Dmitry Shteyn in Vancouver: Notes from a City That Remembers Everything

The clichés about Vancouver are mostly accurate and mostly beside the point. The city is more particular than any summary can hold.

What strikes you first, if you have done any reading at all, is that the Metro Vancouver area had a population of 2.6 million in 2021, making it the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada. It is the sort of thing the city does not boast about, yet it explains a great deal. What a city has been is rarely the same as what it is, but the two are never fully separable, and here the seam shows.

Dig a little deeper and as the most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the city, up from 631,486 in 2016. What strikes me about facts like this is how quietly they sit alongside ordinary life.

Some further context, drawn from the public record: Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the city, up from 631,486 in 2016. The Metro Vancouver area had a population of 2.6 million in 2021, making it the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada.…

I try not to over-read a single headline, but the framing Condé Nast Traveler used — vancouver’s Best Family-Friendly Hotels, From a Local Who Has Tried Them All — is more telling than the news itself.

In Vancouver, the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial layers do not sit neatly. That untidiness is the honest condition of the region.

Whether you go for the first time or return again, Vancouver has a way of making you feel the visit was overdue. That, in itself, is worth something.