The first installment in this series talked about “showing the world who and what we are by working together as the five cities and seven nations of Grand River Country to organize a ‘Culture as Capital Manifest and Homecoming’ event for, say, 2026 or 2027.”
The theme of Part 2 was “Original Kitchener.” It introduced, by way of the “Kilometre of Culture” concept from Kitchener’s first cultural strategic plan, a radial approach to urban development: An organic city or town grew out from a discernible point of origin, following patterns that were not explicitly defined or intended.
The chapter went on to draw attention to some of the advantages held by the city’s central precincts, including:
the constellation of neighbourhoods around the city’s civic and commercial centre;
the rich range of arts, culture and heritage assets in and around the downtown;
the extent (e.g., a main street 2.5 km long) and the density, along with
the “spaciousness” – all the vacant, underutilized and misused buildings and land; and
the built-in walkability of the city's older streets and alleys.
By “advantage” I don’t mean strengths in the competitive sense, but distinguishing elements that make Original Kitchener worthy of loyalty and attention: a place to care about, to belong in, to imagine possibilities for, to dedicate time and energy to. A place to explore and discover. A place to stand, grow, learn, associate. A place to get to work, try things, get things done.
There are certainly prevailing trends and attitudes associated with car-centric planning and building that are damaging to the civic health of the older parts of our cities and towns, but there is no intrinsic antagonism between original neighbourhoods and a city’s suburban stretches. The point is not that one part of the city is better than the other, but that they are different and need to be treated accordingly in planning and other decision-making processes.
By the same token, there is no fight to the finish for economic survival among provincial cities like ours. Original Kitchener is not in competition with original Galt, Preston or Waterloo. Tri-City Waterloo is not in a race with Guelph and Brantford, or even with Hamilton and London. If one gets left behind, it hinders progress everywhere.
Done right, what benefits one part of a city benefits all, and, conversely, what is damaging to one hurts the entire body politic. The same is true in the larger regional context: what works in Kitchener or Galt could also be part of the solution for Guelph or Brantford.
Cities and towns can be neighbours and friends in much the same way individuals can. One of the primary benefits of closer relations is learning from one another. Inspiration can be valuable, but we should be cautious with emulation: Copy-cat and cookie cutter style development is a suburban characteristic. Again, it’s what distinguishes these various entities, municipal and parochial, that matters.
What makes each one of them different, and in some respects unique, is advantageous to all. Harmony requires difference. Uniformity produces a dull monotony.
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Third-tier urban polities like ours also have disadvantages: Toronto has gradually taken over Montréal’s foundational role as Canada’s metropole (mother city), for the time being at least. Wealth, power and talent have generally tended to flow back towards the point of origin, or to a frontier where the establishment is not so deeply entrenched.
The primary connotation of “metropole” is in the colonial sense of outward expansion, continental or maritime: Rome, Constantinople; London, New York. Modern nation states also function as empires turned inwards, establishing dominance from the centre over provincial domains. From the beginning, the trend has been towards eliminating local and regional distinctions in the same way empires, especially landed nation-empires like Canada, United States, Russia, China and India, try to erase cultural differences among alien, conquered or minority populations.
There’s also “metropolitan” in the ecclesiastical sense: For Roman Catholics in the original “Technology Triangle” -- Guelph, Cambridge, Kitchener-Waterloo -- their diocese is centred in Hamilton; for Anglicans, it’s London. Brantford has the same configuration. This is what I mean by “third-tier.”
KW business types who are still in the “Toronto-Waterloo Corridor” and “One Big City; One Voice” mindset like to imagine that a crude, 20th-century style amalgamation is all that’s required to achieve second-tier city status. But it doesn’t work that way. There are deep historical reasons why Ontario only has three medical schools, five major banks and one global financial centre.
Mississauga has been a single city for half a century now, and it’s bigger than Kitchener would be if it annexed Waterloo, Cambridge and the townships. But that unity and that size have not earned this peculiar political configuration any privileges or respect as a city among cities.
I’m not suggesting there is an intrinsic antagonism between Ontario’s metropole and the constellation of provincial cities and towns that surround it. Nor are these various habitations in competition with one another: Tri-City Waterloo is not in a race with Kingston, Niagara, St Catharines, Windsor, Peterborough, Belleville or Kingston any more than we are with Guelph or Brantford.
There are, however, imbalances in the metropolitan-provincial relationship that are a hindrance to both an impossibly congested centre, gridlocked and going nowhere, and to the various peripheral urban centres now stripped of almost all power and influence, and as a result, also going nowhere.
The best way to begin redressing those imbalances is to think about who and what we are as polities – as cities and towns – in relation to the region, the province, to confederation, to the world at large. A full consideration of who and what we are in relation to other cities and towns, starting with those nearby, is equally if not more important.
I’m proposing we think about who and what we are, not in an abstract, generalized way, but as actual places, with distinct storylines and characteristics.
My view of urban development over time is a radial one: An organic city or town grew out from a discernible point of origin, and extends to where the buildings are no longer contiguous.
The bizarre variety of ways municipalities are organized legally and officially here in Ontario matters less and less as power, decision-making and ownership is externalized.
In the beginning, when imperial authorities carved out a County like Waterloo, Wellington or Brant, it was part of the process of establishing private proprietorship, a key component of late, i.e. 19th-century, settler colonialism. This is appropriately known as “alienation” because it grants a measure of local/regional autonomy.
When a free-standing “County” is reconfigured as a “Region,” as ours was 51 years ago, the purpose is to retract some of that independence, and revert the jurisdiction to functioning as an administrative unit of the province.
Since settler home rule was established, Canada’s provinces have gradually been assuming a kind of statehood that the founders of Confederation, both here and in the British Parliament, may never have intended. As masters in their own house operating out of Queen’s Park, provincial authorities can do whatever they like in their municipal domain.
Instead of complaining or resisting, I’ve made peace with constitutional reality by imagining that regardless of all the manipulation, disruption and contention, our historic cities and towns retain a foundational essence that is actual, constant and remarkably resilient.
Places like Dundas, Paris, Preston, Galt, Ayr, Elmira, Fergus or Elora may no longer exist as legally sanctioned corporate entities, but they are as real as they ever were. It is the various “deals” the legislators make along the way, and the ways various powers and interests section off their domains, that are provisional and, viewed in historical time, ephemeral.
Whatever they do with legal Kitchener, Waterloo, Wilmot, Cambridge and so forth, actual Kitchener, Waterloo and New Hamburg will remain, just as actual Galt, Preston, Hespeler, Fergus, Paris and Dundas are as real as they ever were.
When observed from a radial development point of view, the outline of an organic city or town can be observed in the same way the shape of a watershed can. The contours of original city patterns can be seen on any street map: The squiggly lines of suburban building patterns are noticeably different from what came before.
Because of sprawl, the current extent of the city as a whole is not so easy to determine. But 20th-century-style sprawl is unsustainable, and, as we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, a glaring anachronism. Sooner, or not much later, the wisdom of the Waterloo “countryside line” will be understood and respected, and every town and city in farmland Ontario will develop a version of it.
Actual cities and towns – concentrated habitations that have evolved over time – are autonomous, various and distinct in the same way we are as individual people. A large proportion of what is distinct in any community is found in its older precincts.
If a municipality can be imagined as a “body politic,” its downtown is the face: It’s how outsiders recognize who and what we are, and what we choose to look at most often in the mirror.
Older city patterns will be appreciated for their special qualities, and treated accordingly in terms of planning, development and maintenance. This isn’t going to be a retrogressive, “Make Main Street Great Again” kind of movement, but a step towards a new kind of prosperity better suited to current challenges and future possibilities than an economy and a way of living centred around airports, highways and suburbs.
That’s where those advantages that historic city centres have come into the picture. An outstanding civic asset, cultural or natural, that characterizes one city, town or region can be beneficial far beyond its official limits. Some local/regional examples that come to mind immediately are
the Waterloo-Wellington universities;
the distinct built heritage of Galt, Fergus or Guelph;
Stratford's Festival;
Waterloo County’s Peace Heritage;
the County's legendary agricultural bounty;
our diversity, including Berlin-Kitchener as the birthplace and capital of Allophone Canada;
the presence of the Six Nations of Grand River Country and the Mississaugas of the Credit;
and the Grand/Willow itself as a Canadian Heritage River.
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These are all examples of assets that are of broad regional, national and global significance. Those “generative intersections” that are poised for activation in Kitchener's original precincts I wrote about last time have the potential to enrich and enliven communities far and wide in the same way that the Stratford Festival does.
In my mind, what I like to call “The Trinity” – The Symphony, Grand Phil and their instrument, the Raffi Armenian Concert Hall – despite all the apparent setbacks in recent years, stands poised to serve as the cornerstone of such a flourishing. But that can only happen if those that care about the future of this 141-year long legacy can find a vision of its place in the Kitchener, Waterloo Country civic realm of the future, a plan outlining the steps that will need to be taken, along with the courage to bring it to fruition.
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My idea of adapting the “Cultural Capital of Canada” model from the Chrétien Era to a demonstration of “Culture as Capital” as manifested in the cities, towns and nations of the Grand/Willow River watershed began last September, when news about the KWS board declaring bankruptcy and abandoning ship made it necessary, once again, to think about how to “Save Our Symphony.”
As I said from the beginning, it can’t be just about setting the city’s orchestra back on track. Make it a call for a “rising tide that floats all seaworthy boats” in the wake of the devastations of the pandemic, and it becomes a reasonable proposition. Surely an opportunity to raise spirits, hopes and fortunes in the heart of non-metropolitan Ontario with a relatively modest investment of public funds should be attractive to the powers that be in Ottawa and Toronto. It could also serve the purposes of those that would like to take their place in the various elections we’ll be dealing with over the next couple of years.
But if there’s any interest in going on such a journey, it will have to begin here at home. And that’s when the dismal state of the arts here in Waterloo Country becomes an obstacle rather than a motivation. It began with the “Creative Enterprise Initiative” debacle more than a decade ago, and morale has been steadily diminishing ever since.
What I've been imagining must come across as grandiose: a one-time-only, May-to-November happening that will show the world who and what the Cities and Nations of Grand River Country are at some point in the near future. Ambition is a tough sell in a place where being “grundlich”– thorough, careful – is of paramount importance. A measure of caution is a strength, but timidity and small-mindedness are not.
Despite all the bravado of the “Waterloo Way,” “Canada’s Technology Triangle,” “Quantum Valley,” “Spirit of Why Not?” and so forth, the provincial cringe has been a dominant feature of the local/regional mindset for so long that it’s almost impossible to imagine suddenly feeling confident and assured.
Consequently, to get to where I’m imagining we could go, or anything comparably aspirational, it will have to be one modest (but firm) step at a time. And the only way to do what needs to be done is by applying the combined strengths, commonalities and distinctions of a consort of neighbouring cities and towns.
I've always felt that the community deserves a full account of what happened, not to assign any kind of blame, but to help make sure the same mistakes aren't made when and if we ever get around to sorting out the convoluted way arts, culture and entertainment industries are situated in the current municipal order.
I would like to have a better understanding of what happened with Creative Enterprise Initiative debacle.