Seven recent books about my hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia

by Daniel Francis
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7 books
Like most places, Vancouver has a complicated past. These books investigate some of the landmark successes, and some of the continuing failures. Taken together, they paint a portrait of the Terminal City at the beginning of the 21st century.
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Inventing Stanley Park

An Environmental History
Sean Kheraj, 2013
Stanley Park is one of the great civic green spaces in the world, a symbol of Vancouver. Kheraj reflects on the park’s history and its importance to the citizens of the city.

Vancouver Noir, 1930-1960

Diane Purvey, John Douglas Belshaw, 2011
Purvey and Belshaw are a husband-and-wife team of academics who know how to spin a great story for a general audience. Their book is an account of the “noir era” in the city, roughly 1930 to 1960. It is inspired by the black and white photographs of crime scenes and shadowy streetscapes that appeared in the daily press of the period. Reading it is like revelling in an old gangster movie.

Vancouverism

Larry Beasley, 2019
As co-director of planning for the city, Larry Beasley was part of a team that reimagined its downtown during the 1990s. The result was “Vancouverism”, an approach that emphasized the importance of diverse, high density, green living spaces. This book is the story of that transformation, its successes and its failures.

Lions Gate

Lilia D'Acres, Donald Luxton, 1999
As iconic as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge or the Sydney Opera House, the Lion’s Gate Bridge has spanned the entrance to Vancouver’s harbour for close to a century. This beautifully illustrated book tells the story of the dreamers, the engineers and the workers who fought the odds to plan and build such an intricate web of steel.

Saltwater City

Story of Vancouver's Chinese Community
Paul Yee, 2009
Vancouver is often called “the most Asian city” outside of Asia, a reference to the large number of residents of Asian heritage. For many years the centre of this population has been the city’s Chinatown and this beautifully illustrated book traces the development of the neighbourhood since its formation in the 1880s.

Fighting for Space

How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction
Travis Lupick, 2018
Vancouver is also known for its Downtown Eastside, the centre of the drug overdose crisis that afflicts so many communities. This is a journalistic account of the emergence of the harm reduction movement and the grassroots struggle to create Canada’s first legal safe injection site for drug users.

Becoming Vancouver

A History
Daniel Francis, 2022
My own book traces the history of the city from its origins as a small sawmill town on the shores of a remote inlet to its present status as the real-estate investment choice of the global super- rich.