‘If everything is moving where is here?’: Lisa Robertson's Occasional Work on cities, space and impermanence

Abstract

In her 2003 collection of essays Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, poet Lisa Robertson describes a shifting and dissolving Vancouver. Through a consideration of the theoretical work of geographer Doreen Massey and architect Rem Koolhaas, we explore the ways that, for Robertson, space is not reducible to singular, official narratives, but is the result of the complex and contradictory accretion of multiple historical trajectories. Focusing on Vancouver's New Brighton Park, both in Robertson's text and as a physical space, we ask how clashing forces, from the forceful organisational movements of global capital to the differentiating, yet minor, descriptions of the wandering poet, produce a space, a specific site, together through their cooperations and antagonisms?