A commentary by the founder of Open Space cultural centre, Monday Magazine, the Gaining Ground Urban Sustainability Conferences. He is launching The Centre for the Design of the Future — an online “laboratory” examining possibilities for the resurrection of the Golden Rule.
The recent editorial about housing costs, housing availability and growth challenges facing the region (“Difficult measures needed as Greater Victoria densifies,” Sept. 1) was serious, heartfelt, informative and free of the touches of hysteria and ideological reactivity and twitches that tend to colour most public commentary on this subject.
As a 1970 newcomer (from my New York City birthplace) and as someone who has spent 50-plus years here creating new cultural initiatives and institutions, a lot of my thought has centred on matters of healthy urbanism.
This leads me to the one small quibble I have with the editorial: If you describe something as a general social “crisis” — and I appreciate that it is a crisis for many — you tend to affect both the range of responses and the social mood under which actions may be proposed and taken.
I’m not trying to spread pixie dust over this set of pressing social concerns, but, still, I reach for the cliche that every problem is also an opportunity.
Any response that will increase social poise, creativity and adaptability during a time filled with transformative challenges like planetary environmental risks, AI and automation-driven changes to economy, work patterns and employment, the opioid and other drug epidemics, conspicuous homelessness, uncertainties about the near-future prospects for the central-area storefront economy and cultural delivery, and more, should be considered welcome.
Words get in our eyes: “densification,” for example, is bad, bad, bad, but Victorians rhapsodize about their visits to cities in Italy, Spain, Portugal and other places far denser than Victoria.
So, is density itself bad, or is opposition to density code for “I don’t want more cars on my street” or “I don’t want my privacy and other house-owner entitlements compromised”? (After all, single-family home ownership is still a powerful and not-easily-abandoned social aspiration here.)
Which, by the way, leads to my second small quibble: I don’t seen an obvious connection between high housing costs/low supply and crime and lawlessness of unhoused “street” populations, as was suggested in the editorial.
In the context of opportunity, then, what conditions might liberate community-wide creativity and produce fresh urban design/land use protocols and results?
I mean, without suggesting that Victoria try to turn itself into some slavish copy of a European city, there is lots of room for local policy and design innovation whose results will potentially increase, not diminish, livability and visual delight.
In the near term, the challenge, honestly, has less to do with particular outcomes than with conceiving and managing the community-wide “conversation” itself.
My hunch is that this calls for recasting the stated purpose of local political leadership – and that, in turn, likely requires political aspirants willing to step up as champions of urban design/affordability/livability innovation.
Local political and community leaders, and the Times 91原创, face that essential and important challenge: to promote this community-wide conversation in a way that aids and advances our local decision-making abilities.
No small job, but a critical one!
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