CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

Remixing Suburbia?

Canada has always been a nation of immigrants, and the latest Statistics Canada figures reveal that Canada is home to more immigrants than any time since the 1930s. What is remarkable, however, about the current stream of immigration is that most newcomers are settling in Canada's suburbs. While this may seem quite in line with the aspirations of mainstream Canadian society, the trouble with this trend is that suburbs are peculiarly unsuited to absorb newcomers:

"A concern, said Prof. Siemiatycki [a professor of politics and public administration at Toronto's Ryerson University], is that 'the suburbs don't have the kind of public interactive space that the downtown core has. The subways don't exist, the jam-packed buses don't exist to the same degree. ... These are going to be important challenges for suburban municipalities to literally create spaces of interaction.'

Why is this important for immigrants?

'It's critically important that, as a society, we need to construct pathways for people in the various language groups to move in and out of their own community, as well as make it easier for people who are outside of those communities to move in,' said Tung Chan, head of a Vancouver-based immigrant settlement agency. 'We need to create more chances for people to interact, for people to dialogue and for people to understand each other.'"

This theme is picked up by the organization CEO for Cities, which says that what is needed for many reasons, are Remixing Cities that allow people to:

"...mix and mingle, and share and combine ideas from different vantage points and traditions. That mixing takes place on and in shared infrastructures and spaces that bring people together from parks and markets to festivals and debating chambers, churches and universities. In a city with too fragile shared infrastructures, self-organization can descend into a chaotic scramble for resources. Without shared values and meeting places, cities can fray into disconnected and distrusting communities. Investing in shared infrastructures is not a drain on innovation. In cities, it is a prerequisite for it."

When such infrastructure does not exist, and when people of diverse cultures and ethnicities only encounter each other in unusual circumstances rather than in everyday encounters, distrust and animosities born of prejudices are surely to follow. This is portrayed to devastating effect in the recent Paul Haggis film Crash, which peeled back the layers of a society steeped in racism -- but subtly showed how this pathology is exacerbated by the built environment. The characters are so often sealed in their cars -- and their respective enclaves of wealth and poverty -- and as a consequence are unable to engage in the kinds of casual interactions necessary for a functioning society. Indeed, this is revealed in the very first line spoken in the movie by a character who has just been in a car accident:

“'It’s the sense of touch. In LA nobody touches you. I think we miss that sense of touch so much we crash into each other.'"

The challenges for Canada and other nations dealing with large numbers of newcomers are many. But surely one priority must be to find ways to create a physical environment that can facilitate integration; and this is just as true for immigrants as it will be for our burgeoning population of seniors citizens as well. Suburbia -- where so many of us now live -- is simply incapable in its present form of meeting the range of human needs that will be demanded of it. Our suburban areas are going to need many more services and amenities that can be reached on foot. More than that, they will need gathering places, not just enormous parking lots at the power centre near the freeway. In short, suburbia is going to need to become a lot more diverse physically in order to maintain the ever more diverse society that Canada is becoming.

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Fear of an Urban Planet? Not if we Plan for Human Needs

Perhaps the most telling sign of the radical changes underway in the world’s cities can be drawn from two recent news items from India’s most populous city, Mumbai. The first was the announcement that India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is building a new home in the centre of that city for his family -- and their 600 staff. This home is in fact a skyscraper (already dubbed “the Hanging Gardens of Mumbai”) whose ultra-opulent 27 stories will soar some 173 metres over the city, and feature more floor space than the palace of Versailles. The contrast with the slums below – where more than half of Mumbai’s 18 million people call home – couldn’t be starker. However, the same surging market economy that is fuelling the extravagance of Ambani’s fortress is also being called upon to transform those slums: the state government of Maharashtra has put out bids for interest from private developers to buy up Dharavi – a slum in the heart of Mumbai – and redevelop it, as long as the developers can rehouse the 57,000 families currently living there. Mukesh Mehta, the architect behind the scheme, believes the model could be repeated worldwide, making the world slum-free within decades.

What these developments share in common are three themes: that population, wealth and poverty are becoming ever more concentrated in cities; that, if left on their own, the forces of capital can only yield more disparities between the very rich and the very poor; but that, as the Indian State of Maharashtra is showing, governments can use markets to address urban problems that neither governments nor capital can solve on their own. This example shows that even burgeoning mega-cities in the developing world can offer a glimmer of hope for a better quality of life, but only if we have effective policies in place that allow us to plan appropriately and long term.

This is the message of a report released in June by the United Nations Population Fund, aptly titled “Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.” The report warns that the world will need to prepare for dire consequences unless we deal with a tidal wave of unprecedented and rapid urbanization. For the first time in history, the global population will become predominately urban, as some 3.3 billion people will cram themselves into cities by 2008.

Unravelling the urban crisis will also have to deal with the world’s other milestone -- that the population of slum dwellers has reached the billion mark, meaning that one in six persons on this planet currently lives in a slum -- many of which are larger in population than Winnipeg. If current trends continue, the report warns that we should expect to see more mega-cities with populations numbering in the tens of millions, which will also become centres of increased concentrations of poverty and social division on a magnitude not seen before and as the “Hanging Garden of Mumbai” will undoubtedly come to represent.

To counter these trends and to “unleash the potential” of cities, the UNFP recommends that instead of discouraging migration to cities, that urban policies need to be directed at securing the rights of poor people to the city, where they can access education and employment; and that planning needs to be not just people-centred and proactive, but actually “explicit” in its recognition of the land needs of poor people, supplying them with access to water, sewers, power, transport and other necessities. It also stresses the need to promote the health and education needs of women, and to maintain the health of ecosystems. The report concludes, “the approaching urban millennium could make poverty, inequality and environmental degradation more manageable, or it could make them exponentially worse.”

We in Canada would be foolish to believe that these principles applied only to the developing world. Indeed, “Unleashing the Potential” included a stinging rebuke from UNFP spokeswoman Patricia Leidl, who pointed out that Vancouver’s East Side was “one of the worst areas of urban blight” she’d ever seen, made all the more prominent for being in one of the wealthiest cities in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Such observations challenge our complacency. We may believe that the urban problems in North America are a world away from those of a place like Mumbai. After all, while rapid population growth in the developing world will continue to cause their cities to balloon in size, many urban and rural areas here – particularly those removed from the coasts – will experience the reverse: periods of slow or even declining population growth rates that can only be redressed by encouraging immigrants, many of whom will come from the developing world.

However, this report makes abundantly clear that, in order to thrive in the coming urban century, governments at all levels are going to need to get a lot smarter about cities. Nations will need to invest heavily in developing urban policies that can manage growth in people-oriented fashion.

By that standard, Canada is poorly situated to respond. Well into this “urban millenium” we find ourselves in the extraordinary position, amongst industrialized nations, of having no national housing policy and no national urban policy to speak of. And without the vigorous, proactive urban policies advocated by the UNFP, Canada will find itself increasingly unable to meet the needs of its citizens, and the “urban blight” of which Leidl spoke will worsen and spread. Winnipeg is no stranger to the challenges facing our own attempt at dealing with urban problems as we have largely failed in dealing with both poverty and urban decline for decades.

To unleash Canada’s urban potential we will need to look beyond tax breaks for bus passes and recognize that Canada’s cities are not just the engines for the country’s economy, but also intimately connected to the dramatic changes taking place in cities across the planet.

-- Written by Dr. Jino Distasio & Michael Dudley

(Photo: Adrian Fisk, flickr.com)

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Will a Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg Translate into Human Rights in Winnipeg?

Image: thr33d [flickr.com]

There has been a great deal of publicity recently about the proposed Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which has now been granted national status -- the first such institution to be situated outside of Ottawa. The Museum will feature a striking architectural design and a host of interactive displays:

"Galleries will range from themes on aboriginal rights and the human rights journey in Canada to a forum that will feature interactive programs to reveal how personal actions impact human rights. Another level will look at today’s challenges, featuring a real-time map of human rights issues such as poverty and discrimination against women. One display will employ a gesture-responsive wall full of factual information that will work in a fashion similar to Nintendo Wii technology; with a simple swipe of the hand in the air, visitors will be able to turn virtual pages. Upon entering the museum, visitors will be given a 'human rights key' that will provide a digital recollection of their experiences that they can later take home."

If it turns out, however, that the visitors are taking their "human rights key" home with them and their route home happens to take them north up Main Street, then they will also be able to reflect on a glaring human rights calamity in what must be the most prominent display of poverty and despair of any major Canadian city.

On Main Street north of City Hall they will see block after block of boarded-up, graffiti-stained buildings outside of which linger listless people, most of them Aboriginal, many of them obviously suffering from alcohol, drug or solvent abuse.

[Image: Bootless Prayer, at Flickr.com]

Winnipeg has high concentrations of poverty in many of its inner city neighbourhoods, and Main Street runs right through them, with the result that thousands of Winnipeggers see these buildings and people twice daily on their way to and from work. Given its proximity to the Museum's location at The Forks, North Main and its troubles will also be seen by thousands of visitors on their way to or from the Canadian Museum of Human Rights -- visitors from around the world who won't be as numbed as our commuters and hence unable to avoid the savage irony at hand.

I think what we need to realize is that we either get a lot more proactive about addressing Winnipeg's urban poverty and Aboriginal disenfrachisement now, or Museum administrators will need to choose their school bus routes very carefully.

[For more images like the one above, I would encourage readers to view the urban photography of Bootless Prayer on Flickr.com, where you can get some sense of the human dimensions of North Main -- and many other locales in Winnipeg].

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Small Towns, Big Waistlines?

There's been -- pardon the pun -- a ton of studies, articles and op-eds in the past few years linking sprawl with obesity.

Now a new report from Statistics Canada says that peope living in Canadian cities are less likely to be obese than those living in rural areas, and that this tendency increases with the size of city. There are some likely explanations: socioeconomic status (larger cities like Vancouver and Toronto are wealthier than St. John's); larger cities attract more immigrants, who arrive thinner than long-standing Canadians; rural people need to drive more; people in cities have access to health clubs, and so on.

The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente -- predictably -- scorns any attempt to use policy to fix this problem, believing instead that it is up to the individual to eat a healthy diet, and to model this behaviour to one's children.

But there are some real structural causes of obesity that governments have a role in addressing. For instance, thanks to perverse incentives and government subsidies in the "industrial farming complex" wholesome foods are more expensive than junk food, with the predictable result that low-income households fill up on fattening foods.

As well, simply making ends meet for so many people requires two incomes, which means day care, the availability of which is such that some families need to drive all the way across the city to deliver their children before going to work. Living without a car isn't an option. Harried lives to maintain these schedules leaves little room for exercise. Government funding for daycare; higher minimum wage laws; more generous welfare benefits and national standards to enforce them; longer parental leaves -- all these things would go a long way to having a healthier population.

And of course, the built environment mediates on a daily basis our ability to get around on our own volition: the more hostile to the pedestrian and the cyclist your daily environment is, the more car-dependent you become. Addressing this problem requires more than attractive parks and pathways in new developments; it means having more destinations within developments that people will be able to walk to to meet their daily needs. It means mixed land-uses, with shopping and employment opportunities nearby.

There's nothing particularly earth-shaking about these ideas -- they've been batted around for years. But they do mean that planning regimes have to adopt them; consumers need to know about them and ask for them; developers need to recognize the demand for such development; and political will is needed to enforce zoning regulations mandating such "smart growth", and not backpedal to amend development plans just to suit the whim of whatever business-as-usual sprawling development that crosses the planning department's desk.

So, to contradict Wente: yes, there is certainly room for individual initiative to address the obesity problem, but as she herself admits, we live in "an obesogenic culture." Cultural shifts cannot happen solely at the initiative of individuals acting independently: government, institutions and corporations must also change their ways.

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Re-Thinking the "Low Road" to Social Policy

This past week the Institute of Urban Studies made national news with the launch of its new report, Home is Where the Heart is and Right Now That is Nowhere: An Examination of Hidden Homelessness Among Aboriginals in Three Prairie Cities. Interestingly, this release happened the same day as the federal budget, and the contrast between the report (with its stories of deprivation and bitter frustration) with a budget that appears to do almost nothing for the poor yet a great deal for Canada's wealthy, couldn't be more striking.

There is clearly a growing ideological divide in this country between corporate conservativism that advocates "personal responsibility" as a social policy paradigm, and liberalism that seeks to strengthen social programs, and this divide is discouraging reasonable discussion on important issues facing our country.

City.edu

As Wired magazine admitted a few years back, being "wired" isn't, well, "wired" anymore...it's tired. Being wireless is where it's at. And more and more cities are taking the lead in making wireless internet as basic a municipal service as sewers.

In Canada, there are a few notable examples: Charlottetown's WiFi has made a big impression, and the University of Winnipeg has spearheaded a wireless corridor over the downtown using WiMax technology. But now the CIty of Toronto is getting into the act, and plans to make the entire downtown core wireless by the end of the year.

This has become such an important trend that the planning news clearinghouse website Planetizen has selected municipal wifi as one of the top 10 planning issues of 2005.

Pity the Poor (Suburban) Immigrant?

There's a lot of attention being paid to immigration as a force for transformation in metropolitan regions. The international Metropolis Project is a focus for this research, but there is also a lot of thought being given in the press and in academia in general to myriad issues that this transformation raises. One of the most fascinating themes in this discussion is the trend towards ethnic enclaves in suburbia -- or "ethnoburbs." In a 2004 piece called Keeping up with the Dosanjhs Christopher DeWolf argues that new ethnic richness of suburbia not only improves the quality of life for immigrants, but also enhances suburbs themselves:

"Instead of diluting the ethnic presence, the rise of the ethnoburb has actually made ethnic minorities more visible. In Richmond, one of the malls hosts a weekly night market in its parking lot, transplanting a popular Asian tradition to a very North American setting. Big-box Chinese supermarket T&T now has locations across Canada, while banks like HSBC invest in ethnic communities and help erect the financial scaffolding of the ethnoburb...One parallel between the old ethnic enclaves and the new ethnoburbs is the way immigrants can shop and do business entirely in their native language."

It appears, however, that all is not so positive in enthoburbia. As a recent series in the Globe & Mail points out, among the challenges faced by immigrants in making the transition to a successful and fulfilling life in their newly adopted country is suburbia itself.

The Lights go Out

Several years ago, I was invited to a workshop in Baltimore, Maryland. Having worked for several years in Winnipeg, considered to be Canada's murder capital, I was getting accustomed to thinking our city to be in poor shape. Yet I was shocked at the extent of the decline of Baltimore, which I described in the July 2002 issue of Institute of Urban Studies newsletter:

"The challenges facing Baltimore’s leaders and community development agencies are extreme. Since 1950, the city has lost over 31% of its population, either to the outlying suburbs, to Washington D.C., or elsewhere. Most of Maryland's growth occurs in the low-density suburbs between the nation’s capital and Baltimore, and, as a result, three of these counties are among 25 of the nation's fastest-growing school districts. Because of this massive depopulation, between 12,000 and 43,000 housing units have been abandoned, leaving large areas of the city vacant and dilapidated. What exacerbates this situation is that much of this housing is in the form of high-density row houses, some of which are scarcely 12 feet wide...The social consequences of this decline are visible almost everywhere. Drug use in the city has reached such epidemic proportions that it has been estimated that almost 9% of the population – over 60,000 people – need treatment for addictions, and, given present trends, it is thought that the city will face “explosive” growth in drug use. It is possible to travel for blocks and see nothing but abandoned, boarded up row houses. As well, the level of racial geographic segregation is shocking: whole neighbourhoods appear to be populated exclusively by marginalized people of colour."

Baltimore's murder rate hovers around 270 per year (about 9 times that of similarly-sized Winnipeg), and a host of indicators also demonstrate that it is one of the most crime-ridden cities in the country.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité...or Exclusion?

In scenes that few thought would be seen in western democracies, riots have broken out in the suburbs of Paris resulting in the burning of thousands of cars, and as of this writing, one death. The riots are also spreading across the country, and commentators are struggling to explain why. It seems that people are now recognizing that the state of the living conditions for so many recent immigrants were so poor that the situation was a "ticking time bomb": "When large sections of the population are denied any kind of respect, the right to work, the right to decent accommodation, what is surprising is not that the cars are burning but that there are so few uprisings."

Urban Development as "Ethnic Cleansing"

In the recent book "Cities War and Terrorism", editor Stephen Graham writes of the history of "place annihilation" in the planning of cities; how communities or entire cities have been eradicated to make room for developments preferred by those wielding power at the expense of the powerless and disenfranchised. While many of the examples he cites involve warfare, others are more familiar: urban renewal projects in the 1960s that involved mass demolitions, for instance, were widely referred to as "negro removal." Now we are seeing a similar pattern emerge from the sodden ruins of New Orleans: a deliberate strategy to create a city without the large black underclass that used to live there.