The making of good cities

Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson detailed some of the many citizen-directed programs and innovations in Canada’s cities on Feb. 12 when she opened the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada’s conference on Challenging Cities in Canada.

The following are excerpts from her speech:

In my installation address, I said that I would be travelling all over the country to see Canadians "where they live." That was not a statement of casual tourism. To see Canadians where they live is part of what I consider to be the mandate of a governor-general.

So a large part of our programming has involved travelling to medium- and small-sized communities — in 4 1/2 years, we’ve been to 159 across Canada, and to some of them more than once — and logged between 150,000 and 200,000 kilometres getting there. …

You could ask: Why bother to do this? Isn’t there television to link people? Isn’t there radio? Aren’t there newspapers? We can leave all of those as question marks. All I would say is that the human presence of the governor-general does make a difference in every community that I visit. It enables people to find a neutral ground around which they can discuss their successes and their problems.

That was also the approach we took in designing visits to urban areas, in what we called our "Good City" visits. We tried to come up with an idea of what would match the Greek ideal of the "good city" — a place where people will live and want to live, and what makes them want to live there. And we wanted to know what each city we visited in this series had to say about the kind of challenges all our cities are facing: social integration, immigration, urban planning and renewal.

In his landmark work, Lewis Mumford made us realize what cities were in terms of what their function is for us as a civilization. They aren’t just places where people happen to huddle together at the junction of a river, at the foot of a mountain — although that is quite frequently where cities began. "The chief function of the city," he said, "is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity."

So, cities help us with form, with culture, with art, with creativity. Qualities that really lead into the idea that you create a city by creating, first, a community. We wanted to talk to people about what was the nucleus of community in each city and how that could be preserved. …

What has interested us … are the innovations that you can find in our cities. In each, new things have been learned. And, most often, it is on the local level or through the local approach. It is on that level that citizens are doing something innovative, something that does create form, something that does create art, something that makes civic life possible. It is on that level that people are expanding their citizenship. They are doing so by contributing to their community — even if that community, by being urban, is sometimes larger in size than many small towns in Canada. …

During our Good Cities visit to Calgary, we put together town planners, developers, city councillors, builders, and went around with them on the urban light transport and then on a bus to get a good picture of urban life from the northeast to the southwest. We saw a number of exciting developments such as the redevelopment of Garrison Woods, formerly the Canadian Forces Currie Barracks, which has created density, attractive commercial space, and mixed income housing. We travelled to the far south end of the city to South Fish Creek Complex — a multi-use development that comprises, in one building, a high school, YMCA, a continuing education centre for adults, a day care, two hockey rinks and a public library. Here, through thoughtful design, children, youth, adults and seniors interact with each other countless times a day in one seamless space. …

One of the most innovative programs we came across is called "Social Venture Partners." It’s a group of successful fortysomethings who want to engage in and improve their community in a more meaningful way than by just writing cheques. They could write cheques, but instead want to contribute their particular business skills, like accounting, or management, or planning, or marketing, to an organization. First, they pick together as a group an organization which they believe has the possibility to achieve self-reliance. Then, they pledge money and their own skills for a five-year period in order to assist that organization. Based on business practices and methods, it’s a model that has become highly successful. …

Another example of social innovation we found in Calgary is called the "Back Door." It’s located in a strip shopping mall outside the city centre and offers a new approach to helping kids on the street to get themselves off it.

Getting off the street is more than a physical move — it actually involves a cultural shift: from the culture of the "street" to that of "not the street." And it uses innovative methods such as contracts and payment to encourage kids who come there to create a plan of what they want to do and to stick with it. The youth commit that they won’t go to the drop-in centre or the soup kitchen, because those places pull them back into the culture of the street. There is remuneration — not a substantial amount, but still significant — to those who get past certain steps in the rehabilitation process that they themselves have designed. It works because it’s fundamentally about trust and hard work, and a belief in the dignity and potential of each individual. So far, for every 10 kids who go to the "Back Door," seven don’t go back to the street. …

When we went to Saint John, we found a set of circumstances very different from those in Calgary. Its riches were made in the 19th century — indeed, it is the oldest incorporated city in Canada. Having gained its wealth through different kinds of economies — that of the port, of fur trading, shipbuilding, refineries — Saint John’s current challenge is to reinvigorate the economy for the future.

It is on the local level … that citizens are doing something innovative
The key to that future, Saint Johnners are convinced, lies in immigration. They want more immigrants because many people leave their city to go to other urban centres. They have a very strong immigration support network for attracting and keeping immigrants, but find it hard to attract them when the competition is Halifax, Montreal and Toronto. So, they are cleverly pairing up new arrivals with established immigrants or lifelong residents, so they are integrated upon arrival and feel included. …

On the physical front of their city, the people of Saint John have redeveloped their waterfront to make it much more accessible. There’s a network of footpaths now which connect and enliven the city, even going under the overpasses and clover leafs that cut up the city in a kind of urban planning that was fashionable 30 years ago. This they see as a way of helping to limit urban sprawl in a city of only 120,000. And it makes fiscal sense to try to keep people from fleeing the downtown core to live in bedroom communities. A greater tax base means a greater ability to fund infrastructure and capital expenditures. …

Saint John already has … what Lewis Mumford called the third important element of the city: the creation of art. It’s the home of many artists who have national and international audiences: Fred Ross, Suzanne Hill, Miller Brittain — they are all in the galleries of Canada. The downtown area — Prince William and Canterbury Sts. — has a bunch of 19th century buildings with lofts that artists can rent for something like $250 a month. …

Quebec city is another place that is revitalizing itself through art. The mayor and the town council decided to concentrate on the Quartier St. Roch by making what was formerly a very depressed and rather dangerous neighbourhood into a creative centre. They put zoning laws in place that encourage artists and creative industries like high-tech animation and multimedia entertainment to move in … The artists’ studios are condominiums — and if the artists wish to sell them, they must sell the studios to other artists. The place, you have to realize, had been "malled over" in the ’70s and had become a place overrun by biker gangs.

This innovative approach to urban renewal has given the original residents of the quartier a sense of ownership and pride in the neighbourhood. It started with locating the Bibliothèque Gabrielle Roy there in the 1980s, followed by the creation of a very successful urban park from a whole city block. Other institutions moved in — the art department of the University of Laval, for example, and a culture centre has been established in the old Dominion Corset factory. …

The city has its underbelly of poverty, and many institutions and organizations are attempting to do something about it. One of the best-known is a kind of an institution — but he’s not one, nor is he an organization. He’s just one man — Gilles Kègle, who began simply by going by foot to people’s houses to help them take their medicine or to wash them or to give them a meal. He now has dozens of volunteers who work with him, but he continues to go by bicycle or by foot to visit people in his neighbourhood — St. Roch. …

Saskatoon is a very beautiful city and has not seen as much physical deformation under the guise of so-called modernization as have many other cities in Canada. It has an astonishing proportion of writers who have gained their national and international reputations while continuing to live where they feel most comfortable and at home — Guy Vanderhaeghe and David Carpenter, for example. The visitor this year at the Saskatoon Public Library is Yann Martel, winner of the Booker Prize in 2002. We discovered from our round table with the writers why Saskatoon is a very good place to be a writer. Because it’s "one of the few places where a poet can buy a house."…

The Muskeg Lake Cree Nation Urban Reserve is located in an industrial part of the city. It’s part of the larger reserve which actually is some 50 kilometres outside of the city of Saskatoon proper. …

The First Nation has agreed on a co-operative arrangement with the city that … puts them on a "fee-for-service" footing. This enables the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation to be land developers in the city like anyone else, without having to sacrifice their First Nations identity or their status. They can, for example, rent out space to aboriginal and non-aboriginal people for small businesses, while paying the city for infrastructural services just like other urban businesses.

Another area of innovative ideas is the Office of the Treaty Commissioner. It plays a crucial role in educating aboriginal and non-aboriginal people of Saskatchewan about the historical and present role of the treaties, stressing their basic tenet: mutual recognition, mutual benefit. Two years ago, they created teaching kits for Grades 1 to 12, which schools could employ on a voluntary basis. By June of this year, it will be taught in every single school in Saskatchewan … We participated in a class of Grade 2 children from two schools — St. Volodymyr Elementary School and Willow Cree Elementary School. Songs were sung, one line in English, one line in Cree … This shared learning, which calls on aboriginal elders to participate, is one of the most hopeful signs I have seen in the urban aboriginal situation in this country. …

Here in Montreal, you have Santropol Roulant, which is an innovative model for creating a new kind of community between youth and seniors. The bridge between these two groups is something basic that we all need: nutritious food. The idea originated from young people wanting to help with something like "Meals on Wheels," but, because of their irregular schedules, they could not commit themselves to, say, every Thursday from 12 to 2. So, they developed a floating group of 100 to 200 young people delivering meals on a rotating basis out of a kitchen, which they staff themselves. And they’ve produced a kind of interaction that has reduced the isolation of senior and immobile citizens — people who really need meaningful and personal contact with young people. Often what started as a delivery round has developed into relationship where young and old go to concerts together or to the botanical gardens in the summer. …

There is no doubt that our cities are under a kind of pressure they haven’t felt before. And what I’ve noticed is that each city has its own particular challenges. There are some things, however, that I think we can safely say they have in common.

First and foremost, cities are communities comprised of citizens who live in the city in order to be with others. And they are looking to exercise their citizenship in deep and meaningful ways. This provides a useful litmus test for mayors, city councils, urban planners, artists, entrepreneurs and the like. Are we building liveable cities? Will the design of a particular development enhance or hinder the ability of people to engage in their city, and with each other? Is the delivery of a program combating a social problem, or compounding it? Are we building neighbourhoods that facilitate neighbourliness? Are the ways we plan for housing, schools, green space and transportation attracting citizens to stay, or encouraging them to flee?

The Good City is a real city, and it’s being built in many places across Canada. It’s a city that welcomes diversity, and encourages creativity. The Good City will not happen by accident; it’s a deliberate city. There are exciting new approaches — some by governments, more often by citizens — being undertaken at the local level to address specific challenges, but many of these approaches and principles could surely find application in other centres. It behooves us to listen.

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