For release: noon December 4, 2001 (embargoed until then)

Conference on Social Harmony

City of Ottawa, Canada

Ottawa Public Library

Livable Cities Versus Mono Cultured Suburbs

It wasn’t long after my wife and I and our five kids moved to a western suburb of Ottawa in the late 1980s before a group of our neighbors circulated a petition in the neighborhood. They were concerned that a development of townhomes about five blocks away in the largely single family home suburb would devalue property values in the area.

We had moved to Kanata because my wife felt it would provide a better place for our five children to find friends and develop a social life beyond the nuclear family unit.

The not-in-my-backyard (nimby) movement generated a lot of support (we did not sign on) but, in this instance, they were unsuccessful-- the townhomes were built and property values in the area did not suffer.

Urban Icons (nimby targets)

Like many such efforts, they are based on two primal impulses—greed and fear. To a large extent, we are seeing the results of these emotions in the built form of our cities—large expanses of low density structures of similar uses (houses) on curvilinear streets that lack charm and activity—mono cultured suburbs, if you will.

Local politicians, not unlike politicians at all levels, do at least one thing superbly—they can count noses. I have been to many local council meetings and watched soundly based plans for urban development defeated by hostile neighbors. Today, I advise all my clients involved in the world of planning and development to bring the neighbors on side, in fact, to bring all stakeholders on side before attempting a change in use. You just can’t get your plans approved unless you present Council with a beautifully pre-packaged, gift wrapped, be-ribboned project with all the noses in the chamber nodding up and down rather than side to side.

My oldest daughter at 11 asked me if we could move to Riverdale. Not knowing much about Riverdale, I asked her: “Why?”

“Well, all the kids in Riverdale live within walking distance of the Pizza Pit,” she replied.

“I’ve never heard of the Pizza Pit.”

“Well, it would be so cool to be able to, like hang there or like maybe get a job,” Rachel added.

Anyone know who lives in Riverdale?

Well, it includes Archie and Veronica and Betty and Jughead and their gang.

Riverdale is an imaginary place, but not to my three daughters it isn’t.

“The reason everyone likes Riverdale is because everything is in walking

distance, the shopping mall, the grocery store, the restaurant(s), the malt

shop, yada yada yada. Just thought you might need this bit of info,”

From, Jessica :) :) :)

(Email message from Jessica, age 10, to her Dad, Sunday October 7^th, 2001.

It didn’t always used to be that way. Today, people drive 100s of kilometres and take a ferry to park their cars to wander around a place like Nantuckett. Why?

Well, they like the walk-about feel of the place. They like to see people sitting on their front porches. They like that there are sidewalks and that houses are close to the street and each other. They like the fact that there are trees overhanging the street providing shade in the summer and some protection from winter winds.

Tree in the Boulevard (not permitted in Kanata)

Isn’t it ironic that people need to go to Disney World to experience Main Street America?

How did this come to be?

Once upon a time, town government or city-state government was based on the Athenian model of participatory democracy. Citizens and land owners met with town elders to plan the development of their communities—who lives where, what type of activities would be next to each other, where the town markets would be, places of worship, fortifications, tanneries, milliners, coopers, blacksmiths, artisans, guildworkers, merchants, nobles, and so forth.

Problems between neighbors arose from time to time. “Mary’s goat is eating my vegetable patch and it should be staked,” says Tom. “He should fence his garden—my goat, Mabel, needs to be free to forage for food,” replied Mary.

The town elders would meet with Tom and Mary, hear both sides and then render a decision (Mary’s goat shall be free to wander—but she shall pay half the cost of fencing in Tom’s garden).

Speedy resolution of such issues stopped them from festering and making enemies amongst neighbors. I tell people: “Once you start arguing with your neighbor, one of you has got to move.” Nothing is worse than coming home from a workday and not being able to look your neighbor in the eye, wave ‘hello’ or stop and have a chat.

It’s worse than this though. Municipalities today rely on 1-800 snitch lines to spot bylaw infractions—neighbors are encouraged to rat on each other. This is not Greek city-state participatory democracy; it is part of what I call Democratic Abuse.

My backyard in Kanata backs onto the Kanata Lakes Golf Course. It is surrounded by a four foot retaining wall topped by a six foot high wooden fence. You need to be 10 and a half feet tall to see in our rear yard. Yet within three days of erecting a clothesline there, a bylaw enforcement officer was at our front door with a fine and a warning. (Of course, clotheslines are not allowed in our neighborhood—they detract from property values.)

I never did find out who ratted us out but I didn’t take down the clothesline until our last baby was out of diapers—my wife preferred the smell of sun dried diapers not to mention the environmental benefits of not running our dryer six hours a day.

When we were planning a 600 hundred acre development which we called West Terrace around what was then called the Palladium (now the Corel Centre where the NHL’s Ottawa Senators play), I had many meetings with local planners about our concept design.

Along Palladium Drive, we showed nightclubs, cafés, shops and other services fronting on the street. “But where are the six metre buffer strip, the double loaded parking aisle, the side yard requirements?” they cried.

Theatre of the Street (not permitted in Kanata)

I tried to explain that we wanted to develop a mixed use place—somewhere that people could shop, work, live and play … a walk about place.

But it wasn’t in their zoning codes so it couldn’t be allowed.

West Terrace—Circa 1989 Mixed Use Plan

James Howard Kunstler in his influential works on neo-uurbansim (The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere) recommends that cities “burn all their zoning codes.”

Let cities develop organically; let them grow like seeds out of the ground. The world’s great cities like Paris, London, San Francisco, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto all have uses mixed together. It isn’t unusual to find along a boulevard in Paris a patisserie, a corner store, a print shop, a legal office, a café, an apartment block, a butcher shop, a print shop, an internet café, an artist colony, an office building, a plaza, a small park, townhomes, even the occasional magnificent single family home.

The Palladium Interchange

I have often been asked why the Palladium isn’t in downtown Ottawa. Apart from the facts that a) the NCC (aka the No Commitment Club) said ‘no’ to putting a ‘hockey rink’ on Lebreton Flats (reserved for uses that serve a national purpose) and that b) we would have had 500 opponents, most of them lawyers, if we had put it in the Glebe at Lansdowne Park, Ottawa does not have a big time people mover like Montreal or Toronto. Buses running up and down Bank Street can move at best 2,500 pph compared with 20 to 30 thousand pph on subways. We would have had one sellout—opening day after which no one would come because they weren’t going to put up with the four hours it took to clear the arena.

There is a magic elixir or tonic then that helps shape great cities—they all have big time

people movers—their undergrounds, métros, light rail, streetcar systems. This allows a mixing together of uses combines with higher densities to form successful and eclectic urban agglomerations that are highly synergistic.

Siemens and Dopplemayer— 3,500 to 5,500 pph

Ottawa’s O Train— starting in 2001

Synergy is a fancy word for teamwork. According to Jane Jacobs all human economic development stems from the development of villages, towns and cities. It is by proximate co-habitation that we learn about each others strengths and weaknesses and learn to share and divide tasks according to individual skill sets.

Many people have the view: "More pie for you means less for me."

The folks fighting last year on Canada's east coast at Burnt Church over lobster quotas clearly believe this old economy saw and, maybe they are right.

But it is possible that they aren't.

Economic growth derives from a multiplying of options, from specialization, from comparative advantage, from the development of standards and, in the new economy, from network effects, disintermediation and scalability.

Now let us go back in time to the land of Ugh, Nnn and Zll. In the land before time, the family of Ugh lived by themselves in the savannas. Ugh was an expert antelope hunter providing his family with four antelopes a month. His carving skills, however, were poor, producing only one set of flint knives per month. A mile away, the family of Nnn is hungrier- Nnn is a good flint knife producer, producing three sets of flint knives per month but only bagging one antelope.

Ugh

Nnn

The families of Ugh and Nnn decide to co-locate to form a village, at first, for the protection of both. By co-locating and forming the first primitive village, they also open up the possibility of observing each other and co-operating and trading between the families.

The result is that after a few months, they decide that Nnn will concentrate on producing flint knives and Ugh will focus on hunting. The GDP of the two families before the co-location is five antelopes and four sets of flint knives. After co-location and specialization, the GDP has increased to seven antelopes and six sets of flint knives each month. This represents a phenomenal increase in the well being of the two families. So much so that this first village is producing goods surplus to their needs. This sets up the possibility of trading with a third family, the family of Zll, who are expert in producing textiles (animal skins) resulting in a further substantial increase in value for the emerging regional economy.

Before Village Formation	After Village Formation
Ugh produced:
Nnn produced:

This simple example demonstrates why the 'more pie for me' doesn't necessarily mean less for you. You will note too that this primitive economy works because information about Ugh's hunting prowess is flowing from Ugh to Nnn and information about Nnn's skill with flint knives is flowing from Nnn to Ugh. What this means is that it is the beginning of an information economy and it shows how improved communications even in the 10^th Millennium B.C. causes economic growth through the multiplication of options and opportunities. Afterall, it was after 1994's introduction of the Mosaic Browser turned the PC into a mass communications tool that productivity took off and the long promised payoff from huge investments in computers finally arrived.

People need people like no other animal on the planet—we are uniquely co-dependent on each other. Skill sharing is the most fundamental reason for the improvement in the human condition. What we seem to be missing in many of our communities is the feeling of belonging to the ‘tribe’; that feeling of belonging to ‘Team Ottawa’ or ‘Team New York’. We get that feeling during times of great stress like the recent September 11^th, 2001 bombings of the World Trade Center Towers. I have given a lot of thought about how to engender more of this type of fellowship in our cities and towns. It is about more than just feeling good about yourself and your team. It’s about improving living conditions and productivity too. Sports teams, festivals, artist colonies, the performing arts, entrepreneurs, researchers, all those people involved in creative pursuits seem to add to the feeling of belonging which leads to higher team spirits. People working in teams can create far more than the individual working alone.

City-State Team Spirit + Prosperity = Festivals + Performing Arts + Universities + Entrepreneurs + Researchers + Artists + Sports Teams = Creativity + Productivity

For example, the tulip festival of Ottawa celebrates its 50^th anniversary in 2002. They are creating a five foot high tulip (partly in answer to the wildly popular Toronto Moose)—two of these sculptures will be given to each of Ottawa’s 21 Councilors to take into their wards to get local artists there to paint them. The Mayor will then declare the Tulip as the official flower of the City and the 42 ‘originals’ will be auctioned off. Visitors will see these enormous tulips everywhere. It will be a sign of hope and friendship (the Tulip Festival started because Canada gave refuge to Queen Julianna and her children in WWII and Canadian fighting men liberated the Netherlands from the Nazis. The gift of Tulips from Holland represents everlasting friendship between the two nations. City building is essentially an optimistic endeavour and the sense that we are all in it together helps.

Cities and towns all over vie to have the biggest something-or-other: hockey stick or whatever.

Some towns have the big slogans like Biggar, Alberta: “New York is big, but this is Biggar.” Think how much better this is than the recently abandoned, $200,000 Ottawa slogan: “Technically Beautiful.”

Think about how important fire is to almost all human technology. It is amazing to me that in two episodes of the television hit show Survivor Australia and Survivor Africa, 32 people, contestants who knew for months that they would be on this show, could not light a fire with stone age tools after two days of trying on each show.

These people had months to prepare; they had access to books on how to do it; they obviously had read them because they put the tools together—but they got smoke but no fire. Ugh. Imagine how valuable someone who could reliably do it would be on one of those teams. (Tom Hanks did better on his own in Castaway.) Make sure you are one of the people on your team that can make fire!

Ideas are not limited. They are for all intents and purposes infinite. There are no limits to human ingenuity.

There are close to 800,000 people living in the New City of Ottawa when it was officially formed at the end of last year through the amalgamation of the 11 municipal and township governments together with the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton. When the Outaouais (including Hull, Aylmer and Gatineau) is included, the National Capital Region's population swells to 1,009,000. And within a one hour driving radius, there are 1.7 million people with the highest average family income in Canada at over $64,000. This is one of the best kept secrets in Canada; hardly anyone knows just how big the area has become and how much influence Ottawa has on a world stage in many areas. Even people living here all their lives do not understand the changes taking place in this community. It may not be too bold to predict that the population of the greater Ottawa area may pass the Vancouver metropolitan area before 2020; Ottawa has momentum and it has the space.

When a city reaches the one million population mark, an interesting transformation takes place- economic growth becomes more self-sustaining and new opportunities and new options present themselves.

One of the things we need to do a better job of, is convincing our educated young people, who are our greatest resource, that they can stay in Ottawa and do great things here. It is our most important marketing job-- to market Ottawa to young Ottawans.

It has always bothered me to drive the Queensway east bound from my home in Kanata and to see a sign: "Ottawa, Population 304,000". No wonder the media, visitors to our city and our own residents think of Ottawa as small and weak; it is a misleading impression and a damaging one as well. It should be a priority to take down these signs and erect new signage at all major ingress and egress points to the City and inside the City's boundaries as well as to show the true facts- "Canada's Capital City, Population 1,009,000".

Two years ago, a huge proportion of our graduating class in the School of Architecture at Carleton University, where I teach part-time, found employment in the U.S. This is repeated over and over again throughout the Faculty of Engineering to which the School belongs. It is a serious national challenge, which we must face up to.

Today, what we need to sell to young people is opportunity: access to venture capital and stock option plans, quality lifestyles, lower cost of living and housing, lower cost of doing business, the socializing of risk (Canadian medicare and support for public education come to mind) and an absence of social disorder and lower crime rates. Some commentators view medical care as a cost while, in fact, it is an investment in human capital. Healthy people and a healthy economy go hand in hand.

The future global economy will, in my mind, depend on highly dynamic city-states for economic growth; it will be a return to highly self-reliant urban agglomerations reminiscent of ancient Athens and Sparta or renaissance Florence, Venice and Genoa.

Glen Shortliffe's report on amalgamating this region into the New City of Ottawa reflected this trend. Hopefully, the New City will also allow us to keep the wonderful diversity of this region- the rural lifestyle of West-Carleton just 30 minutes from downtown, the french fact of Vanier, the quaintness of the Village of Rockcliffe Park and so on.

But there is more that we can do to make our city-state pre-eminent in Canada.

My daughter, Rachel, is now attending Canterbury High School for the Arts. Canterbury, for those of you who have had the chance to visit, is a supercharged place where students take on a normal course load and they do an additional hour or two each day in an area of their choice- dance, music, theatre, visual arts. There is no vandalism at Canterbury. A visit there is a stark contrast to some of our other high schools where any disaffected young person can obtain any type of illegal drug within an hour.

Why should we not have more Canterburys?

Why not have a High School for the Technological Arts- where our young people can study multi media, internet protocol, web site design, fibre optics, computer networking, micro-electronics and software arts? I would guess that such a school would attract thousands of highly energetic and committed young applicants. Let us not underestimate the power of our teenagers- afterall, Einstein did some of his best work as a teenager.

Sweden recently announced a national program to make broadband access available everywhere in that country and available to all. This type of initiative is as imperative to our nation as electrification was in the early part and middle of the 20th Century.

Ottawa has the highest penetration of internet users in Canada (at 54%)- we should pressure Bell Canada and Rogers to wire up every street in Ottawa for broadband communications. And, while we are at it, let us hope that the Mayor can prevail upon Bell to make the entire National Capital Region a local call- no more long distance to Barrhaven, please.

Let us make a commitment in Ottawa to being at the leading edge in technology, education, the environment and government services. Our Mayor should commit to having the majority of municipal government services available on the net by 2003. Citizens should be able to pay their property tax bills, get a dog license, obtain a building permit, apply for a zoning change- all of it on line.

Flying over Ottawa on a summer's day, one is struck by the amount of green space and the number of trees inside and outside the City. I believe that Ottawa should make a commitment to plant 1,009,000 new trees (one for each resident of the National Capital Region) on public rights-of-way before the end of the year 2010, as a way of affirming our continuing commitment to the environment. History has shown that every country that has become deforested has also become impoverished.

When I was seven, I rode Ottawa's streetcars for a nickel. My friends and I went to the now defunct Rideau Theatre- 5 cents each way for the streetcar, 10 cents for the film, 10 cents for a candy bar (my favourite was Crispy Crunch) and 10 cents to phone home if trouble came our way. One of the biggest planning errors we made, was to rip out our streetcars and our downtown rail station, Union Station, largely to be replaced by the private automobile. This disenfranchised children and made car ownership a pre-requisite for first class citizenship. This needs to be re-examined- the mandate and mission of OCTranspo needs to be rethought. One must not underestimate the importance of Toronto's streetcars, subways and Go Trains in making that city-state the powerful player it is on the world stage.

We should follow policies that allow families to stay together by permitting the construction of in-home apartments or 'granny flats' in the rear yard. Why should we force the elderly to live in high-rise warehouses, in a ghetto where everyone else is elderly? It is expensive and de-humanizing.

We should continue to build communities that provide a wide range of housing and transportation alternatives and we should support our public institutions with adequate funding for public schools and medical care. We have not embraced in Canada the concept of gated communities with their private provision of 'public services' by quasi private governments (Home Owner Associations); some two thirds of new subdivision housing in the U.S. is being built there in the form of gated communities, thereby dividing U.S. society into haves and have-nots. Clearly, this is a grave challenge to social cohesiveness in the Republic to the south of us.

Mayor Lastman and other Ontario Mayors have implored the Federal government to open up public coffers to help solve the affordable housing and homeless problem in Canada. Mayor Lastman says his City has spent $11 billion on the problem and still has 56,000 families on its waiting list.

Solutions to this crisis are not going to be easy or facile; this is a problem that won't soon go away. However, Ontario Mayors cry for more investment from the public purse should not supersede efforts by Ontario cities to do their part too.

Ontario Mayors (http://www.dramatispersonae.org/Mayors_Overlook.htm) have it in their power to push a partial solution to the problem, if they have the political courage to do so. They can increase the supply of affordable housing without costing the taxpayer a cent. They can use the magic wand given over by the Provinces to them—the power over zoning to create value at no cost to the municipality.

In fact, the Bob Rae government almost did the job for them during its stint at Queen's Park in the early 1990s. The Rae government platform and party policy called for (and went as far as to introduce legislation) to legalize 'basement apartments' everywhere in Ontario notwithstanding any municipal zoning by-laws to the contrary.

There are an estimated 100,000 illegal in-home apartments (they can be in the attic, rear yard, basement or above the garage) in Ontario. What the Rae government had in mind was to legalize these in-home apartments and their 'second kitchens' with a view to bringing them within the purview of existing legislation and rules and regulations including the landlord/tenant act, rent control, building and fire codes.

Legalizing in-home apartments would have allowed the construction of new in-home apartments in all neighborhoods in Ontario. This was an important initiative for Ontario; it would have helped to provide more, cost effective housing. However, it died in the Legislature—Ontario Mayors would have none of it; the nimby influence killed it.

In-home apartments can be inexpensively added to the existing housing stock. By addressing the density deficit that affects so many North American cities, they help cities make better use of public infrastructure (roads, water and sewer mains, public transit and so forth). They help folks pay their mortgage and property taxes; allow working men and women to live closer to where they work; they provide alternative accommodation for the elderly in neighborhoods where they have perhaps lived for many years.

Ontario Mayors do not have to rely on Queen's Park to make the required changes to permit in-home apartments in all zones in their cities. They can simply wave their magic (by-law) wands to encourage the creation of additional affordable housing stock at no public cost.

Why did the Rae government initiative fail? For the same reason that Ontario's Mayors do not endorse such action now-- strong resistance from their residents who fear that densification will negatively affect their property values. Prima facie, legal in-home apartments add income to a property resulting in an increase in housing prices. In the Glebe, homes with apartments (above the garage, in the attic, in the basement, granny flat at the rear) tend to sell or rent for higher prices and tend to sell or rent more quickly too. Density, per se, does not decrease home and property values. It brings more customers for public transit, neighborhood shops and services and more potential buyers and renters for homes and apartments. Density increases, in what are now largely low density neighborhoods and suburbs, should increase property values as long as neighborhoods continue to be well maintained and civic order is not diminished.

By bringing illegal in-home apartments out of the gray market, Ontario municipalities have an opportunity to ensure that they meet minimum building and fire code standards. Ontario's Mayors can encourage formation of more affordable housing stock without public subsidy-- all it takes is some political courage.

When I lived in Santa Cruz, California in the late 60s, I resided at 1011½ Seabright Avenue. The elderly lady who lived alone in the ‘Big House’ in the front yard rented out the garden flat in the rear yard to students at UCSC. It helped with her living costs and provided her with company. My friend and I stayed in the garden flat—a lovely one bedroom home with its own garden. It was idyllic indeed. I am helping a local architect/builder, a former student of mine, Brian Saumure is working to bring back these older forms of housing, which can add so much to our communities (see www.mapleleafdesign.ca).

When I built Briarbrook in the 1980s, a community of 850 homes and related uses, I combined offices, shops, retirement residences with townhome and single family houses in an approved plan. In the single family zones, I included a provision that would allow for the rear yard construction of granny flats. None have ever been built. Why?

Well, the City of Kanata introduced some rules including: a) granny flats had to be temporary structures that had to be removed within five years, b) only related persons could live there, c) a development charges (DC) would be levied on them.

In Kanata, in the five year period preceding 2001, approximately 5,000 homes were built of which fewer than 50 were apartments or what could be called affordable housing.

The number of duplexes built in that period was zero. We tried to build some but the Mayor told us that it was City policy to levy not one but two DCs on every duplex built in Kanata (http://www.dramatispersonae.org/DCs.htm). This despite the fact that Mayor Merle Nicholds had related a story to me about how she and (her husband) David could never have got their start without the extra rent they got from the duplex unit they owned.

Greed and fear … fear and greed. People don’t want anything that could hurt their property values (greed). They also don’t want corner stores in their neighborhoods or duplexes or granny flats or in-home apartments or rooming houses because, well, you never know, someone undesirable might live there (fear). In the traditional town, it wasn’t unusual for maids, gardeners, postmen, handymen, teachers to live in the neighborhood where they worked. There was a mixing together of the socio-economic classes. This isn’t permitted in gated communities today. It can’t be good for society to have safe, secure communities with good schools inside policed gates while the rest of their society has none of this.

Our cities are lonely places—it is one of the great tragedies of our time. People are lonely and isolated in suburbia. Many people had the best times of their lives in High School—it’s been downhill ever since. How sad. Why is that?

Well, people like and need to feel part of a team—part of something greater than themselves. In High School, that role is filled by sports teams or debating teams or science teams or by clubs or by your peer group.

As adults we are on our own. How sad.

I have lived in two co-ops in my time and I am involved in financing and creating a new one today. It’s great having your own private space but also common reading rooms, a pub, a television room, a games room, a laundry room where you can go to have interesting conversations and meet people other than your spouse and kids.

When I was doing my PhD in Urban Economics at the Urban Research Institute of the Australian National University, I noticed that they spent a great deal of time designing a true community where people could live on campus, work on campus, shop there, dine there and mix.

In 1975, when the then Governor General staged a royal coup d’état and sacked the PM (Gough Whitlam), Mr. Whitlam found refuge at the ANU where he could lecture, do some research and write his memoirs. Every morning and every afternoon, it was the custom to cease work for twenty minutes and adjourn to the common room where learned people such as Mr. Whitlam would hold forth. It was tea and biscuit time and time for synergistic discussion too.

“A Blank Wall … A Blank Wall … A Blank Wall” from Village of the Damned

I will make a prediction for you—there will be an increase in demand for mixed use, walk about types of place to live and work and play. It is time that architects and knowledgeable people took back the field of urban design from the urban ‘planners’ who have made such a hash of it with their zoners’ codes. It is a disgrace that the first thing a retained architect must do is a pay a visit to the City’s planner’s office to find out what the rules say he or she may do.

Once, you learn from your assigned planner what the proscribed uses are and what the prescribed (single) use is and what the density limit is and what the front, rear and side yard setbacks are, and what the height limit is and where ingress and egress is permitted for cars, supplies and people, it’s no wonder that every building looks like a box.

To be fair, the (former) City of Kanata in its last days made a stab at embracing the mixed use, neo-urbanist movement. They put together a quite imaginative plan for the Kanata Town Centre (an oxymoron so far), championed by none other than Mayor Nicholds. They started talking about minimum densities instead of maximum ones, build-to lines instead of setbacks and so forth.

Proposed Kanata Town Centre Plan, circa 1999

They even prepared a streetscape to suggest the way these lands should be developed. The view is reminiscent of small town Canada circa the 1930s—everything old is new again. To date, nothing has been built but the attempt is laudable.

In the mid 80s, the National Capital Commission (NCC) and Public Works Canada (PWC) were wondering what they could do to add life to the downtown core of Ottawa. It had a tendency to empty out after 5 pm weekdays and was lifeless on weekends.

This is a plague of inner cities in North America—they become deserted and dangerous places after hours.

Since then, the NCC and PWC and the City of Ottawa have tried ‘everything’—putting in cute little street kiosks, covered sidewalks, new paving, banners, banning cars, more street furniture, removing the kiosks, removing the covered sidewalks, allowing the cars back and so on. They have called for proposals; they have torn down buildings, made public squares, renovated public spaces, proposed aquariums and casinos, proposed to move buildings, added linear or urban parks, promised to pave the streets red, added sculpture, put up statues to heroes and much more.

Ain’t none of it worked worth a darn.

Empty Lot

The solution is easy, simple and obvious yet no one does it. I haven’t figured out why but I have certainly told folks often enough. Of course, if they just listened to me, all their problems would be at an end.

There is only one way to revive the downtown core of any city—bring more people to live there. It’s that simple. Nothing else will work, ever.

PWC is considering demolishing the Lorne Building in downtown Ottawa according to the Ottawa Citizen (October 2, 2001). Their consultants studied five options: a) selling the building and moving federal employees elsewhere, b) demolishing the building and replacing it with two office towers, c) converting the Lorne Building to a hotel and building an office tower in the parking lot, d) converting the building into apartents and building an office building in the parking lot, e) renovating the building and adding an office tower in the parking lot. Guess which option was rated best and which worst? Need I tell you that demolishing the building and replacing it with two office towers was rated best and converting it to apartments and building an office building in the parking lot worst? Will they ever learn?

Footnote: People will travel far to go to Casinos. Because of the government monopoly on these, there is an artificial ‘scarcity’ of casinos. As a result, you can pretty much put them anywhere, even in the middle of a deserted downtown and people will come. This is not a prescription, however, for urban renewal (I hate that term anyway). Look at Atlantic City—people will come for their gambling fix but it didn’t fix the city by itself.

There are times when only governments can make a difference and yet they act to make a problem worse. Government investment in public infrastructure and public goods is widely seen as a lever for growth and development. Just as important is getting the right mix of policies in place to guide the markets. The situation in our inner cities cries out for a costless solution—scrap the zoning codes and allow the markets to work. Or, if local Councillors can’t bring themselves to such a pass (afterall, giving up power is so hard to do), at least amend the codes. Introduce a density bonus that allows developers (including the GOC) to add a residential component (and I don’t care if the residential component is a co-op, apartments, condos, hotel or what-have-you) to their office projects. Require it if you want to. Change the ROI calculations by giving them a density bonus. And get rid of those unfair DCs that punish affordable housing. Make your cities a people place by bringing people to live there—services will flourish on their own if people with disposable income live nearby.

The great cities of the world tell us this—people take care of their homes. If they live within a five to ten minute walk of something, that place will work.

People x Density x Civic Order x Mixed Use x Design x Public Transit = Great City

If you have people living in well designed, human scale places with a high enough density where they are allowed to employ their creative energies without undue interference from heavy handed zoning prescriptions, all in a safe environment served by a big tie people mover, you will get a great city. There, that’s it, that’s all.

Vertical Transition Lines- Closed at Street Level and Open

Water is an important element in city design. People are calmer around water. Ottawa is fotunate to have three glorious rivers—the Gatineau, the Ottawa and the Rideau olus one great canal. Imagine what this place looked like 350 years ago before our rivers became polluted and the great pines and other trees were logged.

Given the magnificent setting, what have we done with it? Well, most of the waterfront is owned by the GOC through the NCC and they have built roads (called ‘Parkways’ for goodness sake) along the water separating people from the rivers and the Canal.

Three Rivers and a Canal

Think Paris and the Seine or London and the Thames. Think the Left Bank. Ottawa’s treatment of our waterfront is a travesty.

Pont Alexander III

Why not marvelous cafés, artisans’ lofts and much more along the Ottawa?

Paris Café (Note how many people are facing out to the street)

Take Carleton University as an example—set between the Rideau and Dow’s Lake, it has incredible potential. And yet the entire campus turns its back on the water. Again, roadways separate the campus from the water.

At UCSC, they buried an entire building (their Library) in the side of a cliff rather than mar the vista of a canyon. We can do better with our land use planning and urban design!

One of my favourite places as a boy was to explore along the river banks of the Ottawa below Rockcliffe Park (and out of sight of passing cars and the prying eyes of adults). We built and launched rafts from there (I was ‘arrested’ as a ten year old for cutting down tree branches for raft purposes) and we were the Tom Sawyers of our day (circa the late 1950s).

The Park had a most wonderful stone pavilion. This huge structure overlooked the confluence of the Ottawa and Gatineau Rivers. It had a live element to it—a tuck shop in its lower level that made the best hot dogs on the planet. You know the kind—toasted bread instead of buns and b.b.q.’d to perfection. Mustard and relish and 25 cents at the end of a long day … The money was free too. We collected glass bottles, which we got 2 cents each for at the tuck shop and there were always enough of them for at least one dog each. Can it get any better than this? In those years, money for kids was much harder to come by than it is today. Here was opportunity (the shop) and the cash was at hand.

They had these fantastic WCs too—vast porcelain and tile areas—huge places in the bowels of the place so to speak.

There are a couple of lessons here for today’s neo urbanist. Firstly, kids and people without cars weren’t disenfranchised. They could get to places like a tuck shop, a corner store, a hardware store, whatever on their feet or by street car. Secondly, public parks weren’t these pristine, soulless places that they are today. Did you know what the NCC did with that tuck shop—they boarded it up 30 years ago (the WCs too). It remains that way to this day. We used to have change rooms and pavilions like this on all manner of Ottawa beaches; they were shut or torn down too.

Park and beach utilization has plummeted since then. It’s pathetic really. If you want public spaces to work, you have to allow for live uses like this. They become better places and safer too.

Conclusion

You know I read last year that there are now more than 7 million people worldwide with more than $1 million in investable financial assets (Business Week, August 28, 2000. Data: American Express.)

I guess this was said proudly and I am sure that it is an impressive number but it represents less than .1% of the world's current population. You can be sure most of those 7 million people are Americans.

Fair? Well, the world isn't a fair place but, in my opinion, it is a pathetic number really.

I can imagine a world with much greater wealth and much broader distribution of wealth. I don't think we can get there by redistributing wealth from rich people to the masses. That has been tried and failed. Rich people have better accountants and more options for avoiding taxation than governments have.

No, if we want more wealth, it has to be based on a creative economy where more pie for me doesn't mean less for you.

And more pie for all of us doesn't have to mean that we ruin the planet through environmental rape.

I view technology as the key to human health and well being and to saving the planet too.

Can you imagine a dumber industry than the newsprint business? We remove trees (and, by the way, every nation-state that has deforested itself throughout recorded history has also impoverished itself) to make pulp and paper. We bleach the stuff and ruin ecosystems and rivers in the process. We put it on trucks and in rail cars and in boats and ship it off to printers which churn out billions of newspapers each day that then get loaded onto trucks and planes and some poor guy comes to your door in the freezing

cold early morning (at least where I live in Ottawa most days it seems to me) so that you can read it for 20 minutes and put it in the recycles where another truck burns huge amounts of petrol to pick it up to be put in other trucks, rail cars and boats to be 'recycled' in another hugely expensive, energy-intensive and environmentally degrading process only to start the cycle again.

Message to Amazon.com, IBM and all newspaper publishers- work on e-paper please (for students interested in mediatronic paper, read another Neal Stephenson book, The Diamond Age).

I can imagine a planet with much greater levels of wealth where we treat the earth as a garden and a wilderness.

Father: Hey, I figured out something about the human race on the weekend. Want to know what?

Son: Sure, what is up with the human race?

Father: Well, it's about the reason why the human race is so mucked up- psychologically and environmentally and every which way. The reason we're so messed up is that modern humans are only 30,000 years old and in terms of geologic and biologic time that is a nanosecond- we're so young that we're not even adolescents yet- WE'RE BADLY BEHAVED TODDLERS.

An exchange over IM between father (in Ottawa) and son (in Canberra), August 22, 2001.

Where are the leaders of the past, like President John Kennedy, who, in 1961, could imagine putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth before the decade was out and before there was the technology to do much more than catapult a tiny capsule around the earth for a few laps?

Is our current crop of leaders, with their obsession with re-election and the short term, truly the best we can do?

40% of all physicists in the US are involved in some type of research relating to quantum mechanics. Einstein said that quantum mechanics was, to his mind, voodoo science. It was and is but much of our computer science is based on it and a great deal more will be in the future.

As we all know, Einstein proved that the Universe's speed limit is c, the speed of light. Nothing can go faster than this- 186,000 miles per second.

What is weird is if you were in a speeding train moving in one direction at say 99% of the speed and you were to fire a laser in the opposite direction, the speed of that laser blast to an observer standing on the platform would still be c (instead of 1% of c).

The Universe is weirder still than even Einstein could imagine.

Matched pairs of bosons (tiny sub-atomic particles) are always created with clockwise spin and counterclockwise spins. When you act on one particle to reverse its spin, the other matched particle reverses its spin at exactly the same instant no matter how far way they are. Somehow, the behavior of one particle is instantly communicated to the other no matter what the intervening distance. This appears to break the Universe's speed limit proposed by Einstein.

Whatever, the result is that a quantum phone or data network needs no infrastructure (sorry, Bell Canada, AT&T, Sprint, Worldcom) and you can talk to anyone in real time whether they are in Moscow, on the Lunar Sea of Tranquility or in a canal on Mars with zero transmission time.

Quantum computers have weird algorithms that search all elements of a data base close to simultaneously which means goodbye to difficult net navigation, hello to a world wide phone book and much more.

We are trying to create lasting value. The Holy Roman Catholic Church is 2,000 years old. The Japanese Emperor's line goes back, continuously, over 5,000 years. The House of Windsor is a few hundred years old and the oldest, commercial charter happens to belong to the Hudson's Bay Company (over 350 years).

These long lasting human endeavours share a number of common characteristics: 1. They own and control their own real estate, which provides them with security of tenure, inflation protection and predictable cashflow (rents and imputed rents). 2. They are or have been tax exempt (property taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, wealth taxes, inheritance taxes). 3. They own significant concessions, brands or rights (based on land rents, resource exploitation, embedded constitutional positions, religious faith, feudal grants). 4. They are monopoly providers or oligopolistic concerns.

It is difficult to say who will join the elite group of long-lived enterprises but it might be 'brands' like Coke or Time Warner, who have created businesses that share some of the elements I described above. But you can bring some of this to your own endeavours- I wanted a NHL franchise for Ottawa for many reasons, love of hockey passed down to me by my mother and Russian Grandfather among them. But I also understood that there was likely to be only one NHL franchise in Ottawa!

You know you never want to get too high or too low. Life is full of up and down cycles.

I still remember an Ottawa Citizen headline a few days before we got the Ottawa Senators franchise: "And the winners are … Seattle, Milwaukee." That hurts.

Actually, it was Ottawa and Tampa.

The night before we won the franchise, one of the voters (i.e., a member of the Board of Governors) told me (at a NHL dinner thrown for the nine bidders) with his face just centimeters from mine: "You'll never, ever get a franchise for Ottawa."

I can remember Norm Green, then Owner of the Minnesota North Stars, coming over to my table and asking: "What's wrong." "Nothing," I said. "Well, get that smucky look off your face, kid, and get out there and hustle."

Good advice. Lydia Leeder, in Ottawa, on hearing that comment from Cyril later that night said: "You can't stop now! It's just like the Canada/Russia series of 1972. Canadians never quit. Everyone is running to their radios every half hour for an update … We're counting on you." Now that's pressure!

We did just that and in fact the last thing the Board of Governors saw before they shut the door to consider the matter the next day at 8:00 am was my nose and the faces of my whole team.

We never stopped.

At about noon that day, the pressure was enormous and frankly getting to me; so I went for a run along the beach (this was Palm Beach in December- actually December 6, 1990). I returned at about ten to one and saw some of my team members waving frantically to me. "What's up," I asked. "The NHL has asked all bidders to be in their suites at one for an announcement," said Connie Cochran. "What announcement?" "They didn't say."

Without a shower, I changed into a suit. At one, NHL security took us down to the basement of the Breakers Hotel, a huge antique of a hotel. Next to rotting garbage and standing under dripping pipes, I turned to my colleagues to say: "Fellows. This doesn't look too good. You have done everything that you could do. I am proud of you. If we have lost, we are going to thank the NHL for allowing us to join this process, we are going to congratulate the winners and then we're going to have a press conference to announce- 'We'll be back'."

Then NHL security took us up to the meeting room. Marcel Aubut (of the Quebec Nordiques) gave Randy Sexton, a big hug: "Felicitation, mon ami," he said. We thought he was congratulating us on a good try!

When I went up to the front of the room and sat next to John Ziegler, I saw the words: 'The NHL is proud to welcome, as conditional Members under the Plan of Sixth expansion, the cities of Ottawa … and Tampa." It was a magic moment.

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

(Footnote: about six weeks later, I did call the Governor who had told us that we would never get a franchise. He told me that his comment was part of a plan by a few Governors. They told each bidder the same thing; it was a character test designed to see how each bidder would react. Two of the bidders stormed out; they weren't successful.)

The Ottawa Senators formally returned to the National Hockey League on October 8, 1992 after a 58 year absence; it was another great day for Ottawa. I was at ice level at the old Ottawa Civic Centre when the team was introduced. The people in that arena applauded those players—they gave them a standing ovation—for six minutes. I realized that they weren’t really applauding the players, they were applauding themselves. This City came of age that day—there was a feeling that ‘we did it, we did it together’. It was that special feeling that only comes from being part of something greater than ourselves. Professional sports can do that. But surely, we can add more days like that. It is a challenge for you to take up. Carpe diem.

One last thought I will leave you with—in the last 15 years of my father's life, he journeyed on a quest for peace and harmony. His quest was not successful but the goal was there. It is a general human condition to pursue peace and harmony because so few of us ever get there. There was a moment in my life at age four, standing in a tiny pool of water in the front of our house with the hose trickling and the sun being refracted in the water spray and the colours of the rainbow on a perfect summer day—a liitle boy at peace with himself and the world-- a moment in time that is endless and suspended. The internal dialogue silenced ...

Oh, to get back to that moment or to have another like it! We must be part of something greater than ourselves; we can build better spaces and places; we can be more integrated and co-exist in greater harmony with nature.

Thank you. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, B.Eng.(Civil), M.Eng.-Sci., PhD., Adjunct Research Professor, School of Architecture, Sessional Lecturer, Eric Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, Chair, Hickling Capital Corporation, Founder, Ottawa Senators, Ottawa, Canada, December 2001. www.dramatispersonae.org Copyright, Bruce M. Firestone, December 2001.

Postscript: It is possible that the events of September 11^th, 2001 will change the way we build cities. I think it would be a shame if one act of madness causes us to abandon the idea of great architecture or densification of our cites.

Having said this, European cities have shown that it is possible to achieve high densities with architectural forms that are three to five storeys.

Postscript2: It is important to note that my argument for mixed uses and densification of the city are not arguments against what is called ‘urban sprawl’. Sprawl is what happens when you apply rigid separation of uses imposed by zoning codes. Low density suburbs separated from shopping malls separated from office complexes necessitate car trips for everything.

The fact is, however, that a healthy city requires green field growth—life will jump boundaries; life will find a way around and over artificially drawn boundaries placed around our cities. Instead, we should design our city expansions with a denser mixed use pattern. I mean if our ancestors could build great towns why can’t we?

Japan’s rigid zoning by-laws (zero conversion or rural to urban uses) created a price bubble in land values at the end of the 1980s that reached absurd proportions (the value of Tokyo real estate was worth more than all the land in the continental US). The collapse of the bubble economy in Japan has lead to more than ten years of stagnation there that continues to this day.

Cities are the engines of growth—they need nurturing and must be allowed to grow. By putting more of the global population in denser cities, it is my view that we can better manage their environmental impacts on the planet. People living in cities is a marked improvement over millions ravaging the countryside.
Appendix

Introduction to Architecture and Urban Design- Modernist Urban Design and Spatial Apartheid- Notes for Students

1. 'Modernist' here refers to the 'City Beautiful' movement- the early 20th Century attempt to provide 'the little cabin in the woods' or 'the castle in the glen' for the masses.

2. It was a rational reaction to the concentration of tenements in NYC circa 1900.

3. Huge horse population, horse dung problem, high accident rate between horse drawn transportation and pedestrians, excess density, substandard housing, lack of building, health and fire codes, tuberculosis and disease cause this reaction to urban living.

4. Reaction carried too far.

5. Inappropriate segregation of uses.

6. Absence of civic art in urban design.

7. Architects are producing designs and urban spaces lacking in charm, soul, density, affordable housing, public transportation and other amenities.

8. Kanata clotheslines contravene by-law.

9. Riverdale- an imaginary town where Archie, Vernonica, Jughead and Betty live and where kids can live next to the Pizza Pit.

10. Kanata Lakes- a subdivision where it is 1.6 kilometres to the nearest shop.

11. Taxes (development charges) on small homes, 'granny flats' and duplexes make it impossible to build affordable housing.

12. Zoning by-laws create spatial apartheid and a new form of segregation- segregation by income. 19th Century towns tended to mix folks from different income streams together so that teachers, gardeners, police officers, fire fighters could live close to or in the neighborhoods where they were expected to work.

13. Property owners react negatively to almost any change in land use because of two primal motivations- greed and fear. They are fearful that any changes (eg., densification of the neighborhood) will lead to a decrease in their property values even though densification can lead to increases in value provided there is no breakdown in social order.

14. The reaction to modernist urban deign is neo urbanism.

15. New urbanists will win says Jane Jacobs.

16. New urbanism is the return to 19th century model of town design based on civic art and consensus.

17. New urbanism is the search for catalysts and 'faery dust' to bring decrepit urban centres back to life.

18. Catalysts are- deregulation of zoning rules, mixing of lofts, offices, shops, apartments, homes, theatres and so forth, mixing of uses provided they meet health, building and fire codes (everything permitted except what is expressly forbidden instead of traditional zoning where everything is forbidden except what is expressly permitted).

19. Value can only be created where social order prevails.

20. Mayor Guiliani implements 'Broken Windows Syndrome' solution in NYC.

21. Police on the beat.

22. The spaces of the public room and quasi private/public spaces are treated with respect- graffiti removed, lamps repaired, …

23. No tolerance for small acts that debase the public room. This alarms civil liberties advocates.

24. De-regulation allows organic growth of a city. Best cities are walking cities with mixed use- Paris, London, Tokyo, Sydney.

25. Other catalysts- property tax abatement, special federal tax jurisdiction (tariff-free zone, enterprise zone), abolition of development charges (eg., Mayor Holzman, Ottawa), sales tax holidays on building materials, civic presence (library), return to market gardening and farming in urban areas, urban forests and forest views, parks, commons, fairgrounds, … the kernel around which the urban area will regenerate.

26. Virtually all economic growth since the discovery of agricultural cultivation has derived from the synergy that comes with the development of villages, towns and cities, says Jane Jacobs.

27. Villages came about first because of security needs then synergy was derived from the application of specialization (Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage)- Ugh hunts antelopes, Nrd makes flint knives and Znn produces textiles (sewn animal skins). Trade between families results from their proximity in villages and later on between villages.

28. Villages are first organized on the basis of protection. Then they become hierarchical and they are based on the FOB principal- 'Friends of the Boss' get the best locations.

29. Today, FOB means friends with the mayor, police chief, fire chief, …

30. Zoning creates artificial scarcity of land.

31. Beneficiaries are established (often large) land owners and sitting owners. Suivez l'argent. First time home buyers and renters are worse off.

32. Kanata prohibits work in the home with two or more employees.

33. Each am homeowners leave the suburb and bne (break and enter) specialists move in.

34. Kanata has huge rate of bne and vandalism- nothing for kids to do.

35. Work at home reduces travel time, increases block safety. It is better for the environment, makes double use of very expensive capital investments in homes and urban infrastructure.

36. Offices will still be needed for tribal gatherings, synergy, team work.

37. Cyberspace will have some impact here when people 'goggle' in to the metaverse.

38. The development industry is constantly in conflict with public authority because so much is now prohibited by zoning by-laws and regulations.

39. Urban sprawl is what results from segregation of uses.

40. Everything requires a car trip to get to and from origins and destinations.

41. Land use should be determined by the highest and best use for each site. This is the DAD rule of land development- Dollars are Democrats. The DAD rule is the worst possible rule except for all the others, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.

42. Rules used for determining land use include hierarchical rules (village chief, first officers or nobility, townspeople, expendables), religious hierarchy, FOB (Friends of the Boss, eg., friends of police chief, mayor, fire chief, governor and so forth, get preferential treatment).

43. Urban sprawl results from the application of zoning rules and segregation of uses.

44. This spreads out all uses by separating offices from big box retailers from homes from schools from civic presence.

45. Urban sprawl and city growth are not synonymous.

46. They are often confused but growth at the fringe of a city can involve mixed use design and the application of new urbanist principles.

47. Urban growth is essential to produce innovation using a greenfield approach.

48. When governments act to prevent urban growth, they are aiming for the wrong target. Japan tried this by restricting the conversion of farmland to urban uses resulting in an explosion of land prices, a real estate bubble at the end of the 1980s, distortion in the entire Japanese economy and an implosion of that economy in the 1990s.

49. Urban growth is essential to a healthy economy.

50. Let the highest and best use rule apply- farmland is not a sacred trust and should be treated as any other economic input.

51. If the price of farmland rises because of scarcity and an increase in farm gate prices then the result will be the reuse of some urban lands for agriculture- the process will reverse. This is starting in some US cities where the price of urban land has become negative (eg., Detroit, South Bronx, South Central L.A.).

52. The housing lifecycle is: the BIG house becomes a shared house (extended family), then it mutates to apartments, duplexes, triplexes before becoming a rooming house. Then a gentrification process takes place where it becomes a BIG house again either through renovation or teardown. The latter assumes that social order prevails.

53. There can be no value created in an urban context unless social order prevails (the Broken Windows Syndrome).

54. Land rents increase with increasing density.

55. This is the most fundamental curve in urban design.

56. Nimby-ites are wrong to reject density out of hand. Provided social order is maintained, adding in-home apartments or granny flats increase land rents and increase land values.

57. Construction of a large office building next to a residential area, for example, should increase the number of potential customers who want to purchase or rent those homes to be closer to work, all else being equal.

58. Land rents can be negative where social order has broken down. That is, the cost of maintaining the property and paying property taxes is greater than the annual rents possible in that location.

59. Deregulation of zoning rules should allow a city to densify.

60. North American cities are suffering from a density deficit- the City Beautiful movement has gone too far.

61. The ONLY way to revitalize North American cities is to bring people to live downtown.

62. Robert Kaplan in his work, 'An Empire Wilderness', maintains that global economic and technological influences are undermining the nation-state.

63. While economic progress is related to healthy city-states, throwing away the nation-state would be a mistake.

64. This would represent the triumph of narrow, parochial, regionalist and ethnic interests over the sharing of risk and pooling of resources. Meaningful progress on global policies on pollution, social policy, trade policy, peace keeping, science policy, disease prevention and much more will be retarded.

Copyright. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Ottawa, Canada, 2000.

www.saragassocity.com

www.dramatispersonae.org

Epilogue

There are many challenges ahead for our city-states. It should be clear from our discussion today that city-states are pretty important to the economic and socio-political future of nation-states.

Let’s have a look at some of the biggest challenges ahead.

A. Complexity

When systems become too large and too complex, they have a tendency to break down. Even before the events of September 11^th, 2001, I thought that the hub and spoke system of US Airlines was becoming too complex and was operating too close to capacity. It became inherently unstable and could be easily disrupted.

Cities must operate within the limits of complexity of large systems. The diagram below shows my take on what happens as systems become larger.

As the number of components increases, complexity probably increase linearly. It is my experience though that after a certain threshold complexity increases non linearly. Entrepreneurs can successfully operate in the range from n(1) to n(2). As the number of components increases, however, and complexity accelerates, you need large bureaucracies and a great deal of system and process to be able to cope.

Entrepreneurs often assume that they can scale up their enterprise with more of the same seat-of-the-pants management style (Mitel’s SX 2000 comes to mind). This is not so.

NASA’s moon shot and the early years of the US nuclear missile program are examples of this. Critical Path Scheduling techniques were invented to assist the latter, which was mind bogglingly complex.

Once you get beyond what one person or a very small group can hold in their minds, you get into a no go realm, where catastrophic failure can occur.

Calcutta comes to mind.

B. Terrorism

Wherever large groups of people congregate, there is the possibility of terrorism.

There may be pressure to disperse activities—downtowns may suffer, suburbs may flourish. There will be a tendency to build at lower densities and lower building heights.

There is no doubt that dispersed populations are harder to hit with conventional or biological weapons. It would be too bad if we can’t build great cities which require density to achieve the kinds of synergy that we talked about above.

C. Environment

To me, cities are a key to environmental protection. By putting people in vertical cities, we have a chance to control their emissions.

The emptying out of the capital city of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge showed what happens when more than two million people are loosed on the countryside. Every woodland is destroyed and countries that deforest themselves are economically ruined.

D. Energy

Cities need energy to work, clean, dependable energy. This is probably the biggest challenge ahead for cities.

I learned a new word this year: ‘hazmat’, as in the hazmat team has been called in to decontaminate the postal office.

Languages change very rapidly and there is no way to reliable communicate with people who may live here 500 or 5,000 years from now. It is an intractable problem so we can’t store nuclear wastes for 100,000 years in a safe manner—people have short attention spans. We need to find energy solutions that don’t require this kind of persistent attention. We need energy that doesn’t cause climate change either.

E. NIMBY’s

City-building is an exercise in optimism. The NIMBY crowd hate change—they are motivated by fear and greed: fear of change and greedy to protect their property values.

Dennis Miller defined an environmentalist as someone who has a cabin in the woods and a developer as someone who would like to have a cabin in the woods.

Anytime you freeze the city’s boundaries and resist change you get the bubble economy of Japan circa the 1980s. You limit the creativity of folks and damage your economy.

Private property rights and a financial system of unlocking real capital values underpins our city-state economies and are the best sources of protection for the environment. The former Soviet Union was one of the worst environmental offenders and third world economies have no way of placing home and land mortgages which is the primary souce of entrepreneurial micro capital.

F. Political Stucture

In Canada, there are only two levels of government under the BNA Act—federal and provincial. Municipal governments are wholly creatures of the provinces and have no independent constitutional existence.

Their sources of finance are largely tied to property taxes which limits their scope of action.

G. Public Transport

Without light rail or subways, cities will suffer. Cities can’t finance these pieces of infrastructure and they don’t push high enough densities to make them work properly.

H. Leadership

Democratic abuse is rampant at the local level—politicians are afraid to make decisions because a very small number of upset voters can change election results since so few people bother to vote in municipal elections.

I. Zoning Codes

James Howard Kunstler said if you want to build Livable Cities like your parents and grandparents did, you first have to burn your zoning codes.

Urban design is too important to leave to urban planners.