Cooling pond and Entrance screen at the Linamar Corporation

Introduction

As part of Doors Open 2010, Guelph channelled its inner Stuttgart with tours at the Linamar Corporation.

The Linamar Corp makes precision machine parts for various manufacturing sectors, including the automotive industry. Judging by the tour it appears to be a successful, high-growth multinational corporation, with operations in Canada, US, Mexico, Europe and Asia.

It all started in Guelph, when a young Hungarian immigrant named Frank Hasenfratz set up a one-man machine shop in the basement of his home in 1964. Lucky for Guelph, he found the city to be a supportive environment for what later became an industrial empire. This appears to be a classic tale of a highly-skilled immigrant with ambition and marketable skills doing very well indeed in the New World.

At the entrance to Linamar there is a decorative screen with air-foil shaped blades. These expensive building components create the impression that something highly technical, perhaps aesthetically-inspired is going on inside. Linamar clearly wanted to build an architectural show-piece that impresses the local community. I would say they have succeeded in that goal.

But the architectural aspect of this place is not what is most interesting. Behind the impressive lobby is a large factory floor in spotless condition. It is a high-end machine shop in the European tradition. There are banks of Toyoda CNC machines. There are boxes full of metal filings and gleaming parts machined from blocks of high grade steel. There are signs showing how things should be done. Obviously, process and quality control is of prime concern.

In one room they were testing parts for the McLaren Group, the famous UK race car builders. Not knowing too much about the parts manufacturing business, I would say that working with McLaren is something to brag about.

The whole place has that unmistakable whiff of success. I remarked to my sons, who were reluctantly along on the tour, ‘You know guys training as machinists or CNC designer/programmers might not be such a bad career path.’

Blue-collar knowledge work

At Linamar, relatively small number of people perform highly skilled work. The workers seem to enjoy their work, tending to the CNC milling machines, making and testing metal prototypes. It is clear the instant you walk in the door that this would be desirable employment for many people. There is a sense that people working here have an enviable degree of autonomy.

This is what could be called blue-collar knowledge work.

Canada is not known for blue-collar knowledge work, despite Southern Ontario (and the metropolitan area of Montreal) being the industrial heartlands of the country. We seem much more content with the basic extractive and resource-based industries like mining, forestry, fishing and farming. This has made the country rich, but it means Canada often lacks the skills to produce innovative new products and also makes it vulnerable to the vagaries of basic commodity pricing. The has been true since the foundation of the country.

Southern Ontario has a substantial auto sector, but most of the main action in this industry such as design and development is done elsewhere in California, Germany or Korea. For those interested in industrial design, this puts Canada on the periphery.

Counties such as Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland have much stronger craft traditions than do Canada. These lend support to blue-collar knowledge economies through extensive apprenticeship programs and government support for precision manufacturing.

In Canada, there is not the sense that machine-dependent trades, ones that people typically go to vocational school to learn, are the preferred ways of making a living. Knowledge-based industries such as software or telecommunications get much more attention. High-end machine shops like you find at Linamar get much less attention.

In Canada, the dominant and sometimes naive idea is that the only really desirable jobs are white-collar ones.

Mittelstand in Canada

Linamar appears to have its roots in a type of company that in Germany would be part of the Mittelstand, that is, small to medium-sized, family-owned businesses.

In Germany in the 1960’s the explosive post-war period of economic growth called the Wirtschaftswunder was largely a triumph of the Mittelstand.

In German-speaking countries, Mittelstand-type firms have become experts at producing well-designed, highly technical products. Such small, but sometimes extraordinary capable companies have created much of the industrial wealth that provides such high living standards in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Linamar has obviously grown way past the boundaries of the Mittelstand and has become a North American style multinational, but its Mittelstand roots seem clear.

In Canada, an anonymous corporate model is more common, where the allegiances to a skilled workforce or to craft ideals are much less focused. With large corporations the quality of the end product depends more on trans-national economic factors and tends to have little relation to family pride.

Conclusion

At Linamar, it is obvious that Frank Hasenfratz and his family are the original motivating force behind this corporation — or at least, this is how it is presented.

It appears that Frank Hasenfratz brought his machine shop ethos with him when he immigrated to Canada. Without him and his family, there would likely be nothing similar to Linamar on the outskirts of Guelph.

You find this pattern often in Canada. Here we tend to import our expertise rather than develop it in-house. It is unclear whether this is a sustainable industrial development strategy.

For an industrial culture to produce machined objects of high quality, as at Linamar, you have to hold the work of machinists in high regard. In this sense Linamar is both a product-focused workplace, where beautiful gleaming parts are staked neatly in boxes, as well as a worker-focused one where each worker is encouraged to take great pride in their work.

For these reasons a visit to Linamar is refreshing. Unfortunately, it seems like a bit of an anomaly in the current Canadian industrial context.

Model of Gore Park at the Steam and Technology Museum, Hamilton

One of my favourite times of years is the Doors Open season. This season starts in the early spring and ends in late fall. One of the great rewards of spring is for Doors Open events to begin.

When this event occurs in Hamilton, I am giddy with excitement as I plot my route–to see how many sites I can cram into each day. I have created online maps in order to better organize my assault of cultural consumption–and to help others do the same.

I have learned that almost every single site is worth visiting The architectural, cultural and community resources of this city, and surrounding communities, are remarkable. For example, lining Barton Street, Hamilton are an impressive number of large churches, built at a time when Barton was a major commercial thoroughfare. Eventually, I hope to visit every one.

You don’t have to be an architect to appreciate such sites; they are often captivating for all who walk in the door. Usually, there are well-informed guides to help you see and appreciate the social and architectural history that infuses these places. It’s like an ‘embarrassment of riches’ scenario; incredible riches but few crowds. You sometimes feel very privileged to participate.

Doors Open events tend to be social. They connect you with people who care deeply about buildings and are active in these buildings’ attached communities. A building without a community is often not that interesting. What makes them really come alive are the dozens of people who are passionate about preserving, inhabiting or simply telling about them to strangers. It’s like you stumble into a compelling interactive museum, guided by experts in the field, all for free. I must confess I really like the ‘for free’ part.

The above is all well and good, however, one problem with such cultural consumption is that in my case it is a high-carbon pastime. I drive to these places in a car because the sites tend to be far-flung and because I want to visit as many as I possibly can. So, for me there is a bit of cognitive dissonance. Knowing what lurks inside of heritage buildings (usually splendid places and dedicated, kindly people) clashes with my desire to moderate my consumption and keep our embarrassingly-large car parked in the driveway. The building preservationist side of me wants to work better with the tree-hugger side, because both should be working on the same team.

Getting around to Door Open sites appears to be the only environmentally-suspect aspect of these events.

I could concentrate on one geographical area but then I would miss out on some out-of-the-way gems. I really do want to see it all.

It’s this fear of ‘missing out’ I suppose is one problem. I want to see all the sites, but perhaps I don’t need to see them all at once. Slow-eating is clearly a good idea (as we often tell our ravenous twins). Perhaps slow-Doors-Open-touring is as well. Buildings that may have taken hundreds of years to acquire their ‘patina’ may require more than a rushed afternoon to fully appreciate.

Other ways of being more environmentally responsible would be to use public transit, which is often possible, or to use an alternate means of personal transportation such as a bicycle.

I think, though what might prove most sustainable is to do the touring with other people so that a larger group could pool their carbon consumption. This is similar to the Art Bus concept–a highly successful Hamilton enterprise that encourages communal gallery touring during Hamilton’s monthly Art Crawl. I’m sure a similar idea could be applied to Doors Open touring, where the attractions are similarly dispersed and the rewards of participation are equally as great.

Doors Open events are all about community. This community focus should also apply to how people get to far-flung sites. A communal approach to transportation would make Doors Open touring more environmentally-friendly and more fun as well.

Buildings from many periods in the Colborne St Demolition Zone, Brantford, ON

Two days ago, on a whim, I took my first visit to downtown Brantford, Ontario. I wanted to walk around, take some photographs and get a feel for the place. South-western Ontario tends to reward such impromptu exploration.

I drove to the densest part of old downtown Brantford, the place where the buildings are closest together and the streets the narrowest. This I usually find to be the most interesting and historic part of any town. There in Brantford, I found to my horror that a large chuck of the historic core was under threat of imminent demolition! Workers were preparing to dismantle one of the most interesting and historic street scapes in town. The hammer-swinging may have already begun.

After doing a few Google searches once I got home, the full reality of the situation dawned on me: I happened to stumble upon what might be one the most flagrant instances of urban vandalism in the province. I confidently categorize it as vandalism because it doesn’t appear, from what I have read, to make any sense whatsoever. They are taking down something of great value and replacing it with nothing at all.

This is not the demolition of a single building that has fallen into disrepair, or an urban redevelopment proposal that lacks architectural style. No, this is far worse. This is the wanton destruction of an entire downtown street scape, parts of which date from Victorian times. The site appears to be dripping in urban and historical significance. It literally anchors one corner of the historical district of Brantford. Its buildings, street scape and composition speak deeply of a social history that stretches back to the founding of the city of Brantford.

It is a puzzling situation to see something of such great apparent value about to be eliminated.

What is there

The block to be demolished is located in the central historical core of Brantford, along the south side of Colborne St. It is a long block that includes, apparently, 41 separate buildings, some of which date from the mid to late 19th century. Colborne St lies on top of a small bluff rising above the meandering Grand River.

Buildings on the south side of Colborne St are built with sub-structures that go down several stories. Elaborate steel and masonry structures prevent the buildings from tumbling down the bluff. These buildings are a bit run-down at this point but are definitely picturesque. The age of the buildings vary and the overall design of the block was incremental and unplanned. This is what gives it its charm.

Building on stilts, to be demolished, Colborne St, Brantford, ON

It reminds me of several hill or ridge towns I have seen in Europe or North America where a neat row of attached buildings presents a unified elevation up above on the street, but tumbles down a slope on the other side. This usually creates interesting town scapes that old-style landscape painters might find attractive.

Old Victorian industrial buildings, to be demolished, Water St, Brantford, ON

Below Colborne St are streets called Water and Wharfe. Streets with such names tend to be at the central historical core of cities — typically located along original shorelines. This suggests that not so long ago, along these streets in Brantford, there were warehouses and  small port operations connected to the nearby Grand River.

Brantford itself is a small city, currently not especially prosperous, known for its associations with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone and as the hometown of hockey’s ‘The Great One’ – Wayne Gretzky. It is also close to major settlements of First Nations peoples at the nearby Six Nations reserve and has an attractive location on the bio-diverse Grand River.

Brantford has a small downtown. There are some beautiful buildings in the downtown core. From an architectural and urban design perspective there is much of interest in Brantford, including, fine churches, law courts, civic buildings and a modernist City Hall. Brantford has a central square in the form of an Union Jack around which some of its most prominent buildings are grouped. Outside of Brantford’s historic core is a variety of low density suburban housing and big-box retailing typical for this part of Ontario.

Brantford, despite recent pain due to de-industrialization in the manufacturing sector, is clearly a city with some agreeable cultural, historical and natural assets. These could be spun into something quite attractive. Clearly, demolishing a prominent street scape in the heart of downtown works against such a goal.

My take on this situation

I think demolition of this street scape is a terrible idea. It should have been preserved for the following reasons:

As a mixed-use place to live and work

One of the best ways of creating vitality in downtown cores is to create mixed-use developments that enable people of various incomes to work and live in close proximity. The block being destroyed is an historic and extremely charming example of this type of development. On Colborne St it enabled people to live over pet shops, diners and clothing stores. This is exactly why people sometimes travel to the ‘Old World’ — to see charming scenes of ordinary people living over places like pet shops! Clearly, Brantford is working according to a different model of perceived value.

Art Deco commerical building, to be demolished, Brantford, ON

The condemned block once housed people, was a place to work and was likely an interesting place to shop. All these people associated with the area will now have to live, work and shop elsewhere. The city of Brantford is in effect telling these people to get lost. This ‘communication strategy’ seems harsh, anti-democratic and completely counter-productive to the economic and cultural development of a distressed community. It makes no sense.

Overall attractiveness and urban integrity

The block provides Brantford with urban integrity and texture. The block blends in perfectly with surrounding buildings and anchors the downtown both visually and architecturally on the edge of a bluff. The individual buildings are attractive. The street scape in which they are housed is also attractive. The buildings are currently run-down but this only indicates a lack of investment in their upkeep rather than any inherent lack of value in the buildings themselves.

This condemned block — due both to the quality of its individual buildings as well that of its overall assembly — is probably near the top in terms of overall civic quality and interest for threatened urban street scapes in Ontario. Brantford definitely cannot afford to lose an architectural and historical assembly of such quality.

As a conduit for history

Mixed-use Victorian housing and commercial block, to be demolished, Brantford, ON

It takes a certain insensitivity to  tear down buildings that have withstood the trials and tribulations of the last century and a half. Each age produces its own sets of buildings. These buildings will not come back. Once they are gone they are gone.

This is not to say that all old buildings should be saved. But it does mean that ones of noteworthy quality at the centre of the historical core of cities should be given special consideration and protection.

This is also not to say that cities can’t build modern buildings. Preservation of historic buildings does not put modern architects out of work. The combination of the qualities of old buildings with modern design is often a winning combination.

However, demolishing old buildings in some absurd, nihilistic notion of ‘modernity’ makes no sense.

What were they thinking? Some theories

The question is for me was not whether it is a good idea to get rid of this street scape — it is one of those situations where the inappropriateness of the demolition is not in question even for a nanosecond. I can conceive of no world in which the demolition of these buildings would make any sense.

The question then becomes ‘What were they thinking?’

The decision to demolish the south side of Colborne St was not made in a vacuum. It was made by upstanding citizens of Brantford, likely with support from parts of their community. Here are some theories of what might have factored in their decision-making process:

Elimination of decay and devaluation of the old

Old, historic buildings — especially ones that that are attached to one another in an urban block that falls down a little bluff, are expensive and troublesome to maintain. As well, some people simply don’t seem to like old buildings. They associate them with bad conditions, bad lifestyles, bad choices and all around moral decrepitude.

Clearly, in Brantford, old attached buildings as on Colborne St are associated with the underclass — those who are seen not to have the sense or the resources to live in a more mainstream suburban setting.

Elimination of venues for marginalized businesses and residents

When you demolish an old, sketchy part of town, you usually displace marginalized businesses (e.g. tattoo parlours, head shops, crack dens) and marginalized residents (e.g. prostitutes, drug addicts and those on welfare). Getting rid of a venue for such things lets people imagine that they don’t exist.

Whenever an urban block is threatened with demolition there is also a natural process of marginalization. Who wants to put money into a part of the city that people in power want to eliminate? The threat of elimination is the opposite of a vote of confidence. City Hall thinks so little of residents’ homes and lives that they are willing to go to the expense of sweeping them away for a simple, but seriously deranged idea — an idea based on the concept of ‘eliminationism.’ This eliminationism applies equally to the architectural and social context of Colborne St. Eliminate ‘bad’ buildings and the ‘bad’ people will also magically disappear. It is a fearsomely destructive idea.

Collapse of multiple owners into simpler entities

When you have a street scape with 41 individual buildings, you may have 41 separate owners. If all the properties are bought or expropriated then 41 owners can magically collapse into one easier-to-administer entity. Making it single ownership makes it more similar to the suburban areas of Brantford where the lots are large and the ownership patterns uncomplicated.

The Colborne St block is the opposite of the suburbs: it consists of a messy warren of interlocking spaces and relationships. Getting rid of this simplifies things for some people but at the cost of overall vitality for the city.

Getting rid of this block of old buildings is like clear-cutting an old-growth forest. In both cases you replace diversity with a less stable and less valuable mono-culture. This destruction makes no sense and goes against all we now know about how to develop and revitalize cities.

Provision for higher-returning developments

Sometimes old buildings are demolished to be replaced by higher net-revenue developments. This explains why parts of Toronto have high-rises vs. lower-density row buildings, which were once common throughout its core. But the goal in Brantford does not appear to be a search for higher-returning, higher-density development. There doesn‘t appear to be any preferred future use for the site, except as the site of a bizarre culture war. Previously, the site  had assured income. No firm plans have been presented to replace this income. Something was traded for nothing.

Conclusion

Usually when I travel around small town Ontario I am impressed by the quality of architecture and the overall charm of settlement. This was even the case in Brantford for me before I saw the ominous blue demolition fences surrounding an area of prime architectural significance.

The decision by the City of Brantford to demolish a good chunk of their historical core is indeed unusual. The buildings to be demolished are quite interesting and their site appears to be absolutely central to the history of the city. Like many such crimes against heritage and common sense it was not committed by outside forces intent on the destruction of Brantford, but appears to be a curiously home-grown affair.

This decision to demolish buildings along Colborne St takes a marginalized city and further marginalizes it. It is such a complete reversal of things I value that I remain stunned and saddened.

Dogs on Roof, Hamilton, ON

This is one of my favourite photos of Hamilton. I forget exactly where it was taken but I believe it was near Wentworth and Burlington Streets. It was taken on 19 July 2008.

It shows two dogs who are getting some fresh air and exercise on the roof of a front porch to a modest town-house, in a poor neighbourhood of Hamilton.

They apparently got onto the roof through a small sliding window directly above the porch roof.

This photo raises some interesting questions:

Did the dogs go out the window on their own or were they encouraged to so by someone?

One possible scenario: the dogs were sent out there because they needed ‘to get out’ and the window was the most convenient exit. Is this what happened?

Are the dogs in any danger of falling?

Do the dogs enjoy being on the roof?

Do the dogs urinate and defecate on the roof?

What do the dogs think of someone taking their picture?

Is having dogs on the roof a common occurrence or did I just happen by the only time it occurred?

Are there people in the room behind and what are they doing?

Is this a display of some kind of civic or personal dysfunction or is there something else going on?

Parking Garage on 6th Street, Pittsburgh

Our family spent the US Thanksgiving weekend in Pittsburgh. We booked a hotel on priceline.com (highly recommended) and managed to get a very reasonable deal. Luckily, the hotel–the Renaissance Pittsburgh–turned out to be stunning as well as affordable. It was by far the best hotel we have every stayed in–or ever expect to stay in. The boys were ecstatic when they saw the sumptuousness of the lobby and the fluffiness of the pillows on our king-size bed. This hotel had been recently restored and had an impressive glass dome in its lobby and marble balconies worthy of the palace of Versailles. We couldn’t afford to eat any food in its restaurants or, as it turned out, to use its telephones even for local calls but overall the value was impressive. We suspect that something must be deeply wrong with the new world order when people like us can stay so comfortably in such a fine American hotel for so little money.

Our hotel was in an ideal, downtown location along the Allegheny River waterfront called the ‘Golden Triangle.’ It was the first time we had ever stayed in downtown Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has an unusual urban configuration in that its central business district–the Golden Triangle–is relatively isolated from the rest of the city. The Triangle is where the two rivers meet to form the mighty Ohio. As we told the boys, this is where in the old days people drifted lazily down the river–Huck Finn style–all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Even though Pittsburgh is a northern city, this access to the Mississippi River basin does add some romance to the city’s narrative. At one time, Pittsburgh was the ‘Gateway to the Continent.’ It held a similar role to that of Buffalo–as a trans-shipment hub for a nation bent on Manifest Destiny.

What is striking about Pittsburgh, which you tend to forget when you’ve been away from it, is its stunning topography. Pittsburgh is extremely hilly outside of its downtown core. You soon get into the rhythm of driving through valleys, around hills, along ridges and on top of cliffs. Houses in some neighbourhoods are perched precariously on hillsides, which gives them aspects similar to the Amalfi Coast in Italy or those Greek monasteries built on cliffs. At first this topography is disorienting, then you get used to it. When I look at online maps of Pittsburgh I forget how the neighbourhoods I knew are interrelated, but when I am driving around in them, I can remember where routes lead based on muscle memory.

Pittsburgh has the policy of fixing up its downtown core to make it the most attractive part of the city. This policy seems to have worked out well. Fortunately, there were many splendid, historic buildings in the core to fix up. Pittsburgh has re-branded part of its downtown as the ‘Cultural District.’ There, they have renovated several old movie and vaudeville houses to become venues for live theater and music.  The Cultural District holds Pittsburgh’s major cultural attractions such as Heinz Hall–home of the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Benedum Center, Byham Theater and the O’Reilly Theater. These venues happened to be a block from our hotel.

Heinz Hall Staircase

In downtown Pittsburgh there are many instances of interesting civic sculpture and the quality of new and renovated architecture is generally very high. In addition to restored buildings, there are also other civic improvements such as sculpture parks, river walkways, and new state-of-the-art sports stadiums along the Allegheny river. Overall, Pittsburgh has done a very good job of fixing up their downtown and I would say that the quality of design and execution is superior to most things you see in Toronto or Hamilton. Pittsburgh can be a very classy place, which is something that many outsiders might not realize.

In Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, the remnants from previous eras when Pittsburgh was incredibly prosperous, are everywhere to be seen.  Some buildings have splendid cast bronze sculpture, or intricately carved stonework in the Gothic style. Others are clad in cream-coloured terracotta–an extraordinarily elegant and long-lasting building material. These buildings were obviously built to communicate a level of cultural sophistication on the part of their builders. They are as impressive as buildings you might find in New York, Boston or Vienna.

They were built by names such as Carnegie, Frick, Mellon, and Heinz. These are the people who in old cartoons dress in top hats, wear cashmere overcoats and smoke fat cigars. They made incredible amounts of money when Pittsburgh was the centre of steel production for a rapidly-expanding continent. At the time they may have been ‘new money’ but now they seem as old as the Medici. They built some splendid buildings for their city and therefore gave back to the city in a physically-enduring way. This is somewhat of a different practice than what is done by today’s obscenely wealthy, for which these forms of architectural philanthropy are less common. As an architect I enjoy visiting such buildings despite misgivings about the economics and labour relations of Gilded Age capitalism.

If you live in Pittsburgh and don’t work downtown then you probably will not spend much time downtown, even if you have interest in the urban attractions that the downtown has to offer. The suburbs of Pittsburgh spread for miles and this is where most people live. In general, these suburbs are similar to those in any other American city and have little in common with the hard-core urbanity of the Golden Triangle. The people who tend to frequent the downtown seem to be well-off people who work in corporate offices and drive Audi’s, poorer black people who also work downtown and who take the bus, and those who attend cultural and sporting events such as football games, plays, and concerts. This gives the tourist a slightly skewed demographic impression of the city.

Pittsburgh’s downtown is busy during the work week but it tends to empty of people when the work week ends. Very few people appear to live in the Golden Triangle itself. It lacks the high density pedestrian traffic or residential amenities you might find in Toronto or New York. There is some evidence of higher-end residential development for those who work in corporate towers and wish to live adjacent to their work, but this is a tiny portion of the population. The Golden Triangle seems to lack some basic services for residents. For instance, it does not appear to have many (or any) grocery stores.

6th Street, Pittsburgh

Despite the overall attractiveness of the Golden Triangle, it is unclear whether it will ever become a compelling place to live. One reason is that Pittsburgh has many residential neighbourhoods that are attractive, inexpensive and full of residential-type services such as shops, schools and synagogues. Pittsburgh prides itself on the warmth and sociability of its neighbourhoods. The Golden Triangle may be stunning from an architectural perspective but seems to lack this home-town warmth and practicality. Since the border between adjacent neighbourhoods and the downtown is so distinct in Pittsburgh, to live downtown people have to be hard-core urban homesteaders to make that jump. In fact, we know no one who lives or has ever lived in the Golden Triangle. This is why staying there briefly, in a fancy hotel, was such a novelty for us. It is an experience that many Pittsburghers have also never had.

Pittsburgh is now a largely post-industrial city with little evidence of heavy industry in its city core. It is unclear what the city makes it money doing these days beyond the usual sources such as universities, hospitals and financial services and whether Pittsburgh is still running on old money or whether new fortunes are being made.

Despite the fact that its downtown is very attractive and they have managed to convert the Smoky City’s downtown into a show place that rivals midtown Manhattan, Pittsburgh is not always an optimistic city. It has the typical rust-bucket maladies of declining population, pockets of extreme poverty, racial segregation and flat employment growth. I sense that the attractiveness of the Golden Triangle may not be indicative of the health of the rest of the city.

Travelling to the USA from Canada is interesting because it is so different from what we are used to. This feeling of difference occurs the minute we cross the USA-Canada border. On one side of this border is one set of rules and expectations and on the other is another. America gives the impression of promises of great wealth and comfort for those who succeed, but also great pain and degradation for those who fail. The wealthier seem wealthier but the poor seem poorer than in Canada. Not being too clear about which of these two categories we fit into, makes us hesitate to move back to Pittsburgh.

One does get the impression that in parts of the USA during this current recession some of the working population is in absolute crisis–more so than in Canada. The USA has never been known for having much of a safety net and this recession seems to be more severe than previous ones. There is greater fear this time that not only is the American economy in rough shape, but also that the position and status that the USA has enjoyed up until now is in some jeopardy.

Pittsburgh derives part of its power simply from being situated in the USA. Pittsburgh has direct access to American markets and to American economies of scale. The USA does have a population and an economy that dwarfs that of Canada. As we often thought when we lived in Pittsburgh, the USA may not be better than Canada but it sure seems bigger.

I visited East Berlin several times when I was living in West Berlin. East Berlin was a strange but fascinating place. At that time I never thought the Wall would fall. I thought that this was just how Berlin was always going to be: a divided city with a curious no-man’s land snaking right through its centre.

Checkpoint Charlie, which was the main crossing into the East, was a wonderfully arcane place of switch-back paths, barbed wire, clanking doors and stern-faced East German border guards. It was like a movie set for all the bad Cold War movies you had ever seen. Checkpoint Charlie was a bit frightening, but it was also so comically repressive it almost fell into self-parody. You almost expected the Monty Python gang to burst in at any moment to perform the Spanish Inquisition sketch.

Once you got into East Berlin, there was an eerie quiet and sense of paranoia. Few people were out on the streets. The goods in the shops were minimal–except that slightly stale loaves of heavy dark bread seemed to be in abundance. The locals were drably dressed and looked at Westerners with suspicion.

In West Berlin the scene was completely different. It was spread out, almost in a North American style, and had surprisingly large amounts of green space (it still does). It had some comfortable leafy suburbs such as Tegel and Dahlem. The ritzy neighbourhood of Charlottenburg formed its cultural centre. But West Berlin as a city seemed a bit unfocused, in spite of its dominant urban axes such as the Ku’damm and Bismarkstrasse. That was because the true jewels of the city lay east of the Brandenburg Gate in East Berlin. East Berlin held the historical, central core of Berlin and was where most of the grand, old buildings were situated. This is something I had little knowledge of prior to my first visit there.

In the central district of East Berlin called Mitte there were neoclassical treasures such as the Museum Island and Schinkel’s Altes Museum. You ran into these monuments after about a ten minute walk from Checkpoint Charlie. For a naive Canadian the existence of so many massive, historical buildings was very surprising and a bit humbling. But beyond the architectural and urban attractions of the east, East Berlin didn’t mean that much to me beyond being a Cold War theme park. I never felt that atomic annihilation between East and West was imminent. I never thought that the Communists were a serious threat to Western Europe. I believed that the next zone of world conflict would be far from the pleasant plains of central Europe.

But like most other people, I was astounded when the Wall fell.

Right-wing politicians like Reagan, Thatcher and Bush pretended to play some pivotal role in the whole process of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. But I think they just happened to be in power at the time when Communism was falling all on its own. Communist regimes were notorious for their internal weaknesses such as low productivity, low worker morale, environmental degradation, the high cost of feeding an expensive military/police state, and their isolation from natural markets and investment capital in the West. In my opinion, Communism fell because it was spectacularly unsuited for generating wealth and in creating acceptable standards of living for ordinary people, not because of anything ideologically-driven politicians from the West may have said or done.

In its time though, the Berlin Wall did create much misery. Many who tried to escape over the Wall were shot in the back. The Wall was there to keep East Germans in, not to protect them from outsiders. Life in East Germany was oppressive for all except those with the greyest of personalities. Even more surprising was the fact that East Germany was the most advanced and prosperous of the Communist countries. If life in East Berlin was bad, just imagine how miserable life in Minsk or Wroclaw must have been.

Almost everyone was overjoyed when the Wall fell in 1989. However, as many commentators have noted, even though the disappearance of the Wall itself was undoubtedly a good thing, the reunification of Germany and the social impact of this reunification has not been all good for all concerned. We could see this foreshadowing during the time we spent in the newly-unified Berlin in 1991: not all was right about reunification, or how it had played out in Berlin.

When the Berlin Wall fell, my wife and I were living in Toronto. About a year later we decided to move to Berlin, which we did in the Spring of 1991. We stayed about six months and then moved back to Canada. We lived in the former East Berlin in an apartment at Erbeskopfweg 11, in the Berlin suburb of Nordend, just north of Pankow. It was a charming place in its own way. Our neighbours there had not seen too many Canadians so we were a bit of a novelty.

The fall of the Wall meant that one political system had been taken over completely by another. It was not two systems getting together and working out what would be acceptable to both sides. It was one side having all the cards with the other side having none. A sense of triumphalism emanated from the West: the Communists had lost and the West had won. This sense infiltrated ordinary people, on both sides.

Triumphalism tends to be a negative emotion. When one country triumphs over the other, the sensibilities of the losing side tend to be given short shrift. The Easterners had suffered since WWII in an unusually repressive police state. Now–even though they could buy as many bananas as they wanted–they had to suffer some more, under their sometimes boorish western neighbour.

We were shocked that the dominant emotion of West Berliners seemed not to be sympathy or compassion for those in the East for having the misfortune of living in a police state for the last 45 years, but rather that of pity or disgust. Time under Communism was seen as wasted time regardless of what people had spent their time doing. How were these poor Ossis going to cope under the so-called rigours of capitalism? Their experience under Communism was considered less than worthless. The failure of the Communist state became the failure of its citizens, regardless of whether they had participated in the repressive regime or not. Victim or oppressor, East Germany had instantly became a country full of losers.

In the West the fall of the Berlin Wall is usually portrayed as the Easterners rejecting Communism and accepting Capitalism wholeheartedly. Yet, at the time Easterners had little knowledge of the West and the West little real knowledge of the East. East and West Germany had grown apart in the intervening years and had developed strikingly distinct civic cultures.

Curiously, after the Wall, both sides took it as an article of faith that the model for both sides would be the Western model. This I believe was a mistake. A much happier outcome for both sides would have worked from the premise that despite the horrors of Communism, it was a bit insulting to assume that your marriage partner-to-be had lived a complete lie for the last half-century of her existence. The idea that the West had ‘won’ and that the East’s traditions were of no value lead to some humiliating and corrosive social policies. A stable and equitable union of different peoples should not have the flavour of a shot-gun wedding.

What then could have made the transitions less painful for the East? For one, there should have been negotiations in which both sides had some say about the direction the future union would take. They didn’t seem to take nearly long enough in creating a mutually agreeable ‘pre-nup.’ What could have been a joyous reunification of a divided country to me seemed more like a semi-hostile takeover of one country by another with little concern about the feelings of the weaker side. For some reason, at the time it seemed like most East Germans were fine with that. I suspect this was because they were so demoralized by their experience under Communism that they naively believed that the West held all the answers.

In the end, perhaps they shouldn’t have even joined together into a single state so quickly. If the Czechs and the Slovaks can live reasonably happily in separate countries, why not the East and West Germans? Union and amalgamation sometimes creates as many problems as it solves.

When we lived in Berlin in 1991 a young Ossi shopkeeper in Prenzlauer Berg asked what we thought of the East. We both replied that the Easterners seemed nicer–much more unassuming and gentle, while many West Germans seemed a bit too loud and arrogant for our taste. I think many people would have felt the same way if ideology were taken out of the equation and the rights and aspirations of ordinary citizens were taken into account. Just a little respect for the lives and traditions of the East by the West would have gone a long way in making German reunification more palatable and less painful for ordinary people.

Atrium of the Atrium building at MIP

The McMaster Innovation Park (MIP) had its official opening on October 26, 2009. I took a tour with several others and found the experience enjoyable and interesting.

MIP is a research park and technology transfer facility whose goal is to take technologies developed at McMaster University and transform them into viable businesses. MIP joins dozens of other university research parks in Canada.

The main building in which the opening took place will be known as the Atrium @ MIP. This renovated building was the former headquarters for the former Westinghouse/Camco facility. In the Atrium the commercialization firm Trivaris is an important tenant, under whose umbrella several local start ups have found support.

A new CANMET (Canadian Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology) building is under construction next door to the Atrium. In this new building CANMET’s Materials Technology Laboratory will be housed. This lab appears to be an excellent tenant and anchor for the MIP and will produce over a hundred high-quality research jobs. Such stable, federal agency jobs are a great find for Hamilton and may help turn this part of West Hamilton into a little slice of Ottawa or Kanata.

Observations

The Atrium is an attractively-renovated industrial building with a large, bright atrium. It appears to provide high-quality office and workshop space in a convenient location. The Atrium already houses several high-value and viable-sounding businesses.

The site plan for the MIP appears ambitious. It may take awhile to build out the entire MIP site since it offers lots of land for expansion. Its proximity to McMaster University, to attractive residential areas, and its convenient highway-side location are advantageous.

MIP represents the capital-intensive end of business development: the kind of innovation that requires significant investment from government, universities or venture capitalists to bring to fruition.

Currently, from an urban design perspective, MIP is relatively isolated from surrounding urban areas. If MIP’s site were connected to Frid St it would become much more accessible to the residential and industrial neighbourhoods that lie to the east.

The ideas that appear to motivate MIP are the following:

• Utilize McMaster R&D as a business resource
• Focus on areas for which McMaster has research expertise, such as engineering, material science and medical technology
• Support, through R&D, traditional Hamilton industries such as manufacturing and steel production
• Take an entrepreneurial approach to business development
• Provide support and infrastructure to growing businesses
• Follow a business development model of incubation, acceleration and ongoing support.

Some of these strategies rely on the prediction that manufacturing and steel production have a future in the region. This, I think is plausible, despite the fact that manufacturing and steel production in the region have been severely hit during the current recession.

I’m not sure, though, that all eggs should be placed in that one basket.

Innovation

The word ‘innovation’ takes on a slightly civic-booster quality at the MIP. When the word ‘innovation’ is used in a general, non-specific way it can become a motherhood-type issue that loses meaning and significance. The word ‘excellence’ is in a similar category: nice to have but just saying it doesn’t make it so.

Remember too that innovation is not always required to make money and to create employment. Stelco may not have been the most innovative steel producer in the world but it did employ many people.

If you are trying to establish a successful university research park, of course, what you profess to encourage is innovation. In all of the other university research parks in Canada innovation is also the method for creating value. But if everyone is doing it, then there is little differentiation from your competition.

Getting true innovation started in a place like MIP is tricky to design and depends on fortuitous blends of interesting research, discoveries that are commercial exploitable and the overall business and social climate in the region.

Innovation also depends on the type of people who end up working at MIP. If they are motivated, connected, well-trained and interesting then innovative work might result; or it might not. Innovation is a difficult quantity to conjure on demand.

In academic settings and in industry innovation is not always encouraged, but combining academic research with industrial production can be a potent combination, as witnessed by successful research parks near Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Tokyo, etc.

Lacking a real insider’s perspective on what is going on at MIP, it is difficult to assess whether what I saw on the tour was innovative or not [with the exception of Crazy Daisy, a firm that links awareness of mental health issues with floral design--now that's a cool idea].

What MIP lacks

View from the Atrium building to CANMET

At MIP, there was little mention of green development or alternative technologies. Canada currently is very weak in these areas, despite the fact that green technologies will likely provide substantial future employment in all developed countries. It is this exclusion that makes the MIP seem much less interesting and progressive than it could have been.

At the MIP Opening there were few cultural, social or community aspects to the project beyond the display of art on the walls. The art I did see seemed like a token inclusion.

What would have been interesting is to see an art installation, involving technology found at MIP, that occupied the entire building atrium.

Technology and business development appear to be king at the MIP. It appears to be a button-down kind of place. Scruffy artist types, or grad students with wild hair were nowhere to be seen.

MIP is focused on domains such as material science and biomedical engineering. These are inherently less glamorous and engaging to the popular imagination than research areas such as media arts, green design, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc.

However, investment and employment growth do not always require glamour. Many cities earn lots of money working on the dullest things.

Dancer in gallery window. Nuit Blanche Toronto 2009

Toronto’s Nuit Blanche happened on the night of October 3-4. It was a great success. We saw some good art and left feeling happy.

Crowds

It is the density of crowds that makes Nuit Blanche a worthwhile event, almost regardless of what is exhibited in the galleries. The event attracts crowd-lovers and repels crowd-haters. The crowds are diverse in age, but the physicality of the event tends to favour the young. Black is a common colour of dress. Brightly-dressed individuals stand out from the crowd.

The density of sidewalk interactions in Toronto is usually fairly modest. Nuit Blanche ups this density considerably, for a limited time. But the scale of Nuit Blanche is so vast that this density occurs only in relatively small pockets of the city. In the rest of town it is business as usual.

Physical exertion

To attend Nuit Blanche involves strenuous, physical activity. It takes lots of energy to visit the various venues and districts. We stayed in one district only (Queen St West near Ossington), left early (2am), but even this was tiring.

At Nuit Blanche, walking is the preferred mode of transportation. Leave the bicycle or car at home this night, since these become cumbersome when the crowds become dense. The distance between districts in Nuit Blanche is so great that walking between all of them would exhaust most people. Therefore, an all-night Transit pass is a good investment.

However, even with a Transit Pass, Nuit Blanche has become an event so large that it can’t really be experienced in total by one individual. It’s just too physically exhausting to see it all.

Attending Nuit Blanche means staying up late. This is hard on some people’s bodies. I found it difficult to assemble enough energy to leave the house, at a time when my thoughts focus more on slipping into bed.

A good idea is to eat a substantial meal during the middle of Nuit Blanche so your body has more to work with. There were several attractive restaurants on our path and we ate in a good Chinese one.

Costs of success

Nuit Blanche is a large, far-flung event that is growing quickly. In Toronto, there is high demand for what it offers, within a certain segment of the population. As Nuit Blanche grows and becomes more popular, some people may become troubled by its scale. With this scale it is difficult to know what to do because there are so many options. Given a set of interests, it is difficult to know what particular events are best-suited to these interests.

Distance is also a potential weakness of Nuit Blanche. Walking is the only feasible means of transportation within each district. Yet, it can be physically exhausting to travel between districts. Therefore, a comprehensive shuttle system is needed between districts, beyond that which is offered by public transit. In this respect Nuit Blanche could become a huge, metropolitan version of what is currently offered by Hamilton’s Art Bus.

Dogs on roof in Hamilton, ON

Hamilton has the reputation of being a classic rust-bucket city with an economy excessively dependent on heavy industry. It is seen by its critics as an unclean, rough and slightly dangerous place, where reckless civic decisions are made behind closed doors. It is the Golden Horseshoe’s version of the dark Satanic mills of industrial England combined with the inter-ethnic tensions of a seething, immigrant-fueled city like Chicago.

Mall parking lot in Burlington, ON

Burlington on the other hand is a classic North American bedroom community, where the ills of post-Victorian society have been scrubbed clean and suburban comforts can be enjoyed guilt-free. In Burlington, civic decision-making is seen as more sober, with less chance of overt corruption. By moving from Hamilton to Burlington people could avoid industrial blight, poverty, intractable social problems and historical decay. Hamilton has industrial production, including steel, as its native industry. In Burlington the native industries are suburban tract housing and real estate development. Hamilton is left-leaning politically while Burlington is right-leaning. Hamilton is Scorsese’s Mean Streets while Burlington is more Leave it to Beaver.

History of building

One important axis in which Hamilton/Burlington differ is that of history. Hamilton has lots of history while Burlington appears to have very little.

In Hamilton, history cannot be marginalized simply because there is so much of it. From mid-Victorian churches, to worker’s cottages, to aging factory complexes, history–as far as architectural infrastructure is concerned–is in great supply. However, demand for this history does not correspond to the abundance of its supply.

As in many historical industrial cities, the historical richness of the place is confounded with its current, marginal economic value. This tends to grossly undervalue these resources. With diminished value, old dilapidated buildings are destroyed without outcry. A movement to create money from these old bricks, say, through industrial tourism as found in England and Germany, has yet to appear.

Burlington was purposely built to escape history and to start afresh. Nowhere in Burlington is there much evidence of settlement prior to, say, 1900. Burlington first grew as a post-war bedroom community to Hamilton. It has shifted its focus to being more a bedroom community to Toronto, or a viable edge city in its own right. Burlington also has a surprisingly diverse industrial corridor along the busy QEW, which divides Burlington in two.

Burlington is presented as a modern solution to a traditional Victorian city like Hamilton: in order to build the modern city it was necessary to escape the burdens of the past. Burlington encourages one to forget about history and focus more on consumption. Residents move there not in spite of the lack of historical context but rather because of it.

History of ethnic enclaves

When immigrants move to a rough and tumble place like Hamilton, the resources provided by ones ethnic community and church are a vital source of support. In the absence of money, support comes from the community. Immigrants often live near their supportive communities in urban enclaves.

Hamilton has the remnants of urban enclaves, such as the Italian and Portuguese North End. However, these are losing its ethnic flavour as residents acquire sufficient mobility to move to cleaner, relatively bucolic suburbs like Burlington. As older communities move on, newer ethnic communities like the Vietnamese or Somalis take their place.

Burlington was from the start a post-ethnic type of place. In Burlington, support comes less from community and more from cash-in-hand. In Burlington, the average household income is much higher than in Hamilton. The more money you have, the less dependent you are on support from your community.

In Burlington there is ethnic diversity in the population, since like Hamilton, it has inflows of immigrants. But you would not know this from driving around town. Neighbourhoods in Burlington tend to look all the same. There is some differentiation in neighbourhoods, but this is caused more by variations in income than in ethnic make up.

Avoidance of poverty and ambiguity

To move to Burlington, due to its elevated property prices, you need to earn a certain income. This is a crude stereotype, of course, but as a general rule being a resident of Burlington indicates a certain base household income. This means that if you move to Burlington you can successfully avoid much contact with the urban poor. For some, this is an attractive proposition.

In Hamilton, the chance of poverty avoidance is much reduced. Hamilton, like Buffalo and Pittsburgh, has lots of poor people. But there are also considerable numbers of not-poor people too. Therefore, saying you are a resident of Hamilton imparts less information than saying you live in Burlington. In Hamilton you might be poor, or you might not be. You might be living there because you have no other options, or you might be there by choice. This ambiguity of rank and position creates opportunities to move between social strata.

In larger cities such as Toronto and New York, enormous wealth lives side by side with striking poverty. Diversity of income and circumstance are the marks of most traditional cities. Hamilton is traditionally urban in this respect: if you want to avoid poverty then Hamilton is not your kind of place. Burlington is the opposite: if you want to avoid poverty, Burlington might be just the place for you.

Property maintenance and social diversity

One striking difference between Hamilton and Burlington is their approach to property maintenance. Hamilton is full of buildings that require huge amounts of maintenance. Their bricks need re-pointing, parapets are falling down, flashings are corroded and need to be replaced. Typically, this maintenance work is done inadequately, presumably because of the huge expense of doing it well.

Burlington, on the other hand, is perhaps overly-maintained–despite being a place where low or no-maintenance finishes such as vinyl siding are common. Burlington is full of house-proud home-owners who edge their lawns and power-wash their car-ports to an itch of their lives. There is a great sense of keeping up your property so that the neighbours have no reason to complain. In Burlington, with its relatively homogeneous population, there is concern about what neighbours might think.

In Hamilton, with its more diverse population, there is less concern to conform in this way because there is less likelihood your neighbours are similar to you.

A typical Pittsburgh neighbourhood

Every once in awhile a newspaper article is published that extols the charms of Pittsburgh as a tourist destination. I enjoy reading such articles because Pittsburgh is wonderful city for which I feel great affection. However, lately, there is a sameness to the articles and their manufactured, somewhat contrived message that now seems a little suspect.

Usually these articles go something like this:

You might think that Pittsburgh is a real stinking dump but this no longer true! It is actually a very liveable city with some colourful restaurants, great museums and lots of people who don’t seem to mind living there at all! When the Steel mills were operating Pittsburgh was known as ‘the Smoky City.’ Air quality was terrible and they had to turn on the street lights at noon. Then all the mills shut down in the 70’s and now the air is much better. There are lots of new industries such as health care, research and robotics. Pittsburgh really is quite a cool city–even Andy Warhol came from there!

All of the above is true. The Pittsburgh revival is real and it is a city filled with interesting, friendly people. Its universities can be excellent (e.g. Carnegie Mellon). The museums are well worth a visit, for example, the Warhol, the Carnegie and the Children’s Museum. Some of its neighbourhoods are very attractive and vibrant. As in Buffalo, it is surprising just how beautiful some of its architecture is.

The conventional interpretation

What these articles tend to suggest is the following: that dirty industries and the jobs they provide are bad, while clean, white-collar research jobs are much better–for all concerned; that the steel industry left town all at once in the 70’s. This was bit hard at first but it appears that it’s been a good thing in the long run; that the dirt that the steel industry produced was an inevitable outcome of steel production and that the only way to clean up the environment was to get rid of that type of industry entirely; and finally, that whatever was lost during the period of de-industrialization during the 70’s and 80’s has been replaced with something of equal or greater value.

Some things to consider

What these articles tend not to mention is that one of the reasons that housing is so cheap and artists’ studios in cool industrial spaces are so available in Pittsburgh is that hundreds of thousands of people left town, never to return.  De-population of the once vibrant industrial city of Pittsburgh was an extraordinarily painful process for many, especially for those unlikely to find work in any type of new, research-based economy. This dislocation of one group of people with another, where the overlap between the two groups is minimal, was a socially corrosive experience for those made redundant.

Many neighbourhoods in Pittsburgh have yet to recover from de-industrialization. These may be far from the relatively urbane ones such the Golden Triangle (downtown), Lawrenceville, or Bloomfield, where some new investment has trickled in. The pain in less-glamorous neighbourhoods, such as Munhall, Wilmerding, or McKeesport, still appears raw and unresolved.

Pittsburgh still tends to be a highly segregated city according to race. The Hill District, for example, is essentially a black ghetto within walking distance of downtown. It attracts little investment, is not a place you want to explore late at night and is under no danger of being gentrified anytime soon. The racism which presumably perpetuates such ghettos is as powerful a force as recent attempts at civic reinvention.

The speed at which de-industrialization occurred to the steel industry in Pittsburgh always seemed a bit fishy. Why did it happen so quickly? Can it be explained by market forces (e.g. cost of labour, materials or transportation) or are there other, possibly more sinister factors such as avoidance of environmental regulation, or the desire to set up shop in locales without pesky, activist unions? If Hamilton, Ontario can still be making steel, why is it that thirty years ago Pittsburgh decided that it couldn’t do the same?