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In recent decades, under the mutually constitutive processes of neoliberal urbanization and globalization, Vancouver has radically transformed and become a serious contender for the title of 'world-class city'. Against the background of this socio-spatial force reconfiguring the city, I explore how the city's unique development of mini schools - small and selective public schools within larger urban public secondary schools - has been transforming the meanings, practices, projects and imaginaries of the city's communities. I conducted a multi-sited ethnography using an interdisciplinary methodological framework to critically examine how such transformation is carried out. My ethnography focused on the dismantling of long-standing connections between the school and the neighbourhood within the context of the emerging local education market, and how this process unfolds in young people's lives and self formation. This paper draws from Raymond Williams' socio-cultural theories, and Nikolas Rose's theory of the new styles of 'government through community'. I use these theories together in order to bring forward a nuanced understanding of the new projects of global city communities. I focus on how these new projects are manifested in young people's complex experiences of Vancouver's mini schools. The outcomes of this study will illuminate the ramifications of the education market on the new dynamics of intra-urban social disparity and polarization in global cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vancouver exemplifies the richness of the many processes that set the civic culture of large contemporary cities. This paper focuses on what drives the social and economic construction of Vancouver, pointing to the complex linkages that tie agents to their environment. It shows that, in Vancouver, power arises from strong popular control and local democratic and participatory values, where group interactions produce and co-produce community development. The Vancouver regime is open yet stable, socially progressive yet fiscally conservative and pro-development. It is a regime that upholds an activist, tolerant and entrepreneurial civic culture. It emerges from an on-going process where the openness of the regime is re-negotiated in each neighbourhood and around each policy arena leading to the emergence of a culture of ongoing participation where civic, neighbourhood, ethnic and business groups constantly re-invent the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning and local policies, informed recurrently by theories of transformative urban development, have represented influential (and at times decisive) agencies of change in Vancouver's metropolitan core. A commitment to principles of post-industrialism in the 1970s, realised through the conversion of False Creek South from an obsolescent industrial site to a medium-density, mixed-income residential landscape, effectively broke the mould of the mid-century urban core. The seminal Central Area Plan (approved 1991) enabled the comprehensive reordering of inner-city space, exemplified by a post-modern diversity, complexity and interdependency of territory and land use, and a strategic reversal of the employment-housing imbalance in the core. The city has broadly succeeded in asserting public interests as contingencies of change within the core, but these processes have created new social conflicts, tensions and displacements, as well as a glittering and paradigmatic 21st-century central city. In theoretical terms, the Vancouver experience marks a clear break from the classic model of the post-industrial city, the latter typified by a monocultural, office-based economy, extreme spatial asymmetries of investment and development and modernist form and imagery. At the same time, emergent production clusters, residential mega-projects and spaces of consumption and spectacle in the central area present marked contrasts to the spatial disorder and chaotic patterns of 'incipient' post-modernism, underscoring an exigent need for innovative and integrative retheorisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]