Condos Love Culture: New arts development brings “creative placemaking” to Chinatown

While arts and culture aren’t bad things, governments and developers have increasingly instrumentalized them as a way to stimulate market value in marginalized and working class communities. Under intense pressure by the City to develop, BC Artscape is the latest wolf in sheep’s clothing making an incursion into Chinatown.

When she was a child, Jannie Leung and her dad made regular weekend shopping trips to the Sun Wah Centre at 268 Keefer Street. Back then, the mall was bustling, and even had a grocery store in the basement. This experience, she recalls, was “formative for me as a Chinese person, going to Chinatown.”