Rozanski Hall, University of Guelph
May 5, 2006
Jane (Jacobs) talked about cities as places that generate wealth. If cities cannot generate wealth, if they cannot generate a surplus of wealth, they cease to exist. They don’t have a healthy economy. And if we don’t understand what real value is, and what really generates wealth, then we cannot build healthy cities. We cannot built cities that work economically.
Killing Wealth-Generation In Our Cities
It’s amazing to me how divorced from the way we develop our cities and think about our cities that we have come away from their economies and from their capacity to generate wealth. I would argue that most of our national strategies… are things that are driving away our culture, our uniqueness. And right now public policy is driving away the capacity and the ability of cities to generate wealth. We are really destroying many of the underpinnings that make cities work.
We talk about climate change and the impacts that it’s going to have. Most people say we’re talking about the impacts on the people of the North, the Inuit, the loss of traditional ways of life, the loss of the polar bear. It’s the loss of the automobiles in Mississauga that’s going to be the biggest cultural fall out from that. We often divorce ourselves from nature but we also want to pretend that we’re not driven by the consumerism of our society.
One of the things that I learned is that people are motivated often by some very fundamental things. Some people, every time you make a decision, politicians know this, will look at their wallet. They will make a decision on what they vote on if it’s going to cost them more. Some people will look at their children and ask what the legacy is going to be. Unfortunately, in my experience in politics, that is a minority of people. As much as we want to be idealistic, too many people look down at their wallets and calculate every decision or tax change on how much it saves. That to me is part of the problem of the bankruptcy of our values.
The National Infrastructure Deficit: $125 Billion
Our national infrastructure deficit of $125 billion, which you can experience in potholes and dirty locker rooms and rundown pools and inadequate libraries and an absolute pile of poor maintenance in cities and differed maintenance because people don’t want to give up their bus route, they don’t want one less police officer, they don’t want to see their property taxes go up, so deffered maintenance, which we’ve been doing for two generations now in our city, is the thing that’s the most politically acceptable. A leaking roof is a lot easier thing to get away with in an election than five less police officers or a two percent tax increase.
As cities get poor, their values change. The impoverishment of the economy, of the capacity of a local government leaving it with fewer choices and worse choices is not lost on the values and the thinking and the belief systems of an electorate. It changes the contract between the citizen and the people that they elect.
Winnipeg started as a city that had a huge sense of the possibilities. The first people that arrived there were trying to attract the railroad so they built grand railroad stations. They built beautiful Carnegie libraries and grand boulevards with beautiful trees. There was a sense that beauty had to be necessary and necessity had to be beautiful and that when you walk down the main street of your city, what things looked like were a reflection of your values, your sense of civic pride, sense of identity and a celebration of the intellect, the imagination, the culture and the success and prosperity of the community. You wore it on your sleeves.
"There was a sense that beauty had to be necessary and necessity had to be beautiful."
The idea was also about the public good. People like Carnegie were putting money into libraries because they thought it was important that places of knowledge and learning were open and accessible for people who might feel the library was a much more extraordinary and beautiful place than they would ever be able to own. The public realm was to be beautiful and to be shared, so we all could have something greater together than any one of us could own individually.
One of the changes in values in the suburbanization of our culture is that what’s on our property matters most. It’s not the local community park. A whole lot of people — when I was arguing for a “new deal” for cities and major tax reform in the city — looked in their wallets to see if something would cost them a bit more. If they got a park or a beautiful new library or a healthier community or less air pollution and a more walkable neighbourhood, they would first look and see what that would cost them.
The younger generation of people — which gave me some hope — looked at what wasn’t on their property as part of their community wealth.
Those values drive a very different set of elasticity, it is what people like… I think they understand it and I think there’s enough sophisticated choices in our environment that people are driven by status and values that are cultural and you cannot talk about change or culture unless you deal with the values that are associated with it.
Leading a Community Nowhere
If you want to be successful in politics and be elected mayor of almost any city in Canada I’ll give you the secret. Three P’s. You run on police, pavement, and pipes. You promise more police officers, you promise to fill the potholes, and fix the leaky pipes. If you promise to freeze or keep taxes down and you promise to close the deficit and give people more consumer choice, promise them a Wal-Mart and a community centre, they’ll love you and they’ll elect you forever. And you’re leading your community nowhere.
I speak from experience, people often think, you’re gay, you ran on this artsy-fartsy thing, touchy feely. I bet you really just secretly wanted to be the Chief Interior Decorator for the city didn’t you? I ran into a room full of people who’s understanding of infrastructure is that they saw light at the end of the tunnel and thought their job was to order more tunnel. There was no such thing as too much pipe and too much pavement in any budget. It was very hard to get people thinking in a different kind of way.
When I became mayor of Winnipeg in 1998, we were depopulating by about four to five thousand people per year. We had the highest per capita average property taxes and the highest debt. I spent my first four years as mayor cutting the entire accumulative debt of the city, the biggest in the country, in half, freezing and cutting property taxes every year I was mayor, increasing the number of police officers to an all time high, doubling the budget for potholes, and then dealing with the biggest menace known to humanity — mosquitoes — with a $20-million dollar mosquito program. When that was all said and done and I was running for election on this very utilitarian program, having taken the city’s credit rating to an all-time high on top of that, all these people who voted against me and thought I was some left-winged wacko were all finding themselves writing cheques for my campaign. The headline in the local paper was “Our love affair with our mayor: Murray polls at 76 percent.” And my chief of staff looked at me and said, “It’s time to go on vacation and disappear for three months and don’t say anything because it ain’t going to get any better than this.”
I being a shy, humble person always desirous of other people’s enlightened opinions, a week later said, “This ain’t working. People are still leaving. We can put a police officer on every corner, can fill every single pothole, and young people are still going to leave.” Most people are telling me this is a god-awful boring city to live in and it’s friggin’ cold and I hate mosquitoes and that’s the sad reality that we’ve got to confront kids. Not exactly a popular kind of sentiment.
The Creative Economy: Vilified by the Uninformed
I proposed that we start doubling arts funding, we build on the housing initiative in the downtown renewal programs — really kick those up — lay out a whole cultural, creative strategy for the city about “cultural renewal” and “creative economy” and the idea of developing both an ecologically more sustainable city and one that became a magnet to retain and attract creative people who drive the knowledge economy.
That immediately closed the democratic deficit. I dropped to 52 percent within a week. I went from having zero opponents to five. And the Winnipeg Sun, on the front page, ran a big cartoon called “The mayor’s public art policy,” which was me drawing a chalk outline of a dead body at the corner of Portage and Main because clearly I had lost all sense and reason. Somebody who cared about art and culture and the quality of place and the aesthetics and the design of a city, obviously was a big-spending jerk who would just fritter all the money away on public art programs.
Winnipeg had abandoned somewhere in the middle of the last century all of its value-added quality investments. It had built utilitarian kinds of places. It moved from a city that was very connected and integrated to one that was very diffused. Abandonment — even post-industrialization people moved away, far away from where they were, and we separated and disintegrated our city and removed people and put great barriers up between where people lived.
You saw that in the presentations of how that urban form started to change, and it was particularly provocative. We moved to very introverted buildings. We put barriers up at Portage and Main. We built buildings that looked into themselves. We moved from very extroverted buildings that had a face and a relationship with the street, with pedestrians, buildings that were inviting, to malls that turned our downtown into an enclosed shopping mall, and emptied out the streets around it — what I call “neutron mall development.” You build a mall; it leaves the building standing but there’s no people there.
"We abandoned planning. We were, 'Open for business.' When you hear that in your city plan start crying."
We became a drive-through community, and I don’t mean just driving up for burgers… It was interesting because we came to value what was homogenous, what was standardized, what was easy to build. We lost the sense that anything that we had that was unique or authentic, that had any importance or any value. If Saskatoon had two Wal-Marts we had to make sure we had four because we were twice the size. We abandoned planning. We were, “Open for business.” When you hear that in your city plan start crying. We were “open for business” and one of the great victories that we had in economic development was when the Wal-Mart got built in Winnipeg and we kept the taxes and it didn’t get built in the adjacent rural municipality.
Rather than looking at any kind of sophisticated understanding of what was driving our economy, we got into this sort of sense that any kind of development is good development. There was no qualitative judgement about whether it was costing us money or making us money. As James Howard Kunstler would say, “When every place looks the same, there’s no such thing as place anymore” and no one comes to your community to see this. This is not economic development.
"Rather than looking at any kind of sophisticated understanding of what was driving our economy, we got into this sort of sense that any kind of development is good development. There was no qualitative judgement about whether it was costing us money or making us money."
If you actually start calculating how much energy is used, how much the increase will cost of owning a home in a low-density suburb, especially as energy prices are going to go up and up and up… I know something of this. I chaired the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy and in about six weeks we’re going to release our report for a 50-year climate-change strategy for Canada, which is really a national strategy to look at the energy challenges and propose solutions. You cannot avoid climatic cataclysms globally. If we in the advanced “first world,” as it’s arrogantly called, do not within the next five or ten years radically reorganize and reduce our levels of consumption, [we have difficulties].
In fact, the biggest savings, one of the only ways that we can actually sustain our planet and our nation, is by starting to live in higher-quality communities that have better connectivity and better density. That means we have to find status in smaller cars and in walking. A good pair of shoes has to take on the same sexiness as a Lexus.
[Referring to a slide of the main street in Erin, Ontario.] This is a place. It’s one of the most successful communities. This is a place. You can walk on it. You can walk to it. You see things that you won’t see anywhere else. You see things that are unique to this community. It is authentic. It is real. People want to go there because they experience something they can’t experience on Bloor Street or on the Danforth or on Queen Street in Ottawa or on Wyndham here [in Guelph]. It’s unique.
Investing in Authenticity
Every community has something that’s authentic. But it’s the first thing we give up when we lose our civic esteem, when we want to be like every other place, when we want to build cinder block buildings and stretch our tax dollars. So we save the 10 percent that makes the building ugly and leaves our children something that they’ll have to tear down in 20 years.
How would I know that I am in Guelph? What would tell me I’m here as opposed to somewhere else? Limestone. I would know I was in Kitchener if I saw… red bricks.
[Kitchener] is going through an interesting exercise in building a new downtown library and trying to figure out what a library is. Is a library books and stacks? Is it an economic incubator? Is it an expression of different types? How does multimedia fit into it? Is it an extroverted building or an introverted building? Does it go on the centre block? How does it relate to generating new traffic and a customer base? Is it an economic development investment, a cultural investment, an ecological investment?
It’s the whole thing. You can’t have an economic development plan here and a cultural plan over there and a land use and transportation plan over there. If you don’t force them all onto the same page through the same process you get bad decisions.
I’m trying to convince the people in Vancouver there’s no such thing as a cultural district. That there’s actually an economy that relates to the culture, that there’s actually ecological implications to a district and you cannot exactly move museums around and not realize that they’ve created a commercial ecology of different types of creative people who drive different types of businesses and have interdependencies that are related to things like location and customer bases and where people can go and how you design the neighbourhood. They’re complex relationships and you’ve got to understand them before you mess with them.
Let’s understand that: a place’s authenticity comes from offering unique experiences. They’re your story. They’re the manifest experience of your history. They’re the best gift and legacy your grandmother gave you. Twenty-two brick factories in the 19th century in Kitchener… You have alluvial soils. You had people of a particular faith. Mennonites were devout people with ideas of community, ideas of architecture, ideas of organization. They had come with a cultural, religious, faith perspective. They had come with skill sets of masons and brick layers. They all came to a place that had resources in the land… resources unique to that place, to develop a beautiful city. What an extraordinarily unique and beautiful community that is. Then you go to Galt, 12 kilometres away and what do you discover? Beautiful black granite buildings by Scots who knew how to cut stone.
Why Place-Making Is Important
Why is [place-making] important? Because the world has changed. Now that I’m out of politics, I’m allowed to look more than four years ahead and more than four years back… If you think about how the world has changed over the last 200 years and how it’s changing over the next 100 and you step back, you start to see your communities in very different ways. Things that may seem unimportant or obvious all of a sudden take on a difference in importance.
Eighty percent of us now live in cities, a complete reversal of where we were when Guelph was founded. We don’t live with borders and tariffs regulating prices. We really have both a local and a global economy. Ideas, since the Internet, move around the world in split seconds, something unknown to any other generation. We do not control prices very effectively anymore at our borders. It’s not ownership like the National Energy Policy or the federal Investment Review Agency. And cities… are important in a global economy in that they generate the creative capacity of a nation to generate wealth. If we end up with more restrictions because of energy costs and the [restricted] flow of goods internationally, locality becomes extremely important, the local economy becomes really important.
Eighty percent of our gross domestic product comes from four urban regions: the Lower Mainland, the Calgary/Edmonton corridor, the GTA and southwestern Ontario, and the Montreal and Quebec quarter… That’s 80 percent of our GDP, not 80 percent of our national wealth because we still are selling a lot of oil and natural gas and electricity to Americans that is really increasingly responsible for our trade surplus.
These jobs are less. You go to a resource community and you find fewer mining jobs. My uncles — I spent my summers in Sudbury — were all miners. The few that still work in the mines operate computers. They don’t operate big drills anymore. Eighty percent of our jobs — 80 percentof our GDP — is in the knowledge economy, where we’re not performing.
The Vital Mission: Attracting Knowledge Workers
So what makes a place as attractive though? How do you attract, if 80 percent of our jobs and our GDP comes from not our land but products of our intellect and our imagination? How do places, like this one that we’re in, and like all the communities that you come from — Hamilton to Thunder Bay — start managing the most important resource in this global economy, which is human creativity, the human imagination?… Talent, technology, the celebration of tolerance, the celebration of human diversity, those open, fluid societies in which ideas and human diversity, multitudes of faith, race… These are the things that this nation is built on.
A creative economy isn’t about people making macrame in one room and another group coming up with crazy things with pixels on a computer in another. It’s the qualitative ability to apply technology and creativity to different designs. We are not a low-volume, low-cost labour economy that produces widgets that can compete with what’s being produced in China or India. Our great advantage is the intellect and the design and the quality of products. Where technology is important is in differentiating between the edge of mediocrity and excellence and in producing new ideas and a quality to our product — how we design them, how they work, how they use energy.
Information technology is a mining issue. The fact that our mines work with very few labourers right now is because of the application of an IT revolution that affected Sudbury as much as it affected financial services companies at King and Bay. What happened in Waterloo and the networking that went on in the Kitchener/Waterloo area that particularly allowed [a successful culture of technology business and education] to happen was kind of an extraordinary event. But what really drives it is the live culture of a community. It’s the experience of not just large signature arts organizations but the actual experience.
Bus stops are cultural institutions. Subway stations are economic developers. In Toronto right now there’s a huge battle going on around the subway stations. There’s a group that’s arguing we should make them cultural places, explode these new art institutions out into the subways so that the subway is full of public art and they’re beautiful places and they’re aesthetic cultural places that when you go through them you hear opera music and you see operas playing. When you go to the ROM you see iconic and interesting representations of the content of the museum so that they become congested.
Develop “Creative Congestion,” Value Will Follow
Congestion is very important to economic and cultural development. It’s very hard to explain that to traffic engineers. Not all but some. Also about how you zone it… beautifully, aesthetically pleasing assets built into the surrounding environment and connected to key cultural institutions to create traffic flow… pedestrians and potential customers for businesses. Where the zoning allows mixed use development you create integrated 24- hour activity that makes them safer, makes the land more valuable, makes the investments more valuable, pays the city back a dividend. You get more people through the turnstile on a beautiful subway system that’s interesting and in itself is a destination and not just someplace you go through.
You should calculate into the financing of [civic] projects what the paybacks are and not just what the costs are. If you only look at the cost and you do it cheap and dirty and from a utilitarian perspective, only how many dollars in. You don’t actually get the value on the payback.
I first discovered this in this experience when I was first a councillor, this [refers to a slide] was the main street in my neighbourhood which was a bunch of run-down apartment buildings. We widened the boulevards, we put some interesting street furniture out there, we had a public art program, cafes. We rezoned this to be a multi-use building. It became a gathering place. The street is now just blocks of cafes and small shops and all kinds of interesting knowledge workers in design and creativity — dressmaking, information technology, business services — a whole range of interesting things. And the assessments went way up.
I was very proud. I was this councillor with this huge new tax base in my community that no one had thought about as a revenue source. As a matter of fact we were generating more revenues than we would have from a 1 percent tax increase in the places that these investments had been made.
The properties were so much more valuable that [landlords were] getting better rents, the businesses were more productive, the cash flow was more productive. That small microcosm of the street was not only culturally interesting, it was generating more wealth. I was getting more tax revenue without having to raise taxes.
Quality Development is Integrated and Alive
I started to get into the idea of what actually drove [value], that there was this huge link between culture and the liveability of places and the quality of the setting. It wasn’t just good enough to have beautiful buildings and treat them as museums but to start to understand how they relate to each other.
[Referring to a slide of the Provencher Bridge] This was the great line in the sand… It was also one of the reasons I lost the federal election. Stephen Harper visited this numerous times. I thought we should call it “Stephen Harper’s bridge.” It was an example of wasteful, terrible spending and it absolutely split the community down the middle. We did many things. We built amazing Red River College, which is 60 percent done. We built a beautiful new library and all kinds of extraordinary developments and rehabilitations.
As one radio commentator said in such an enlightened way, “It’s really a dumb idea. What use is a bridge you can’t drive a car across?” It reconnected the old Provence Blvd. to the old St. Bonaviste Blvd. It reconnected two principle boulevards that used to be one. It provided a new spine down the middle of the Forks. It is now the site that was chosen for the Human Rights Museum, which is going right behind it. And is stimulating all kinds of new residential development in the area. There is a vehicular bridge beside it. But this is a bridge you can walk on, drink martinis on, have a meal on. It’s the first inhabited bridge built in the world since 1770, the first of the public works as public art.
A Bridge That Pays its Own Way
After I left office and was dissed and lost the federal election by one percent, after winning mayoralty elections by overwhelming numbers, the utilitarians really feasted out on this bridge. But no one says anything bad about it anymore. There’s this dead silence. It appears on every postcard that the politicians who came after me send out. It is the new photo op. No one complains about the cost anymore. Can anyone guess why?… It makes money. It’s the only bridge that we don’t have to go to the taxpayer to raise taxes to fix, to remove stone, to repair, to do anything on because that restaurant made more money in the first three months — because there was no parking and who’s so stupid to put a restaurant in the middle of a bridge? Who’s going to walk that far? Everyone loves to walk there and it’s been a huge success.
[Referring to slide of new Winnipeg main library] This is our new library… our knowledge centre… We had $4 million dollars to fix a roof. We leveraged a $20 million project through private donations and partnerships to rebuild all of this. In 36 downtown projects, the city was never in for more than about 10 or 15 percent. We leveraged huge private-sector dollars and community partnerships and did fundraising in a community is arguably one of the poorer cities in Canada.
It was all done because we looked at the district, we studied the ecology of it, we looked at the zoning, we allowed people to write off 50 percent of their investments against their property taxes. My council flipped out. The Chief Financial Officer came to me and said, “What happens if we have to give away $10 million? [I told him,] “That means they’ll have spent $40 million down there.” And I asked, “What happens if they don’t spend $40 million? We’re not collecting much money on these empty buildings. What happens if we gave out all the taxes for five or 10 years? We would eventually get them. Taxes catch up to people. Eventually we’ll get them.”
Major Tax Incentives For Revitalization
We basically allowed [property owners] to develop the cash flow. We did that and we rezoned the area to multi-use zoning. We restored the idea of what the city was originally about — an intense, 24-hour, live, work, play, drink, do all kinds of naughty things that you don’t want to tell your mother about. Students live there. We introduced co-locating the college with the IT companies that were down there… putting high-speed Internet, rezoning it, putting public art in the streets, redesigning the streets and narrowing them. All of that created a different environment. All of it was done based on the careful analysis of the ecology that existed both culturally and economically.
That one thing changed it all. We had no capital. Our businesses did not have the capital to make the down payment investment to trigger the start. A 50-percent tax reduction wasn’t just pulled out of the air. It was the difference between the rents and what the rents would have to be for people to invest and build. The tax credit was phased out once we could generate rents and revenues to pay those rents. It stepped down from 50 percent. We allowed people to cash out a portion of their tax credits. You got a $2 million dollar tax credit. You went to the city’s development corporation. They gave you a $500,000 loan. That created the capital. Three years later, 36 projects were done. You can’t get space down there now.
It’s understanding the integration of land use, transportation, economic planning, and cultural planning that generates wealth. We normally think about these things — our investments in culture and our built environment, lived and expressed as grants, sometimes tax and capital. We build those into our budgets. But what we never build in are the revenues, the new jobs, the export, the investment, the property value, and the cost-effectiveness of not having to build new things when you invest in existing neighbourhoods.
Small-Minded Thinking = Bad Decisions
If you actually look at the level of subsidies… depending on the decisions you make, you get very bad decisions that look really good because the city ain’t spending much money. But they pay absolutely no dividend. So it’s costing the community lost jobs, lost revenues, and lost opportunities. And when you put a Wal-Mart through the same lens, you get a very different kind of economic equation because all you’re doing there is shifting consumer spending from one part of town to another. You’re not introducing any export businesses. You’re not doing any import replacement. You’re not driving anything in the economy that’s idea-based or creates any additional wealth.
You’ve got to understand that this is the basic analysis on an urban global economy. When you’re working in a borderless world, is the creative quality of place that is driving, attracting and retaining creative people and making creative capital possible to formulate in your community.
Seeing Opportunity Clearly
We take four approaches. Cultural planning and mapping. We do gap analysis of what’s missing in places. We then do economic-opportunity assessments to tell where the investments will work. And we do a district wealth creation plan, which is what I’d like to do when I’m not charging people to speak to them.
If you look around this room I want to leave you with this final thought: the most important resource you have in your community is your citizenship. If you look at each and every one of you in this room, you will realize that you have the human imagination and the intellect and the ability to make this community extraordinary, creative, and successful — to build on the imagination and beauty that John Galt had imagined, and to create this century as your century, because you are the people that understand this reality. There is no generation that has had as much knowledge as your generation, so much technology at it’s disposal, so much wealth, and so much opportunity.
If you blow it, there’s no excuse.
God bless and keep safe.
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