Indy Dreams and Urban Nightmares: Speed Merchants, Spectacle and the Struggle over Public Space in the World-Class City. (Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus)

Mark Douglas Lowes. Indy Dreams and Urban Nightmares: Speed Merchants, Spectacle and the Struggle over Public Space in the World-Class City. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 148pp. When representatives from Molstar Sports and Entertainment approached the citizens and elected representatives of Vancouver's Hastings Park community, the plan to revitalize and Hastings Park was already in place. After years of political struggle, grass and trees were to replace the banality of concrete while a reconstructed riverbed was, once again, to provide vital spawning habitat for salmon. That Molstar wanted to relocate the Molson Indy Vancouver (MIV) to Hastings Park was not surprising. The park had been commercialized for generations, providing a home for the Pacific National Exhibition and thoroughbred horse racing, among other urban amenities. Yet, with the long sought after restoration ready to begin, Molstar's timing could not have been worse. Indy Dreams and Urban Nightmares explores the grass-roots resistance that erupted in the wake of Molstar's attempt to relocate MIV to Hastings Park. According to Lowes, the dedication and tenacity with which the Hastings community resisted, and eventually thwarted, Moistar's relocation bid speaks to a series of much larger social, political, and cultural dynamics. With its unparalleled emphasis on consumption overproduction, capitalism's contemporary state of flexible accumulation is reducing many urban centres to postmodern pseudo theme parks characterized by spectacle and nourished by the relentless commodification and sale of contemporary culture. The resistance offered by the Hastings community, therefore, speaks to the importance of exploring ...how urban public culture is defined and shaped by competition over the right to conceptualize, control, and experience public spaces (Lowes, 2002: 8). The relocation of the MIV to Hastings Park, argued Molstar, would place Vancouver on the world stage, infusing the wider community with much needed capital while providing the city with international reputability; accepting Molstar' s offer was, therefore, a matter of civic obligation. Yet, it was this ideological (and largely symbolic) relationship between the appropriation of urban space and questions about citizenship that permeated both sides of the debate. For those dedicated to the park's restoration, opposing Molstar's vision of urban spectacle and exclusionary space was a matter of civic obligation, a position that reflected the community of Hastings' belief in the importance of green space and the participation of citizens in the development of their own urban environment. According to Lowes, despite a lack of financial resources and labour power, the Hastings community successfully thwarted Molstar's relocation bid. Hastings' deep sense of community--which Lowes sees as emerging out of its young, middle class, and family-oriented population--provided the wherewithal needed to resist the further encroachment of modern capital and the spectacles it brings. Lowes' work is a fine piece of scholarship that speaks to the importance of re-theorizing urban space and its relationship to ideology, citizenship, identity, and the flows of power that surround its rhetorical and actual appropriation. Lowes traverses the macro and micro fields of research well, effectively connecting local events with national and/or global shifts in socio-political and economic ideology. …

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