In the 1960s, the citizens of Vancouver, a Pacific port city in the Canadian province of British Columbia, rebelled against the “North American disease of proliferation and gigantism.” The collapse of plans to build urban freeways was followed by the rehabilitation of the city’s peninsular downtown, the deindustrialization of the shoreline, and finally the pursuit of the “world’s greenest city” status through the construction of bike lanes and expansion of the SkyTrain transit system.

By the time the city hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver had spawned “Vancouverism” — a concept and a brand. Vancouverism meant “city building in paradise.” Hemmed in by mountains and the Burrard Inlet to the north, bisected by False Creek and bordered by the Fraser River to its south, the city of Vancouver had no choice but to grow responsibly, which meant upward. Planners controlled the flow of developer capital after a successful World’s Fair — Expo 86 — by mandating clusters of green-glass condo towers for former industrial areas, mounted on podiums of shops to keep the street scene lively. What one book called The Vancouver Achievement pushed the city up the Economist’s global “livability” index, where it still sits in fifth place, alongside other cities from the former British Dominions. While paying polite heed to that “achievement,” Daniel Francis’s concise and vividly illustrated Becoming Vancouver also invites us to consider the related costs, and how the city’s history might provide new ideas for how to overcome the deep social problems it has failed to address.