Ultimately, such an approach could provide Ontario with leading edge expertise in successfully addressing issues of water management and community decline within the cross-border Great Lakes Region. It also has global application by its potential to create a knowledge base of professionals who demonstrate that Ontario is a place for leadership in revitalization, akin to that of Silicon Valley for the information technology industry.
This compelling restoration story involving the City of Brantford and Laurier Brantford makes explicit what is already being practised in so many places, but it is only now entering the broader public conversation. Until now, environmentalism, greening, and sustainability have been the common reference points for this discussion, but each of these has in its own way become part of the silo thinking that reduces their use to that of special interests and “nice to haves.” They have been critiqued as being essential to most people’s lives only when they have reached a certain degree of personal comfort. Environmentalism has become, and perhaps always was, a lifestyle movement within advanced western industrial countries, with little relevance to depressed parts of the world.
Restoration, and its complement of re words including revitalization, regeneration, renewal, and redevelopment, on the other hand, link, indeed embed, environmental imperatives within an economic development context, and therefore more robustly recognize the real potential for a more mature understanding of the relationship between what have been seen as contradictory ideas — improving the environmental character of the world while making money.
Restoration, Cunningham says, is the “sweet spot” of sustainability where we can actually measure the enhancement of our built and natural resources, rather than the depletion of one in service of another. The challenge is moving this insight from the level of storytelling to that of real, on the ground proposals for improvement consistent with revitalization. Increasingly jurisdictions from municipalities to regions and national governments are beginning to understand the need for resiliency in their public policies, particularly as the reality of climate change, global economic competition, and loss of local biodiversity impinge daily on their former “business as usual” responses. Ontario’s Places to Grow strategy, based on maintaining and enhancing the character of its rural and countryside locations for the purposes of agriculture, watershed protection, and scenic amenity, is aligned with the goal of intensifying growth and population in existing urban areas.
A restorative development strategy clearly benefits both of these goals. On the one hand it supports measures for agricultural transformation to higher-end commodities that are healthier, more value-laden, and, in the bargain, taste better and can be delivered locally, while responding to climate change through reforestation of damaged lands. Such a strategy supports watershed enhancement through restorative measures that improve the quality and access to drinking water while revitalizing fisheries and ultimately the health and long-term sustainability of the Great Lakes. It maintains and enhances the scenic, and with it the tourist potential inherent in features such as the Oak Ridges Moraine and the Niagara Escarpment.
From an urban perspective the value of restoration is even more pronounced. Yet many of our urban places are dispiriting in quality either because of their low density, single use, automobile-dependent, disconnected street character, or because those in inner cities and their surrounding post-war suburbs have experienced several generations of out migration, becoming in the process places of last resort either for long-time citizens at the bottom of the economic scale or new immigrants looking for a toehold in the Canadian economy. The revitalization challenge for the latter places has been recognized by agencies as diverse as the United Way and the Canadian Urban Institute. They have supported or engaged in a more deliberate policy and practice of neighbourhood-based intervention in everything from community support resources such as jobs and shopping places, to transit and place-making improvements such as heritage recognition. The commonly used term of regeneration as practised in the United Kingdom provides a model for such activity.
Just as problematic, however, are the single-use, low-density, car-dependent places generally at some remove from the places people work, play, and shop. This broader realm of interaction has become the existential terrain of people’s lives. The mortgage fiasco in the United States, the often short-term life expectancy of contemporary constructed projects, and the galloping cost of fuel and its likely peak oil character are creating a perfect storm of almost invisible catastrophe for such places within what is acknowledged to be the broader “megapolitan” modern city reality (Toronto, for instance, has effectively become an area defined at minimum by Orillia in the north, Peterborough and Belleville in the East, Waterloo in the West, Brantford in the southwest, and St. Catharines around the lake). Revitalization of such places has become an urgent public priority.
Cunningham’s recipe, spelled out in greater detail in his latest book reWealth2 indicates that a restorative strategy must account for the integration of four elements of the built environment — heritage, infrastructure, brownfields, and places harmed by catastrophe, along with four elements of the natural — fisheries, agriculture, ecosystems and watersheds, and finally with the socio-economic elements of schooling, services such as public safety, culture, and commerce. Their successful integration works best within a non-partisan renewal coalition standing outside normal electoral cycles, and it should be managed by creative partnerships between public and private interests.
Above all, restoration requires hard examples that can inspire and provide a foundation for manufacturing new opportunities. The Brantford experiment is one of the best in southern Ontario. Its frustrations included a lack of provincial support, changing local administrations, and hard choices faced by university decision-makers conscious of their primary mission to deliver education. Town heritage advocates have had to recognize that preservation might not always be feasible but the values of past models such as streetscape integration, human scale models, and architectural detailing could be replicated in the new with careful planning. Wilfrid Laurier University’s triumphant visionary approach in restoring the heritage built environment of Brantford, and in so doing revitalizing a downtown that a former mayor had once called the worst in Canada, are exemplary.
New investment has followed Wilfrid Laurier into the downtown, the vibrant presence of students has rejuvenated a once sad place, and a wider audience of citizens and public authorities have been instilled with a sense that good things can happen with the right vision. These benefits have followed the University’s bold commitment to what Leo Groarke calls “a new kind of economy.” It is one no longer dependent on sprawl and short-term retail big-box models either outside of the old town or in its downtown.
Brantford has become a poster child for the magic of restorative development.
William Humber
Leader of Seneca College’s outreach in urban sustainability and regional renewal
Toronto, Canada.
On June 7, 2008, the City of Brantford celebrated the death of its downtown. The funeral featured brightly coloured carriages, bicycles, and costumes. It proceeded down Colborne South, the city’s original main street, and came to a stop at a new public square that was christened Harmony Square. In the funeral that followed, representatives of the city, a new university campus, the arts community, and downtown churches blessed, eulogized, and toasted the old downtown. In a daring move the health authorities had not approved, the toast featured untreated water taken from the Grand River two blocks away. A fifteen-piece New Orleans jazz band provided music for the event.
The funeral celebrated the death, but also the rebirth, of downtown Brantford.