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Sometimes I have more complete, formal, panoramic dreams of cities. Mexico City until my recent visit was the purest fiction; it was in fact a dream flight; with that certitude of dreams I just knew that this was "Mexico City". I was, as usual, apparently suspended in the air, moving slowly above a city of mighty coruscating brown structures rearing into the sky, cowls, giant chimneys, towers, Flash Gordon-type edifices and improbably baroque industrial plants against a hazy sky. (Nor was my dream so wrong; it just turned out, on my trip to Japan, that my "Mexico City" was Osaka.) My Maghreb mediterranean city dream (because I 'knew' where it was) involved an intense high speed car chase, barrelling through dark streets shiny with rain with that special scrolling effect of the video game, until suddenly we slewed left and there were the docks, as innocent and stylised as an illustration from Babar the Elephant, and a fanciful little crescent moon above the latticed gantries.

I dreamed of Vancouver before I went there. 'Vancouver' was to be a city almost in the Arctic circle, fronting the most hyperborean reaches of the Pacific, the white pinnacles of the skyscrapers glittering in reply to the snowy peaks encircling them. In the embrace of these mountains a twenty kilometre grid of wide streets flanked by glossy buildings would rise, massive ziggurats white and clean in the near Arctic air. In the streets would process whole tranches of global demographies, the black, the white, the asian, the oriental, in a state of integration far, far beyond the pedantries of positive discrimination. I needed to feel that there could be a city that was sage and rational and yet magnificent, fashionable, hip, cosmopolitan. If anywhere could manage it would have to be Canada; for surely Canada, for so cruelly longviewed as dull, its turn had come. Just as Belgium, so long the butt of Europe awoke in the nineties to find itself feted as a hip nation. I wanted to find a city that gave me an intimation of the twenty-first century, a great white icy city perched out on the north of the Pacific Rim.

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