I can’t take anymore…
This has been building for a while. It started as a niggling little feeling at the back of my head and over time it grew and today it just burst out.
I AM PISSED OFF!
Why? Because we and by that I mean the collective, North American, consumer-economy, celebrity-worshipping, haven’t noticed that we no longer have the means to take care of ourselves, we are f**ked, whole bunch of us - ARRRRGH!
There, I got it out and some of the pressure is off and now I can go back to my content smile and show you dear reader another example of how we can scaledown.
In my quest to find better ways of doing things I came across Transition Towns. Transition Towns is a response to climate change and peak oil. This is a plan for economic re-localization and sustainability. Documents like Portland’s - Descending the Oil Peak: Navigating the Transition from Oil and Natural Gas and Hamilton’s - Hamilton: The Electric City are similar in flavour but Transition Towns is a community directed initiative. It is not imposed. It relies on education and consensus, the collective genius of the community.
Why would I support a Transition Towns initiative? Simply because it is a means to an end. By developing a regional economy that buys goods and services from itself and thus is self-supporting and re-invests in itself, a community is able to: insulate itself from larger events like economic collapse and infrastructure failures (remember the black-out a few years back) and it strengthens the relationships between its citizens creating a stronger cultural bond. Windsor/Essex is well suited to something like this because we have the manufacturing and technical know-how to produce many consumer goods for ourselves and our agriculture sector could feed us and still have a surplus to sell to other communities. With an investment in solar and wind energy projects we could supply ourselves with a large amount of renewable energy as well.
My lost post on Jane Jacob’s book “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” highlighted Ms. Jacob’s theory that local economies were the real engines of a national economy. Cities and city regions thrive because they replace imports with their own production and then export the surpluses to other regions. By continual innovation the city economy is able to grow because it continually re-invests in itself. When cities fall behind and no longer replace their imports and the profits are gone or belong to another city/region then they fall into decline.
This passage illustrates exactly where we are. As much as I want to build walkable neighbourhoods and the like, I cannot see any way of doing it until we redevelop an import-replacing, self-reliant local economy.
When a city at the nucleus of a city region stagnates and declines, it does so because it no longer experiences from time to time significant episodes of import-replacing. Gradually the stagnated city’s economy becomes both thinner and out-of-date. It fails to compensate, with new and different export work, for losses of its older exports, and so grows poorer as a market for its own region, for other cities, and for regions lacking cities as well. Its practical problems and those of its region pile up unsolved. Idleness grows. The region of an economically declining city does not revert to its former, largely rural condition. For a long time it retains its characteristic of being a mixed and intricate economy, but the region’s economic life slowly grows thinner and backward, too. The regional fabric develops holes and tatters as it were. Young people who leave settlements within the region for city jobs tend to bypass the region’s own city or cities and go, instead, to distant cities if work there is open to them. For a long time, transplants of city work continue to leak out into the region, but that is no longer because they are being crowded out of the city by younger enterprises. Rather, they flee unsolved city problems, leaving emptiness behind. Eventually the transplants cease flowing, their source having dried up.
From “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” pg. 58
Tags: community building, Entrepreneurs, independant retail, local business, local economic development, place making, Regional cooperation, relocalization, revitalization, World Changing
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So, Ms. Jacobs has been to Windsor?
What’s interesting about that? The book was published in 1984.
In spirit Chris. Outside of a small few, nobody else knows who you are talking about.
James, your quote above basically describes Windsor at this point in time, just look at our young grads flocking to a B.C. job fair the other day, they know better, see farther and have taken a good look around than our mayor and council and we as a city haven’t given them any hope of staying here.
Yes, you are, I am, we all are pissed off! We know what other cities are doing around the world, some smaller than us, with less resources, less geographic location, less of great climate and I can go on, we all know that! And as someone stated in a past blog, there is really no use in posting what other cities are doing because our city know-it-all’s don’t get it, let alone have the ability to comprehend what they’re reading. Remember Windsor has a 27% literacy rate and most of them aren’t on council!
BUT! There is NO leadership! But a mayor out of control, looking everywhere else but this city for something, ANYTHING, ANYONE, to deliver the block buster, Lord we’ve been saved developer, in one stroke our problems are solved. Hint! It doesn’t work that way!
The mayor can’t demonstrate anything to this city, the county, the province and this country, that Windsor is willing to roll up it sleeves and build it for itself, we did once. Forget the grand scheming developers, the legal actions of this city have told them that, in blazing branding letters, this city isn’t open to ideas or development, without first running a bank of lawyers!
Once upon a time, Windsor had more heavy industry, than all four western provinces combined and most of Ontario! Once upon a time we exported to the world! Now we export our most precious resource, our young people, and with the ever climbing out of control infrastructure taxes, levies, and shell game financing, our retirees will be leaving! We’re thinking of it and really hard! And it isn’t southward!
There are more progressive cities in this province, cities wanting to build for the near future and beyond, who are getting things done, have defined what they want for their city i.e. Kitchener, Hamilton, Markham, Ottawa, London and even Chatham and are going after it, not matter where the idea comes from. While our mayor and city planning are locked into the 1960’s sprawl paradigm, that some humungeous corporation(s) are going to come in and hire everyone off our streets and give them wages beyond their wildness dreams.
If Jurassic Park wasn’t written, it could be written here, because it seems that we have resurrected through alchemy, a mayor and a city council from another age, and a labour union that can’t see beyond the 19th century. Two creatures doing the most damage..The Buzz Eddie, and Buzz Hardgrove, both playing hard ball in a time when baseball is a slow tedious game.
With soil depletion is running rampant around the world, fresh water for growing crops disappearing just as fast, look around, our agribusiness in the county could save the world. We have water, we have wind, we had productive farmland, but this sprawling city and all other towns in this county are building McMansions on them. Our tool and dye industry was once the leading edge for the world but it lies almost in ruin today because they bought into the one thought, one industry town and that was all they wanted to see! Some are trying and succeeding but not enough.
If you can’t adapt, you die and that is what has happen to Windsor. For almost a hundred years, this city relied on one thought, as a one industry town, and life was good but you didn’t have to work hard to get it, You didn’t need an education to get it. While the once big three hummed along, our young people with more education and drive left this city to grow somewhere else (they have always been our greatest export!) because the city was happy with the status quo, as long as the factories hired the majority of this city, the city was happy to continue business as usual…NOT ANYMORE! I know, I worked on the line for seven years in this city, so if someone tells me that I don’t know what I am talking about, you have got it wrong!
Adapt, innovate, create, as your life and our lives depend on it, as fast as you can, the global village isn’t waiting, but it does want what you innovate and create AND EXPORT!
An aside: If by how the city defines the Interm Control By-law and the Demolition by-law and how it uses the Heritage Act , or their interpretation of it (last Monday’s council meeting), Does that make Jason’s on Chatham Street a historical heritage building and it can’t be demolished, or the United Grill, because both are built on to historical houses. I think at one time Jason’s, previously the Commodore, Windsor’s first true nightclub is actually the Ouellette house!
Urbanrat,
What can I say but, Amen brother.
What is waiting for us on the other side of this lastest economic “downturn”?
Ironically, we were a more diverse and innovative economy one hundred years ago, before the auto makers came to town. That was why Henry Ford brought his brand to Windsor. Since then our industrial diversity has been downsized, outsourced and offshored.
The internal combustion engine automobile has had a good run. If there is a future for automobiles they will be electric. Electric cars will have fewer moving parts, fewer components and require less machinery and labour to make them. They will also be much more expensive and less widely available to consumers. What is left of the auto industry in Windsor is pretty much done. The labour problems at TRW and later this summer when the CAW targets Chrysler may be the last big battles to be waged.
As a city-reigion we need to refocus and recognize that our survival is in our hands. We can have smaller, closer communities because that is what it will take to move forward. We need innovators like that engineer at the U and his imaging invention. We need to hang on to him and his product and make it here for others to buy from us.
If there ever was a time for politicians and business leaders to STOP PLAYING GAMES it is now.