Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley (review)

If urban landscapes may be understood as palimpsests of change and continuity, then historic maps allow one to peel back the layers of time and gain some understanding of the evolution of landscapes, their enduring patterns, and – perhaps – the forces that have shaped them. In his Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley, award-winning author and geographer Derek Hayes has applied his considerable knowledge of historic maps and their wealth of information to his home urban region. The result is a wonderfully illustrated and rich example of how maps (and geographical information generally) may be used to tell stories of place and to enhance our understanding of the changing urban landscape.

The author of several other popular historical atlases, Hayes uses maps both familiar and novel to offer mini-narratives of significant places and developments in the history of BC’s Lower Mainland. Unlike Bruce MacDonald’s Vancouver: A Visual History (1992), which created maps to display cross-sections of the region at ten-year intervals, Hayes’s atlas compiles cartographic representations from a variety of different sources, from explorers’ charts to promoters’ panoramic ‘bird’s-eye’ maps. The result is an often surprising and always absorbing look at how various people encountering and shaping the region’s landscapes used cartography to make sense of it, and to what ends.

The book is organized into roughly chronological mini-chapters, with periods ranging from contact to contemporary times, and along a series of major themes, from exploration to the establishment of settlements, to transportation, communications, and regional economic development. Each chapter is accompanied by a short text summarizing these developments and expanding on the accompanying maps. The maps themselves are well labelled and often presented as details, allowing for close inspection of their contents. Many chapters highlight the various blind alleys and untaken paths of the region’s history; even most Vancouverites would be unaware, for instance, that the city’s downtown West End was initially planned and platted in the 1880s as a ‘great city, to be called Liverpool’ (50–52). Others illustrate fateful decisions with long-term consequences for the region’s growth and development, such as the demise of the inter-urban rail network (66–67) or the ‘freeway fight’ of the 1960s that ended plans for a downtown expressway (154–59). In all these cases, Hayes uses historical maps to prompt reflections on the historical-geographical effects of planning decisions, economic forces, and technological change.

Yet, as entertaining and enlivening as Hayes’s chapters are, their analytical reach remains somewhat limited. Perhaps reflecting the nature of the available maps and their intended usage, there is an emphasis in these pages on transportation and the physical expansion of the region; there are few, if any, chapters dealing with aspects of Vancouver’s rich and complex social and economic geography. A notable exception is the section on the Great Depression in Vancouver, which uses a 1934 map created by city archivist Major James Skitt Matthews showing the distribution of relief recipients to illustrate the city’s geographies of class and wealth. Hayes briefly acknowledges, then largely forgets, the critical role of maps and cartography in processes of colonial dispossession and ‘resettlement’; yet some of the most powerful illustrations in the atlas are of the imposition of a Cartesian grid across the pre-existing human and natural landscapes of the region (38–41). Unfortunately, the region’s First Nations remain confined to pre-history and the contact era at the front of the book, in spite of the fact that they continue to be active in the redrawing of territories and boundaries in the region (such as at the Musqueam Reserve on Point Grey or in the historic urban treaty signed by the Tsawwassen First Nation in late 2006).

In spite of these shortcomings and a few other ‘bloopers,’ such as referring to the 2010 Games as Canada’s first Winter Olympics (171), the general audience at whom this...