Proposal to the City of Cambridge
The Cambridge City Council was asked to adopt the concept of a safe and healthy city for the
Millennium. Hear the story of what is happening with this proposal.
Sustainable Communities Group of Waterloo Public Interest Research Group
(WPIRG)
This group is committed to the ideal of a healthy sustainable community. Hear about their
initiatives and advocacy for sustainable development and transportation planning.
The Healthy Community Initiative in Cambridge was at first difficult to implement. The concept was not understood nor warmly embraced when first proposed to City Council. The main reason for this tended to be an attitude that such concepts were more properly dealt with by the Region or the Province and that the City was straying into areas beyond its jurisdiction.
I found this reaction to be somewhat frustrating but with some re-packaging it was finally funded allowing the Social Planning Council of Cambridge to undertake a study, which will give the Cambridge Community indicators, which will reflect a number of the needs of the City.
The Healthy Community proposal was really a building block that I have felt over a period of time was long overdue. Two years ago I proposed Cambridge Youth Council that now has become a large success story in our community. In dealing with youth issues I became more aware of other needs in the community and this led to a period of discussions with members of various non-profit organizations.
Over time it became apparent that local Councillors did not have a full perspective of the needs of the City. As a result of various discussions and documents on homelessness and the Toronto report on the Safe Community, I undertook to produce an initiative and presented it to our local Council.
With a reminder that Cambridge's Strategic Plan was not in step with new concerns, Cambridge City Council approved funding and a final report is expected in January of 2000.
The process is now underway in Cambridge and various members of various organizations have been called together this week to organize the committee that under the leadership of the Social Planning Council will initiate the study.
This is the first step towards Cambridge, the Healthy Community and I believe that we have turned the corner by breaking down some of the barriers that have resisted the acceptance of responsibility for these new type of initiatives.
Yours very truly,
Doug Craig,
Regional Councillor
by Michael Parkinson
The story of a sustainable community begins very long ago, and is surely a part of our collective consciousness by now. The story has been lived and told an infinite number of times. We are all a part of this story, all actors in the grandest story of all stories, and just like those before us, we help shape the story and the story shapes us. It is a story for the living, and those who may follow us.
The story of this sustainable working group begins in 1993 when an vaguely defined meeting was held one evening on the campus of the University of Waterloo. A couple of people showed up, and we just talked about what a sustainable community meant to us: economics, architecture, ecological integrity, democracy, health, social justice, government, science, the role of citizens, media, education and so on. We were small but we had a broad vision of what a sustainable community is and is not.
So we did the only thing we could do: we agreed to get together again and carry on the discussion. It soon became clear that the pragmatics of such a paradigm shift were ginormous, but rather than get too depressed about it, we thought we would do what we could in our own backyard, broadly speaking.
We took an interest in looking at human settlements and the multitude of communities that are a part of the city systems that envelop us. In particular, we were fairly quick to single out urban design as a foundation for building sustainable communities; who could say that a landscape built almost exclusively for the 'convenience' of the automobile could be the basis for a sustainable community? Our vision of the built environment was one that had to include human and ecological systems too.
And so we got to work and before long about a half dozen of us had met and shared our concern about the ability of our communities to function as sustainable, life giving systems. Healthy communities, sustainable communities, green communities: whatever terms we use, they are all about the same basic thing - the quality of life we lead and strive for and the quality of life that we will leave for future generations.
At one meeting, Kathy, who was perhaps worried that the rest of us were all talk and no action, brought along some cereal boxes and scissors and pens. She was determined that we would take some action before the end of the night, and we did. We wrote to the management and stores of Waterloo Town Square and lamented the lack of bicycle facilities, and suggested that improvements could be made. And we each wrote our letter on a postcard size piece of cereal box. It was the first time the group took action, rather than just talking about it, and it took us less than 30 minutes.
Since then writing to the mall has become a semi-annual event. And we always get the same basic response: 'there are many factors to consider when planning bike racks but we are working on a plan'. It has been 7 years since they began working on that plan, and still there are no new facilities. And every year since, hundreds of bicycles are stolen from Waterloo Town Square.
As a group we went on to do some pretty nifty things. Figuring that the best way to learn and share ideas about sustainable communities was to just invite key guest speakers in, we organized several lecture series around a theme: energy, housing, transportation, urban design and development, activism and so on.
Having all the tools we needed, we started to do research too. We quizzed politicians, got involved in public policy discussions at all three levels of governance, we went to public meetings and we held public meetings, we surveyed neighborhoods, we wrote reports, we counted cars and surveyed drivers etc. The research helped show us that asking the right questions is often more important than jumping straight to conclusions about what contributes to our quality of life and what does not.
One day in 1994, feeling the need for a road trip, we hopped in a car and went for a drive to a public meeting in Breslau. It was being hosted by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and they were showing off their plans to build a new 4 lane controlled access expressway between Kitchener and Guelph, about 1 km north of the existing highway 7. Actually it was more of what is called an 'information session' in bureauspeak: the proponent fills the room with a big display and lots of maps to show you what they are going to do and when they are going to do it and if you have any questions, you ask a guy (usually) dressed in a suit. At the back of the room there are 'comment sheets', whereby you write any comments you have about the project on the comment sheet, and maybe someone will get back to you.
Going to that meeting changed some lives forever.
It has been five years now and some of us are still involved in the process being dictated by the MTO to get that new expressway built. I think it is fairly safe to say that if we had not intervened in that process, the project would have been approved by now. And a new expressway would be given public funds -more than one hundred million dollars- to do tremendous damage to this concept of a healthy community. In our opinion, building a brand new expressway is the worst transportation option for the highway 7 corridor since there is very little about this megaproject that makes it a convincing solution from an ecological or socio-economic point of view.
The express way issue meant that we did a lot of research, but what have we done with all of this work? We have brought this information to the public attention to the extent that the media is able to convey the material. And we have taken action on certain issues that we think are in the public interest, that work against the construction of a healthy community. Research and education remain vital components of our work but it took almost 4 years after that 'information session' for us to finally go public and take political action on the MTO proposal. It is not with great joy that we find ourselves sharing the spotlight on the 'express way' issue; we are volunteers who believed that the public process could bring about a rational solution to planning transportation along the highway 7 corridor without having to resort to (political) activism in order to be heard.
As it turns out, the work done by the group has been pretty much ignored by the decision makers and we really have to question whether this project is about solving a transportation issue in a rational way. For example, in 1998 we submitted a 12 page report on the express way 7 proposal and while it was nice to get a response, the "thank you for much for your comments" letter reminded some of us about the time when we wrote to the decision makers at Waterloo Town Square. All of which begs the question of whether the public has a democratic right to participate and influence decisions of public expenditures (we think so).
There is an extreme power difference here between the public and the folks we pay or elect to make good decisions; with the public very much on the outside, and paid lobbyists with the power trying to control the outcome from the inside. I think it is easy for us as participating citizens to say what a public consultation exercise is or what a good public meeting looks like, but rarely do we see those kinds of expectations met. And it may be due to the fact that those who set the public agenda have a very different view from their window. For example, it may be that they don't go to public meetings or get involved themselves or that they feel the public could only create delays on a project they are expected to get through the approval process as quickly as possible.
Where you are determines, in large part, what you see. Consider this: in 1991 I asked members of the Region's Engineering Committee who had taken the bus recently. No one could say that they had. I asked who had used a bike; again, nobody could say that they had. Yet these folks were responsible for deciding the future of transportation for our community. What we ended up with was a completely auto-dominated 'transportation' scheme, with no funds allocated to other modes of transport, despite the fact that a significant number of people choose to, or have to, use other modes of transport. What the Engineering Committee did was entirely human: they normalized their experience and figured the rest of us would be happy with an auto-centred 'transportation' plan.
Ultimately, our experience has shown that one of the hardest actions for a bureaucracy, a business or a government to give up is power. And yet a key component of building healthy communities is the sharing of power, particularly when decision making is required. The healthy communities movement got it's start because of citizen initiative; it sprung up from the ground. Top-down, hierarchical decision making is the very antithesis of a healthy community, and despite efforts by the status quo to co-op the lingo of healthy communities, the current power and organizational structure of government will never be able to realize the healthy community dream.
A couple of years ago I spoke with Jane Jacobs about this and she started to mention that almost all of the really good urban development stuff happening in Toronto was being initiated and driven by citizens- not the Planning Department or the Engineering Department or City Council. She listed about 12 good initiatives and concluded by wondering out loud if Planning bureaucracies were really useful after all.
All of this may sound a bit extreme, but we have found that once you start practicing democracy and acting like a citizen, one finds that things are not quite as good as the government and others would have us believe. And so it is hard not to sound like a radical, because what is required is radical surgery on the systems around us that prevent us from realizing what we have come to know here as a healthy community. And as a society we are getting down to some pretty fundamental stuff when we talk about the future of community; the ability of eco-systems to function, the centralization of power further away from those most affected by that power, an economic system that is an end in itself and so on.
It is a long road to travel and there are hard choices to be made, but to paraphrase Robert Frost, the road less traveled will make all the difference, for I doubt we should ever be able to return to this fork in the road. It is a critical time in our community, in the history of the earth, when nothing less than survival is at stake. Choosing the path to a healthy community could make all the difference.