©
The world is going to hell in a hand-basket, but then it always is, so why waste time thinking about the antics of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke or Paul Volker? One hopes they’re clever enough to solve the problems they helped create.
Down here on planet Earth we ordinary mortals are left to deal with the artifacts left by past generations of empire builders. As a kid I was always fascinated by the forgotten old buildings down by the waterfront or along the main street—the warehouses, old office buildings and railway stations now abandoned or semi-occupied.
One of these buildings was the Grain Exchange building in downtown Fort William. Built in the early 1900s, it was a solid, five-story red brick structure with ornate white overhangs, but never did become a home for the grain trade. Instead it was filled with insurance brokers’ and lawyers’ offices and a big local department store on the main floor.
By the time I was a teenager the family-owned department store was on its last legs, overtaken by the international department store chains like Sears. In fact the entire downtown was overtaken—by new shopping malls located in the suburbs. Today, the shells of the old downtown and old department store are still there. But little past glory or activity remains. The entire downtown area has been given over to social services offices, homeless shelters and discount stores.
Being a young idealist, I wanted somehow to renew that grand old building, and the dying downtown area, too. Sadly, even then I realized that chain store and franchise owners wanted gleaming new facilities and so did their customers. There was no business case in renovating old retail space. It was cheaper and better for marketing to simply build new.
We saw a newer version of this trend on our last trip to the States. There, right beside the Target store in Bangor, is the empty hulk of the old Home Depot. It’s a perfectly acceptable building, and relatively new, but I guess the ashtrays must have been full, because the new Home Depot store, which looks nearly identical to the old one, is now doing a thriving business about a half-mile away.
Further down the Eastern Seaboard we stopped in Lawrence, Massachusetts to pick up a stove part. It wasn’t hard to figure the place out, even though we’d never been there before. A wide canal ran through the middle of the town, and flanking the canal were dozens of red brick factories—all five or six storeys high and running a block long. Cotton factories, I’d guess. Today they’re all but deserted. Here and there amid the red brick facades, we could make out a Miller beer sign or a Spaghetti Factory-type restaurant sign, an anemic effort to recover some value from the buildings.
The real factories, of course, have all migrated overseas to southeast Asia, China, Mexico and Brazil, and along with them the manufacturing jobs. That’s where Paulson, Bernanke and Volker do come in to the picture, because they know what’s happened to the American economy. It’s gone south. And every other direction.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are building at an astounding rate. They’ve cornered the world’s construction cranes. They’re building 2000 coal-fired electric generating stations a year. Their GDP has been growing at near double-digit rates—while their government has kept their currency value artificially low to keep their export sales soaring upward. The net effect has been the growing indebtedness and impoverishment of the average American consumer. With the bursting of real estate values, that beleaguered US consumer now has a mountain of debt and zero equity—but lots of great Chinese gadgets and clothing in the closets.
It’s not the fault of the Chinese. The average Chinese worker wants to get ahead as much or more than her US counterpart—and so does the Chinese government. That’s just the way of the world. And the world runs on money.
Here at home the lack of money is painfully obvious. Undeveloped lots and storefronts on main street sit empty for years. Every so often a new project will come along to help solve the problem. A new arena or civic centre will replace a city block of decaying old stores. A government building will inject some new life on main street.
I visited the far end of this thought this week. I took a pre-season tour of Ministers Island, Canadian railway builder Sir William Van Horne’s summer estate. Built in the late 1800s it was design tour de force, a modern marvel of technology with wind generators, high tech farming operations livestock breeding programs and solidly built, world-class architecture.
Today, none of its technology is operational. The buildings are in a poor state of repair and the island is completely underutilized. It’s a sad thing. And daunting too—if one were to consider restoring it. The effort would take years and tens of millions of dollars. After rebuilding it, what would prevent it from falling into ruin again? What activities would generate the money needed to maintain it?
A few miles away is the town’s arena. Back in the 1960s it was state-of-the-art, too. It had an 8-lane bowling alley, a movie theatre, curling rink, hockey rink, dining hall, residential rooms and more. Most of it is still there, though the bowling alley has been dismantled to make room for a call centre, which generates more income for the arena. The trouble is, the arena is expensive to operate and maintain. For example, a new roof takes several hundred thousands of dollars. And income is scarce. It will become even more scarce when it is forced to compete with the town next door when it opens its brand new civic centre.
All of these past glories were built on financial windfalls. The railway baron’s dream cottage. The arena built by wealthy philanthropists. A new civic centre funded in large part by the government. Each dream was great in the beginning. The difficulty comes with maintaining the dream—keep up that Ferrari on a Kia budget.
We’ve managed to overbuild the entire planet in the same way, and if the environmental degradation continues at the same pace, we’ll be lucky if the whole place only looks as bad as Hopper’s broken dreams painting. The reality could be a lot worse.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Organizations and Organic Self-Interest
©
His e-mails are incredibly long—and arrive in bunches of two or three a day. Of course I enjoy reading them, but sometimes it’s just too much. He covers everything from the Rothschild banking conspiracy to the social reform of the late Buckminster Fuller, and peppers them with links to YouTube and the TED Talks.
The writer in question is an old friend I met in the UK years ago. He’s a really interesting guy who just happens to be a total misfit in the real world. He can’t seem to hold down a normal job, which is just as well; if he did he’d be a lot less entertaining. His other friends must think so too. One older couple, a retired doctor and his wife temporarily donated a cottage to him. Another professional couple put him up periodically in their guesthouse. A young investor friend of his just paid his way to Europe for a few weeks.
From what I can tell, his friends don’t gain anything from supporting him, other than listening to his never-ending stream-of-consciousness flow of ideas. So there’s no enlightened self-interest on their part. Nor can I ferret out much enlightened self interest on his part either. He never stays long enough with any one friend to have a secure home base, and he’s always living a bit hand to mouth. Like some struggling artist or a poet, he’s always on the verge of being destitute.
But if there’s no enlightened self-interest, there is some kind of organic symbiosis that supports him. Somehow, his social circle always expands to accommodate his peculiar needs at just the right moment in time. Still, I have to wonder how much of this he engineers vs. how much things simply work out for him serendipitously. What I’ve concluded after watching him all these years is this: he doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t consciously engineer relationships. He just kind of “grows” toward the next new thing.
Coincidentally, I’ve also noticed this in business—and I think everybody does this to a greater or lesser extent. For example, a while back I heard a couple of older career guys talking about getting their kids through college. Each of them started off bragging up their own kid’s achievements, then moved on to comparing notes, and finally probing mutual opportunities for their kids, discussing how each might be able to hire the other’s kids for summer jobs. It wasn’t really calculated nepotism—it was more like an organic need finding an organic opportunity.
My English conspiracy-theory friend would beg to differ, I think. He’d view this as a low-level version of some elite compact, in which everyone at a certain level has an unspoken understanding of the game, and gets free access to privilege. He’d see it all as social engineering.
In my more naïve moments, I’d like to believe that most of us don’t have the time or the inclination to actually work at pressing our social advantage to the max. Or even to organically grow their advantages. In my naïve moments, I’d like to believe that everyone follows the rules and doesn’t try to “tilt” the pinball machine.
But I guess on reflection, I have to admit that maybe my English friend is speaking from experience. Perhaps he’s engineering his relationships more than I suspect, which is why he has such a low tolerance for others doing the same thing, particularly those he identifies as “elites”.
So the lines between blatant self-interest, enlightened self-interest and what I would call organic opportunism are pretty grey and fuzzy. And why would anyone bother to figure it out? Good question. I suppose it’s because a person’s motive actually matters to the rest of us.
We’ve all seen this in business and politics many times over—especially when there is ample opportunity with little supervision. Here in southwestern New Brunswick there’s a shortage of skilled workers—as well as a shortage of high paying jobs. So there’s a great temptation, if one is a boss, to hand out jobs to reasonably qualified friends and relatives rather that doing an intensive search for the right candidate.
There’s also the temptation, and I’ve seen this one in action especially among those whose egos border on the god-like, to unilaterally take control of organizations by constricting the flow communications and then quietly setting one’s agenda in motion. Usually there are plenty of organic opportunities available. These could include the availability of a large temporary pool of money or the presence of a lucrative contract and a narrow window of time in which to spend the funds. Alternatively, budget shortfalls present other organic opportunities, such as getting rid of staff members that one subconsciously doesn’t like.
And it’s not just money. Power and control are just as organically compelling as a cash advantage. I’ve seen power-fixated individuals worm their way into organizations in very strange ways. Over-supervision can become an addiction with these people—probing computer files and e-mail, monitoring phone calls, even sifting through the trash to gain some sort of advantage on the job. It’s pretty sad, really.
Yet there can be a lot of abuse on the job that necessitates supervision. Drinking on the job, stealing company supplies, hijacking cheques, misuse of company vehicles and equipment are everyday occurrences. A lot of this too, is not intentional. It’s just part of an organic impulse to take advantage of a lax situation.
The modern view is best defined as “situational ethics”. In a world where everything is relative, we are able to tolerate a certain level of organic opportunism. Above a certain threshold the rules kick in.
I’d have to say that such relativism is a positive survival mechanism, which allows societies to function smoothly. We’re probably not operating that much differently from beehives, ant colonies, wolf packs or gorilla tribes.
Where it gets to be a problem is when an individual’s natural organic opportunism begins to impinge on the organic success of the group. Hopefully, the presence of conscience, or Jung’s idea of a punishing superego, will keep most of us revisiting our motivations and keep our worst impulses in check.
Better yet, it’s cooler to just concentrate on all the great things that need to get done.
His e-mails are incredibly long—and arrive in bunches of two or three a day. Of course I enjoy reading them, but sometimes it’s just too much. He covers everything from the Rothschild banking conspiracy to the social reform of the late Buckminster Fuller, and peppers them with links to YouTube and the TED Talks.
The writer in question is an old friend I met in the UK years ago. He’s a really interesting guy who just happens to be a total misfit in the real world. He can’t seem to hold down a normal job, which is just as well; if he did he’d be a lot less entertaining. His other friends must think so too. One older couple, a retired doctor and his wife temporarily donated a cottage to him. Another professional couple put him up periodically in their guesthouse. A young investor friend of his just paid his way to Europe for a few weeks.
From what I can tell, his friends don’t gain anything from supporting him, other than listening to his never-ending stream-of-consciousness flow of ideas. So there’s no enlightened self-interest on their part. Nor can I ferret out much enlightened self interest on his part either. He never stays long enough with any one friend to have a secure home base, and he’s always living a bit hand to mouth. Like some struggling artist or a poet, he’s always on the verge of being destitute.
But if there’s no enlightened self-interest, there is some kind of organic symbiosis that supports him. Somehow, his social circle always expands to accommodate his peculiar needs at just the right moment in time. Still, I have to wonder how much of this he engineers vs. how much things simply work out for him serendipitously. What I’ve concluded after watching him all these years is this: he doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t consciously engineer relationships. He just kind of “grows” toward the next new thing.
Coincidentally, I’ve also noticed this in business—and I think everybody does this to a greater or lesser extent. For example, a while back I heard a couple of older career guys talking about getting their kids through college. Each of them started off bragging up their own kid’s achievements, then moved on to comparing notes, and finally probing mutual opportunities for their kids, discussing how each might be able to hire the other’s kids for summer jobs. It wasn’t really calculated nepotism—it was more like an organic need finding an organic opportunity.
My English conspiracy-theory friend would beg to differ, I think. He’d view this as a low-level version of some elite compact, in which everyone at a certain level has an unspoken understanding of the game, and gets free access to privilege. He’d see it all as social engineering.
In my more naïve moments, I’d like to believe that most of us don’t have the time or the inclination to actually work at pressing our social advantage to the max. Or even to organically grow their advantages. In my naïve moments, I’d like to believe that everyone follows the rules and doesn’t try to “tilt” the pinball machine.
But I guess on reflection, I have to admit that maybe my English friend is speaking from experience. Perhaps he’s engineering his relationships more than I suspect, which is why he has such a low tolerance for others doing the same thing, particularly those he identifies as “elites”.
So the lines between blatant self-interest, enlightened self-interest and what I would call organic opportunism are pretty grey and fuzzy. And why would anyone bother to figure it out? Good question. I suppose it’s because a person’s motive actually matters to the rest of us.
We’ve all seen this in business and politics many times over—especially when there is ample opportunity with little supervision. Here in southwestern New Brunswick there’s a shortage of skilled workers—as well as a shortage of high paying jobs. So there’s a great temptation, if one is a boss, to hand out jobs to reasonably qualified friends and relatives rather that doing an intensive search for the right candidate.
There’s also the temptation, and I’ve seen this one in action especially among those whose egos border on the god-like, to unilaterally take control of organizations by constricting the flow communications and then quietly setting one’s agenda in motion. Usually there are plenty of organic opportunities available. These could include the availability of a large temporary pool of money or the presence of a lucrative contract and a narrow window of time in which to spend the funds. Alternatively, budget shortfalls present other organic opportunities, such as getting rid of staff members that one subconsciously doesn’t like.
And it’s not just money. Power and control are just as organically compelling as a cash advantage. I’ve seen power-fixated individuals worm their way into organizations in very strange ways. Over-supervision can become an addiction with these people—probing computer files and e-mail, monitoring phone calls, even sifting through the trash to gain some sort of advantage on the job. It’s pretty sad, really.
Yet there can be a lot of abuse on the job that necessitates supervision. Drinking on the job, stealing company supplies, hijacking cheques, misuse of company vehicles and equipment are everyday occurrences. A lot of this too, is not intentional. It’s just part of an organic impulse to take advantage of a lax situation.
The modern view is best defined as “situational ethics”. In a world where everything is relative, we are able to tolerate a certain level of organic opportunism. Above a certain threshold the rules kick in.
I’d have to say that such relativism is a positive survival mechanism, which allows societies to function smoothly. We’re probably not operating that much differently from beehives, ant colonies, wolf packs or gorilla tribes.
Where it gets to be a problem is when an individual’s natural organic opportunism begins to impinge on the organic success of the group. Hopefully, the presence of conscience, or Jung’s idea of a punishing superego, will keep most of us revisiting our motivations and keep our worst impulses in check.
Better yet, it’s cooler to just concentrate on all the great things that need to get done.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Mortality is the only way to go
©
Gracie was the softest. Softest skin, softest coat. Softest eyes. That's the way of puppies. They hook you on their softness, and then their playfulness, and that's how Gracie reeled in our whole family.
She scooted out the front door on Monday, ran across the yard barking at a woman on the other side of the street. Seconds later she was in front of a pickup truck, then under it with a sickening thud, then under the back wheel. She rolled over and began to run back toward me, drunkenly, and I thought that she might be okay, despite her panicked yelping. I picked her up and she quieted as I carried her back to the house. I felt my leg go warm and looked down to see that her bladder had emptied down my leg.
She didn't make it of course, and the whole family was devastated. It's impossible to gauge the importance of a puppy on children until something like this happens. And what can you say to a broken-hearted kid? There's no reason she died, no noble cause, no teaching-learning moment. It's just the dark painful side of being born.
Because of Gracie, I've been making connections. Connections like the recent news of Natasha Richardson's head injury on the beginner's ski hill in Montreal. It was just another random accident, and there was no purpose to her death either. She's left a hole in the lives of her two children and famous husband, but she'll soon be forgotten as the media moves to other stories.
When death comes close to you, though, you don't forget. When someone or something close to you dies, a black hole opens in your heart and never seems to close over. And as you get older there are more black holes as more friends leave. I'm not sure it gets any easier, and I think many people harden their hearts along the way.
It's different when you're young. I can still remember my first taste at age 16 when someone I knew from high school dances, Carol McCutcheon, was killed instantly when her boyfriend's car crossed a level crossing and got hit by a locomotive. Entire high schools grieved for her. I know we all wanted to grieve, and there were tears everywhere, but in reality it all felt so unreal. I'd felt far more shock and heartache, when at age 6, my first dog was hit and killed by a delivery truck. I blamed that driver for years, and mourned that scruffy dog for a decade or more.
Since then there've been a lot of gaps. In my early 20s I was having tea with my girlfriend's grandmother when she quietly died of a heart attack. Ten years later my photographer got off work early one Friday afternoon with friends, had a few drinks and on the way home their driver wrapped the car around a tree. He was in the passenger seat up front. He lasted for three weeks in a coma, then drifted away. A decade later my brother died of cancer leaving behind a young family. After that a very close friend of mine died in her early 50s of a brain tumor. In the last few years two more friends died, both from pancreatic cancer. In between all my grandparents passed away. Their passing came with less aching, they were older after all, but the gaps are still there.
Somehow I thought that I'd left all this behind when we moved east. But that hasn't been the case. Both Sharon's parents died within the space of a year. And three acquaintances of mine have passed on: Chuck Schom, a scientist, ecologist and whale watcher, Wilfred Carter, a biologist and internationally recognized salmon conservationist, and Hank Mulder, web designer, long time computer science guy and writer. Although very different men who died at different stages of life, all were very unique, very special. Of the three I had more dealings with Wilf Carter, and I am sure I am not the only one who would characterize him as an exceptionally fine and gentle man.
Standing there with Gracie dying in my arms, I didn't want to feel anything. My defenses were up; I'd been through all this before. I thought about the truck driver, that woman standing across the street and how Sharon and the kids were going to feel. By the time we took her home from the vet's and quietly buried her in the woods between the tiny shoots of crocuses piercing the wet ground, I'd let down my guard, and it all came pouring in, or pouring out. Not just for Gracie, but all the life I'd lost.
It's kind of fitting, I suppose, to have these thoughts on Easter week. I grieve like a Christian; I was raised with the crucifixion and the resurrection and the whole thought of redemption. If I were raised a Buddhist, I'd be getting rid of my attachments to ego and to this life of suffering. Instead of affirming my attachment to redemption, I'd be seeking the negation of attachment. I'd be a different person, differently attached to life.
There are important distinctions between cultures, I think. We post-Christian Christians are still trying to “save the world”. Or Eastern brothers and sisters don't see it the same way at all. The world is not there to be saved—it is there to be transcended. To them the world is a place from which they (we all) escape. And that's a significant spiritual shift. I imagine that post-religious Eastern people still have that paradigm of escape and transcendence hardwired into their collective nature.
So I wonder, is grief different for them? Are they less attached to their families and lovers? I don't know. Not being a sociologist, I couldn't say. My own take on it is simply this: under the cultural veneer, I think all human beings, in fact all living things, share a strong bond to this short life and the things in it that are close to them. How could it be otherwise? We all long to be attached in the deepest way. The real disappointment is not death, but the failure to live these small mortal lives of ours to the wildest, craziest, absolute fullest extent.
This one's for you Gracie dear. Night night.
Gracie was the softest. Softest skin, softest coat. Softest eyes. That's the way of puppies. They hook you on their softness, and then their playfulness, and that's how Gracie reeled in our whole family.
She scooted out the front door on Monday, ran across the yard barking at a woman on the other side of the street. Seconds later she was in front of a pickup truck, then under it with a sickening thud, then under the back wheel. She rolled over and began to run back toward me, drunkenly, and I thought that she might be okay, despite her panicked yelping. I picked her up and she quieted as I carried her back to the house. I felt my leg go warm and looked down to see that her bladder had emptied down my leg.
She didn't make it of course, and the whole family was devastated. It's impossible to gauge the importance of a puppy on children until something like this happens. And what can you say to a broken-hearted kid? There's no reason she died, no noble cause, no teaching-learning moment. It's just the dark painful side of being born.
Because of Gracie, I've been making connections. Connections like the recent news of Natasha Richardson's head injury on the beginner's ski hill in Montreal. It was just another random accident, and there was no purpose to her death either. She's left a hole in the lives of her two children and famous husband, but she'll soon be forgotten as the media moves to other stories.
When death comes close to you, though, you don't forget. When someone or something close to you dies, a black hole opens in your heart and never seems to close over. And as you get older there are more black holes as more friends leave. I'm not sure it gets any easier, and I think many people harden their hearts along the way.
It's different when you're young. I can still remember my first taste at age 16 when someone I knew from high school dances, Carol McCutcheon, was killed instantly when her boyfriend's car crossed a level crossing and got hit by a locomotive. Entire high schools grieved for her. I know we all wanted to grieve, and there were tears everywhere, but in reality it all felt so unreal. I'd felt far more shock and heartache, when at age 6, my first dog was hit and killed by a delivery truck. I blamed that driver for years, and mourned that scruffy dog for a decade or more.
Since then there've been a lot of gaps. In my early 20s I was having tea with my girlfriend's grandmother when she quietly died of a heart attack. Ten years later my photographer got off work early one Friday afternoon with friends, had a few drinks and on the way home their driver wrapped the car around a tree. He was in the passenger seat up front. He lasted for three weeks in a coma, then drifted away. A decade later my brother died of cancer leaving behind a young family. After that a very close friend of mine died in her early 50s of a brain tumor. In the last few years two more friends died, both from pancreatic cancer. In between all my grandparents passed away. Their passing came with less aching, they were older after all, but the gaps are still there.
Somehow I thought that I'd left all this behind when we moved east. But that hasn't been the case. Both Sharon's parents died within the space of a year. And three acquaintances of mine have passed on: Chuck Schom, a scientist, ecologist and whale watcher, Wilfred Carter, a biologist and internationally recognized salmon conservationist, and Hank Mulder, web designer, long time computer science guy and writer. Although very different men who died at different stages of life, all were very unique, very special. Of the three I had more dealings with Wilf Carter, and I am sure I am not the only one who would characterize him as an exceptionally fine and gentle man.
Standing there with Gracie dying in my arms, I didn't want to feel anything. My defenses were up; I'd been through all this before. I thought about the truck driver, that woman standing across the street and how Sharon and the kids were going to feel. By the time we took her home from the vet's and quietly buried her in the woods between the tiny shoots of crocuses piercing the wet ground, I'd let down my guard, and it all came pouring in, or pouring out. Not just for Gracie, but all the life I'd lost.
It's kind of fitting, I suppose, to have these thoughts on Easter week. I grieve like a Christian; I was raised with the crucifixion and the resurrection and the whole thought of redemption. If I were raised a Buddhist, I'd be getting rid of my attachments to ego and to this life of suffering. Instead of affirming my attachment to redemption, I'd be seeking the negation of attachment. I'd be a different person, differently attached to life.
There are important distinctions between cultures, I think. We post-Christian Christians are still trying to “save the world”. Or Eastern brothers and sisters don't see it the same way at all. The world is not there to be saved—it is there to be transcended. To them the world is a place from which they (we all) escape. And that's a significant spiritual shift. I imagine that post-religious Eastern people still have that paradigm of escape and transcendence hardwired into their collective nature.
So I wonder, is grief different for them? Are they less attached to their families and lovers? I don't know. Not being a sociologist, I couldn't say. My own take on it is simply this: under the cultural veneer, I think all human beings, in fact all living things, share a strong bond to this short life and the things in it that are close to them. How could it be otherwise? We all long to be attached in the deepest way. The real disappointment is not death, but the failure to live these small mortal lives of ours to the wildest, craziest, absolute fullest extent.
This one's for you Gracie dear. Night night.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Organic nature of urban redevelopment
©
The Hollywood Ranch Market was the centre of downtown Hollywood. I don’t know if it still is. But it was when I was there a long time ago. And as I recall it was open late, maybe even 24-7. It was the one place you could run into stars and starlets wearing shades at 3:00 a.m.
Here in St. Stephen, the town where I live, you don’t bump into starlets downtown. And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone at all on main street at 3:00 a.m. But that may change, because I understand that downtown rejuvenation is once again a top priority for the town.
I learned this when I bumped into an old acquaintance at the Scoops ice cream shop, which, along with the two pizza restaurants, seems to be the actual heart of our downtown. As we got our kids cones on a Sunday afternoon, he gave me his thoughts about urban renewal in St. Stephen, especially in light of the new, proposed civic centre, which is being planned for the downtown area. His idea was to knock down a lot of the unsightly old buildings to make way for the new.
His idea caught me by surprise. After all, I’d spent a year looking at downtown development, and had done a couple of public presentations on the decline of the main street, and an interest in urban redevelopment. In my view, the old buildings are not the problem, they’re the opportunity. If anything, there are too few old buildings remaining downtown.
The trouble with urban renewal is its complexity. If you’ve ever played Sim City (a computer game in which you build and manage your own city) you know exactly what I mean. If taxes are too high people move away and your town dies. Too few police stations, schools, hospitals, sports and recreational facilities, the same thing. And that’s just a game. Real life is much more difficult.
So, what are the complexities of this downtown, or any urban centre, for that matter? First, the centre has to have real resonance for people; it has to be a living, breathing place. One of the key indicators is food. Saint John, which has a good downtown (uptown), has a large indoor market at its centre. Like the Hollywood market, the Saint John market anchors all the other activities of the area. Another hallmark of a living downtown is walkability, and viable, locally-owned shops—shops as attractions and a source of entertainment. Well, St. Stephen is virtually unwalkable, and has a very low density of local shops.
The actual centre of St. Stephen is the new box store area around Kent, the Superstore, Sobey’s and Canadian Tire. Our walkable community happens inside, along the store aisles of box stores, or outside in the grim, expansive parking lots as we walk back to our cars. In most cases, there is no need to go downtown. Whatever isn’t available in box store land, is available across the river in the U.S. at Wal-Mart. It’s almost the perfect modern existence. So, why would we need or want a downtown?
Frankly, families with kids or old people don’t really need an urban downtown. They need to be able to park their cars close to handy shopping, buy stuff at the lowest prices possible, and go home. Sure, they may want and actually need a civic centre for fitness and recreation, but that doesn’t translate into a need for a downtown experience. So who does want or need a downtown?
Working professionals and young people seem to thrive in a downtown environment. Government workers, lawyers, artists, engineers, designers, bankers, all kinds of professionals work well in the downtown collective. Young people tend to enter the job market in downtown urban environments, a fact I always notice when visiting downtown Toronto, where few workers seem to be over the age of 40.
When I first visited the problem of redeveloping the downtown core of St. Stephen about 5 years ago, my first priority was looking at the potential for young people to participate in the downtown renewal experience. So what does one need to attract young people, I wondered. Well, the first thing would be to have an available pool of young people to begin with, which I think is a real challenge in the area. Most bright young people here seem to go away to college and never return.
The second thing is to have easy-entry opportunities for the young people who are interested. That means cheap rental space or real estate in high-traffic pedestrian areas. That’s a challenge in St. Stephen, where most of the real estate is owned by a few individuals, rents are not exactly dirt cheap, and pedestrian traffic is at an all time low. The situation in neighbouring St. Andrews is better relative to pedestrian traffic, but the high real estate costs pose a real barrier to entry for young people.
It’s no secret that shifting cultural values affect urban environments. Here in Charlotte County, we have an aging population. Aging retailers and business owners, most of whom have no pension plans, can’t afford to sell their businesses at rock bottom prices. Their nest eggs are tied up in their businesses, and most young people can’t afford to buy out those nest eggs.
Young people today are not the same as young people in the past. Today’s graduates have much higher professional aspirations, preferring good jobs in established corporations, or glamorous creative careers in big cities. Those who do migrate to small towns may have a difficult fit. Because old people are not the same either.
Old people are no longer old, for one thing. For another, they have a sense of entitlement that forms an unspoken barrier to entry. For example, when financially comfortable retirees move to waterfront homes and condos close to small downtown areas, the last thing they want is noise coming from busy youth bistros at 12:30 a.m. on a quiet summer night. But busy bistros are exactly what young people want, and healthy downtown cultures require.
Of course, a town like St. Stephen should be so lucky. It has neither affluent retirees living downtown, nor artsy bistro-going youth.
If there is any answer, it’s not in knocking down old buildings and building more expensive new ones. It’s in understanding the social and cultural elements required to build lively downtown areas.
The Hollywood Ranch Market was the centre of downtown Hollywood. I don’t know if it still is. But it was when I was there a long time ago. And as I recall it was open late, maybe even 24-7. It was the one place you could run into stars and starlets wearing shades at 3:00 a.m.
Here in St. Stephen, the town where I live, you don’t bump into starlets downtown. And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone at all on main street at 3:00 a.m. But that may change, because I understand that downtown rejuvenation is once again a top priority for the town.
I learned this when I bumped into an old acquaintance at the Scoops ice cream shop, which, along with the two pizza restaurants, seems to be the actual heart of our downtown. As we got our kids cones on a Sunday afternoon, he gave me his thoughts about urban renewal in St. Stephen, especially in light of the new, proposed civic centre, which is being planned for the downtown area. His idea was to knock down a lot of the unsightly old buildings to make way for the new.
His idea caught me by surprise. After all, I’d spent a year looking at downtown development, and had done a couple of public presentations on the decline of the main street, and an interest in urban redevelopment. In my view, the old buildings are not the problem, they’re the opportunity. If anything, there are too few old buildings remaining downtown.
The trouble with urban renewal is its complexity. If you’ve ever played Sim City (a computer game in which you build and manage your own city) you know exactly what I mean. If taxes are too high people move away and your town dies. Too few police stations, schools, hospitals, sports and recreational facilities, the same thing. And that’s just a game. Real life is much more difficult.
So, what are the complexities of this downtown, or any urban centre, for that matter? First, the centre has to have real resonance for people; it has to be a living, breathing place. One of the key indicators is food. Saint John, which has a good downtown (uptown), has a large indoor market at its centre. Like the Hollywood market, the Saint John market anchors all the other activities of the area. Another hallmark of a living downtown is walkability, and viable, locally-owned shops—shops as attractions and a source of entertainment. Well, St. Stephen is virtually unwalkable, and has a very low density of local shops.
The actual centre of St. Stephen is the new box store area around Kent, the Superstore, Sobey’s and Canadian Tire. Our walkable community happens inside, along the store aisles of box stores, or outside in the grim, expansive parking lots as we walk back to our cars. In most cases, there is no need to go downtown. Whatever isn’t available in box store land, is available across the river in the U.S. at Wal-Mart. It’s almost the perfect modern existence. So, why would we need or want a downtown?
Frankly, families with kids or old people don’t really need an urban downtown. They need to be able to park their cars close to handy shopping, buy stuff at the lowest prices possible, and go home. Sure, they may want and actually need a civic centre for fitness and recreation, but that doesn’t translate into a need for a downtown experience. So who does want or need a downtown?
Working professionals and young people seem to thrive in a downtown environment. Government workers, lawyers, artists, engineers, designers, bankers, all kinds of professionals work well in the downtown collective. Young people tend to enter the job market in downtown urban environments, a fact I always notice when visiting downtown Toronto, where few workers seem to be over the age of 40.
When I first visited the problem of redeveloping the downtown core of St. Stephen about 5 years ago, my first priority was looking at the potential for young people to participate in the downtown renewal experience. So what does one need to attract young people, I wondered. Well, the first thing would be to have an available pool of young people to begin with, which I think is a real challenge in the area. Most bright young people here seem to go away to college and never return.
The second thing is to have easy-entry opportunities for the young people who are interested. That means cheap rental space or real estate in high-traffic pedestrian areas. That’s a challenge in St. Stephen, where most of the real estate is owned by a few individuals, rents are not exactly dirt cheap, and pedestrian traffic is at an all time low. The situation in neighbouring St. Andrews is better relative to pedestrian traffic, but the high real estate costs pose a real barrier to entry for young people.
It’s no secret that shifting cultural values affect urban environments. Here in Charlotte County, we have an aging population. Aging retailers and business owners, most of whom have no pension plans, can’t afford to sell their businesses at rock bottom prices. Their nest eggs are tied up in their businesses, and most young people can’t afford to buy out those nest eggs.
Young people today are not the same as young people in the past. Today’s graduates have much higher professional aspirations, preferring good jobs in established corporations, or glamorous creative careers in big cities. Those who do migrate to small towns may have a difficult fit. Because old people are not the same either.
Old people are no longer old, for one thing. For another, they have a sense of entitlement that forms an unspoken barrier to entry. For example, when financially comfortable retirees move to waterfront homes and condos close to small downtown areas, the last thing they want is noise coming from busy youth bistros at 12:30 a.m. on a quiet summer night. But busy bistros are exactly what young people want, and healthy downtown cultures require.
Of course, a town like St. Stephen should be so lucky. It has neither affluent retirees living downtown, nor artsy bistro-going youth.
If there is any answer, it’s not in knocking down old buildings and building more expensive new ones. It’s in understanding the social and cultural elements required to build lively downtown areas.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Living with the slack in the machine
©
It’s been a bi-coastal weekend, from the Right coast to the Left. I flew out of Saint John at noon, tripping across the time zones to arrive in Vancouver at 5:00 p.m. Two nights later I traded back the gain, leaving Vancouver at midnight and spending the entire night and half a day getting home.
Crossing time zones wasn’t the only lost time on this trip to attend my nephew’s graduation. While he was busy with graduation parties, friends, a final project to write, a girlfriend and a weekend gig DJing, I ended up with too much free time. I hadn’t rented a car or a hotel room, instead staying at his apartment, which was in strike-down mode as he’s moving out in a couple of weeks. Everything was a bit of a hike from the apartment, and to make matters worse, on the first morning there, when I got back from a walk to Starbucks for my morning coffee, I found I’d been locked out in the rain. After cell phoning around and hitting voice mail, I managed to get back into the apartment in through an unlocked window.
There was a paradox to the trip—lots of rushing to make just-in-time, cross-terminal airline connections mixed with big chunks of downtime in between—wading through time zones, alone-time in the apartment waiting for my nephew and long walks in the rain. All that got me thinking about both the tension and the slack in the system. My first reaction was to resent the slackness. I mean, I’d set out to have a busy, interesting trip, to meet with friends and relatives and have a good time and there I was, alone most of the time. But on reflection, the slack time gave me a chance to emotionally reconnect to the West Coast environment again. It occurred to me that maybe all systems depend on having some slack.
That’s certainly true in machines. Without mechanical slack wheels can’t turn, shafts can’t rotate on bearings and gears can’t shift. A critical degree of tension and slackness is essential.
I stumbled on this mechanical duality a couple of weeks ago on the Internet in a reference to the SR-71, the famous US spy plane. Also known as the Blackbird, the plane was purpose-designed in the late 1950s to do high atmosphere espionage over the Soviet Union. As these things go, it was a work of art, and technical mastery. Engineered to travel at three times the speed of sound, its skin was made of titanium, some of it corrugated, to withstand the heat generated by the friction of the air rushing over the plane’s surface at Mach 3. The heat was so extreme that the pillars on the inside of the cockpit would heat up to over 240 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course the exterior was a whole lot hotter.
This was the fastest, most technologically advanced aircraft ever built, bar none. For example, the first space suits were actually designed as life support systems for SR-71 pilots. But on the ground, the Blackbird was, well, just plain sloppy. None of its body panels fit together. There were big 2-inch gaps between everything, and when it was fuelled up and sitting on the tarmac before takeoff, the aviation fuel would actually pour out through the gaps between the panels. That was one slack machine. But all that slack was essential. Because once the Blackbird was airborne and got up to speed, all its body parts would heat up, each one expanding to create an integrated supersonic machine—only perfect when running at Mach speeds. If the slack hadn’t been there, the machine would have crushed itself.
I would call this the intentionality of design. Of course a lot of slackness in systems would seem to be unintentional, such as the downtime spent waiting in line at the Horton’s drive-thru. We humans waste a lot of energy on unintentional slack. TVs that stay on in sleep mode, pilot lights in stoves, all kinds of ways.
Like the chain reaction through a line of boxcars as a locomotive begins to pull, organizations have a lot of slack too. A great deal of it is unintentional, but some of it may also be quite intentional. For example, organizations in transition—even entire economies in transition—seem to invite a lot of slack into the system. The financial bailouts of Wall Street by both the Bush and Obama Administrations are good examples. Unlike the auto industry bailouts with the tight business case restrictions, the financial bailout was full of slack, enough slack to hopefully re-flood the markets with cash (which hasn’t quite happened yet).
Career opportunists love to engineer this kind of slack. To take control of organizations they can reduce the number of board meetings, for example. They can re-engineer oversight policies, allowing them to hide their personal objectives and activities in the shadows. The list of these quasi-ethical gap-creating methods is probably endless. Conrad Black seemed to be one of these tactical geniuses, at least for a while.
I see this a lot in my consulting. When personal power agendas become more important than organizational goals—or societal goals—watch out. I’ve seen good firms break into pieces. I’ve seen good people leave good organizations. All because someone put a personal agenda ahead of the group goal.
That’s one reason why I’ve come to respect a well-functioning board of directors. A good board may not be the most visionary or ambitious tool in an organizational tool bag, but it certainly has an essential role in protecting the essence and direction of an organization—in other words keeping its integrity tight.
This is a part of the current problem in US politics today. Over the past 5 decades the Executive Branch has become increasingly more powerful as it has levered the gaps in power to the president’s advantage, while the Congress has become a less effective regulator. In fact our current financial problems stem directly from 30 years of privatizing and dismantling public oversight of the financial sector. We now see the end effects of too much slack in the system.
It all comes down to balance. If systems—or lives—are too tightly controlled flexibility is impossible. But we can’t have things so slack that they’re falling apart. Like everything else, it all comes down to a bit of wisdom and a lot more vigilance.
It’s been a bi-coastal weekend, from the Right coast to the Left. I flew out of Saint John at noon, tripping across the time zones to arrive in Vancouver at 5:00 p.m. Two nights later I traded back the gain, leaving Vancouver at midnight and spending the entire night and half a day getting home.
Crossing time zones wasn’t the only lost time on this trip to attend my nephew’s graduation. While he was busy with graduation parties, friends, a final project to write, a girlfriend and a weekend gig DJing, I ended up with too much free time. I hadn’t rented a car or a hotel room, instead staying at his apartment, which was in strike-down mode as he’s moving out in a couple of weeks. Everything was a bit of a hike from the apartment, and to make matters worse, on the first morning there, when I got back from a walk to Starbucks for my morning coffee, I found I’d been locked out in the rain. After cell phoning around and hitting voice mail, I managed to get back into the apartment in through an unlocked window.
There was a paradox to the trip—lots of rushing to make just-in-time, cross-terminal airline connections mixed with big chunks of downtime in between—wading through time zones, alone-time in the apartment waiting for my nephew and long walks in the rain. All that got me thinking about both the tension and the slack in the system. My first reaction was to resent the slackness. I mean, I’d set out to have a busy, interesting trip, to meet with friends and relatives and have a good time and there I was, alone most of the time. But on reflection, the slack time gave me a chance to emotionally reconnect to the West Coast environment again. It occurred to me that maybe all systems depend on having some slack.
That’s certainly true in machines. Without mechanical slack wheels can’t turn, shafts can’t rotate on bearings and gears can’t shift. A critical degree of tension and slackness is essential.
I stumbled on this mechanical duality a couple of weeks ago on the Internet in a reference to the SR-71, the famous US spy plane. Also known as the Blackbird, the plane was purpose-designed in the late 1950s to do high atmosphere espionage over the Soviet Union. As these things go, it was a work of art, and technical mastery. Engineered to travel at three times the speed of sound, its skin was made of titanium, some of it corrugated, to withstand the heat generated by the friction of the air rushing over the plane’s surface at Mach 3. The heat was so extreme that the pillars on the inside of the cockpit would heat up to over 240 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course the exterior was a whole lot hotter.
This was the fastest, most technologically advanced aircraft ever built, bar none. For example, the first space suits were actually designed as life support systems for SR-71 pilots. But on the ground, the Blackbird was, well, just plain sloppy. None of its body panels fit together. There were big 2-inch gaps between everything, and when it was fuelled up and sitting on the tarmac before takeoff, the aviation fuel would actually pour out through the gaps between the panels. That was one slack machine. But all that slack was essential. Because once the Blackbird was airborne and got up to speed, all its body parts would heat up, each one expanding to create an integrated supersonic machine—only perfect when running at Mach speeds. If the slack hadn’t been there, the machine would have crushed itself.
I would call this the intentionality of design. Of course a lot of slackness in systems would seem to be unintentional, such as the downtime spent waiting in line at the Horton’s drive-thru. We humans waste a lot of energy on unintentional slack. TVs that stay on in sleep mode, pilot lights in stoves, all kinds of ways.
Like the chain reaction through a line of boxcars as a locomotive begins to pull, organizations have a lot of slack too. A great deal of it is unintentional, but some of it may also be quite intentional. For example, organizations in transition—even entire economies in transition—seem to invite a lot of slack into the system. The financial bailouts of Wall Street by both the Bush and Obama Administrations are good examples. Unlike the auto industry bailouts with the tight business case restrictions, the financial bailout was full of slack, enough slack to hopefully re-flood the markets with cash (which hasn’t quite happened yet).
Career opportunists love to engineer this kind of slack. To take control of organizations they can reduce the number of board meetings, for example. They can re-engineer oversight policies, allowing them to hide their personal objectives and activities in the shadows. The list of these quasi-ethical gap-creating methods is probably endless. Conrad Black seemed to be one of these tactical geniuses, at least for a while.
I see this a lot in my consulting. When personal power agendas become more important than organizational goals—or societal goals—watch out. I’ve seen good firms break into pieces. I’ve seen good people leave good organizations. All because someone put a personal agenda ahead of the group goal.
That’s one reason why I’ve come to respect a well-functioning board of directors. A good board may not be the most visionary or ambitious tool in an organizational tool bag, but it certainly has an essential role in protecting the essence and direction of an organization—in other words keeping its integrity tight.
This is a part of the current problem in US politics today. Over the past 5 decades the Executive Branch has become increasingly more powerful as it has levered the gaps in power to the president’s advantage, while the Congress has become a less effective regulator. In fact our current financial problems stem directly from 30 years of privatizing and dismantling public oversight of the financial sector. We now see the end effects of too much slack in the system.
It all comes down to balance. If systems—or lives—are too tightly controlled flexibility is impossible. But we can’t have things so slack that they’re falling apart. Like everything else, it all comes down to a bit of wisdom and a lot more vigilance.
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