The future of our city and the leadership it needs
Do the mayor and city council have the will to collaborate going forward?
The future of Hamilton has been in play for far too many years. Parking lots now dot the city centre where vibrant and transformative projects were to have materialized — telltale signs of reductionist thinking, simplified responses to complex challenges, and the failure to learn the truths buried in divergent voices. Mayor and council have clashed too often around critical issues. As a result there is no clear “executive will” for the future. Perhaps the space caused by a pandemic provides the time to ask probing and necessary questions about Hamilton’s future and how we will get there.
To begin with we need to acknowledge the obvious: conflicting visions for a vibrant, people-friendly urban core for Hamilton. Responding to the challenges of planning requires both patience and daring, immediate action and long term preparation, clear leadership and follow-through.
Too often we see public discourse get stalled in apparently irreconcilable opposites. For example, the expectations of anti-gentrification, affordable housing advocates and the anticipated opportunities for commercial and residential development seem at times hopelessly out of sync. Lacking trusting and productive collaboration, past decisions have abandoned real progress, in favour of short term fixes and compromises that squandered the city’s chances of practical transformation.
Perhaps the issue that has attracted most attention lately is the light rail transit. A row of abandoned buildings lines its proposed route uncertain as to what comes next. In some places demolition has begun, allowing investors to begin construction that many say will meet a range of retail, business, and residential needs along the way. A hyper-politicized LRT debate has polarized our town in a way that sadly typifies our leadership and obscures what is at stake, because the important question is not whether you are for or against the project, but what might city life look like beyond LRT?
When discussions of the future are “full of sound and fury,” common sense and rational argument wane. The current lockdown along with its economic uncertainty impact our city now. They are also harbingers of its future.
Global warming is another dimension of future planning. The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline is emblematic of a larger shift away from fossil fuels. The movement across the globe toward automobile free inner cities is a wake-up call for Canadians. Reducing downtown traffic through efficient and clean mass transit, however, can be undone by an unreasonable increase of highrise residential and commercial construction.
Large-scale construction along the route of the not-yet-dead LRT will populate Hamilton’s central corridor with a human density fuelling an unprecedented demand for energy. How that energy will be produced is still an open question. But “cars or condos” is not the only question.
While gentrification of long-neglected streets may remove unsafe structures and improve the look of some neighbourhoods, the resulting living units become either too expensive for current residents and seniors or too small to raise a family. Moreover, COVID-19 challenges many assumptions about work, travel, and social interaction that have in the past formed the basis for urban planning.
How people live is as important as where they live. There is currently a rich and growing “cultural mile” from St. Joseph’s Hospital to the Waterfront. Schools, art galleries, concert venues, recreation centers, restaurants, and theatre enrich the neighbourhood and draw people from across the region. But this area is also marked by significant income disparity and homelessness. “Affordable” housing cannot mean “substandard” housing. It remains an issue that requires the buy-in of developers, politicians, funders and investors. How does a vision of the city’s future make social and cultural integration more than a suggestion?
Industrial and business parks materializing on the peripheries of the city are both a sign of hope and a threat. Such development invites investment and creates jobs. It also incentivizes urban sprawl, threatens farmlands and a greenbelt protected for years by progressive conservation policy.
All of these concerns raise the question: do the mayor and council have the will to collaborate in leading the way forward? Leadership that is visionary and practical is not an easy task. To tackle the inherent contradictions in building Hamilton’s future, government officials at all levels must take a “both-and” approach to the future of Hamilton and Hamilton of the future. The so-called cost of progress must not be paid on the backs of vulnerable people or a fragile environmental balance.
Unfilled promises and numerous abandoned “studies” point to a failure of leadership to take seriously the need for a comprehensive vision able to respond to the complex of human issues at stake in every discussion of progress. One can list the projects that were supposed to have made Hamilton a “best place to live and work.” Experience has shown the folly of pinning our hope for the future on “rock star” projects. (Do we have an NHL team yet?)
Effective leadership needs to be able to inspire. It must be able to involve the voices and engage the energies of the many folks who have a stake in Hamilton’s quality of life — not only at the planning (blue-skying) stage but throughout the project. It is not an easy task to build consensus among divergent voices and competing views, especially one-issue or one-ward interests that narrow the debate and feed into disinformation and division.
Whose vision, whose values? There has always been a tensive relationship between imagination and the fiscal and material requirements of development.
We need the kind of leadership that will not have to tell our children “we thought it would work”; the kind of leadership that can listen long enough to understand hear what binds us together as a community; leaders who know how to preserve and enhance neighbourhoods without losing sight of the need for a vibrant city core and that will make Hamilton a place that is not only open for business, but people friendly. A fruitful future will grow out of mutual listening and hearing not only what is said, but understanding the persons saying it.