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

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong

Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong offers some suggestions for the badly needed reform of municipal government.
The author is Alan Broadbent, Chair of the Canadian Maytree Foundation, which identifies itself as “committed to reducing poverty and inequality in Canada and to building strong civic communities.”
Among the Maytree Foundation’s initiatives is Ideas that Matter which is based on the wide-ranging ideas and principles of Jane Jacobs.
Political Parties – Most cities in Canada do not have a party system. Adding a party system could help local officials articulate policy, and make the system more comprehensible to the electorate. It could also make consensus easier to obtain because of party discipline – but this is a double-edged sword. If party discipline is too strict, it could prevent a diversity of opinions from reaching council, or limit the influence of local councillors.
Mix of Ward and City-wide Councillors – In Vancouver, councillors are elected city-wide, and the electorate votes for their top 10 candidates. In most other cities candidates are elected by a ward and only mayors are voted city-wide. There are pros and cons to both approaches. A mix, where some councillors are elected to represent local issues, and others are elected with the views of the entire city in mind, would likely result in a stronger city government.
Strong(er)-Mayor – Canadian cities are governed by a “weak mayor” system. In most cities, the mayor is the only member of council elected by the entire city. Once elected, they have to negotiate with the councillors of each district or ward. While this arguably provides more opportunity for individuals to have their views expressed through their councillors, it also make it difficult to pass city-wide initiatives.
In cities like New York, London or Chicago, the mayor has substantially more powers than the councillor, and the office has a budget for staff that mirrors that of provincial and federal ministers. They can make appointments to key council committees and senior positions in the public service. They can also prepare annual plans and budgets, subject to approval of council.

Thursday, July 21, 2022

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