On Beggars and Choosers

[ryan_mcgreal]

http://www.raisethehammer.org/blog/1005

I'm reading Richard Florida's new book Who's Your City?, and it's an absolute banquet of insights into how cities work and how to make them work better, backed by robust statistical data from a variety of innovative sources (yes, statistical analysis is a creative endeavour).

It's already opened up several new (to me, at least) avenues of research and focus, but I'd like to jump in with one section that seems particularly a propos given the major cusp on which Hamilton currently balances.

It's tempting to comment (snidely) that Who's Your City? reads like a litany of what Hamilton is doing wrong, but aside from being trite, it's not strictly true.

Hamilton is a seething mess of ambivalence, conflict and cross-purposes between the local, regional, and global trends and movements buffeting us. Whether and how we decide to respond to these forces will go a long way toward determining whether we slide into crisis or flourish in an urban renaissance.

With that in mind, I'll quote a section (pp. 162-3) that addresses what our goals ought to be:

[S]ome urban experts and community leaders remain convinced that only basic needs matter. They key to a great community, they contend, lies in good schools, safe streets, and upt-to-date infrastructure. Anything else - parks, trails, museums, or other amenities - is a luxury, aimed at the affluent, yuppies, and the privileged classes. Or they say it's something that comes only when a community is already rich. Jobs and basic services are what's needed to generate wealth and income. The rest is what we pay for with the resources so generated.

...[T]hey're wrong. The places that make us truly happy don't get trapped in any such tradeoff. they do it all, providing great schools, safe streets, and nice parks, to boot.

Far from being the product of great communities, such amenities are actually a cause and requirement for great communities. Florida's research identified five major essential community dimensions that contribute to success (in order of significance):

1. Basic services - schools, health care, housing, roads, infrastructure, public transportation.

2. Beauty and aesthetics - beautiful buildings, streetscapes, trees, parks, trails, air quality, opportunities to create and share beautiful things.

3. Openness - tolerance for and acceptance of people with various lifestyles (families with children, gays and lesbians, bohemians, seniors, people living in poverty, recent college graduates, immigrants, minorities), opportunities to meet people and form relationships.

4. Physical and economic security - safe, clean neighbourhoods, good job opportunities, a growing economy and general optimism.

5. Leadership - leaders are honest, accountable, positive, forward-looking, effective, and responsive, and citizens feel engaged.

To be perfectly clear, Florida argues that successful cities do well in all five of these categories, and by corollary that all five are essential to a successful city.

What do you think?

How does Hamilton measure up on these five categories? What are our strengths? What do we need to improve? What are the obstacles to progress? How do we get past those obstacles?

[astroblaster]

sorry.. this is going to be slightly off topic, but I haven't read this book yet so I can't comment specifically.

I've heard Richard Florida mentioned a few times, I think I'm going to pick these books up soon.

Looking at the description of his other major book "The Rise of the Creative Class" -- it seems extremely relevant to the Hammer.

rough points about members of "the creative class" & hamilton:

- scientists (makes me think MAC Innovation center)

- engineers, architects, (MAC's awesome engineering program, whose graduates all move away to work)

- educators, (why doesn't hamilton have a teacher's college? so many of my friends had to move away to attend TC somewhere else)

- writers, artists, and entertainers (i think Hamilton does pretty well in the Arts department, comparatively.... lets keep up the good work!)

[realcity]

Given Richard Florida's "five major essential community dimensions" it seems that the City of Hamilton is

90% concerned with point 1
and 10% concerned with point 2

leaving nothing except for lip service for 3,4, & 5

[adam]

I think we just have to give our city some time and we're on the right track with most of these...


1. We need to work on the public transportation aspect, but we have some of the best hospitals in Ontario (St. Joe's, McMaster, Chedoke), roads are slowly being converted to 2 way and they go through all the right places, schools are okay, housing caters to people at all different levels except the very poor.

2. We have beauty and aesthetics in spades. Hamilton has great bones that other cities would die for... architecture that is varied in style and in great shape, the escarpment, princess point, the bayfront

3. Openness - When I first moved to Hamilton 2 years ago, I couldn't get over how friendly people were. Try saying "hello" to someone in Toronto and see how far you get. - Hamilton has a very high immigration rate. I know some newly landed immigrants and they say the city is great.

4. This is our biggest downfall in my opinion. We have failed to attract businesses and consequently jobs for our citizens. This has got to change if we are to be successful as a city. Neighbourhoods are safe, but unfortunately they are perceived dangerous by everyone who doesn't live here.

5. We have a good leader in office right now, and he's come up against a lot of resistance. Things are getting better.

[raisethehammer]

yea, I agree.
Hamilton is pretty darn good in these areas.
I think drawing the good investment back into the city is our biggest challenge and slowly we're getting there.

[omro]

As someone moving there early next year and only been there for a week this year:

1) I know very little about the basic services, something I'll have to find out about when I get there, but the housing looks good and the infrastructure and transport are improving.

2) The city has fantastic architecture showing off it's heritage as a wealthy industrial city. I hope it'll get greener and more aesthetically pleasing over time. If it would kowtow less to the car in terms of road and parking....

3) Haven't a clue how open the city is to newcomers, but the people on this forum have been friendly. I have family there and hope to make some new friends. Being gay, I would hope that the city is not too closed minded about such things!

4) I've heard horror stories about crime and so on, but it seems quite safe to me when I was walking home to the hotel late at night. However, showing common sense and sticking to well light thoroughfares is the rule in all cities! My family have no issues living there and they are just off the "dreaded" Barton Street.

5) Can't comment too much on the leadership, as they seem to be heading in the right direction on some things (LRT for example), but in the wrong direction on others (turning farm land into industrial land around the airport, rather than reusing existing industrial lands as the older industries die out).

[drpgq]

I think that Florida sometimes mixes up correlation and causation. I've also noticed a habit of him telling cities what they want to hear.

That said, I'm also optimistic about the Mac Innovation Park. When I did engineering at Mac I always thought it would make sense to have an office park close by like the University of Waterloo. Now finally there's a logical place for a startup company that wants to be close to Mac. Now the only problem is trying to get the Mac Eng faculty to be more entrepreneurial and less paper mill oriented.

[BCTed]

Originally Posted by drpgq

I think that Florida sometimes mixes up correlation and causation.

Agreed. Lots of people on this site do the same thing.