As many of you are aware, our little ol’ city has been featured across the nation in todays Globe and Mail.

Journalist Chris Turner (who you may remember as our keynote speaker from our February website launch) paints a pretty accurate picture of the state of our city and the decision makers at City Hall.  Although I wish Chris published our ScaleDown’s URL at least once, and maybe didn’t use the photo highlighting my double chin, the rest of the article is quite accurate.  I’ll shut up now and let you read it…

SUSTAINABILITY: THE ‘HUMAN-SCALE’ URBAN VILLAGE

WINDSOR IS RUNNING OUT OF GAS
Depending on the auto industry is a dead end, say advocates for a ’scaled-down’ city
CHRIS TURNER

[email protected]

April 19, 2008

WINDSOR, ONT. — The welcome signs at the city limits identify Windsor, Ont., as the “Automotive Capital of Canada,” so it’s no surprise that the auto industry’s recent struggles have meant hard times for the city.

The announcement in early February of the closing of an auto-parts plant jointly operated by Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd. and Nemak of Canada Corp. shed 600 more jobs from a municipality with an unemployment rate of 8.7 per cent (the second highest in urban Canada); Ford alone has cut 3,600 jobs from its Windsor work force since the fall of 2005.

Meanwhile, the response from the city’s civic leaders and its allies in the Ontario government has been to embrace business as usual.

City Council has rezoned land on the suburban fringe for another big-box retail development, putting the promise of 1,500 new jobs ahead of its rhetorical commitment to inner-city revitalization.

And Queen’s Park has ponied up $17-million out of the Ontario Automotive Investment Strategy - a fund dedicated to investment in new, “green” automotive technologies - to help Ford reopen an assembly plant in Windsor that will employ 300 autoworkers to build more-efficient V-8 engines.

Such stop-gap measures, however, utterly fail to acknowledge the fundamental crisis Windsor is in. A city built almost exclusively by and for the premier transportation method of the 20th century now faces the 21st century’s core socio-economic challenge: the urgent need to move beyond an automobile-centred, gasoline-driven way of life.

Stuck in an outmoded American car with a sputtering engine, Windsor can either continue along familiar expressways until it runs out of gas for good, or it can try to find some other way to get by - on a new, sustainable path. Its salvation, in anything but the short term, will rely on the city’s ability to reinvent itself completely.

If this thorny truth is rarely acknowledged at City Hall, it has been fully embraced by an increasingly influential website called Scaledown Windsor, launched in February by prominent downtown restaurateur Mark Boscariol and laid-off Ford worker Chris Holt. Initially hatched as Mr. Holt’s personal blog several months earlier, Scaledown is based on the dissident premise that Windsor’s status quo is headed nowhere fast.

“It’s definitely no way to plan for the future,” Mr. Holt says of Ford’s V-8 plant. “I look at it sort of like a methadone treatment for a city that’s addicted to a huge amount of money from the automotive industry. It’s not going to save my job.”

Mr. Holt is, on the surface, an unlikely dissenter: He’s a single father of two and a fourth-generation autoworker; his great-grandfather was hired off the street in 1914 to work in Henry Ford’s very first Windsor plant.

Before the calls of family and job security lured him back to Windsor, however, Mr. Holt had studied urban design at Fanshawe College in London, Ont. There, he had awakened to the wisdom and durability of mixed-use development and walkable-neighbourhood planning.

When Mr. Holt talks about Windsor’s salvation, he makes no mention of the assembly line at Ford. He looks instead to a gaping 20-hectare expanse of vacant lots and parkade pavement in the downtown core called City Centre West, a derelict district that has languished in an urban-renewal stasis of big ideas and bureaucratic bungling since it was annexed by the city in 1990 with the intent (since abandoned) to build a hockey arena there.

In 2006, City Hall endorsed a plan, whose champions included Scaledown co-proprietor Mark Boscariol in his role as president of the Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Association, to turn it into a mixed-use “urban village” - a New Urbanist design built to human scale. The plan contrasts starkly with the megaprojects - a $400-million convention and resort complex currently being fused to the mammoth downtown casino, for example - traditionally favoured by the city’s leaders.

The City Centre West project is a prime example of the regenerative, human-scale urban design beloved by Scaledown’s coterie of contributors - a “flagship model,” as Mr. Holt puts it, for the city’s rebirth as a knowledge-economy player. “I don’t see that project in and of itself saving Windsor,” he explains. “But what I do see it as is maybe sort of the crack in the dike - the glimmer of something different.”

Mr. Holt’s endorsement is particularly impressive given how handsomely he profited from business as usual in Windsor, drawing a six-figure Ford income as a tool-and-die maker until he was laid off last November. In a city where success has always been counted in auto-industry paycheques, it’s understandable that the overwhelming majority of his former co-workers still look to those 300 new positions at Ford’s revamped V-8 plant for salvation.

To do so, however, requires a significantly blinkered point of view. It ignores the hard fact that those 300 jobs are 200 fewer than the plant erased when it closed in November, and that it had been built in the late 1970s to employ 2,000 workers.

And it blocks out entirely the thorniest questions - whether, for example, a gasoline-fuelled muscle car’s eight-cylinder internal combustion engine meets any definition of “green” other than the Ontario Automotive Investment Strategy’s. And whether indeed it makes any sense for the provincial government to subsidize 300 jobs building soon-to-be-obsolete engines, even as it encourages the rest of Ontario to adopt state-of-the-art solar panels and wind turbines whose manufacture employs tens of thousands - in Germany and Denmark.

THE SWEDISH EXAMPLE

Windsorites would do well to look far beyond Queen’s Park to the other side of the Atlantic for guidance - particularly to distant Malmo, Sweden. Like Windsor, Malmo was a one-industry burgh of a quarter-million or so across a thin channel of water from a major metropolis in another country. In Malmo’s case, the business was shipbuilding and the foreign hub was Copenhagen.

Malmo’s shipbuilding industry collapsed in the early 1990s, eliminating 40,000 jobs in a few short years; even the harbourfront’s signature ship-yard crane, long the tallest structure in the city, was dismantled and transplanted wholesale to South Korea. In its place stands Santiago Calatrava’s landmark Turning Torso condo tower, serving as the centrepiece of a revitalized harbour district of homes and offices meticulously planned to encourage walkable, mixed-use urban life and powered mostly by renewable energy.

Malmo is home to a bustling new university, thousands of knowledge workers and a burgeoning population of Copenhagen commuters.

The most recent development is a green-bent revitalization effort in a largely immigrant suburb plagued by high unemployment. Though it remains to be seen whether the greening of Malmo can entirely heal the lingering scars of its collapse, the city is at least addressing its crisis head on. Faced with the sudden demise of its 20th-century raison d’être, Malmo has reinvented itself to take a leadership role in the green-collar economy of the 21st.

Malmo’s transformation is precisely the sort of radical new direction advocated for Windsor by Scaledown’s bloggers and videographers.

THE RISE OF SCALEDOWN

The website, born in June, 2007, as Mr. Holt’s personal blog, quickly attracted a small but passionate clique of readers and contributors, most notably Mr. Boscariol, who kicked in funds to expand it into a multimedia forum on the city’s future and a watchdog on the machinations of City Hall. (Full disclosure: I was a paid speaker at the website’s February launch.)

The amped-up Scaledown site has reputedly become a regular read in Windsor’s planning department. Mr. Boscariol has been told that the proponents of business as usual at City Hall now view it as an irritant on par with Alan Halberstadt, long the lone dissenting voice on City Council (and the only councillor to vote against the expansion of big-box development in Windsor).

“We’ve obviously struck a chord,” Mr. Holt says.

Should it follow Scaledown’s recommendations, Windsor will begin with better raw materials than many other mid-sized, one-industry burghs. The city boasts a cohesive (if presently moribund) downtown core, an elegant riverfront and several prewar, pedestrian-scale neighbourhoods. The most promising of these is Old Walkerville - a company town on the fringe of downtown Windsor, built for employees of Hiram Walker’s Canadian Club distilling empire using the 19th-century “garden city” model now frequently imitated by New Urbanist designers.

Old Walkerville is also where Chris Holt makes his home.

Unlike many of Windsor’s autoworkers, Mr. Holt ignored the enticements of a brand-new suburban McMansion, investing instead in a 100-year-old brick home in the area. He eschews the Fords he used to help build in favour of a 20-year-old Volkswagen “hippie van,” and he adheres strictly to his father’s credo of living within his means.

Windsor might be better served by the pursuit of his more modest goals. His 12-year-old daughter, for example, is currently at work on a homework assignment about urban sprawl. “I’m not giving up on this city,” Mr. Holt asserts. “I’m raising my kids here. It’s a great city. I’m raising them to carry on the fight - they know exactly what Scaledown’s all about.”

Calgary journalist Chris Turner is the author of The Geography of Hope. His feature appears monthly in Focus.

Now, I guess the question is; Will council paint our criticisms as “unpatriotic” and divisive, or as a cadre of citizens who genuinely care about the direction our city is heading and will do what it takes to see it through to better days. Let’s hope for the latter so we can all work together through what we all know will be difficult times ahead.