The Guardian

A long time ago, I ran away from home and ended up in London. Then I returned home to Vancouver and found my city had become a verb. The sleepy, rainy town of my youth had become an international urbanist's darling. The place where I'd climbed mountains and swum in the cold north Pacific waters was now the model of a sustainable city, one that married highway-free, high-density downtown living with a growing green sensibility, and "Vancouverising" had replaced "manhattanising" as the hip buzzword. Our former director of planning, Larry Beasley, has become a consultant to the emir of Abu Dhabi, and the gospel of Vancouver is now being exported worldwide. I've just come back to London to witness the birth of a new exhibit called, precisely, Vancouverism, part of the London Festival of Architecture. The show is curated by two architect/critics, Trevor Boddy of Vancouver and London's Dennis Sharp.