I opened this book with a poetic reflection on how I like to stand at English Bay, dreaming up alternative worlds. Perhaps the key problem with this scenario is that I am standing alone, entertaining fantasies, rather than taking action with others in the real world and waiting to see what we dream up together. In some sense, as we shall see in this chapter, my whimsical musing performatively realizes the intentions of some of the people who designed Vancouver. They built City Hall upon a hill outside of the downtown area from where it could appear to rule over the city without being particularly accessible (Monteyne 2010, 52). They offered very little space for public gatherings, where people might face either those in positions of power or one another to engage in dialogue. And they instead developed a thin, two-lane walkway around the red cedar-and Douglas fir-lined West End archipelago, encouraging people to turn outwards towards the sea; to literally turn their backs on the city. They wanted us to stand there, alone or in groups of two, whimsically musing about aquatic adventures.

In this chapter I complicate the simplified picture of liberalism painted in Chapter 2, detailing the complex ways in which liberalism has and has not become embedded in the city my friends call home. The advantage of the critique I offered in Chapter 2 is that it gives us a broad overview of the history of liberal ideas and an outline of how these have become reality. But this same advantage is also a shortcoming. Such overviews end up assigning agentive force to a phantom. Liberalism becomes an ideology without real places or people. It is simultaneously the entire backdrop against which everybody operates and yet explains no single feature. It is the reason that society is crumbling around us and yet no individual person seems to fit the profile. With this shortcoming in mind, it is my contention that what is needed is a variety of liberalisms approach. This means recognizing that there are globally circulating ideas that have found their way into a range of institutions and individuals, producing similar results in seemingly disparate places, while also recognizing that liberalism is not merely a framework that is preconceived and imposed from above.