Another Vancouver

(Via the NYT.)

Vancouver, Washington--a city of over 160,000 residents, sitting serenely across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon--is giving itself a stern talking-to. A search for identity ensues:

With world attention about to focus on that other Vancouver, the one with the international cachet, the creative cuisine and the cosmopolitan diversity, this Vancouver is having a tough talk with itself. How, it is asking, can a former mill town that has become an increasingly assertive city, a place that courts high-tech companies and takes pride in its expanding university campus, make a name for itself when another city with the same name in the same misty vicinity of North America has already done so and then some?

More.