Is Vancouver a world-class city? Justin McElroy travels the world to find out

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During the COVID pandemic, Justin McElroy asked himself a question that many people were asking themselves: “What do I want to do when this all ends?”

His answer was a bit surprising for someone who had never travelled beyond Canada and the U.S. — take a year off and see the world.

Thanks to a workplace leave program, the CBCVancouver municipal affairs reporter, known for his popular and often quirky brackets and charts, could come up with no convincing reasons to not follow through. So, he began to plan a trip of a lifetime.

The idea for turning the whole adventure into a book surfaced, but McElroy says he had no interest in producing the familiar travelogue of destinations visited where views are admired and lessons are learned.

The hook for the book arrived via Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim, when being pressed on how the city would pay for increased density around transit stations, he invoked the need for Vancouver to become a “world-class city.”

“I sort of rolled my eyes and said, ‘Not this phrase again,’” McElroy said about the words he had heard forever. “What does it mean? And what values does it bring? We’ve hosted an Olympics. Isn’t that enough of a stamp?”

Then his reporter’s instinct kicked in. If he was about to visit the world’s great cities, he could test the cliché himself. “I’ll let you know how we do,” he remembers thinking. Suddenly, he had his book.

Searching for the Best Place On Earth: 52 Countries In 52 Weeks, McElroy’s debut book, follows his 2024 journey through 52 countries and 100 cities while asking how Vancouver measures against the places routinely described as global capitals. The result is a funny, insightful and useful book that blends memoir, analysis and, yes, McElroy’s love of ranking almost everything — cities, food, museums and rail systems.

“It’s important to remember that this is not, in any way, objective or official, albeit it is done through a specific and hopefully useful lens, considering it both as a good place to live and a good place to visit,” writes McElroy in the book.

His definition of a world-class city and one that “centres” a lot of his thoughts is a city where “people can live and get around with reasonable comfort, with a mix of interesting things to experience that are uniquely tied to the city’s culture or geography.”

Spoiler alert: Vancouver ranks No. 26 on McElroy’s list.

For McElroy, the scale of the undertaking was not simply functional and geographic. As a neurodivergent traveler, he knew that unfamiliar situations and new sensory experiences could bring intense anxiety. Routine mattered to him, and travelling to a new city every few days appeared to be the opposite of routine.

“Everyone’s autism is a little bit different, and the pressure points on them. And I know that, for me, routines are really important, and doing things that are new are really, really terrifying,” said McElroy. “I have to think through every scenario of how something might go, and if I’m processing a new sensory experience for the first time, that puts a great amount of anxiety on me. That’s probably one of the reasons why I never traveled until this point.”

But he mitigated the terror of travel by deciding to give himself permission to change course and maybe roll with the punches more than he usually would.

Then something interesting happened: chaos offered its own structure. Packing, changing currencies, orienting himself in a city and making the most of visits became a workflow he could manage.

“On one hand, this is completely chaotic. But after a few weeks, it’s like, I can figure this out,” said McElroy, who added that the trip, where he was anonymous, had the added bonus of removing him from the pressure of expected social behaviours. “I found that, oh, when I’m in a completely new city and I don’t have these expectations and I’m just here for a couple days, I have way less to worry about than I ordinarily would. And that was just such a freeing experience. And the type of thing that I would have never realized had I not done this.”

McElroy had arranged the book deal before leaving, allowing him to experience the trip on his own terms rather than shaping each day into a pitch. He posted regularly on Instagram, wrote “sketches” on Substack, and, of course, scored his experiences.

Interestingly, his years covering affordability, homelessness, drug policy and public space in Vancouver became a lens through which to examine other cities.

What emerged was an assessment of Vancouver’s housing crisis. In many European cities, McElroy found extensive public or subsidized housing, rent controls and neighbourhoods dense with older apartment buildings.

“Most cities have figured out some way to make it so that people of all types are still, by and large, able to live in their city,” he says. “Vancouver has not.”

But the book is not a polemic of what ails Vancouver. In fact, McElroy says travel restored his appreciation for the things Vancouverites may take for granted. Mountains and ocean sound like tourism-board cliches, but after a year of travel, he realized Vancouver’s natural calling cards are unmatched.

“There truly is nowhere else better to enjoy this than here,” McElroy said about Vancouver’s relationship to nature.

The trip also left a more intimate mark. McElroy, 37, returned with greater tolerance for uncertainty. After years of building a life around manageable situations, a year on the road gave him a new way of looking at things, increased confidence, and made him alert to his own excuses and self-imposed barriers.

“There’s a little part in the back of my brain that says, well, you managed to pull this off, so maybe give yourself a little bit more credit,” said McElroy.

After his 52 weeks out in the world, ranking cities and looking at the question — what is a world class city? — he came back to Vancouver with the understanding that a city can be both flawed and beloved. And that travel can change the way you see your home.

McElroy will be at The Rio Theatre in conversation with CBC’s Stephen Quinn on Nov. 9 at 7 p.m.