviewed the history of VLS as the central branch of VPL as well as the historical context of VPL as it grew from a humble beginning as the Hastings Literary Institute. Given that VLS was built due, in large part, to citizens expressing their desire in a referendum ballot, it is fitting that this building would cement itself as a new third place capable of resisting the harms associated with the neoliberal transformation of Vancouver into a creative city. On these harms, works by Georg Simmel (1903), Guy Debord (1994), and Deborah Leslie & John Paul Catungal (2012) were used to show that isolation and atomization of citizens, the instrumentalized intense need for citizens to individuate themselves from a deployed caricature embodying the spectacle, and disproportionate inequity faced by women and minorities in creative cities as well as how these factors together produced a diminished emotional capacity for urban citizens characterized by a blasé outlook. Further, we explored the process of neoliberalization, defined by Neil Brenner & Nik Theodore (2002; 2005) and Peter Brand (2007), as a necessary precondition directly responsible for the rise of the creative class thesis by Richard Florida (2002). In exploring the relationship between neoliberalism and creative cities, I argue it was necessary to view the spectacle by Guy Debord (1994) as a mediating force for social interactions explaining the evolution. Specifically, I argue that the development of the creative class is a presentation of the spectacle given that the idea of the creative class is a manufactured caricature imposed on cities to represent three essential values – individuality, meritocracy, as well as diversity and openness – described by Florida (2002). Whereas these values could arise naturally in a city, in creative cities they are projected onto a population as both a marketing tool to attract the creative class and as a normative tool to alter the behaviour of citizens primarily for economic reasons consistent with neoliberalism.

With an understanding of the evolution of neoliberalism and how it manifests as creative cities, as well as the harms it imposes on citizens, we then looked at Vancouver’s relationship to the processes described by examining the City of Vancouver’s (2019; 2020) “Culture|Shift” and “Making Space for Arts and Culture” policies. These policies generally aimed to instrumentalize the arts and culture sector as a means to facilitate economic improvement across all industries in Vancouver. The artists and culture workers were likely still to be relegated to the service class – in some capacity – following the completion of the City of Vancouver’s goals despite being given enhanced opportunities to practice their crafts; in this way, the process of transforming Vancouver into a creative city provided a period mutual benefit between the City of Vancouver and artists and cultural workers that was undermined by the enhancement of the previously discussed harms following the achievement of the City’s goals. Additionally, the intensity of the process was expected to occur at a city scale given that, under neoliberalism, cities received an elevated status as policy experiment laboratories that can be seen as a positive feedback loop with creative cities as creative cities that are successful in implementing new and successful economic policies have their image elevated to a national scale via the spectacle. Following this, we examined libraries as “new third places” capable of combating isolation and atomization of citizens as well as creating diverse communities and fostering cross-cultural connections. In this way, VLS, as the central hub of VPL, is a critical piece of social infrastructure for building social resilience to the deliberate instrumentalization of isolation and reduced cross-cultural connections that disproportionately affect marginalized communities, visible minorities, and women in communities under an increasingly neoliberal landscape facilitated by the creative class thesis.

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