A commentary by a Victoria resident with a lengthy resume of community involvement with an urban design focus.
Good evening, fellow citizens, mayor and council, I’m Gene Miller — a resident of Victoria since 1970 and now temporarily self-exiled to the Western Communities.
These lengthy issue- and opinion-filled meetings take enormous energy and stamina. My gratitude to everyone.
I was born in Women’s Hospital, 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in Manhattan. Tall buildings don’t frighten me and, in my experience, are perfectly able to house vertical neighbourhoods and fill the public realm with culture and people who mingle, work and shop, and grab coffee.
I don’t especially admire the architectural expression of the buildings proposed for Bayview and wish they had more filigree, more ornamentation, more beauty.
But I also realize that tonight’s meeting is not intended to parse architectural esthetics.
I would, in my five-minute speaking slot, like to deliver a variant on my all-too-familiar “Cracks of Doom” speech.
We are in the early middle of a profound social, economic, political and environmental transformation, with lots more to come. Demogogues and autocrats are multiplying around the world and, threateningly, south of us, next door.
Economic shifts are leaving people, even in well-off countries, homeless, penniless and hungry. Community, cooperation, shared values and a sense of common purpose are almost upside down.
We say the words but, mysteriously, little around us supports them. AI may render countless millions jobless, and if that’s not a recipe for social revolution, I don’t know what is. And a pervasive message of ill health from the systems of nature penetrates our souls.
These things are shocking for all of us to experience, but what shocks me even more is the speed of this transformation.
It creates enormous challenges for all of us — for our systems, for our organizations and our steadily degrading institutions. We think X is true, and the next minute Y is claiming all the space.
It’s hard to catch your balance or stay up with things, leave alone get ahead of them. This is the definition of social climax, and its impacts are fundamental, limitless, ominous.
Who, a short decade ago, would have predicted the COVID-assisted abandonment of downtowns? Or vast homeless populations camped along streets and in doorways in urban centres everywhere, an all-too-visible sign of flawed social management?
Or technology-enabled work-from-home emptying downtown office buildings? And exponentially increasing online shopping with Amazon and other delivery vans busily cruising our neighbourhoods?
And all of it significantly affecting the financial viability of downtown retail and service businesses.
In lots of cities, people go downtown infrequently. Everything they need is elsewhere, and downtowns increasingly feel everything from drab to threatening.
As well, the entire structure of social participation is being recast — a fancy way of saying that the old rules for downtown commerce and culture don’t work so well anymore.
The traditional purposes of downtowns are up for challenge. You can sense the economic and social dereliction in central city environments, and Victoria is not immune.
Catastrophist that I am, I worry privately that in a decade or less, three-quarters of our downtown storefronts and offices will be vacant.
We count on our political leaders for knowledgability, understanding, wisdom, a forward view; and out of these to conceive and implement a counter-force to threatening trends.
I can think of no other option than residential intensification in and around the city centre, coupled — and this is important — to a comprehensive public realm beautification and amenitization strategy and new-building design guidelines that would result in structures and streets to make us the envy of other cities.
I think that force of circumstance is presenting all of us with new challenges and requiring us to shift our sensibilities, relinquish some of our conventional comforts and expectations.
We have been surfing on our fossil remains for a very long time, while history has been whispering: “Time for a new Victoria.”
I believe Victoria, without losing its heritage assets or the still-viable parts of its character, has to develop a new and contemporary character, a new kind of singularity.
Communities, I note, often form in response to threat.
Our downtown is threatened. It needs a Community of the Whole.
An earlier speaker cleverly noted that a car’s front window is larger than the rear. It’s a telling image and it makes me hope our elected representatives will proactively — that word again: proactively — meet the future.
In light of the above, I encourage you, mayor and council, to support this Bayview proposal.
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