So the Windsor event was more than a week ago now, but I left before dawn the next morning for Detroit, flew to New York, spent four fun hectic days on US "business development" - in practice, an activity somewhere between schmoozing and begging - and then all this week digging out from under the accumulated mess of too long on the road. But now, finally, the final Tour Recap.
First,
Windsor . . .
My hosts in Windsor were the energetic, passionate team behind
Scaledown.ca, a blog turned web portal that aims to move the dialogue about the city's future beyond which automaker should receive government money to keep the local auto industry treading water a few years longer.
(One of Scaledown's contributors wrote a sort of recap of the event on the blog; the Windsor Star also ran
a brief article on my talk.) Windsor's downtown is a gutted mess of decay and white-elephant "redevelopment" - particularly the marquee casino and the massage parlours that feed off it - and I was informed shortly after arrival that the city is cursed with Canada's highest unemployment rate, as the flailing auto giants across the river in Detroit shutter one facility after another.
I often open my talks by describing climate change as "an expiration date on business as usual," and in a sense Windsor's one of the first major Canadian cities to reach its best-before date with no plan whatsoever as to how to reinvent itself. It wasn't climate change per se that brought it to the precipice, but the core issue facing Windsor is undeniably a question of sustainability. Its economic raison d'etre was an industry that literally provided the engines for the age of oil, and that industry is no longer sustainable in its current guise. Leaving Windsor to ask the question we all must one day face: How do you begin to adapt a twentieth-century city to the realities of the twenty-first?
The answer should start, truly, with the Scaledown.ca gang, all of whom are bursting with energy and full of new ideas in a city aching for heavy doses of both. It was an honour to help with the site's launch before a good-sized and diverse crowd, and my tour of the city and post-event chat over pints were both revelations. I was particularly taken with
Walkerville, one of North America's first planned cities under the nineteenth-century "garden city" philosophy. It's a cozy neighbourhood of sturdy old brick houses and ridiculously well-appointed green spaces, built by Hiram Walker to house the workers in his whiskey distillery. It'd be as good a place as any to provide the first rough sketches of the model for Windsor's future.
Keep up the great work, Scaledowners. Every city's only as great as the stories it tells itself about what it is, and you're the people telling the most hopeful ones.
Bright and early the day after the Scaledown launch,
I was off to New York City . . .
. . . which was its usual endlessly fascinating, pulse-quickening, eye-opening self. I could go on and on - I always feel like a learn something new with every step I take in New York - but this post is long enough without my tales of the Big Apple, so I'll stick to a couple of vaguely GOH-related highlights:
-
Grounded, the cafe a couple blocks from my hotel in the West Village, is a perfect example of the intangible added value of a dense, mixed-use neighbourhood. The first morning I walked in, the laptop-tapping "satellite office" crowd outnumbered casual coffee drinkers two-to-one, and the joint's staff clearly relished the idea of being
one of those essential "third places" that urban planners love to talk about. I used it as my office for the duration, and though my own neighbourhood recently (finally!)
got its own third place, I do already miss Grounded.
- I finally made it to the Met, and coming as it did at the end of the tour, I found myself reading its contents for signs of our current crisis. I think if you watch the certainties of representational art pass through Impressionist diffusion and Cubist disjointedness into the frenetic chaos of Abstract Expressionism (Jackson Pollock in particular), you can see the unraveling pretty clearly. Maybe I'm projecting, but Pollock's always looked to me like the aesthetic manifestation of a society spinning off into fragments; up close and in person, the effect's even more intense. If I wanted to overstretch the metaphor, I might suggest the little flashes of red and yellow beneath the haze of grey and black in his most monumental piece at the Met were like the first rays of hope . . .
- I've been reading Jonathan Lethem's awesome novel
The Fortress of Solitude, the first half of which is almost entirely in one four-block patch of Brooklyn's Boerum Hill neighbourhood. Turned out I was meeting an editor at a bar nearby, so I went early to walk the book's streets. Early on, Lethem describes these sidewalks made of slate, which I just couldn't picture. Lo and behold I was walking down Dean Street, and there were long stretches of sidewalk where the paving surface was not concrete but these wide uneven slabs of slate.
- Classic New York Moment (among many): Late night at Bleecker Street Pizza, eating a post-pint slice. Sitting across from me is a young couple, and the girl actually has Rosie Perez's Puerto Rican NYC accent, which I think I'd decided had to be at least a bit of an affectation. So I'm sort of eavesdropping, just to hear the cadences, and this slick black dude comes in off the street and starts trying to sell the pizza joint's employees (mostly Latino, I think) these fake Rolexes. They want none of it, but then they shoot the shit for a bit and the guy hauls out some dice. They were still losing greenbacks to the dude when I left.