It's been rumoured that Vancouver supplied the inspiration for the rain-swept, futuristic city in the 1982 film Blade Runner. Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick actually spent time living here, after giving a 1972 talk at a Vancouver science fiction convention and checking into a local rehab. However, the film was based on Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was first published in 1968, well before the author escaped Orange County for Lotusland. Another beautiful urban legend slain by an ugly fact.

Still, it's interesting to revisit the joint vision of Dick and director Ridley Scott, about a futuristic West Coast city where it's always raining and whites are the visible minority. Dick lived just long enough to see the set designs and trailer for Blade Runner, and his observations on the film version of his book were recorded in the book What If Our World is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick.

"The city is up in the air. And all the people on the outside, sort of the losers, are walking around on the street level. And all the beautiful people are up forty stories. And when you get up forty stories it's like getting through Dante's Divine Comedy, going up through hell to purgatory to heaven. And they are just living great, I mean, they are doing fine up there.... and it becomes very, very glamourous." The author's words almost read like advertising copy for a local high-rise condo development, pitching sky-high lifestyles for those who can afford it. A guy who tinkered with simulated worlds, Dick probably would have been intrigued with today's slick ads for vertical living, which invariably feature attractive young couples having sunlit fun in their swank pods, far above the gritty reality of the street.

Vancouver's pods are on a sliding scale of size, style and cost, although the concept of affordable housing becomes a bit sci-fi when the minimum income bracket is $60,000 a year for one ballyhooed Vancouver development. I suppose this redefinition of "affordable" for the Millennium Water is part of the "Olympic legacy" our civic leaders and real estate marketers having been crowing about.

Let's not forget The Games were bookended by two touchstone events: the Olympic Village's coming out party in mid-May as the Millennium Water, and the December 2009 demolition of the Little Mountain housing complex, the oldest public housing development in B.C. The former occupants might as well have been replicants, hunted down by civic officials rather than Harrison Ford.

Blade Runner's vision of a high-rise dystopia came out during the first term of U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who along with Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney, launched the Anglo-American campaign against the public sector. If this threesome were the Holy Trinity of the free market, then the Chicago School of Economics was The Church, and Professor Milton Friedman was the High Priest. Wages in real dollars for middle-class workers began their terminal decline during the tenure of Ronnie, Maggie and Mulroo, while the incomes of the top 10 per cent went through the roof. Quaint notions like subsidized housing became increasingly suspect, from the federal to civic level.

By the early '90s, the crusade for free market monopolies was well underway. At that time, Seattle novelist Jonathan Raban travelled through the U.S., setting down his observations in his 1991 travelogue masterpiece, Hunting Mr. Heartbreak. In Manhattan, Raban noted how the "Ground People" and the "Air People," occupy two entirely different cities:

"At present the two cities were held together, one on top of the other, by the slender umbilical of the elevator, and by the Air People's dependence on the traffic that came up it--the Times and Wall Street Journal, beefsteak and zucchini, laundered shirts, maids, flowers, guests, invitations.... Access to the elevator was proof that your life had the buoyancy that was needed to stay afloat in a city where the ground was seen as the realm of failure and menace."

The divide between the Air People and Ground People is no longer limited to Raban's real-world New York or Blade Runner's imaginary San Francisco. The marketing theme of vertical escape, away from the addicts and homeless and up into fortified precincts of privilege and personal debt, has been mainstreamed and globalized. It's everywhere now, from Beijing to Coquitlam. If it was science fiction, you might even call it Dickish.

www.geoffolson.com