Little Boxes

Brooklyn Heights, New York is considered to be the first suburb in America. It's a 5 minute subway ride to Wall St, and overlooks well...well it overlooks things. Views of the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline are within walking distance and some of the architecture dates back to when Washington walked the streets. The picture to the left is not Brooklyn Heights. It is Denver Colorado.




I grew up in Oshawa, ON. On a recent visit home, and a long walk up to another placed called Brooklin, just north of 'Shwa, I rediscovered that not only is the spelling different, the idea of the suburb is yes, very different from the age of founding fathers. I also rediscovered years of vitriol I have layed upon the 'burbs. The plague that is the desert of prefab sterility so many of us call home seems unending, even with the end of oil just coming over the horizon, urban planners, city councils, developers and new families are hell bent on continuing what is a proven broken model of human organization. Brooklin, ON is a cute little town surrounded by a patchwork of overgrown wooden weeds. Housing developments have sprung up almost at random and seem like some horizontal monolithic monster on the edge of consuming whole the once quaint small town Ontario community.






The white signs of 'progress' are everywhere. These civil little signs, dutifully placed in accordance to law appear in communities everywhere but no one really notices them. In the case of southern Ontario, there is usually a corresponding boarded up farm house on the property, as another family business responsible for generations of local food production and local employment dies. It's a tired conversation over a lot of dinner tables now. "We're paving over the best farmland in the world to put up another gas station?!?". Does Royal Bank really need branch number 445 right here, on this field? With another Mac's, a tired old sports bar, that'll go out of business within a year to be replaced by another tired old bar and grill which will be next to another Dollarama.















The walk to Brooklin also reminded me of Jesse's fear of the suburbs. He actually gets Ill. It's natural living proof of how the suburbs are antithetical to our nature. For someone like Jess, who lived in small communities in Taz and then in the brilliant big cities in Australia, to see him drive through a 'new community' is funny and frightening as it fills him with anxiety and nausea.

There's an inherent disconnect in the suburbs, and the newer model called exurbs. These are commuter towns, with no core, no old business district and are built with more attention paid to the highway leading in and out of the city than travel within the city. They are in many cases even further from the city of working destination for it's inhabitants than older suburbs, and people unlucky enough to get work in the exurbs, are usually employed in a service job, low-skilled manufacturing or high-tech. Boxes that people work in boxes to pay for the boxes that they live in.

The in-betweeness. Of something not finished. Exurbs exude this in their design, and feeling. They are hollow in the centre with no attention to the details of life like parks, functional walking based shopping districts, schools you can walk to, and landscaping. The community centres are in most cases private facilities and you 'd be hard-pressed to find any municipal buildings within them as the governing of cities has centralized to the point of absurdity.

There seems to be no end in site to this. In fact, the exurb model of continued growth outwards and creating new cities based on what is offered to developers by local governments in terms of tax breaks and sweet land deals is going to go ahead unabated. Building up and renewing our old cities, which were built in a time of community needs and linkages that didn't rely on the car as transport does not seem to be the preferred model.

There are amazing case study cities that have bucked the trend in recent decades and are starting to reap the rewards of better health and prosperity. Portland, Oregon, Pittsburgh, Penn. Boston, Mass. San Francisco and in Canada, Quebec City has been mentioned as a example.

Urban renewal, which used to be a couple of dirty words is being reviewed through the prism of greening our cities. If new development and revitalization is framed by what is best for the environment in a lot of cases it proves to be better for human organization as well.

There is always a better way. In how we choose to live amongst one another, it seems we have decided to choose the least human and natural imperatives to guide our city's developments. Take a drive on a nice summer day to place like Niagara on the Lake Ontario, or Cambridge Mass. or to Whistler in the winter, or Port Perry Ontario during Christmas, you'll see countless foreign plates and strange faces looking in awe and comforted wonder but also with a tinge of jealousy toward the natives. We favour closeness and convenience in so much of our personal lives, we design technologies to make it simpler for life but we have made our great cities mere places to live. They are so unattractive and unlivable, the opposite of what we desire in our hearts. Your home is the largest single investment you will make both in terms of money but also on the impact it has on the design of your life, the friends you meet, the family that comes to visit, the state of your health, the happiness of your marriage, the safety and development of your children are all dependent on this decision. If we start to ask ourselves as individuals and families what is best for my needs outside of the pocketbook, and what is a better way to live, the home we buy and the piece of earth it occupies should be at the top of the list.

A New Lincoln Presidency

Sen. Barack Obama was born in 1961. This is one-hundred years after Abraham Lincoln, the father of Emancipation was inaugurated and started the history changing path of ending slavery and planting the seeds of the modern civil rights movement. The commonalities and serendipity don't stop there. Lincoln was an Illinois lawyer who settled in Springfield. The first Republican party convention was held in Chicago, the town where Obama settled, and practiced law. So what does this mean? Are we to believe in a divine design of events that link these men and these facts? Are we to succumb to the conspiratorial story that many a mad conservative commentator may try to run with? Is this too good? Or is this just relishing the beauty of coincidence?

When one reads the biography of Lincoln he truly does inspire the belief that he was the greatest leader America has known. Imagine, you inherit a country on a one-way track to war with itself, you have been elected by a brand new party where no one really knows you outside of a few close operatives and friends you have made along the way, you choose to surround yourself by people that either hate you, covet your job, or don't believe you have near enough the capacity to steer the country in even the best of years. America was still wiping off the afterbirth of it's revolution, the industrial revolution was stoked but nowhere near a full burn, communication was still by messenger if you were lucky by telegraph, and to get from Washington to New York still took days. But in a little less than 5 years, he united the country, ended slavery, and was in control of the administration responsible for vast internal improvements, the creation of the IRS, income tax, and national monetary policy.

So in our jaded post-postmodern political reality we find ourselves a little less than 2 weeks away from, with all superfluous hyperbole aside, the most important election in maybe generations gone and yet not born ( I guess that was a might superfluous) . With the multitude of pre-election, last minute analysis available to the still yet undecided voter (as the recent SNL skit played on the question, 'If you are not decided at this point, do we really want your vote?') Regardless, here is my contribution.

Time magazine (http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1850921,00.html) asked a fantastic question and got some really smart people to try and answer it. What is the right temperament for the presidency? The short answer sort of depends on the time in which the presidency occurs. In the fractious heady days of the 80s with an unsure Soviet Empire crumbling, we looked to the Gipper for a calm hand and a reassuring smile. 20 years previous when we were even closer to oblivion we needed a scholar war-hero to bring us back from the brink of WWIII and inspire the country to a new direction and true world dominance. Wilson was the perfect man for rebuilding the country and world after The Great War. Conversely, we have just gone through 8 years of a president who was determined by most to be out of his depths, and proved us right with every policy decision he made in a time created by design for the acquisition of vast wealth for a few friends and the ultra-powerful friends of those friends (see: Blackwater/KBR/Halliburton). In the late 1830s/early 1840s America had a president in Andrew Jackson who forestalled it's great economic potential out of fear and greed and created a divisive socio-economic and political climate that culminated in the bloodiest war, the one the Lincoln did everything to avoid, than everything to win to save the Union. Lincoln's temperament has been judged to be almost out of reach of analysis. He showed relentless determination and took hit after hit with a smile, a poem and then brilliant policy. He was calm, and welcoming to a fault. His White House was one big open door. It was the people's house. He needed a team of rivals to think, to ensure that every possibility was discussed, but when he made up his mind, that was it. He was empathetic, trusting, and yes extraordinarily honest. In the time he lived it is argued that no other man of different temperament could have steered the country out of ruin.

Barack Obama is one cool cucumber. Maybe to a fault. People are saying, 'we just want to see him a little riled-up'!. But folks, it's just not him, and I would argue that's not what America needs. America is at a precipice. Crumbling infrastructure, failing economic systems, an unfair tax system, a racially divided nation, the legacy of a war that shouldn't have been fought: Iraq, the need for the continuation and intensification of a war that should have been fought: Afghanistan, a drowning public sector and well, a manufacturing sector being crushed by a changed and slowing global economy. Sound familiar? When will we ever learn that we keep doing the same things just in different ways. History doesn't necessarily repeat itself but it shows us patterns. Patterns that can be seen as mystic signs, powerful serendipity, or coincidences that we must take note and learn from. It showed us one-hundred and forty-seven years ago that we needed a man that knew what America was, needed to be and how to get it there. His sense of morality and decency was unparalleled. He dared America to think beyond what was known. It was said that there could have been better 'presidents' beside Lincoln. Seward, the New York Governor (yes, there's another one) was his chief rival. He was a master politician with a true grip on policy and at the time an even more staunch opponent of slavery. But the nuances of his character would have been too weak for the the pressures that ensued. He may not have been able to lead the country through the horror of the civil war. America has had a president for the last 8 years, but no leader. There are great women and men in both parties that understand the call to serve and have the requisite capacities to manage the office. But what a great leader has transcends all that can be learned. It just exists in the person.

Obama is a brilliant tactician, strategist and judge of character. He has proven it by the decisions he has made all his life and the people he has surrounded himself with. He is connected to people. He wants to help people. He can be trusted. In the time we live in I argue that no other man of different temperament can steer the country out of ruin. The perfect combination of words are passed down to us through the years to remind us of the fact that we have been here before, facing a home with the door to devil's gate ajar. As it is in song, Blind Alfred Reed asked "How can a poor man stand such times and live?", Honest Abe's words still ring and answer-"Though passion may be strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angles of our nature".

L.