The Broken City
All you long-time SD readers, prepare yourself for a blast from the past.
Today’s guest blog is brought to you by none other than original ScaleDown contributor Joshua Biggley. We are pleased that Josh has continued his urban activism in his new home of Charlottetown, PEI, and is staying in touch with ScaleDown in his hometown of Windsor as well. Thanks for the great post, Josh!
I am, among other things, a systems analyst. My job is to examine systems and perform 1 of 2 functions — pre-emptively determine failure points of a given system or determine why the given system failed so as to prevent further failures in the future. It is interesting how that methodology, systems analysis, can be applied in so many areas that are completely unrelated to my current industry of choice. System analysis is really about understanding the complex parts which comprise the whole and their interaction with each other; determining how inputs, expected or unexpected, impact the outputs. As a systems analyst, it is difficult to convince someone who does not want to believe that their system is broken to invest to prevent the system from failing, even when everything is running clean and green. Riding it out is always a very poor choice, but one that I see again and again in my line of work. It is based on that experience that I declare the following…
The system of the city is broken.
The irony is that very few city dwellers will acknowledge the fact that the city is broken, even as the very systems around them fail. As long as there is food in the grocery stores, fair trade lattes in the coffee shops, and public transit abound then all is well in Zion. And then the power goes out; in the middle of winter; in the middle of a record deep freeze. All is not well, just ask the100,000 Torontonians who endured last week’s loss of power that lasted only 24 hours.
You see, the system of a city has gotten too big to function well. Cities have grown untamed, outgrowing the processes and procedures that have been relied upon for the last 30 years to manage them. Cities are still built with single points of failure, or the simple reliance that redundant systems, no matter how diverse, will maintain the status quo. Often, urban citizens do not understand how close to the brink they really are until the system fails to support their daily routine. Twice, in the past 5 years, I have been personally reminded of the fragility of the cities that an estimated 3 billion people worldwide call home.
The first was the blackout of 2003. My wife was standing in line with a buggy full of groceries (that happens when you buy for a family of 6) when the power went out during The Blackout of 2003. It was summer and we were fortunate to have a full tank of propane in the BBQ. The power came back on, and we went on living life in the city — and we bought the buggy full of groceries while we silently considered what would have happened it had been the middle of winter instead.
The second time was on January 2nd, 2009. Charlottetown was hit by a blizzard on New Year’s Eve that dropped 49 cm of snow, nearly 20 inches, in 24 hours. We had done as all good Islanders do and stocked up on some extra essentials, but nothing over the top. We had, after all, already prepared f or an emergency with canned goods, a sturdy wood burning stove and other essentials. My wife ventured out on the January 2nd, after the storm had subsided, to replenish some optional supplies only to discover the shelves of the local grocer empty. By grocer I mean Sobey’s and the Atlanitc SuperStore (aka Zehrs in Ontario), not a small Mom and Pop grocer. No fruit and veggies. No meat or fish. Empty, or nearly empty, shelves were everywhere. The cause? High winds of 100 km/h+ had shut down truck traffic on the Confederation Bridge, and, when combined with the heavy snow and the Christmas holiday buying frenzy, had exposed PEI’s most striking vulnerability — there is, at any given time, only 2 days of food on store shelves on the Island.
Charlottetown, or PEI for all intents and purposes, is not alone in these glaring vulnerabilities. Single system failures have collapsed the status quo in countless city operations throughout the world, though the generally robust global economy has always been there to provide the needed support to restore order, civility and hot lattes. With provinces clamouring for handouts from the Feds for infrastructure projects with the hopes of “spending their way out of recession” (that insanity is for another day!), the reality is we cannot simply replace what we have already built and hope that the past can be restored. Cities must change, adapt, even evolve, if they want any hope of surviving. This isn’t a story about more independent businesses, though they will be part of the revolution. This isn’t about more walkable communities, though those will be a natural product of the transformation. This is about understanding, acknowledging and believing that, in spite of the bailouts and buyouts, the holdouts and the handouts, the city is broken. Only when the city is broken enough that everyone can see it will we be humble enough to accept that there is a better way, a more sustainable, fulfilling and symbiotic way to build, and live, in the city.
And it has nothing to do with lattes.
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Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor
Great thoughts Josh.
As I was reading I thought you were leading to some solutions.
You have told us the city system is broken and given a couple of examples of why we are vulnerable. You must have some thoughts on what it would take to fix existing systems within our cities.
Rick — I was going to, and I will in a future installment. Scaledown has focused, for the most part, on what is good for Windsor. I hope to focus on what is good for all cities, regardless of size, industry or current condition. That said, there is no “one size fits all” solution for sustainable city development. There is no silver bullet but there are some basic principles that can be applied to strengthen a city. I think we’ll all be surprised at how simple the path toward revitalization really can be.
Not to be a jerk or anything, but was there a time when city’s weren’t broken by your standards. When everything simply ran smooth?
I just think a little perspective is in order. Whatever problems we have, everyone else in the world has more. The only difference now vs before is the breakdown of community. When power goes out in smaller towns especially in Europe, people actually look out for and take care of each other. Its not the cities, its the people.
Was there a time where no one had blackouts? food shortages? weather related closures?
I’m just wondering if we don’t have unrealistic spoon fed by the government expectations. What about the old stories where poeple had to walk 5miles to work each day, both ways uphill?
As far as I’m concerned having problems is a symptom of the condition of being alive.
In many ways, the large city is an entity that is designed to fail. Think of Las Vegas for instance. That city is powered by an ever weakening Colorado River system, draws it’s drinking water mainly from that same source and a few small springs, has to have everything flown or driven in and it is not surrounded by farmland that could sustain it pending an emergency as many other cities are. Yet it is the fastest growing city in the United States. Los Angeles is another story all together, with its cozyness to a major fault line that threatens to tear it away from the continent at any moment, and 11 million people still live there, knowing this fact.
It is a scary thought, knowing that our lives hang in the balance of our infrastructures because we have somewhat lost our way. Our ancestors would always hoard food for the winter months and save everything. Think of the farmers saving grain in their stores for the winter months. My great grandmother would can everything from fruit to pasta sauce in sealable mason jars “just in case” yet now in our cushy 21st century lives of conspicuous consumption we have forgotten the ancient human instinct to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
I was thinking the exactly same thought while cooking dinner today Brendan. It’s not that I want to think the lights are going to go out, it’s that I don’t want to be caught without the ability to support myself, my family, my neighbours, etc. when the lights go out, or the food runs out, etc.
I’ve started to look at things with the perspective of my grandparents — building family and community without the need for mass consumption or collection of ’stuff’.
In the 50,000 year history of our species or so, cities have come and gone. Fantastic cities, that were at the top of their game, yet it is archeologists now that shows us what was once. Cities are fragile and for any cause can be broken quite easily, be it famine, plaque, running out of fresh water and arable land or natural resources, conquest or just the shift of economic importance and trade routes.
Cities are dynamic beings or they should be, not static as Windsor has been for almost a hundred years with the auto industry. The status quo only keeps a city alive for a time being until it becomes staid and stale and tries to hold on to power and keep things the way they were.
But the modern city as we know is far more fragile than cities of old. Cities of antiquity most likely didn’t rely on electrical generation from somewhere else far away as we have found out most dramatically in the last few years, although they cleared the world for wood for their fires. Roads, sewers and water mains are fragile at the best of times, any car can take out a hydro pole, or anybody with a backhoe without realizing what they have done or are doing, can shut a city or great parts of it and I’m not including natural phenomenon such as tornadoes, ice storms and flooding.
New Orleans is a prime example of a broken city from the start and will never come back the way it was once. But New Orleans has been gambling for years, living and building below the water/shore line as they have. it was only a matter of time. Hubris took a beating that day!
Every day I praise Otis, or I couldn’t live where I do! In the big blackout, if it weren’t for his invention and backup generators, I would have been looking at climbing twenty stories to get home. I very rarely actually step inside a bank anymore to do business, I get as far as their ATMs and access an electronic account in which my pay cheque is deposited electronically, which I had visited that morning of the blackout, later that afternoon, cash was king! Debit and credit cards being absolutely useless! And I was rich for a while!
My hand cranked radio became a life line to civilization! Since then, I keep two months worth of food and some bottled water on hand and cash!
A city is broken from the day the first sod is turned and doomed by forces it won’t know or can comprehend that or what is coming its way.
Today’s Windsor Star has the article that General Motors will not take a Canadian bailout, leaving the question are they abandoning Canada altogether, what if Ford or Chrysler do the same, it would and will devastate this city. If they go, so will the trucks, so do we need a new super highway and bridge, the old industrial trade routes are about to change and Windsor just might become a big Tim Hortons on the side of the road to somewhere else. A quaint rusting post industrial city or as it was described of Detroit a few years back, as the first X-Urban city in the U.S.
Yes Josh, there are just to many parts in a city to keep it running smoothly all the time, neglect one part of a city’s dynamic nature and the whole house of cards can come tumbling down faster than it toke us to build it!