Hope in shadows

Vancouver, host of the 2010 Olympics, is a city of startling contrasts. A prosperous urban center, it is also home to the Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest neighborhood and one of North America's most notorious districts, a bleak landscape transformed by addiction and poverty. But many of its residents defy these surroundings, driven by a sense of community, kinship, and, above all, hope. This book is a project of the Pivot Legal Society, which supplied cameras to the Downtown Eastside's residents to document their own lives; the result, accompanied by moving first-person narratives, is an intimate social documentary of an at-risk urban community that will change one's view of society as we know it, and of those who are forced to live in its shadows.