Saturday, August 20, 2022

Jane Jacobs on social capital.
Dark Age Ahead, 2004

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Social capital builds a city's wealth of livability

Consider the public library: equitable, open to all; innovative, changing constantly as the city changes and as technology changes. Consider the recreation centre, the public aquatic centre, city parks and urban squares. Consider the art gallery, performance spaces, the public theatre that houses the symphony. Consider the university campus and the public school system.
These are examples of one of the two spheres within a city’s public realm; they are examples of the city's social infrastructure. They nurture and create a city’s social capital. Social capital (a concept commonly used to measure people’s relationships and interpersonal networks) builds a community’s wealth of livability.
The other sphere is the important public works mechanics of the city. The administration, the engineering, the land use planning. The day to day physical infrastructure we rely on to keep the city's systems working in every practical way.

"Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local, face-to-face interactions – at the school, the playground, and the corner diner – are the building blocks of all public life.” Sociologist Eric Klinenberg

Let’s call the two spheres Social Infrastructure and Public Works Infrastructure. They are interdependent but very much one is unlike the other when it comes to thinking about their problems and about investments in them. The creation and maintenance of Public Works Infrastructure benefits from a mechanistic approach while the creation and maintenance of Social Infrastructure requires a holistic approach, design thinking. It’s important we don’t use the techniques and the mindset of the former to think about investing in and solving the problems of the latter.
Social capital is in measurable decline in North American cities. In Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam found that car-dependent suburbanization was, as Jeff Speck says in his Walkable City Rules (Ch5 Sell Walkability on Community) the most predictive measure he could find of this decline. Putnam: “each ten additional minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by ten percent—fewer public meeting attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, and so on.”
A city is a complex adaptive system. Former Dean of the UofT Rotman School of Management, Roger L. Martin’s latest book studies the system failures caused by applying machine-thinking solutions to complex adaptive system problems.
Nanaimo’s future as a growing urbanizing small city, the centre of a mid-island regional economy, that attracts talent and investment, and retains its young adults, depends not so much on our physical infrastructure but absolutely on our social infrastructure. Our equitable, inclusive, livability.
While our City Hall administration is well-equipped to maintain our physical infrastructure, it falls to our elected body, councillors and mayor, to ensure public investments in the highest level of quality social infrastructure, the city’s holistic and humanistic “urban design.” Council can achieve this by instructing the city manager (CAO) to appoint a Director of Urban Design and Planning and instruct her to work directly and closely with Council to achieve its social infrastructure goals. A downtown campus of Vancouver Island University should be a high priority, part of a new urban design plan for the city centre from the harbour to the Parkway.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Commitment to human rights should be
the organizing principle of cities

Sunday, August 14, 2022

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