Vancouver Small Town

If only it was warmer in Vancouver, there would no doubt be a motion of Baywatch to B.C.'s beaches, thus keeping Vancouver on the cutting edge of character reference programming.

But television is not the only attraction of Vancouver, and the metropolis fathers - urged on by Arthur Griffiths and sister, Emily Griffiths-Hamilton - understood last year that a best city needed a inaugural field of honor to showcase its jewels. Those jewels were, specifically (and no doubt coincidentally) Mr. Griffiths' and Ms. Griffith-Hamilton's NHL hockey aggroup, the Vancouver Canucks - summing up the (then-expected, now realized) unused(a) NBA basketball franchise, the Grizzlies. In keeping with the initiative nature of his - er, Vancouver's - sports teams, Griffiths & Co. went looking for a world-class sponsor for the arena. They effectuate that sponsor in the oecumenic Motors Corporation. Hence, the name and soon-to-be fame (it opens in September) of Vancouver's new, 20,000-seat multi-use arena, General Motors Place. (Yes, true, it sounds like the address for a corporate mail-drop, but world-class cities don't go in for piffling-town labels.)

Before pondering on how bolstering Vancouver's world-class image could lead to American ownership of the Canucks, perhaps it would be wise to look at how to a greater extent of an improvement this is o'er the past. After all, there

Campbell, Neil A. "Debt consign forced Griffiths to sell control: Canucks, Grizzlies, arena too much for Vancouver owners to shoulder." The Globe and Mail, 8 March 1995, A12.

Hall, Neal. "'GM Place' nothing to honk about(predicate), hardhats say." Vancouver Sun, 30 March 1994, A1.

Fong, Petti. "Builders putting a lid on new stadium." Vancouver Sun, 26 August 1996, B2.

Gruneau, Richard, and Whitson, David. "Communities, Civic Boosterism, and Fans." In Hockey night in Canada. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1993, 199-221.

Which brings us to the new General Motors Place. There is no getting around the fact that one part of " individualism" in an urban surroundings is a certain aim of personal anonymity. From the small-town perspective, this is Impersonality with a capital "I.

" But it is also a protective device: the citizen of a city has so many an(prenominal) inputs on his or her interior communications system that it is essential to assume a certain "neutrality" in the usual course of daily intercourse within the urban environment. In the small-town, one has few choices as to the entities with which one identifies. In a world-class city, by contrast, one builds a thousand small links: to brand names, car models, shopping centres, and so forth. Well, yes, it is consumerism. Against the small-town handed-down identifications of Church-Place-People (with hockey embracing the latter two), in the urban environment one finds Bought, Buy, and Will-Buy as the prime focus. In this context, of course, naming the new arena General Motors Place makes perfect sense.

There is something unique about small-town thinking. It tends to get caught up in illogical fantasies about "community" and "belonging." The small-town boosters who gave Vancouver the Pacific Coliseum seemed to wish upon the home team their own sense of peace with the place they lived in. Never intelligence the fact that professional hockey players are on the pathway more than half the season, or that they rarely stay more than
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