Gene Miller

News flash: Gene is thinking of relocating to Mexico! This is his final (for now) column in Focus. WHICH EMAIL TO OPEN FIRST: “Brain Surgery” or “Get Instahard”—my brain or my Richard, my ability to pay attention or to stand at attention? In these parlous times I respond to any offer or sunlit promise. Speaking of such times, can one be both an optimist and an apocalyptarian? Well, you can believe everything will turn out for the best, while nursing an Old Testament hellfire-tinged definition of “the best.” You may have noticed, an angry mood of retribution is spicing the air right now. I’m informed by online commentary that we are in “a new era of existential unease”—a matter of particular interest to me as I continue research and ideation for a book titled Futurecide: Catastrophe is Ecological. While not likely to survive the final draft, the preface presently opens with: “Shit happens.” It will examine various ideas of catastrophe—for example, the speculation that the energetic signature of the universe itself carries the ingredients for catastrophe (in other words, it’s ‘built in’); or that human social aspirations are blunted by ‘flawed’ neural design; or that the profound fact of death imposes an existential handicap—and that neither civilizations nor individuals can step outside such conditions (try though we do) any more than we can cross time. And while we’re on about the passage of time, you are reading my last Focus column. Honest. Finito. And after 53 years here in Victoria, I’m considering relocating to historic, hilly Guanajuato— “Europe in Mexico,” they call the city—a cultured but also an elemental place, site of five hundred years of silver and gold mining (the city for a while supplied three-quarters of the world’s silver), a place of mile-deep holes and an extraordinary web of traffic tunnels that perforate the ubiquitous, hulking mountains that define the contours and vertical character of the city. I turned 80 on August 2nd. Time for the next—okay, one last—show of courage, yes? How’s all that for a news package? “Wow!” You can say that again. “Wow!” If you’re a fan of my particular brand of bummerismo and irony, you’re going to have to shop for another accomplished pessimist. Given current circumstances and conditions, there must be plenty arou—whoops, there I go again! I leave you with some parting thoughts below. Social revolution, if history to-date offers lessons, is one of life’s essential and often messy facts. Currents of change run everywhere through existence: new information, new tools (and weapons), scientific discovery, new technologies or economies, new ways to suffer or grow rich, new political, cultural or religious ideologies…all these and more show up when they will, always packaged on their own novel terms. They challenge, disrupt or destroy history, habits and institutions—the social infrastructure and undergirding belief systems we designed to meet earlier ops or probs. You’ll remember from high school science or chance reading that the universe began in explosion (the “Big Bang” or “Original Expansion Event”), and this remains a durable existential condition, a vibration, that resonates in every cell of every thing that has a physical identity. Reader, these times, our lifetimes, here, everywhere, now...we are being lofted by the latest explosion, the combustion phase in some natural cycle or rhythm. History is cracking (again), chunks are shooting off in all directions, and when things re-stitch, the world will be different. Life will be different. Vigilance, wisdom, poise, preparedness, adaptability are small defense and no guarantee against such elemental force, just the only tools we have. Still, they’re better than a populace covering its eyes and chanting: “Nothing’s really changing! It’s business-as-usual!” Look at it from explosion’s point of view: catastrophe is just something novel wanting to get out. By the way, I just read that 60 percent of Americans believe, based on biblical assertion, that the universe is 6,000 years old. Fortunately all of this stops at the Canadian border, where magic gives way to fact. Whew! No need for a royal commission. You may remember that the daily featured some late-February/early March content and follow-on commentary and letters about the state and fate of downtown Victoria, worries triggered by Covid’s forced scouring, the growing damage caused by the technology-enabled work-from-home trend (the Province is a big fan) and by online shopping and commerce, and diminished social investment in the downtown public realm and in its image as a place of appeal and safety. I ventured then in Focus that maybe it was time for a week-long all-stakeholder conversation/visioning session about downtown’s future, and idly added that such a session might do well to start with a blueprint for a projected downtown/ central area residential population of 40 thousand over a hundred square blocks, Humboldt to Bay, Wharf to Cook, accompanied by a thorough contemporizing and phased re-making and re-acculturating of the entire public realm within that area—esthetics; urban design; cultural, recreational, social amenities; natural assets; services; everything, right down to the look of the manhole covers—to produce a downtown of unequalled urbanity, utility and compelling beauty. To any of you unsettled by such a vision and by the idea of so much change, I note that the assumed stability, the status quo, we have enjoyed locally for years—the sense of definition and continuity within generally understood social boundaries —is now disappearing with shocking speed. That “new era of existential unease” is just grownup for “ka-boom!” Ex-mayor Lisa Helps saw the coming change, saw the future, embraced it, championed fresh responses and policies. The unprecedented levels of public animus and criticism she attracted were, in my view, simply proof of her courage, singularity and political acumen. Current Lilliputian preoccupations with Victoria’s potholes, or antipathy toward bike lanes, or worries over provincial approval of fourplexes and the possible loss of some trees, or finger-wagging from budget scolds and the prevailing vigorous promotion of the entire yesteryear culture of Victoria reveal a collapse of both civic intelligence and courage, and demonstrate the antithesis of citizenship in times like these. Social conditions change (as this piece argues) and the very meaning of ‘city’—this city and cities everywhere—is undergoing profound change. The future’s knocking and there’s a city (both its physical and social expression) to re-fashion, and tremendous need for collective bravado. Time to learn a new dance. Consider, for example, that the single-family home must be seen as an ecological squander that particularly in urban settings has maybe a decade left. Houses in century-old neighbourhoods near the city centre? Turn ‘em into eightplexes! If you put current and pending changes in the stewpot—things like the AI takeover and the collapse of human work/employment as an organizing social principle and economic method; the waning of globalism and re-tribalization of nations (accompanied by spreading autocracy and growing risk of in- and inter- country violence); and the looming collapse of most ecological systems (also known as ‘life’)—a staggering volume of accumulated social behaviour and habit must be jettisoned. Much of the past, in so many of its beliefs and practices, is over and going away, sure to be reflected by vast social rupture (this stuff doesn’t go easily). Forced into a flexible posture, most of us retreat from the future’s message: if you can’t bend, you break. Turn the page. Three words, effortless to write. Yes, I appreciate that page-turning is easy to propose and very hard to do. It’s disruptive, and people hate disruption. When history’s page turns, some benefit, many may lose; some see advantage, many see a loss of fragile security. This, I think, is one of the reasons that anticipatory social change is so difficult. It may also help to explain the purpose of catastrophe: no negotiation, no consensus, just consequences. Seen in this light, catastrophe may be community’s best friend. I take three projects with me into my eighties: the aforementioned study of catastrophe; another book of themed stories and essays entitled “Virgin Mary,” concerned with the growing re-subordination of women; and The Centre for the Design of the Future (CDF)—essentially, an idea factory (workshops, conferences, online publishing, etc.) for the production of a new social language and protocols, new ‘tools and rules,’ now, just as liberal democracy flickers and threatens to go dark. With appropriate humility, I would suggest that CDF hopes to contemporize the universal message of Christ and to elevate it above the ooga-booga of biblical Creation storytelling, and above the current scary faith-driven political agenda. “Der Mensch liegt in größter Not! Der Mensch liegt in größter Pein!”/Man lies in direst need! Man lies in greatest pain! wrote Mahler in Urlicht (Primordial Light), a short movement in his Second Symphony The Resurrection. “Shit happens.” PS Thank you for reading my Focus columns published over nearly two decades. You’re welcome to email me anytime (genekmiller@gmail.com). I promise a timely response. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, and originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, He is currently writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future. Editor’s Note: I have enjoyed Gene’s columns—way too many to count—and our association over the past 25 years. I didn’t so much edit him as occasionally ask, “What the heck do you mean?” Or “You can’t say that!” But he did. And I don’t expect this is really the last we’ll hear from him. He admitted to having “a rant or two left in me” recently. Meanwhile, thanks for the wonderful, thought-provoking, writing, Gene. I do believe our community is the better for it. And, if you do move to Mexico, all the best in lucky Guanajuato! (Image at opening by jcomp on Freepik)

One little change on that third note has the power to make you feel hope or dread…lit up or left in the dark. —Online discussion of the emotional difference between major and minor musical keys A SHORT LETTER TO THE EDITOR caught my attention a while back. It seemed remarkable for its emotional nakedness, its anxiety and despair, and because it captures the viewpoint and sentiments of an ever-widening slice of the public. In part it stated: “We are in a mess that has no way out. Our governments play at governing. For us the people? I don’t think so. Yet here we are in a global crisis that is not being taken seriously… People are doing without, fighting to survive…but nobody is listening. Promises made. Just words. Blah blah blah…How much more is going to be thrown at us before we say enough and actually do something?” Hold on to the writer’s closing phrase, “actually do something.” Isn’t it a fact that we do plenty of somethings, but somehow they seem to be the wrong somethings; or maybe they’re the right ones but in the wrong proportions or sequence, or the wrong people or agencies are doing them, or the social signals seem either over-simple or obscure and indecipherable; and in any case they don’t produce the change or results people are hoping for. If we try to build some picture of our times, free of the conceit that “this is Canada and we’re different,” we must be sure to include: the significant and enduring social trauma, far beyond health impacts, imposed globally by the Covid pandemic; economist Mohammed A. El-Erian’s widely circulated contention that the roiling global economy signals that globalization as a way of understanding civilizational evolution and the aspirations of governance is changing, maybe passing; and that national postures appear to be more territorial, more defensive; a world-wide movement asserting Indigenous rights, land and natural heritage ownership; the demographics of aging and stresses of mass migration as Canada ‘seeks’ 500,000 immigrants per year; the folly of faith in a ‘return’ to previous economic, social, or political states of relative or seeming stability; the rootless physical and emotional geography of the digital space, and our quickly shifting protocols for social interaction; an emergent ‘Age of Worry’ flowing from emanations and transmissions of pending ecosystem collapse. Such conditions (likely, among others) are exerting enormous pressure on social memory and turning the past into an opaque yesteryear drained of lesson or guidance. The “neighbourhood” is now in many ways electronic and it has permitted or imposed a very new and often dislocating set of adjacencies, different scales, different social frameworks. All of this is exciting and terrifying. Consciousness is crowded by ‘nows’ packaged as social ideologies that compete for attention and adherence. This reduces and challenges custom, continuity, tradition, habit, stability, security. It makes people less certain, more vulnerable and manipulable. It is no wonder that soft (or not so soft) dictatorship and autocracy are spreading throughout the world. In numerous FOCUS Magazine columns, I have suggested that when a civic (or a national) community loses, or runs out of, ‘story’ or a defining and broadly shared narrative, it puts its identity—its ‘us’—at risk. Intentional and purposive cooperation gives way to social abstraction. Under such conditions, citizens (people who think of themselves as civic stakeholders) can easily become lost and confused, an unmoored public lacking story or purpose and open to bombast and a range of social threats—not least, confusion and immobilizing anxiety about where things are headed. By “story,” I mean not heritage buildings or an Old Town, physical “leftovers,” the residue of legacy, but more the passage of social purpose through time, the ‘why,’ the ‘what we’re here to do’ of a place. Yes, this takes community-scale time and effort to consider, and no, we don’t have very good protocols, probably because social agenda consanguinity was long-assumed but infrequently tested. The extraordinary level of everyday social noise today and the division of paths—lifestyle choices, we call them—makes even the modelling of wide-scale conversation difficult. Also, let’s acknowledge that current conditions, as bulleted earlier in this piece, are a difficult platform on which to build a programme of cultural or social direction. Citizenship requires story, a populace that says “this is who we are.” In its absence, story remains a waiting challenge. What do we do to ensure that story takes up more space on our busy and crowded dial? Please understand: story is existential, story is a social project, not something ‘they’ do for ‘us,’ but more like planting more trees, or housing the homeless, controlling flood risk or, in a rural setting, bringing in the harvest. Why take on this work, here in Victoria? Because we have the particular social skills and emotional makeup: the aspiration for community and a desire to perfect the world cleverly masked by an annoying inflexibility and tendency toward self-righteous judgment of others; because, beneath our stodgy reputation, we are a community of social innovators; and because we are as a community capable of self-disappointment and guilt, a sense of failure, which can be re-packaged as a debt to the world and to the future to be exemplars, to succeed, to demonstrate that such effort can still produce recognizable outcomes, even or especially now as our civilization shudders. Consider: we are leaving work, we are leaving the family, we are bestowing human-generated intelligence and imagination upon AI; we are leaving Earth. As civilization ruptures the past, how do we discover or invent new grounds for story? With the possible exception of software engineers, social media designers and any others who may be riding the current wave and who feel sure of landing on the far shore, these are anxious, minor key times for many of us. Now, behaviour entirely precedes order, and globally and at home, brutality, hostility, antipathy, a clawing, high-stakes ideological opportunism have grown to the scope of social pandemic. If we hope to hear a major key within the lifetime of now-living generations, we could not do better than to return to story; that is, to a re-crafted and re-imagined meaning of home. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

Maybe we start with a vision of 40,000 people living urbanely and comfortably Downtown… REMEMBER nice? I have some older friends, people about my age (500 years) who are still nice. I didn’t realize that nice was just a cultural season, a social garnish, in civilization’s march toward oblivion but, like bell-bottoms or cufflinks, the Twist or 45’s, it is. Reminisce with me that for a while, the appropriate response, the nice response, to someone’s “Good morning!” was “And to you! Everything’s well, I hope?” instead of “Fuck you.” I see your eyes are moistening. Best dab ‘em with your hankie. I bring this up because I’m in a reflective—okay, an especially reflective—meaning-of-life mood these days, attempting to weigh recent progress and human accomplishment. Right now seems like the definition of ‘risky times,’ what with: Russia-Ukraine (the war Putin cannot lose); enormous changes globally to food production and the reliability of material supply chains basic to manufacturing economies everywhere; very scary prospects in China (food, productivity, political rule, etc.); the collapse of globalization and its geopolitical implications; the spread of autocracy and the growing re-subordination of women (Roe Vs. Wade, anybody?). My wife, who’s a lot more tech-savvy and competent than I am, recently programmed my Apple watch. I hate watches, so why am I wearing an Apple watch in the first place? Because my doctor thought it would be useful for me to wear a device that could monitor my heart rate, brain activity and other related systemic performance. Why do I need any of that? Let’s just say that I am less spring chicken, more autumn roadkill. So, she set—sorry, programmed—the watch accordingly, and now it informs me, with a vaguely parental ping or vibration and a screen message, if my heart rate falls below 40bpm, or if I need to complete some exertion to meet an un-invited (and unwelcome) exercise goal, or if my oxygen intake is worryingly low, or if I seem sad or abstracted or assailed by existential fears or beset by life’s tragic qualities. I know that somewhere in that fucking watch there’s a password to a function that flashes: “Solve all world problems? Yes 🔲 No 🔲.” But in some inexplicable embrace of perversity, my wife won’t let me near it. Such matters seemed particularly pressing after I read a report in the Daily Dither about the vulnerability of downtown streetfront businesses and ground-floor residences to the angry, the crazy, the drug-addicted and the predatory. The story, about a rash, or epidemic, of broken windows and thefts, included a shopkeeper’s observation that things haven’t been the same Downtown since Covid: fewer strollers and shoppers, and more people working from home, less in downtown offices; and business owners’ thoughts of relocating out of Downtown. Well, damned if I didn’t learn from “The Delicate Downtown Future,” a report in Governing.com, that because of Covid, every city in North America lost a significant percentage of downtown office workers to remote work, and that things are likely never to return to pre-Covid levels. Oops! Life is chess, certainly at the business level. If you wish to survive, you can’t strategize or behave oblivious of your opponent’s bishop; the price of such disregard is lethal. Just one of the many problems faced by Downtown: developers who, with their neo-brutalist, Soviet slabs, contribute new square footage but add no charm, character or appeal. Downtown has long been assailed by “traditional” challenges like the malls; suburban distances; parking inconveniences and cost; cultural shifts and social preferences dis-favouring (or outright rejecting) Downtown; and so on. And now there are new and emergent issues like online shopping; remote office work; the unknowable impacts of AI and robotics on social behaviour; the under-managed downtown presence of the addicted, mentally damaged and violent; the necessary but necessarily slow and incremental effort to build a new, economically captive downtown residential population; developers who, with their neo-brutalist, Soviet slabs, contribute new square footage but add no charm, character or appeal to Downtown; concerns about personal safety in a Downtown less safe than presumed; and on top of all this, Victoria’s patented indisposition to meet reality head-on, to, if I may borrow the phrase, call a spade a fucking shovel—itself an enormous handicap because it blocks war-footing sensibility. When I write “war footing,” I don’t mean wage war on the homeless. I mean the scale of the challenge to Downtown’s viability calls for the widened intellectual boundaries of emergency and what-if thinking. Have you gathered from sources other than this column that we, all of us, are currently living in an “Age of Emergency,” and that the last 75 years of relative stability is at least on pause, more likely over? Hmm, what to do? How’s about we plan and hold a vast, all-stakeholder-inclusive, well-prepared, expertly-informed week-long Downtown blueprinting session, framed by the recognition that what was ain’t what’s gonna be. We are in fundamentally changing times, and any visioning and planning must start by acknowledging that. What people need to bring to such a session, I suspect, is a structural mindset: nothing off the table. But Victoria doesn’t do structural, doesn’t think structural thoughts. Victoria prefers icing. Structural pieces are too big and you have to move a bunch of presumed ‘certainties’ to the ‘who knows?’ column. Pieces like real estate uses, values and long-term viability, which speaks backhandedly to tax income. Or the viability of much of the downtown retail/service base as online shopping and commerce expand. Or the downtown employment base (thousands of jobs) which, beside its economic impacts, is also a cornerstone of social stability and community coherence. Gives you sudden insight, doesn’t it, into why there’s so much actual stalling and hope-and-pray in the reality sandwich. These are incredibly hard things to focus on, especially when others are yammering on about preserving heritage curbstones in Bastion Square like that was the most important thing in the world. It’s my point that the poetic and romantic reasons, the cool reasons, the reasons based in cultural conceit, the reasons Victorians love, for Downtown’s appeal were always—but never more so than now—subordinate to functional reasons: buying and selling, commerce and service, cultural exchange, community coherence and social safety. If Downtown has a future, its crafting must start with engagement with such ideas and with a vision of Downtown’s functional relevance in the years to come. Maybe we start with a vision of 40,000 people living urbanely and comfortably Downtown— Burdett to Bay, Wharf to Cook—accompanied by a checklist of what such a residential population needs close at hand (food, services, clothing, furnishing, other stuff, health services, cultural resources, recreational resources, and so on). Maybe the entire missing middle thing could be re-expressed in a housing format appropriate to Downtown, and senior governments could pour in a zillion bucks. Comprehensive, sustained block-by-block beautification, in which the entire public realm is treated as a canvas. Education, education, education—millions of people are going to be seeking fresh training and new skills development and creativity cultivation programmes/institutions to help them adjust to and succeed in this rapidly transforming world. An evening/ nighttime block watch plan to ensure personal and property safety (and to assist Downtown stakeholders to act/feel more like a community). You cannot respond to tomorrow’s challenges thinking they are yesterday’s challenges with a different hemline. If you go with yesterday’s tools—outmoded sensibilities, rules, policies, civic structures and culture—you’ll never catch up, you’ll always be a step behind, reinforcing a debilitating and toxic culture of unsuccess that leaves everybody feeling failed and crappy. During that proposed week-long visioning exercise, it might help to hang banners throughout Downtown: “3...2...1.” Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

Have we overlooked the obvious in the “story” of Victoria—our region’s rootedness in a thousand miles of adjacent coastline? OPINION COLUMNIST Carlos Lozada writes: “In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths. Their impossibility is part of their appeal; few would pause to debunk the physics of Icarus’s wings before warning against flying too close to the sun.” In the spirit of Lozada’s commonsense treatment of fabulist matters, I would like to take you on a journey, local and distant, that may offer you a more dimensioned understanding of this place, Victoria, and of your important role in its history and community. We begin with excerpts from a note prepared by cultural historian and university academic Martin Segger for the panel responsible for reviewing proposals from cities and other places seeking UNESCO World Heritage Site status (Victoria is currently in the midst of such an appeal): Victoria has branded itself variously over the years: “Little bit of Old England,” “City of Gardens,” “Follow the birds to Victoria.” But branding is not a story that roots a community in its place. If the City has a story about itself it is fractionalized. Popular local cultural sites provide episodic moments, often maddeningly superficial. Some historic house museums hint at the Hudsons Bay Company fort; HSMB plaques on Wharf Street reference the heroics of frontier gold rushes; the Royal BC Museum focuses on the Northern coastal First Nations and presents a vague nowheresville ‘Old Town;’ numerous scattered monuments memorialize victims of nearly forgotten wars. Civic studies school curricula reveal a parade of elderly white men who plod through an increasingly contested continental history in search of our manifest destiny, Confederation. We look to our historic urban landscape to provide glimpses of a mostly fantasized past: exotic Chinatown, Victorian economic boom-times leaving a romantic picturesque legacy of elaborate rooflines, garden suburbs laced with middle-class Tudor cottages and robber-baron manor houses. All a dislocated and incomprehensible palimpsest of exclusion and entitlement, from an elitist viewpoint and an icing of racism and class privilege. All the while we have overlooked the obvious: the region’s rootedness in a thousand miles of adjacent coastline and a geopolitical reality that embraces the world’s largest ocean, its adjoining lands, its peoples and a thousand other stories. In the setting of Segger’s thoughts, is it too much to view the European “discovery” of Victoria as the recapitulation of an ancient and primitive biological ritual repeated countlessly across a vast ocean and its framing continents: the spermatic quest of male-prowed ships in search of welcoming, receiving harbours promising the bounty of a fecund and resource-rich inland? The calm, safety and provision of Victoria’s Inner Harbour…what a place to drop your anchor! And when was all this? In what dim and distant past? Why, six grandparents ago, roughly. Architect and architectural thinker Chris Gower, who has spent a professional lifetime listening to the hidden voices of historic places and buildings, undertakes his own meditation on the same harbourscape: “Victoria's Harbour was the wellspring of the City—for all of its eras. Two waterfront Urban Design Studies, initiated some years ago in my time as a City Urban Design Planner, and updated as part of site reviews for the Maritime Museum, focused on: 1. Maintaining a large, multi-use Urban Festival Plaza for Ship Point. Long a public open space on the Harbour—how might this be newly presented for the future? 2. Examining potential for a modern reconstruction of the original 1858 Hudson's Bay Company Warehouse below Wharf Street. How might a lost pivotal frontier building provide a reference, to pivot towards times to come? Illustrating his two points, Gower offers this gull’s-eye view of the subject area, capturing a warm, civilized and cultured welcome from the land; views out to the harbour puddle and the westering ocean distances that brought us here a short century-and-three-quarters ago; the site of our first mercantile footfall (the HBC warehouse); and an overall expanse offering prompts to the imagination, if you’re the kind of person who thinks of history as purpose, however indecipherable, flowing through time. (Am I blind to the fact that other peoples called this place their home, long before we showed up? Aw, c’mon.) My point is this: each of us is a citizen of the past and the future, and we abandon and leave to others the extraction of meaning from history and the projection and production of the social (or political or economic or other) future only to risk our status as fully-subscribed members of the human team. We relinquish our compass—the meaning and impact of the legacies we inherited and those we will leave—at our peril. To sense the risk, you need only acknowledge as three (among many) worrying conditions currently shaping the human project the worldwide spread and expanding influence of autocratic government (with concomitant threats to democracy), a growing desperation and dismay regarding livability (environment, health, community) and, in the face of the right-wing blitz, the fading potency (or relevance) of progressivism as a liberating social force. I invoke my own fabulist tendencies to state that I believe we are in the closing chapters of our species’ mission, our biological job. Why else—please, soberly and seriously ask yourself this question—would we be suicidally engaged, as we are now, in the destruction of the ecospheric features and conditions that sustain us on this singular planet? We even name it: ecocide. The New York Times recently carried a lengthy report on the looming emergence of consciousness in Artificial Intelligence—consciousness, that is, self-awareness, in AI, in machines. Not biological life, as we currently consider or define it, but life nonetheless. At current speeds of development, the article suggests, AI consciousness—a machine entity capable of thinking of and experiencing itself as a ‘me’ and, presumably, with growing self-regard and a will of its own—is only a decade or two out. And what does humanity do in an increasingly work-less world? Make ever-worse trouble, is my guess. Truly, all of this is myth-worthy content, and it’s in the context of such evolutionary developments that we—each of us—are invited (or required) to consider and understand our citizenship in the past and the future, as these tenses give meaning to the moment. As you walk and drive around our city, and particularly as you find yourself anywhere close to the Inner Harbour, imagine the last stupid thought that may have floated up from the sixty-five million-year-ago blanket of mesozoic palms: “I’m Tyrannosaur! I’m not going anywhere! Ever!” When citizenship—engagement in story—lapses or dies, the moral or, less gratingly, the situational or even ecological roadmap blurs. All options seem equally credible and valid. Story no longer defines our social prospects, no longer answers the questions: “Where did we come from?” “Where do we want to go?” And what are we left with if we run out of story? The End. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

Downtown Victoria needs to look and feel like our living room, not the grim, grey, anonymous thing it’s becoming. IN HIS BIOGRAPHY of Russian late-Romantic composer Nikolai Medtner, author Barrie Martyn chronicles Medtner’s early years in turn-of-the-Nineteenth-Century Moscow, commenting on the “flourishing of the arts, music, literature, philosophy.” Evocative language that sets the imagination racing, especially the surprising inclusion of philosophy in public culture. The world had entered a new and exciting century, and these were years in which society’s pulse beat faster, not just in arts and culture, but social, political and scientific thought, too. Things expand, things contract. We are now again in powerful, but very different and perilous, times of social change featuring a resurgence of far-right religion-and race-based neo-conservatism, threats to freedom of expression, risk of collapse of egalitarian democracy (you now hear growing reference to “Christian Democracy”), the shrinking of social imagination and dangerous intellectual contraction, the growing re-subordination of women (just watch the next decade), social/political violence south of us, and a hatred of cities as presumed centres of urban liberal thought and practice; and globally a strong drift toward autocracy, thickening borders and the surveillance state. In ways and for reasons I only begin to understand, the idea of a global order and the dream of loosening and cooperation that accompanied it is suffering at least temporary abandonment. These are existential times and it’s my worry that all of this will generate profound threats to and challenges for Canadian democracy and, specifically, for the identity and integrity of Victoria and its prospects as a centre of liberal values and practice. It’s an enormous challenge to hold a citywide conversation about this, and most of us are rarely motivated by—in fact, tend to scoff at—alarm. We seem to require a completely visceral encounter with catastrophe before we will react or go on a “war footing.” Regrettably, nature has designed catastrophe so that its urgencies and outcomes are all one package. But if the wind is blowing the right way, people can be motivated (or seduced) by opportunity, benefit and by invitations to pleasure. People like fun. Come and Play! is an idea inspired by the cultural fever of Mentor’s Moscow. To the extent that such things can be engineered rather than emerging organically, its purpose is to breathe new life and viability into downtown Victoria and to restore strong identity to our regional society. Downtown currently faces and is poorly prepared for a set of unmistakable threats and challenges. It looks and feels like a setting for danger, not pleasure; grim, grey and, increasingly, a place of anonymity, not of landmarks, a visual copycat of cities everywhere. It needs ‘icing’—a major investment in public realm beautification, distributed as needed in the course of a decade, say, over a roughly 60-block area—Wharf to Cook, Humboldt north to Fisgard and into Rock Bay. For lack of a better image, Downtown needs to look and feel like a living room. Many new Downtown buildings make it look and feel like a setting for danger, not pleasure; grim, grey and, increasingly, a place of anonymity. The world is now desperate for conversation, and this will only intensify. I can’t imagine a better place to create a centre for thought and cultural production in the broadest terms than Victoria. Come and Play! is cultural renaissance intended to foster public conversation in all of its expressions. Force or charm the university—at least its relevant programmes and departments—Downtown, instead of that pointless landscaped arcadia in the middle of nowhere. Encourage the creation of new organizations and institutions, and invite others to relocate to Victoria. Create a hundred public realm venues for the display of art, photography, sculpture. Conferences, workshops, speeches, debates, reinforced and amplified by widespread media interest, online publishing, the promotion of nameplate experts and leaders in various fields engaged in professional residencies here. Play to an obvious local strength and make Downtown by intention a centre for ecological/environmental thought and innovation. Invite creative individuals and groups to locate Downtown. Give them whatever incentives they need. Build strategic alliances with worldwide media. They’re always looking for content. Encourage chess tournaments and other intellectual games intended to distract people from depression. Create opportunities for massive First Nations cultural renewal and contemporary re-expression. In other words, give people countless new reasons and incentives to come Downtown, to be part of its life and energy. And by the way, the public library, which has been intentionally and successfully broadening its range of services, appeal and clientele, is a logical partner in all of this. Ditto the provincial museum. Also, high-tech is a logical partner. Isn’t there some currently under-celebrated plan now unfolding for a tech-driven innovation district Downtown? Look, the way things are now, with the economy upside down and turmoil likely to continue; with relentless competition from increasingly urbane shopping centres; and with the ever-expanding clout of online shopping and other online economic services, there is risk not of erosion of downtown retail/commercial infrastructure, but implosion, a loss of critical mass and viability. Might the Province be a financial partner in this entire initiative? It couldn’t hurt to ask. What would all of this cost? I don’t know, $50 million. Peanuts. The global publicity and the financial benefits would easily outstrip the cost. Where’s the energy Downtown right now? The “Old Town” rind around the Inner Harbour. People like the energy, visual appeal and distraction of such locales. Somehow, these areas give story, legibility and identity—definition and distinction, an ‘us’—to civic society, but none of this comes with a guarantee. It requires reinvestment and reinvention. It requires chance-taking and enormous drive and dedication. Habit and custom get tired, wear out, turn into the past. This fact puts great pressure on stakeholders. Letting go ain’t easy and the impulse to hold on, hold on, hold on is a powerful force. Still, times and conditions change, and downtown Victoria is in history’s crosshairs. As happens to every system in nature, social parts wear out and need re-expression. People like the energy, visual appeal and energy of “Old Town”—such areas give story, legibility and identity. But they require reinvestment and reinvention. This shows the Oriental Hotel at 554 Yates Street. (Photo by Michael John Lo) Why Come and Play!? The phrase has the right energy. It’s inviting, capacious, seductive. It’s anticipatory and points toward a new future for Downtown. It’s distinctive: it provides an organizing idea and establishes an image for Victoria that other cities haven’t conceived. By intention, Come and Play! is more frame than blueprint, a canvas that should be filled in by numerous influencers, originators, innovators with their own good ideas. Still, here are some of the key initiative areas: • public realm beautification and amenitization; • cultural capture and recentralization Downtown; • a proliferation of education/learning (new programmes and facilities); • engagement and volunteerism by downtown residents and others to foster citizenship and stakeholder values and habits; • a promotional ‘machine’ for Downtown marketing/image projection (Come and Play! needs appetite, a desire to succeed a competitor’s energy and poise); • Downtown resident customer incentives (special status and benefits to downtown residents); • elimination in one or two years of homelessness and street camping; • a strategy for the attraction of new organizations, centres, programmes (good for office rental and a driver of downtown visitation); • attraction of conferencing, lectures and other forms/expressions of social broadcasting; • particular emphasis on environmental and ‘one-planet’ ideas/programmes/leadership, and promotion of downtown as a global capital of one-planet practice; • more directed networking and active communication/collaboration between DVRA, DVBA, cultural resources and institutions, faith/spiritual resources and entities, civic leadership and other stakeholders. If you have any doubts about the potential for near-term success of Come and Play!, I encourage you to objectively and un-ironically consider the profound social and physical transformation of Westshore, achieved in twenty short years. Let’s go! Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

The basic math of Missing Middle housing makes it an unsafe bet for most developers. ASH. THAT’S WHAT I CALL IT. Stands for Affordable Sustainable Homes. The idea is pretty simple: a two-and-a-half-storey ‘houseplex’ of between eight and twelve suites, each of which has its own front door. Less apartment-y feel and no wasted square footage ($$) on common areas or internal circulation. Okay, the “Affordable” bit’s a complete joke in today’s market. ASH isn’t affordable, nothing’s affordable, new or existing. Everything’s “market” which among other things means that folks owning conventional properties that proliferate in Fairfield and other established neighbourhoods are sitting on roughly $1.5 in value. That number bears repeating: one million five hundred thousand dollars. Million, with an ‘m.’ If you sell and you’re not carrying too much mortgage debt, that makes you an instant millionaire. Did you ever think you would live in such times? Of course, the market’s softening a bit. So maybe that’s down to $1.3 million. Pass the tissues, please. What conditions, exactly, have lofted prices throughout Victoria to the stratosphere? I don’t know. Macroeconomics was never my strong suit. Closest I can come is: everyone wants to live here so there’s over-demand and under-supply. Profound, huh? While that might explain why land/property costs have laddered, consultant costs, fees, the cost of borrowing money and the cost of a 2x4 and everything else required for building a house have gone sky-high, too. You may have noticed, as you go past construction sites, “We’re Hiring” signs on every hoarding. Which brings us around to so-called Missing Middle housing. Given my increasingly porous memory, I can’t recall if the phrase was meant to address housing typology, the scale of buildings, housing costs, housing availability or, depending on circumstance, all of these. It’s not in my memory that former Mayor Lisa Helps, the City’s Missing Middle champion, or any of her council members thundered that success with the Missing Middle initiative would create a new era of housing affordability. My take, for reasons you may by now well understand, was that Missing Middle—permitting mid-block houseplexes of up to six suites and street-corner townhouses as-of-right, without onerous and costly rezoning (though still subject to various performance conditions)—simply made ASH-type and -scale developments quicker and easier. Examples of Missing Middle-type housing from the City of Victoria's design guidelines. My initial reaction was enthusiastic, tempered only by rue for the staggering amount of time it had taken me to complete the development approval process (more than three years) on my own current project during which direct costs—all pass-alongs to the housing consumer—leapt by a third…not exactly a blow in support of affordability. But then I did some of the Missing Middle math. Story-telling style, it goes roughly like this. So, I find a mid-block property for sale in Fairfield. Price: $1.4 million, let’s say. You mean, the property owner doesn’t understand that Missing Middle is intended to deliver housing affordability, and won’t sell for $800,000? Let’s continue. So, my land or property cost (my ”dirt cost” in developer-ese) per door—remember, six is the permitted maximum—is about $235,000. I plan six, roughly 850 sq. ft. two-bedroom units. Hard costs (everything related to construction ) are not less than $400/sq. ft. or $340,000 per suite. Soft costs (architect, consultants, interest cost of borrowing the working capital, various fees, real estate commissions, etc.) are likely to come in at $250/sq. ft., or about $210,000 per unit. So, where are we now? $785,000/door, by my reckoning. Then there’s developer profit. As everyone knows, almost all developers make 500 percent profit—or a gazillion—on their projects; but because I am the living incarnation of Jesus Christ, I will settle for a mere 20 percent, or $157,000/door, assuming my project lender, from whom I’m borrowing millions, feels that this is a sufficient (and credible) margin, just in case. This brings the total purchaser cost to $942,000, or about $1,100/sq. ft. In fact, stuff in Fairfield and other “prestige” neighbourhoods has been selling for upwards of a thousand a foot (prices are softening a bit right now, but not much). So, now we’re at the most interesting and subjective feature in the development process: developer appetite for risk. And you want to know something? As I do a risk assessment, from the gut and on paper, reviewing the numbers and trying to measure the future of an uncertain market (from development property purchase to the end of the sales process will be 18-24 months), I don’t like it. Too many things could shift. Costs could jump. Sales values could soften. The amount of capital (equity) my project lender requires me to put into the deal could increase. If all of that happens and my margins are too thin, I’ll be selling pencils on the streetcorner. Nope, I’m not going to buy the property, I’m not going to do the development. I’m outta here. Goodbye, Missing Middle. Maybe if I could do eight or ten units…maybe if land costs…maybe, maybe, maybe. The City’s own commissioned financial analysis of Missing Middle Housing appears to agree with my own. Coriolis Consulting Corp’s April 2022 report states: “The financial viability of missing middle housing development is likely marginal in most locations in the City, so if permitted, the pace of missing middle development will likely be modest for the foreseeable future.” And also: “Because the financial viability of missing middle housing is marginal, there is little room for missing middle projects to provide amenity contributions or below market housing.” (The word “marginal” appears frequently in the report.) Luckily, this doesn’t put the entire Missing Middle initiative at risk. I mean, I’m the only prudent developer in Victoria. All the others are testicular, high on pills or Chivas and well into their fifth marriage. So, given my tale above, and the City’s plan for the diffusion and placement of Missing Middle projects, and the fact that suite-ed homes already proliferate throughout Victoria and the world does not appear to have ended for nearby single-family values or quality-of-life, why has there been so much fear and hysteria directed at the prospect of Missing Middle housing? Why the fierce opposition when the basic message of Missing Middle is: more of what already exists? Why all the hand-wringing letters (in this magazine and elsewhere) about Missing Middle as the end of the tree canopy—prompting my nasty quip about a new species of Fairfield tree: the NIMBY Oak? Why has no one figured out that the City, comfortable with policy, not market risk, has placed limits on Missing Middle that under current market conditions, guarantee no projects will be undertaken? The idea, the principle, of Missing Middle was and remains so rational: distributed density throughout the city in familiar and traditional building forms that will have minimal impact upon the character of Victoria’s neighbourhoods. Brilliant! Everything works but the math. I can only conclude that communities were poorly equipped with the facts, and the Missing Middle conversation jumped the tracks fairly early on. Hysteria is often an expression of worst fears, and it appears the City was never in a position to resolve those fears. Hysteria, as you likely know may author or influence civic policy, but not good civic policy. So, a new City leadership is about to reconsider Missing Middle, and may well approve it—either as conceived by the last administration, or with some new twists. Assuming that the City’s goals have not changed and that, with now-Premier David Eby’s eye on the City’s performance (he was Housing Minister when he first made clear his expectations of Victoria), I would encourage mayor, councillors and relevant planning staff to sit down with developers, commercial lenders and project marketers to have them either echo or repudiate my concerns about project viability—assuming it’s in no one’s interest to initiate a plan that will have little or no take-up or, even worse, an early failure or two. Such a sit-down may well alter Missing Middle development characteristics, which would then justify a fresh public information and review process. Let me know how it all works out. I’ll be in my office counting my zillions. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

Gene imagines homelessness in Victoria solved—and then how it happened. Tweaks to the plan welcome! WHATEVER HAPPENED to your better homeless? Remember? They would stand at the street-corner, cap (or cup) in outstretched hand, portraits in noble suffering, their sight fixed on a better tomorrow. They had fallen on hard times and would respectfully ask and show thanks for your generosity; and if you gave, you gave to a brother or sister in the human family. Sigh. The homeless today—their presence in and impact upon the public realm—disturb us. They symbolize not shared social hardship but chaos, a social cancer, in a city that yearns for order and stability. They make a lie of our conceit of community and puncture our grounds for self-congratulation. They conspicuously remind us that we no longer live in string of charming little hamlets, but in a modern, increasingly impersonal city or, to invoke the ultimate Victoria horror, a place just like every other city. “Home” is a powerful symbol and it exerts a deep tug on our feelings and values. You might think we would do almost anything, invest whatever financial and social resources it took, to move the homeless from our streets and parks, to house them. But the condition remains, un-budging, and the realities both on the social investment and spending side and on the side of the homeless themselves result in collisions and a nearly paralyzing complexity at almost every level. First, consider that while we use the term “homeless,” it masks the fact that the un-housed are, in too many cases, something-plus homeless, something-before-homeless: mentally ill and homeless, impoverished and rendered homeless, addicted and homeless, unskilled or uneducated and homeless, culturally adrift and discarded and homeless. No less an eminence than Reverend Al Tysick, a man who has for a lifetime been on the front lines of compassionate service delivery to the homeless at the faith-initiated Open Door, Our Place and Dandelion Society, states that we band-aid the homeless situation without ever aligning our response to the true causes and conditions of homelessness. Grant McKenzie, communications director of Our Place, quoted in a recent Times Colonist article, echoes Tysick’s concerns, highlighting mental illness and addiction as the two greatest challenges to successful housing and service delivery. Homeless people camped along Pandora Avenue. (Photo by Ross Crockford) We have de-institutionalized—in some cases with good cause—but have left a vacuum that contemporary, more atomized society with its numerous priorities, preoccupations and problems appears nearly helpless to fill. Equally telling is that much of the social response to homelessness comes from non-profits of various kinds, which forces you to wonder: if the various societies and non-profits that currently do such an extraordinary job on the front lines of this social calamity didn’t exist, what would take their place? None of this makes “housing first” an outright lie—after all, people need sustenance and shelter every day, especially during Victoria’s long inclement winter season—but it reveals the complications and impediments, including reluctance by many of the homeless to be warehoused, managed, distanced from mates and familiar turf, even if the turf is made of concrete. Nothing prepared contemporary society for either the scope or the nature of today’s homeless. Most of us retreat and, with a shrug, regard the homeless street presence as a price to be paid. We simply skirt Pandora Avenue, objectify, and wonder why they—the mayor, the Province, Trudeau, the UN—don’t do something about it. Of course, the homeless are not something apart from society, not a dead branch on a living tree, but an expression of society itself, despite our tendency, reinforced by anecdote and news story, to view otherwise. It’s important to understand that the homeless condition is pandemic, local in all places. You have only to read the news to learn that every city in North America is swamped and more or less solution-less. Downtowns, if you read the hyperbole, are turning, or have turned, into “jungles.” A recent New York Times piece about the impacts of homelessness and poverty in sweet, little Burlington, Vermont (population: 45,000) cites increased crime, violence and even murder, along with an epidemic of brazen bicycle thefts (the bikes and bike parts are sold for drug money). The title of a television news piece about central Portland, Oregon? “From Wonderful to War Zone.” A recent letter in the Times Colonist, “Origins of the homeless should be counted,” questioned the method and accuracy of the bi-annual homeless count, noting that Victoria isn’t necessarily the “home,” so much as the destination, for many un-housed who arrive here from across the country. The letter suggests that we significantly undercount homeless numbers, and it calls for greater financial and other forms of investment by all levels of government in a countrywide strategy of local needs-meeting as the only way to manage Victoria’s homeless numbers and challenges. “Various levels of government [need to] work together to provide standard levels of care, support and legal regulation across the country.” Great idea. Let’s just wait around for that to happen. Shouldn’t take long. The well-meaning letter makes reasonable points, though it tiptoes past the fact that gainful employment, assets and a fixed mailing address, while nice-to-haves, are not conditions of civic occupancy. And by a logic equally clear to the housed and the homeless: why be out on the street in the Red Deer winter when you can simply dodge the raindrops in Victoria? Another recent TC letter placed the responsibility for indiscriminate homeless tenting on streets and in parks on a 2008 court ruling that established the “right to security of life, liberty and security of person.” Labelling the homeless a threat, the letter-writer asks: What about the wider public’s rights to the same securities? Now, there’s a helpful attitude guaranteed to result in big changes, don’t you think? How did we get from Pete Seeger (“Guantanamera”)—With the poor of the earth / Conlos pobres de la tierra / I want my luck to cast / Quiero yo mi suerte echar / I will die facing the sun / Moriré de cara al sol—to the peevish sentiments of that letter? Wasn’t the world supposed to be perfect by now? Too many right turns, huh? There’s an interesting connection between public attitudes about homelessness and the level of public trust in the state to successfully manage the condition. What I take from online commentary and coffee chat is that there is diminished public confidence that the state can handle this (or any other) social dilemma. But a consequence is that the state lacks citizen challenge or push to innovate, and the public won’t, through increased taxation or support for spending priorities, give the state what it needs to address homeless housing and related social health concerns. The conventional leave-the-problem-for-somebody-else-to-solve approach appears to be exhausted. It “outsides” homelessness and seeks bureaucratic responses to what is very much a community existential concern. I’d like to propose an exercise. Imagine homelessness in Victoria almost completely eliminated, imagine the problem solved: people housed, rehabilitation and social return efforts underway, and so on. Then, work your way back from that result to how, step-by-step, it was achieved. Who did what? Then what happened next? Take it all the way back to the forms and scope of public behaviour and support required for action. In other words, build a reverse blueprint for success. New Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto claims that the most successful housing comprises groups of a dozen to fifteen. Commission our architectural community to design a small, standardized living component—a 200 square-foot module, say—contained within a 12- to 15-unit houseplex with common area and space for a resident manager to help occupants and ensure order. The city and surrounding municipalities have available property which can be used on a land cost-free basis and, with appropriate sweeteners, owners of private property in appropriate areas also may be open to land use deals. It’s my estimate that between 50 and 75 such properties would be required, at a likely capital cost of $40-60 million, with $10 million more in annual operating costs. Create a couple, work out the bugs, then create more. Is this the best plan? Is there something better? Please! I’m accustomed to having my ideas vastly improved by others. Eager to make sure my facts were straight, I sent a draft of this column to Reverend Al Tysick. He concurred with everything but, with my “something better” on his mind, rejected the idea of designated housing, with its ghetto overtones, calling instead for full social integration. Jesus Christ speaking through Reverend Al. Leaving methodology to my betters, then, this I know: end homelessness, and teams from every other city will flock here to learn how we did it. Poet Vachel Lindsay is credited with this profundity: “to live in mankind is far better than to live in name.” End homelessness in Victoria, and we just might be a community, a human family, again, linked and re-humanized by an extraordinary and meaningful social accomplishment. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

Why don’t developers, at their own initiative and without civic coercion, gift the city with beautiful buildings? FRIEND DOUG CURRAN recently sent me a link to a mid-1950’s promotional video (or whatever they called videos back then) highlighting the new line of GM cars. Produced in Hollywood musical style, it featured a song-and-dance number: Tomorrow, tomorrow Our dreams will come true. Together, together We’ll make the world new. The hope-filled conflation of new-car ownership and happiness is rendered without a shred of marketer’s cynicism, and what makes it jaw-dropping is not its silly consumerism, but its unrestrained and genuine optimism and idealism, even: possibility itself—the “world made new”—as a statement of hope pushed all the way to the horizon; practically a guarantee of happy outcomes and reason for that smile never to leave your face. That was the promise—it hits you that the promise itself was society’s emotional chassis—delivered with every Chevy, as certain as the new-car shine on the hood. I swear, you cannot watch the promo without being clawed by wist, by a rush of longing for so much joy, for so much…upswing. The new car, of course, sat in the driveway of a suburban rancher. The whole package pointed away from the miseries and frictions of city-dwelling and social (and racial) churn and toward a frontier without constraints, without a minus symbol at its prow. The whole picture was painted in shades of white. Dad worked. Mom cooked. Billy and Little Suzie behaved themselves. Everyone knew the rules. There were rules back then, not like today’s free-for-all, goddammit! All of this followed the wails of a war- and depression-weary generation, an immigrant generation, or the children of immigrants. Life to that point was a battle, every single thing was a battle. Nothing was easy, lubricated. Nothing flowed. You can imagine the joys of something featuring dynaflow—Buick, if my memory holds. That ‘fifties promise of flow and future lasted no longer than one of history’s heartbeats and, by steps and lurches too familiar and dispiriting to note here, deposited us in front of the likes of this headline in the October 5 New York Times: “Talk of ‘Civil War’ Is Flaring, Ignited by Mar-a-Lago Search”: “Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend. “Posts on social media that mentioned 'civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. “Polling and studies suggest that a growing number of Americans are anticipating, or even welcoming, the possibility of sustained political violence.” Elsewhere, the Times observes: “According to Gallup, 56 percent of Americans disapprove of the job President Biden is doing. Around 80 percent say the country is on the wrong track.” It’s not my purpose here to dwell on US todays or tomorrows, or even the milder challenges and dangers here in Canada, but to make the connection between social mood and cultural production and outcomes. This is to say that hope is culture and works its way not just into political and economic forms of social practice, but also finds unmistakable expression in the arts, and architecture and urban design in particular. Literature, visual art, dance are somewhat ephemeral; buildings, however, tend to stick around conspicuously, and long after the social barometer has shifted. Let me give all of this a local spin. A column ago, I wrote how I wish Victoria mayor Lisa Helps had stood up in front of real estate developers (with a strong echo to architects) and said something like: “You want height and density? Then give the city distinctive and beautiful buildings.” There’s a question lurking inside this: Why should the mayor have had to? Why don’t developers, at their own initiative and without civic coercion, gift the city with beautiful buildings? Why isn’t it a reflex behaviour? Leaving room for the possibility that most developers simply have shitty taste, why aren’t they flooded with idealism and ego: “I’m going to put up something so beautiful that it makes me proud and shames everything else in town!” That kind of thing. Speaking practically, part of the answer is that there is no School of Developology with required courses in “building citizenship”—buildings as civic investment. Our society doesn’t ask developers or property owners where are we headed or who we want to be (or it does, and the answer is underwhelming) How, for example, might every new building convey a quality of welcome? How, through our buildings, do we extend social harmony and optimism? How might every new building leave passersby feeling hopeful and good about life? Why doesn’t every new building say: “You’re home, you’re safe here”? These concerns are not really the abstractions they seem. We all pretty much share the same visual instincts; and besides, Victoria is a city filled with architecture critics. The Jawls, in an extraordinary and durable collaboration with architect Franc D’Ambrosio (Victoria’s Santiago Calatrava), have, almost by reflex, created distinctive and superior buildings and ex-industrial communities all over Victoria. Ditto Chris LeFevre (LeFevre and Company—Railyards, several Old Town redevelopments). Don Charity and Fraser McColl, partners of Mosaic Properties, have added architectural value and beauty with each project they have undertaken. The list is longer than those few names, but they are the standouts. Their project vision extends beyond the development pro forma and seems, somehow, to embody the understanding that every new building impacts—enriches or impoverishes—the story of this place, the story of us. I have a nasty and ungenerous theory about Victoria. The reason there is so much backslapping and eager noise around instances of community is that there is so little community here. Community is not simply adjacency or lifestyle protection, but shared wider purpose and action; sacrifice, sometimes. If there was more of that, we’d clap less. I don’t blame us locals; common purpose is suffering everywhere. What is the most regular response, as people comment about Downtown’s new emerging highrise identity? “Now Victoria looks just like every other city.” With that comment, no one is longing for the return of “a little bit of Olde England.” Nobody is calling for everything to be half-timbered. No, what people are disturbed about is a loss of character and singularity, and the loss of a connection between person and building. I state again, that if developers cannot internalize these values on their own, then the City needs design guidelines that will do it for them. Trust me (and look around you): in spite of municipal conceits, these do not currently exist. Where might such guidelines come from? Where might the City find the principles, ideas, poetics, lexicon and phraseology for such brand new design controls? Why look farther than the endless writing and presentations of locals like architect/urban designer Chris Gower and architectural historian Martin Segger, both of whom (among others) have for long years been pleading for built-form quality, humanity and originality. They may never have been asked how you lose a city, but they would likely answer: “One bad building at a time.” Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

In these disruptive times, the idea that a good political leader is one who champions and promises the return of “normalcy” is preposterous. That's why Lisa Helps has been a great mayor for Victoria. SO EASY TO FANTASIZE Victoria’s beginnings as an oil painting: the European discoverer’s noble stance on the rocky shore, powerful and hostile nature poised to retreat, toss in a cleric and some noble savages. Historical facts, though, seem to favour the image of Victoria as a filthy port, an entrepot from which miners outfitted themselves with supplies shipped here from England before crossing to their mainland treasure-metal claims near the Fraser River. History: cherished as romantic origin story and source of local custom, hated as constraint or prohibition in times of change. When I came here in 1970, the place was begging for release from Olde England, desperate for a new story and fresh mission. “A little bit of Olde England” had run out of juice (and legitimacy) and, as a story of this place, even in Oak Bay, had retreated to the defensive and protective pettiness of land use regulations. So what has happened in a half-century? What has this place become? I answer subjectively: in my five decades and some here, I have tried to make Victoria a perfect human place. I’ll explain below, but if such a line seems rich in hints of exit, no, this is not my last column and I’m not dying. I state, without a lick of self-applause, that I’ve been the city’s unelected mayor over those 50 years. In five decades I’ve created Open Space Arts/Cultural Centre; Monday Magazine and its affiliated media siblings; The First Urban Conference; The Gaining Ground Urban Sustainability Conferences; the Harris Green Charrette; have written endless monthly columns for FOCUS Magazine; produced ASH (Affordable Sustainable Homes), inspired by the very successful multi-suite conversion of large Rockland, Fairfield, Fernwood and other area homes into houseplexes; and have for years, with my wife, daily cleaned Beacon Hill Park of litter. Calling myself unelected mayor is not self-congratulation any more than calling an elephant “large” or a snake “sinuous” praises those creatures. I have worked to give expression to and, overall, to quicken the opportunity, the potential, that sits at the heart of this singular, urbane and cultured—that is, profoundly privileged—place endowed, as it is, with the capacity to undertake—not as task or burden, but as joyous human project—an important social mission: specifically, to be the best human community in the world, and a laboratory from which social successes might be exported. For what other purpose do you imagine communities, cities, clusters of people like this one (there aren’t many) are handed such gifts of natural and constructed beauty, location, setting, climate, cultural and economic advantage, gifts of rationality, social equilibrium and a rich, remembered past, if not to demonstrate to the rest of the desperate world that things are improvable? What other purpose did you believe such largesse serves? The way I see it, privilege just increases obligation expressed as citizenship: that is, full identification and engagement with one’s immediate social setting. Citizenship, not community. Giving, not getting. A touch of mission and self-sacrifice. Citizenship’s the investment; community’s the payoff. The urgencies associated with social mission seem to me to be even riper now, more looming, more clearly defined, locally and everywhere. Honestly, I worry that civilization has already passed the “undo” step on the way to its next blowup, not yet at World War III nuclear fisticuffs (though heading there), but a stage in which complexity and the reflex for conflict block any form of resolution beside catastrophe; while head-spinning cultural novelty and unimpeded technological change leave everyone feeling like they’re dancing on marbles and just visiting, responsible for nothing more than their own well-being. Notes the New York Times’ Charles Blow in a recent column about President Biden and current geopolitics: “Biden often drifts back into idealism, seemingly longing for and lost in a long-gone politics in which bipartisanship was more common and an antidemocratic opposition unfathomable. But then reality reminds him that he is in a war, not just a disagreement. He is reminded—and must remind the country—that these are dire times.” And dire times now include a novel feature: vast environmental damage and the risk of ecological collapse, all of which delivers enormous functional, psychological and health stress and harm to society. In Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, historian-author Niall Ferguson writes, “Richard Evans’ meticulously detailed study of the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 introduced me to the idea that the mortality caused by a deadly pathogen is partly a reflection of the social and political order it attacks.” However well disguised, this column’s intended destination from the outset has been outgoing Victoria mayor Lisa Helps. My cards: I believe Helps is the best mayor the city has had in this half-century. Best? Best at what? Best in what way? I’ll answer immediately: best at designing and leading civic adventure; best at dragging the future’s looming truths into the present; best at removing the grounds for complacency; best at getting in the ring with uncertainty; best at steering with a moral compass; best at engineering wide-scale change; best at turning civic maundering into an action blueprint; best at reflexively rewarding any and everyone’s engagement in city ideas, issues and process. As you may imagine, Helps has lots of detractors, and had she chosen to run for a third term, might have proved un-re-electable. If so, the voting public could not pay her a greater compliment, or itself a greater insult. Look, social winds don’t bypass Victoria. Nobody bussed our homeless in from Vancouver or Chicago. Welcome to our One World: social problems don’t respect borders. Here’s my tally of global disruptions: that sociopath Trump’s transformation of US political reality and the world-changing threat he poses to working democracy, as right-wing values and policies surge, next door and globally. The inching advances of global warming, these days looking more like feet than inches. The revolutionary impact of online commerce on conventional retail (storefront) consumerism and service delivery (you can now receive psychotherapy online: “betterhelp.com—Talk to a therapist from the comfort of your own home”). The unknowable risk of ever-more-autonomous (and, loomingly, self-aware) AI. The imminent collapse of working class jobs as such work is captured by software and skilled machines. The increase of homelessness and the terrifying third world-ification of our downtowns. A growing realization that the entire liberal premise as the terms of social conduct may have run its course…These have not bypassed Victoria. We’re in the world. In such times, the idea that a good political leader is one who champions and promises the return of “normalcy” is preposterous. Apart from feeding delusion or momentarily reducing anxiety, there is no use or benefit in pretending that a roller coaster is an elevator. Under such circumstances, doesn’t it (grimly) comfort you to have had a mayor who gets all of this, who gets the world? Of course, none of this has impeded those luddites, the Trumpy Taxpayers of Greater Victoria, terrified by ambiguity and eager to leverage their terror as passage back to a lost world. My only disappointments associated with the Helps era? First, that she was obliged by city council political math to abandon the so-called “missing middle” land use initiative (better described as “distributed density”). Its passage would have triggered a necessary social revolution and, in my view, would have been her greatest and most significant political accomplishment. I wish she had found a way to ram it through. (I gather there was significant public support for the initiative, but the City sowed doubt by doing a crappy job of explaining and selling this innovative urban development programme.) Second, that concerning all of the new downtown-area residential highrises, she seemed to have had a tin ear for architectural and public realm design. In my view, she let developers get away with murder, and I regret she didn’t, at the start of her first mayoral term, stand up at an Urban Development Industry luncheon and say to the crowd: “Okay, boys and girls, you want to do twenty, twenty-five, thirty storeys around downtown? Then you give the city beautiful, warm, welcoming buildings, architectural masterpieces, not soulless, standard-issue shit-boxes; and show up with detailed plans for heart-stopping beautification of the public realm outside your buildings. Have we got a deal?” Putting these two matters aside, Helps, I argue, has shown the political intelligence and fluidity, the values. the courage, and an appetite for the future that present conditions require. Now, it’s civic election time and the calendar pages are shrieking “Next!” Who’s next? What’s next? We’ll see. We’ll see. Beside the biographical notes in his column above, Gene is currently writing Futurecide˛ a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, presenting and editing the website Shit Sandwich: the Best of the Bad News, and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for new answers to old questions.

The Jukebox on View Street is a rare example of a downtown residential building that shows good urban design choices can happen, even here. ON I WHINE, column after column, about these life-hating slabs springing up around Downtown, residential high-rise monstrosities devoid of warmth, welcome, visual appeal, singularity, esthetic citizenship, urbanity or commitment to improving the human project. Buildings conceived by the committed and purposeful corporate mind: risk managers/money-makers, full stop. You hear it said, with some reason, that it makes no sense to fault a developer when civic society, through its various policy and regulatory structures, can’t or won’t enforce a higher design standard. It’s a developer’s best defence: “If the city wanted a better or different design, it would impose some new terms in the development approval process; but the city approves my buildings as they are, so don’t blame me.” Look, real estate development is not a credentialed profession. You don’t have to study urban design or the cultural impacts of architecture or social history, or the meaning of life to be a developer. The profession demands the same skills and talents required to operate a lemonade stand. That’s not an insult, just a fact. Another part of the problem is capital. Capital doesn’t have a home. It wanders, it sniffs out opportunities and it avoids or disregards moral entanglements, steers around complexity or ambiguity, all of which it reads as added risk. This, too, feeds the roots of development culture. Also, no developer ever went broke underestimating market taste. I’ve never figured out whether the average citizen lacks understanding, sensitivity or interest when it comes to matters of urban design, or whether, in fact, the average citizen has plenty of understanding and concern, but that a strong public culture and effective social protocols for communicating taste are missing. Consider: a house going up in Oak Bay would likely have greater design refinement, less because of municipal design guidelines than because of unwritten, but powerful, public culture. As if to reinforce such contentions, the protocol for design review in Victoria is almost unbearably process-laden. What do I mean here? Well, if there is a health, safety or other emergency that requires action, all you have to do to summon a response is dial 911. You don’t hold a workshop or fill out endless forms to put out a fire. You comprehend and respect its urgencies. So, where’s the urban design 911, the urban design emergency? That’s what I mean. And if you see images of coherent, beautiful, heart-stirring streets and urban communities from other places and wonder why, if they can do it, we can’t, well, that’s just elsewhere or elsewhen. You like Italian hill towns? You like Lisbon? Move there. Cornered and out of arguments, you think: if only there was one new downtown building with exemplary design, one building that repudiated all of the ugliness, or exposed it for what it was: developers blinded by the belief that they are exclusively in the risk-management business and that their buildings occupy some social or spatial void, rather than downtown Victoria, a place that will have to live with bad urban design choices and negative social impacts for a century. There is one such building? Amazing! Which one? The Jukebox, a nine-storey low/high-rise with over 200 dwelling units, occupies several city lots on the south side of View Street, between Vancouver and Cook. It’s an imposing building, a one-off, not because it can’t be equalled for style (it can, of course), but because of something more abstract but un-missable: developer ego and sense of accomplishment, the need to take pride in your public acts, to stand behind your work, to “show ‘em.” The Jukebox on View Street, Victoria Before tackling the Jukebox, developers Don Charity and Fraser McColl redeveloped the Mosaic, that nearby lollipop of a building on Fort Street, and the adjacent Jigsaw. The Mosaic’s and Jigsaw’s eccentricities may have given them license to think more freely about design of the Jukebox. Say the developers about themselves: Mosaic Properties Inc strives to create and deliver unique spaces filled with visual interest, quality and creativity. The company combines a profound understanding of the art and science of building with a mission to create unique, playful, colourful and cool condominium spaces that stand out visually and architecturally to the public. It’s not my intention here to produce a detailed architectural study of the Jukebox. I lack the expertise to explain exactly how the building achieves its effects and simply note that somehow, through its massing, design choices and the singularity of its vision, it adds social capital to Downtown, rather than being a testament to missed opportunity. Such a building makes you wish the developers had the franchise on new Downtown projects. I encourage you to visit the building, give it a once (or twice)-around, see if you can summon the language that captures its difference, its distinction—what particular things the developers and architect have done to produce so singular an outcome. A rearview of the Jukebox In his recent study, A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose writes: “Conservatism appears to be a simple inversion of classical liberalism. It sees humans as naturally tribal, not autonomous; individuals as inherently unequal, not equal; politics as grounded in authority, not consent; societies as properly closed, not open; and history as cyclical, not progressive.” So, what does the emergent city centre say about us? No imagination. No originality. No vocabulary. Just another effing place. We have no idea how to create an appealing city centre, a centre that says good and promising things about us. We have no idea how to renew ourselves. Social capital? We’re near-bankrupt. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

Does your email inbox (not to mention world news) make you feel we’re in a dress rehearsal for the zombifying apocalypse? THERE I WAS, ONLINE, waist-deep in a joyless, turgid, futility-inducing explanation of current geopolitics and wishing I was watching some uplifting porn—remember, you promised to show me again how to get onto that free stuff you watch—when I heard a melodious and welcoming electronic trill announcing new email. An Inbox arrival, what a treat! Out of Google and into Entourage in a heartbeat, to find a note, nestled between “Alzheimer’s Dementia Health” and “Cute Ukrinian Grils” (what’s life without at least one cute Ukrinian gril?), sent by Ambassador Collen V. Kelapile, and titled “YOUR UNCLAIMED PAYMENT.” Delightful! I haven’t had mail from the good Ambassador in, why, forever. And short of opening the email, I found myself wondering who I would find if I could trace the communication to its source—some masturbating little whiz kid back east mining sucker money, or a roomful of extortionists in Kenya or some Rio slum, regaling each other with crazy name ideas? Wikipedia informs me: “email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014” (eight long years ago, and before the enforced tedium of Covid) “was estimated to account for around 90 percent, or 54 billion a day, of total email traffic.” Continues Wikipedia: “The legal definition and status of spam varies from one jurisdiction to another, but nowhere have laws and lawsuits been particularly successful in stemming spam.” You will, however, be pleased to learn that “governments, through various policies and agencies, are aggressively combating spam in all of its forms.” Here in Canada, we have invoked the Wave a Stern and Disapproving Finger At Them Act. Presumably, if caught, the little bastards will be sent to bed without their supper or recreational drugs. My research also takes me to the related topic of Internet service theft, where I encounter the expression “zombifying malware.” Great name for a death metal band, huh? Principal culprit countries? Brazil, India, Vietnam, Russia, China, Turkey. My guess is that the ambassador hails from Russia. Collen V. Kelapile—the V and the K are giveaways, don’t you think? Plus Russia is, like, so evil. Well, actually, maybe Turkey. That last name, Kelapile, sounds vaguely rug-ish. Or maybe…oh, I don’t know! And what do you imagine I would have to do to claim my UNCLAIMED PAYMENT? Probably just slip some tidbit like a bank account number and a password. Seems reasonable: a give for a get. I’m sure the daily 54 billion has doubled in the last eight years. “YOUR UNCLAIMED PAYMENT” is only one of a number of things bobbing along on my ever-rising personal crap river, joined, at the moment, by “Bio Boost,” “Men’s Miracle Male Enhancement,” “Big Diabetes Lie,” “Brain Fix;” or, by subject, financial and identity theft, big penis fantasies, and sickness and dementia. Penis size versus Canada’s stern finger—do you even need a ruler? All of which takes us to the larger subject of fraying social control. Given current misadventures with managing the pandemic, you have to hope that stop signs and traffic lights at intersections don’t turn into the next symbols of the state’s efforts to limit personal freedom. What a comfort it would be to hear someone dismissing current excesses as simply the latest short-lived fads, like propeller beanies or peace sign headbands in their day. I’m posing such matters because I want to paint a picture that reveals the absolute fragility, the limits of capacity and resilience, of our systems of social response and, by extension, the skin-thin wall of social agreement that allows us to get along, that makes every day a nice adventure, happy-face stuff, instead of a horror show. These days, I wouldn’t call this an armchair conversation. First, our friends to the south are in a dress rehearsal for chaos—one of their own making, but trust me: borderless. Second, you surely see COVID as the ecological metaphor it is. Next, the Russia/Ukraine catastrophe alerts us to geopolitical, economic, ideological shifts that will touch every human system, including food, energy, financial and other systems, everywhere. And last, we are stepping into a technological twilight zone and even right now, with the emergence of the surveillance planet, it feels like a dress rehearsal for the zombifying apocalypse. If you were given to acknowledging catastrophe you might call this a time of emergency. And what’s the least useful thing you can do in an emergency? “Emergency? What emergency?” You can forgive people for clinging to animal comforts and to presumed normalcy. Anything you can do to make that tinnitus of worry stop ringing in your head…. Some recent geomorphic event in Tonga, or Pago-Pago, or Narnia has put earthquakes and earthquake preparedness back in the news—a good time to remind you of Gene’s 3 Rules of Earthquake Response: 1. Run to your closet to grab that outfit, you know, the one that makes your ass look like you’re still a teenager; 2. Clutch the houseplant, the one you named Dempsey and talk to when you think nobody’s around to hear; 3. Scream a lot and act paralyzed until someone carts you to safety in an ambulance. Which, incongruously, brings me to a last point that’s more or less on point with this column’s stated—okay, ostensible and presumed—themes, architecture and urban design. You will have noticed—this instalment living proof—that such parameters seem rarely to contain the wanderings of this column. What’s the architectural message of all the residential high-rises—I’m tempted to say “shitboxes” but I’ll settle for “filing cases”—sprung and now continuing to spring out of the ground around Downtown? If you believe in the principle of the courtship of opposing forces, the hubris of all that concrete and rebar can invite only one outcome. In terms of social messaging, they exist to remind you that the rigidity, exclusion, non-negotiation and social inertia embodied in the city’s previous identity—a little bit of Olde England—made it a candidate for destruction. The only criterion for tomorrow’s buildings—that is, buildings that will serve any social purpose tomorrow—is their ability to foster community and connection—in other words, love, love, love (drag out that peace sign headband, you know it’s still in your closet). Today’s frozen towers will soon be abandoned by good citizens, the windowless shells taken over by the neo-tribal homeless: the Pandora Punishers, the View St Vikings. Zombifying malware. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

A cycling network, Downtown revitalization, and the plan for an innovation district are among the “liberal” legacies of Mayor Helps. What might follow? NO, THIS IS NOT MY LAST COLUMN. I’ll write Focus columns as long as my fingers can type. “Aaaaarrrrgggghhh!” Thud! Just a bit of senior’s standup. Okay, sorry. A mid-April Times-Colonist news story described the City of Victoria’s plans for a simplified and shortened approval process for not-for-profit developers of various forms of affordable housing. The piece featured quotes from the mayor about the City’s intentions and goals, praise from provincial Housing Minister David Eby, and a comment that Victoria was the first BC municipality to initiate such new rules. First! Not bad for a city used to boasting “We’re number twelve!” Not bad for a city still waiting for the Queen’s visit. By sailing ship. It may have caught your attention that something’s, well, changing in Victoria; and while I’m sure there’s lots of deserved credit to spread around for this latest housing accomplishment, I believe that, in the diminishing months of her second and last term, it’s important to recognize that Mayor Lisa Helps’ most potent gift to Victoria civic society is the one that will be least understood or appreciated…. Poise. While Victoria has had mayors good and bad, no mayor in my lengthening memory (back to Courtney Haddock in 1970, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth) gave the City the habit and tools of preparedness, anticipation, instead of just reflex; that is, of reading the future, of giving the City some bounce, of setting it in a world larger than its own microscopic preoccupations, a more risk and opportunity-filled world, and less blanketed by the illusion of a guarantee. Poise. No, not “bike lanes,” but a bike mobility system. Oh, the bike thing isn’t perfect? Well, apart from your cure for all that ails us, what is? People who believe the road system belongs, by custom or biblical command, exclusively to cars—their speed, power and cultural meaning—and that only school kids ride bikes, are critical of the bike mobility network because it inconveniences cars, changes or adds rules, imposes a counter-reality. In turn, this leaves them critical of Helps herself who has been the signature champion of the bike mobility system and who has poured a significant amount of her political capital into engineering its public support, policy adoption and implementation. And now the bike lane system spreads almost everywhere, reaching back to us from the future. Poise. As noted, Helps has now led a City initiative to simplify and shorten the development approval process for affordable housing proposals and at least softened the imperial veto of the community associations—her last big win, you might think, before her two-term mayoral stint ends this November. But don’t overlook two others in which she has played both a creative and leadership role: the significant residential re-densification of Downtown, sure to figure crucially in long-range Downtown business and economic viability; and a strategy, now taking shape, for arts/cultural intensification and re-centralization Downtown, somewhat linked to the idea of a so-called “innovation district” in ex-industrial Rock Bay, just north of Chinatown. While the City’s design approval of heartless, ice-cold tombstone residential high-rises mutes my general excitement, I’m willing to look beyond their enduring visual and social damage in support of the goal of Downtown renewal. Helps is not likely to be followed by a successor with the same disposition or skills (let’s just say the odds don’t favour it), which worries me because the world is turning upside down and efforts, however understandable, to hold on, hold on, hold on, or to seek a social return to the comforts of yesteryear’s traditions and practices, will likely prove fruitless or flawed and will simply deepen the city’s handicap, making it more rigid, more inertial, stupider, less potent…not a recipe for healthy survival. Progressivism, liberalism—really, whatever words you use to define the recent and now-diminishing climate of profound social permissions, tolerances and encouragements—has hit a ditch, or a wall. A Trump presidential return in ’24—a near-certainty—will unleash a collapse of US progressive values and social practice and a lurch rightward in Canada, too. It’s all just waiting to crawl out from under the floor. Under such conditions, civic adventure ends. It’s not the purpose of this column simply to iterate Mayor Helps’ accomplishments, but to give you a context, a way of studying your own life as a civic stakeholder, a citizen. In serious times like these, “lalalala” has little value, plays no purpose. Instead, you have to ask: “Do I like this life? Do I like what I have? Do I like where I live? How do I sustain it?” That’s the start of citizenship. Otherwise, you’re just camping. Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist, recently quoted from Matthew Rose's new book A World After Liberalism: “After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds.” Klein goes on to write, “Rose means liberalism as in the shared assumptions of the West. That liberalism seems exhausted, ground down, defined by the contradictions and broken promises that follow victory rather than the creativity and aspiration that attend struggle. “At its best and sometimes at its worst, liberalism makes the past into a truly foreign land, and that can turn those who still inhabit it into anachronisms in their own time. “Liberalism needs a healthier relationship to time. How can the past become a foreign country without those who still live there being turned into foreigners in their own land? If the future is to be unmapped, then how do we persuade those who fear it, or mistrust us, to agree to venture into its wilds?” Good to have civic poise, in other words, but then follows the non-stop work of doing wise and hopeful things with it. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

Victoria owes a debt to architect Paul Merrick for showing what can be done. THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH PRAISE at your funeral is that it comes too late to savour; and besides, regardless whether you’re headed heaven or hellward, the celestial hosannas or the screams of the damned block out other sound. But what about legacy? Legend and $3.50 buys you a latté. So, while the guy is still vertical, I want to bring (my) overdue praise to an under-sung local hero, Victoria’s extraordinary architect Paul Merrick. I’d like to shape that praise around his two most conspicuous (but by no means only) Victoria accomplishments: Shoal Point, set on the Inner Harbour’s welcoming southern arm, and Sussex Place, the romantic, art deco-influenced, skyscraper-esque tower behind the original Sussex Hotel façade at Douglas and Broughton. Have you ever seen Merrick? He’s a slim man, now in his eighties. There’s less Merrick than there is space around him, and he’s thin enough that, caught in the planes of life, he could just wink out, vanish. Architect Paul Merrick From the Merrick website I find not “We sell the best and service the rest” but some ruminative content beneath the unusual and revealing heading, “Philosophy.” It states in part: Community, humanity, culture, history, sustainable future: together, these principles embody the collective spirit and values of Merrick Architecture…we provoke design solutions of lasting substance…it’s about respecting people and our planet—contextual-design architecture that acknowledges its surroundings…architecture embodies the continuum of the human race and what we aspire to…carry the aspirations of ‘craft’ forward…respecting the efforts of all those who have come before…. Gosh! I’m especially interested in the idea of context. In architectural culture, it’s a strangely egoless word, free of celebrity and starchitecture. It suggests subordination, an ability to still inner professional noise so as to be aware of continuity: in other words, that places embody stories that must be renewed, even amplified, by architectural means. Some people find such ideas constraining; I sense it leaves plenty of room for novelty. I think there’s a cliché in our culture that sees the architect (or certain forms of architectural expression) as hero, a noble warrier engaged in some battle against coarse materiality, extracting meaning from indifferent nature itself and bringing forth some great and liberating design. Perhaps in the grip of such thinking, critics of his work, in and out of the architectural profession, fault Merrick for a lack of innovation, a rejection of cutting-edge design, a scarcity of bold new blah blah. I chalk all such criticism up to intellectual adolescence and the confusion of novelty with creativity. I sense in Shoal Point and Sussex Place, and other Merrick projects, enormous creative rigour and control. Here is a landside perspective of Shoal Point, the sizable residential project beside the Inner Harbour, undertaken by the innovative, intellectually restless, now-deceased developer David Butterfield. Below the Shoal Point image is a photo of a hillside covered organically with a climbing skin of homes in Guanajuato, Mexico. In one case the contour is exploited; in the other, manufactured; still, the two seem to share an idea. The building is softened by decoration and detailing (I encourage you to trespass), and by its highly articulated roofline. Shoal Point climbs with terrace-work and a large number of greenhouse-like toppings that soften the building’s significant volume. And here is Shoal Point’s harbour-side presentation: The Sussex Hotel, on Douglas at Broughton, was in its day a respected residential hotel designed in the art deco style, in the 1930s, by architect Studley Birley. Times and trends change and the hotel eventually outlived its utility. The city was eager to have the historic façade preserved in a redevelopment, and Merrick’s response was to retain the frontage and turn much of the building’s former internal volume into a forecourt for a new office tower designed in an Empire State Building-esque style. The tower is a mere 11 storeys, but manages to feel much taller and to convey a sense of aspiration and machine-age optimism. The Merrick website states: The design was developed to respect and augment the historic 1930’s facade of the Sussex Hotel, The practice worked in close collaboration with the client, public, and Victoria’s City Council to achieve the rezoning. The process proved rewarding to all parties involved and has resulted in what has been described as a benchmark for creative and appropriate design in downtown Victoria. And here is another whose name and city are well known to you: Thinking about a streetscape intervention like the Sussex, I’m taken by Robert Jawl’s contention (I paraphrase) that if a developer hasn’t provided for a building’s beauty or design appeal, then he hasn’t met the project’s budget requirements. Many developers act as if the funds needed to make a building attractive are not a project condition, but money stolen out of their pockets. This grudging attitude impacts and compromises Victoria’s urban design culture by setting the bar low and forcing the city to settle for crumbs when it should be demanding jewels. Oops! There I go again, on my favourite rant; but let me work my way back to Merrick and to contextual design with this thought: Shoal Point and Sussex Place were not conceits or vanity projects. Each was a business initiative, yet each provided generous room in the budget for Merrick’s extraordinary architectural expression. Other projects benefitting from Merrick’s involvement include Swallow’s Landing, The Cityplace, the Janion, and Aria, plus a host on the mainland. Victoria owes a debt to Merrick for showing what can be done—buildings beautiful on their own terms and as a standard for others to reach for. Think of Merrick not just as an architectural artist, but also a serum injected into the city’s blood stream. Could you have too much of that here? Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

And what would it take to remove the phrase, “I never go Downtown anymore,” from the regional vocabulary? I WAS AN ATTENDEE AT A RECENT UDI (Urban Development Institute) webinar, another of those bloodless, disembodied, Zoom-empowered events that Covid requires and technology allows. The topic was “Retail & the Future of Downtowns and Malls” and the three presenters seemed to know their stuff. I took two points away from the event: first, the contention, shared by the speakers, that the ever-expanding online marketplace will not eliminate the in-person retail shopping experience (this deserves roughly the same confidence as yestercentury’s conviction that the automobile would never replace the horse); second, that shopping malls throughout Victoria, from Mayfair to Westshore, were in the process of becoming more downtown-ish: more diverse, more urbane, more socially and culturally—really, more functionally—inclusive; and that one could anticipate the Canadian Chess Championships along the corridors of the Hillside Mall, or a Schubert lieder-fest in the generous foyer outside Winners at Tillicum. I make a joke to make a point, but take a walk around Uptown, even now a combination of shopping mall and cultural experience with its buried parking, kiddie recreation area and shopping high street, professional offices, an ice skating facility and, coincidentally, the region’s only Whole Foods. Says its promotional bumph: “Uptown is Vancouver Island’s Premier Shopping, Dining and Entertainment Experience. Funny, no “after Downtown Victoria” qualifier. One of the webinar presenters, Laura Poland, the Manager of Mayfair, broadly hinted that her mall would soon be undertaking a transformation directed toward similar ends: from conventional shopping mall—a hermetic shopping space surrounded by endless parking—to something more communitarian and culturally inclusive, more energetic and more like traditional downtown. Interestingly, the matter of downtown’s retail future was hardly touched on by the speakers...unless their silence was intended to speak worlds. Their remarks and enthusiasm were directed toward this trend of cultural appropriation by shopping centres. And when the Victoria Symphony relocates to a shopping centre performance hall, what happens to the Royal and McPherson, and to other downtown cultural real estate and civic assets? After all, there are only so many event dollars to spread around. May the best theatre win? Rainbow Over Costco. Even God favours good prices and easy parking. Had the Q&A-less format permitted, I would have asked if, as they appropriate traditional downtown’s key cultural and social assets, the various malls around the region would also be claiming a share of the homeless, with their tents, tarps, overflowing crap-filled shopping carts and, er, spontaneity. Anyway, provocative changes, huh? And consider this irony-filled prospect: shopping malls, owned and operated by professional real estate management companies attuned to the slightest market twitch, now engaged in the synthetic appropriation of the qualities and features that make (or made) for an authentic, character-rich downtown. While you’re at it, give study to the Starlight proposal for two central downtown blocks bounded by Cook, Yates, Quadra and View: a joyless, airtight proposition with three residential towers plunked on top, the whole package looking like one of Jon Jerde’s architectural confections (Mall of America, The Fremont Street Experience, etc.), but with all the fun removed. An artist’s rendering of Starlight’s proposal for the Harris Green neighbourhood You think: no, all of this could only happen in a sci-fi movie! Friends, we are living in a sci-fi movie, a period of dislocating, dangerous, chartless social, cultural and environmental transformation. Chained to our ankles are a million old meanings of things bearing on family, gender, work, job, home, community, communication, connection, purpose, politics, expertise, autonomy, selfhood, climate. And one more (among others): downtown. All of these, seemingly all at once, don’t mean what, or behave like, they used to; and it’s not that all the traditional meanings are good and the current state of flux is bad (long-overdue, liberating benefits have emerged in many cases), but that many social conventions and institutions are losing, or are now bereft of, any stabilizing content or social compass. So, what, exactly, is our Downtown in the 2020s? And to pose a second rarely asked but pertinent question, who’s actually in charge of Downtown and do ‘they’ have the understanding, skills and the indomitable will to succeed necessary to ensuring Downtown’s continued viability, its social and economic success, its centrality and symbolic potency, its renewal? What would it take to remove the phrase, “I never go Downtown anymore,” from the regional vocabulary? I ask Google “What is Downtown?” Google replies, in part: “A city’s downtown area has an important and unique role in economic and social development. Downtowns create a critical mass of activities where commercial, cultural, and civic activities are concentrated. This concentration facilitates business, learning, and cultural exchange.” I sense some nostalgic idealization and hidden pleading in that. I mean, if you had responsibility for a successful downtown in the 2020s, wouldn’t you want it to be the city’s and region’s most appealing and vibrant area? Utterly safe? Crawling with people? Loaded with cultural, educational, recreational assets, and the stewpot of citizenship and social innovation—that is, a place of community where everyone felt and acted like a stakeholder, a place of social ego, if I can put it that way? Candidate businesses lined up and clamourous for the next commercial vacancy? Not a box surrounded by an ocean of parked cars, but a genuine and vital experience? Wouldn’t you want it to be absolutely ravishing? So much beauty you wouldn’t know where to put your eyes first? Festooned with squares and pocket parks and public art? Wouldn’t you impose a design culture and code on development that resulted in streets lined with gorgeous architecture? Wouldn’t you guard downtown’s existing cultural and educational resources, and exert gravitational pull on everything from elsewhere? Wouldn’t you have a comprehensive strategy to increase downtown population, and to make sure that you weren’t just warehousing the old and the young, but housing all ages and types? Assuming a “Yes!” to the above, let’s ask one more question: “How?” If you ask local politicians or planning officials, they will tell you that the city is currently attempting or undertaking all of those objectives. But this is just standard political fatigue and bureaucratic inertia and misdirection speaking; and since responding “Really, and how’s all that working out?” conveys cynicism and thinly blanketed criticism, let’s modify our own question to “How...Now?” Are current strategies and initiatives truly rooted in and responsive to contemporary reality and emergent styles and social directions—that is, how people are behaving now and may in the near future? New rules abound these days, rules so new that we’re currently involved in their crafting. I understand that we’re emotionally attached to the idea of downtown, but does downtown, the real place as it is right now, feed our souls? Downtown, I contend, needs to express an entirely new story that can be seen and felt—that is, experienced. You ask: what is that new story? Here’s the start of an answer. I would propose an intentional and ever-expanding strategy, a new story for downtown called: “Come and Play!” A blueprint for public engagement of the ever-growing downtown population and downtown institutions and organizations in a wide range of social initiatives; for esthetic improvement (utilizing the arts of decoration and embellishment, so as to minimize capital costs); for the creation of new learning institutions including a centre for urban ecological design attracting the world’s innovators; the patronage and encouragement of all forms of local business enterprise; the ending, finally, of the homeless and street pop mess on, and spreading out from, Pandora; the encouragement of performance and display; turning downtown Victoria into a megaphone through which the near-future can shout: “Bring your appetite. Bring your wallet. Bring your head, your heart, your eye, your imagination, your intellect, your desire for connection. Come and Play!” Can’t be done, you say? I remind you that two or three short decades ago, downtown—its ‘story’—was “a little bit of Olde England.” And all that took was low building scale, some half-timber facades, a few tea, woolen and junque shoppes, a guy playing bagpipes, and the like. Imagine! “Downtown—the Centre of it All!” the signs once proclaimed. Haven’t seen that lately. Maybe the paint’s just peeled. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

Climate change will make zoning issues and social equity seem like quaint cultural artifacts. What Man’s hand may make, Man’s hand may undo. —A wise-sounding old saying, maybe IN A RECENT COLUMN titled “NDP needs to rein in its wild horses or see a repeat of 2001,” Times-Colonist resident tub-thumper Lawrie McFarlane wrote about the provincial government’s intent to eliminate the statutory provision requiring municipalities to hold public hearings before making zoning changes. “The argument is that this will speed up home building. Perhaps it will. But there’s more here than meets the eye,” he wrote. The objective, he states, is not just to build more houses, but to end “exclusionary zoning”—in particular the single-family zoning of the suburbs that some believe “confers an unfair advantage on those who can afford to live in such exclusive districts.” “End public hearings, and it becomes possible for municipalities to radically alter the character of residential neighbourhoods in the name of social justice, with no input from those most affected,” writes McFarlane, who is against such a policy being “rammed through in a manner that pays no heed to community sentiment.” McFarlane accurately identifies the ever-diminishing exclusivity of single-family areas, though I’m a bit confused by his marriage of “exclusive districts” and “suburbs.” I mean, Victoria’s suburbs are filled with people who take the wax out of their ears with their thumbs, and practice their rebel yells in the Canadian Tire parking lot. Exclusive? Hmmm. Also, it might have better served the rules of objectivity if McFarlane had balanced his worry-spinning with an inquiry into the market factors that now make a Fairfield home worth $1.5 million and new condos priced to sell at a $1,000/square feet. That’s right: twelve inches by twelve inches, a thousand bucks. I have no doubt that McFarlane is saving that for another column and will, given his lights, discover that somehow the poverty groups, in cahoots with government, have engineered the extravagant pricing—probably to embarrass and undermine the virtues of the market system, comrade. If right-wing ideologues can blame January 6th on the Democrats, nothing’s off the table. Anyway, with that kind of real estate pricing, it seems to me that the “character of residential neighbourhoods” is being altered by factors more potent, pervasive and pressing than anything related to the social justice agenda. I digress slightly to make another point, one likely to become thematic in this column (if it isn’t already): climate change-driven planetary ecology is shifting, and it will affect all human systems and conventions, all our flimsy social constructions including the single-family suburbs (and the economy that undergirds them, the energy source that enables them, the systems required to sustain them). How can we miss the message of COVID? It is a primitive event, not a “modern” one, not a parenthesis in the modern project, but a foretaste; it has upended “normal” human protocols—social, cultural, economic—in a heartbeat. The force of it! And now, more than two years in, we wonder when it will finish, when (and if) normalcy will return; or is this like some horror movie that just won’t stop? For godssake, the credits are rolling and the creature’s still chewing on her leg! And will opinion writers in the near-future still be harrumphing and raising points of order when wholesale climate refugee-ism and general social chaos are the conditions of the day, and countless thousands, rendered jobless by AI and robotics, or by a climate-damaged economy and made homeless by climate impacts, swell the ranks of the street pop on Pandora, and we’re all bunking with each other, and the single-family home is little more than a cultural artifact, a memory? In other words, it could be time to dislodge the idea that a man’s home is his castle—if for no other reasons than that these days a man’s home is his mortgage, and honestly, it’s so hard to find qualified moat-cleaners any more. After all, what do we think the less in “living with less” means—living with everything we have now, in everything we have now, but thinking nice less thoughts? We can’t hide from God. We can’t trick Nature. Which brings me to a cousin-thought: all the bitching about the Victoria bike mobility network is a clear display of how significant a change it is, how much of a lurch from peoples’ routines, how much of a collision with their sensibilities. And that’s just some painted lines, bollards, curb-juts and traffic signal adjustments intended to improve co-existence between bikes and cars; really, the smallest of social gestures designed to meet the now-arriving future. Considered as social change, the imposition of the bike lane system must be seen as an extraordinary political accomplishment and, I suppose, as a measure of the, uh, imperfect local appetite and capacity for adjustment to ecological imperatives. Maybe the public anger has less to do with the traffic adjustments than the deeper social messaging: end of an era. Climate change will prove to be a great democrat as we are forced to adopt a neo-medieval lifestyle. Single-family homes? Poverty groups? Social equity? All of that, I speculate, is yesterday’s conversation. Most single-family-zoned areas in Victoria are not exactly lush arcadias like Uplands. Rockland used to be Uplands, and look at it now: a mix of single-family homes, low-plexes, suite-ed mansions (former single-family homes now operating as house-plexes), apartment buildings. In other words, the transformation of which McFarland writes happened of its own accord—driven not by social engineering but social evolution: economic change, need change, change in family size and composition, and so on. Policy didn’t impose reality, it followed reality. But if you don’t have the luxury of time on a generational scale, it takes not modest changes in zoning, but a complete transformation in land use, to achieve any serious expression of economic democratization in housing. That is, I’m not sure that waiving rezoning accomplishes very much. So, you slam in a fourplex next to a single-family house, and that’s a blow for social justice and housing affordability? What, did the owner donate the property? Is Acme Construction working for free? For that matter, did the city forgive all of its normal fees? No. The property was a million-two, the construction and soft costs came to $325,000 a door, plus financing costs, plus developer profit. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see the social justice/housing affordability angle in a fourplex each of whose units sells for three-quarters of a million or more. Affordability hopes based on such market realities, as local social critic Doug Curran puts it, is “magical thinking.” We may be short of moat cleaners but, it appears, magicians still abound. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

People protect what they value, and the evolution of Victoria’s Downtown is challenging that value. IT WAS 5:30 ON A DARK, DRIZZLY TUESDAY MORNING. I was heading south on Douglas and coasted to a stop when the light turned red at Broughton. Not another vehicle in sight. There I stayed, growing a minute older, briefly toying with the fancy of driving through the red—an idea immediately followed by an image of some 4X4 materializing out of nowhere, barreling across Broughton on the green, and crushing my car and me in a life-changing second. Gaaaaaahh! My foot stayed on the brake. That’s how it works, isn’t it? We all agree to stop on the red. That’s what the welcome sign says: “Welcome to Victoria. We stop on the red.” We all agree: it’s a good idea, a reasonable curb on absolute freedom. What’s behind agreement is the principle of mutuality: you behave in a way that protects/benefits me, I’ll behave in a way that protects/benefits you. Small compromises—no more than courtesies, really—in support of social calm and civilization. The very essence of the under-celebrated idea of co-operation. The balance may not square at any particular moment, but what goes around comes around a hundred times a day. Elegant, yes? What’s aggression, then? The blinding urgency of self-interest—a messy but admittedly energetic and appealing triumph over mutuality. And with some regret I assure you there’s no sense clucking about how nice the world would be if all was mutuality, because it isn’t, it can’t and won’t be. Yes, Trump’s an asshole, but he didn’t create this. Mutuality and self-interest have entirely different energetic signatures, and each appears to have its own role in the course of things. And analogues exist everywhere in nature; the principle of friction, for example, or forest fires caused by lightning strikes. That is, wishing for one without the other will get you as far as wishing you were born with angelic wings. A timely question, then: how do we ensure that there’s enough mutuality, enough good will, framing all differences, to sustain a society? In the absence of autocrats and dictators, is any of this subject to anything more durable than voluntary social enforcement, a tissue of written agreements…a handshake, really? I pull, almost at random, a paragraph from Colin Clarke’s ominous January 21, 2021 opinion piece in the New York Times, “A New Era of Far-Right Violence” (Clarke, an authority on domestic and international terrorism, is a fellow at the Soufan Center): “The turbulence of the next several years should not be underestimated. Record-setting firearms sales, looming economic calamity and the continued fraying of America’s social fabric—exacerbated by declining mental health, rising domestic violence and worsening substance abuse during the pandemic—make for a worrying combination.” Government is the social tool through which mutuality is managed (or imposed), but newspaper headlines now project an image of governance, its legitimacy challenged, stalked by climax just waiting to pounce; and if the timing is uncertain, the outcome isn’t. History provides the proof with a long roster of expired civilizations and cultures. Strange to be living in such a “moment” of ubiquitous social threat (joined, for the first time, with the profound risks of global ecological collapse), and to realize there must have been earlier times when, like us, Romans and Aztecs, with little care, got up, brushed their teeth and prepped for a day at the office. All of the above was invoked in a recent Times-Colonist contribution by Victoria city councillor (and mayoral aspirant) Stephen Andrew entitled “Victoria is facing a public safety crisis.” Andrew paints a picture of an overworked, disrespected and sometimes even threatened police force facing an increasing number of assaults, as if simply wearing the uniform and projecting civic authority was signal enough for some people to flip out. The TC’s Jack Knox dittoed Andrew in a long November 14 profile of an overworked, stressed-out, understaffed Victoria police force. So, do you hire more cops? The police chief says yes. Does that make the problem go away? If you live in Victoria right now, you are witness to, and an actor in, a vast if quiet local drama. For a long time, Downtown seemed in social, economic and urban design terms to be the centre of it all: offering a cheerful “Good morning!”, linen and lace, Eaton’s and The Bay. Now? That Downtown is vanishing. Homeless citizen camped on Pandora Street High rises proposed by Starlight for the Yates/Quadra/Vancouver Street area. And all these Downtown highrises, that collection of ice-cold towers? It’s a gamble that, as the wider shopping public disperses to the malls, and commerce, culture and community move online, eventual thousands of new highrise occupants will become tomorrow’s Downtown spenders, culturati and community, keeping things lively, inviting and viable. Some re-urbanizing trends seem to favour this outcome; others, like online commerce and electronic community, don’t. We’ll see. In Victoria, as in other places, certain social assumptions—you might call them hopes—are baked into land use; assumptions about citizenship, social engagement, community—that is, about what it takes for people to experience themselves as parts of and players in the civic project. If, due to social change, those assumptions are no longer, or less, valid, more social artifact than fact, the results won’t be some renaissance, but indifference and alienation, privacy instead of rare and wonderful publicy; that is, a table set for hardness, indifference and crime. I wonder if the City has given thought to the connection between how a place looks and how people feel in it and what they do with it; that is, Downtown public realm urban design and private building architectural niceties (whatever enhances the sense of welcome) intended to elicit and support the feeling of “this is mine, this is my home.” When visitors used to come to Victoria, the expectation was “a little bit of Old England.” Ever thought about exactly what, beside tea at the Empress, Fort Street junque shoppes that meant, what it stood for? The place was maternal, protective, containing. Victoria projected civic and social order. You took a ferry to get here—“toot-toot,” for God’s sake! Governance, as square footage and culture, was everywhere; the city was the home of ceremony, ritual, order. When I first got here in 1970, there were two panhandlers. Two. Godfrey and Cliff (“I work around your house for a dollar.”). Homeless, in 1970? What’s that? Things are looser now and it’s more of a free-for-all. Highrises and homeless—how big city of us! Victoria contemporized. Had no choice, likely. And here we are: cops getting mauled on the streets. Can this council and the City’s urban design leadership conceive of and impose public and private realm design and architectural guidelines that might deliver warmth and help to inspire citizenly feelings and behaviour (and remind the cops they have a thousand friends)? It’s no mystery; people protect what they value and love, so give ‘em a Downtown with lots of things to love. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological, writing “Houseplex—Density Without Damage,” presenting and editing the website “Shit Sandwich—the Best of the Bad News,” and initiating the Centre for the Design of the Future, a Victoria-based host for social innovation.

In the City of Victoria’s attempts to address the “missing middle,” is something missing? (Hint: densification and affordability are not spelled the same.) ALL THE TALK HERE in The Land That Thyme Forgot is about the “missing middle” in housing. It appears that the City is preparing a major zoning policy re-do in which significant swathes of now-single-family-zoned real estate will be opened up for duplexes, triplexes, even four-plexes. Horrors! I mean, four-plex people are not like you and me, dear. So, at this moment of sky-high markets and land use changes, I thought it would be useful to point out that densification and affordability are not spelled the same, and shouldn’t be conflated. Drifting up from coffee conversations at Cook Street Village Moka House are snips of breathless gossip about the house next door on Howe or down the block on Linden or Moss that just sold for one-four, one-five, one-six. “Can you believe it?” delivered in that special Fairfield property-owner voice that simultaneously conveys censorious moral judgment and self-congratulation. How high is up? Why is high up? Wow, so last night I dreamed I sold a property for a million that I bought for $180,000 about six years ago…. Wow, so last night I dreamed I was a real estate developer, and I bought a property for a million and redeveloped it as 6 townhouses which I sold for $1.3 each. And with my land, construction and other costs all figured, I made over $2 million…. Wow, so last night I dreamed I bought a townhouse for a steal price of $1,300,000 and flipped it for $1,550,000 a month later…. Market realities dance across every feature and factor of housing economics, and sprinkle their ironies over the housing blame-fest in which everything’s the fault of opportunistic developers, or parsimonious and slow-to-provide government, or location-crazy, want-it-all housing consumers, or take-forever bureaucracies, or property sellers who struck gold, or entrenched neighbourhoods that fight change, or the effing banks and mortgage lenders who hang you out to dry. Oh, and every so often, us locals remember that everyone in Canada wants to move here, so basically it’s a high-pressure seller’s market that has sent prices stratospheric. And if the insanity mounts in the US and prospects there deteriorate, or the country cracks up and goes tribal (never say never), that’s a million Canada-bound refugees fleeing with money in their jeans. On top of all this, widespread concerns about housing are now refracted through the murderous threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has lowered all perceptions of safety anywhere, in any form. This adds further seasoning to the worry that our kids will never own because of high housing costs. Others hand-wring about the so-called “missing middle” in housing supply and home pricing. A surprising number of people live in their vehicles (cruise the Beacon Hill Park/Dallas Road perimeter early some morning). And all levels of government and a staggering number of social and philanthropic organizations wrestle (tenuously) with the challenges of housing the un-housed—a condition that hovers like the grim social danger it is. Homelessness, you remember, is not a government but a social problem. An October 2, 2021 Times Colonist piece quoted David Langlois, president of the Victoria Real Estate Board, saying: “In terms of the way…land is developed and treated, it’s taking on the idea that the single-family home preserve that occupies the vast majority of our land base needs to be altered…We need to allow for a mix of housing types in neighbourhoods that have traditionally been single-family homes.” The article added: “Langlois said it’s about opening up to the idea of adding duplexes and four-plexes in single-family-home neighbourhoods. ‘That’s the future and the quicker we choose to embrace the future, the happier we will be,’ he said.” I’m sorely tempted to get distracted by prescriptions for happiness, but, again, it’s very important to keep the ideas of housing availability and affordability away from each other here. The economic theorists in the room will disagree, claiming that if availability and choice multiply, prices will soften, housing will become more affordable. I say: true, if we’re talking about bars of soap or bags of peanuts. We all carry this set of market assumptions around with us, the Costco model, that more or a surplus of something should make it cheaper than less or a scarcity of something. But peanuts don’t push back. Peanuts are a straight-ahead retail event, but with housing and property, you have a diffuse counter-force: a market of owners who are totally invested in keeping prices as high as possible and, purchasers who are themselves believers in ever-higher prices. “Don’t delay” sing the real estate sales professionals, “because it’ll be higher tomorrow.” I’m steering us toward closer scrutiny of Langlois’ claim that “it’s about opening up to the idea of adding duplexes and four-plexes.” I don’t disagree with his social ideology; but the economics bear study. An example of a multiplex from the City of Victoria’s “Missing Middle Housing Project: Phase 1, Early Engagement Summary” Remember: houses don’t subdivide in the middle of the night. They don’t grow extra bathrooms, kitchens and separate entrances. You want to turn a single-family home into a four-plex, or replace an existing house with a new four-plex? You are going to spend big dough—and expect a big reward. And even if you’re playing developer with your own property (I don’t recommend it), you have to think like a developer: market value of property as-is, plus costs of all new construction or renovation, and the cost of all fees, plans and so on (so-called soft costs), plus the cost of the money you borrow for the work, plus profit. Playing developer, let’s say you buy a property in some relatively modest-priced neighbourhood for $800,000, knock down the house if there is one (conversion costs not worth the iffy results), and build a new four-plex of 850-square-foot (sf) two-bedroom condos. Four times 850 is 3,400sf at a construction cost of about $300/sf, or $1,000,000, plus all soft costs (everything that isn’t construction) of about $90/sf, or $300,000. So, total cost (property+hard+soft) is $2,100,000. And you haven’t yet allowed for profit of, let’s say, 25 percent (you’re not doing this for fun). Total: $2,600,000 divided by four is $650,000—or roughly $800/sf—for a two-bedroom condo. (Rule of thumb: stuff in Victoria is currently selling for $800 to $1,000 per square foot.) You can quibble with my numbers, but you get the idea: not cheap. “Yes, but…but…I can buy a _____ in Langford for _____.” Go ahead. Local markets move in uniformity. They’re intuitive. They listen to each other. They resonate. Plus, carpenters don’t charge one price for an hour’s work in Langford, another in Victoria. Under the headline, “Langford launches fund to help young families buy condos,” the T-C recently quoted the mayor: “It’s tough for young families to get into the market, even in Langford,” said Young, noting the average sale price of a single-family home in Langford is nearly $900,000, while it’s over $1 million in the core. “A lot of people say they feel their opportunity to get in is now gone.” Within certain limits, a developer, if so motivated, can manage the cost of housing through some combination of finding cheaper sites (less desirable locations/areas, which can be zero sum because of lower sales price/rental rates), rezoning properties to greater densities, thus reducing the land cost per door, negotiating parking relaxations (less structure, less required property, or both), reducing unit sizes, reducing building amenities, securing government funding tied to affordability, negotiating with municipalities during the development approval process to meet various (largely symbolic) affordability conditions in return for density goodies. You note, of course, that I didn’t add “reducing developer profit” to this list. The reason is that the entire financial machinery that supports development is rigorously organized to require demonstration—proof, within reason—of project viability. No proof, no dough from lenders, investors, anyone. Any developer who attempts outright philanthropy within the financial architecture of a project is a one-project developer. I would temper reader expectation that innovative land use policy contributes much to affordability. So, what can we do to aid housing affordability and improve offerings for the missing middle? Duncan today, gone tomorrow. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, and writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological.

If our city becomes one more placeless place on the planet, well, that's how democracies die. ON A RECENT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I was driving north on Douglas near the Burnside turnoff. A red light gave me time to sip my senior’s two-and-two and take in the physical setting and recognize…absolutely nothing! The shapes, the business names and signage, the purposes…abruptly, none of it made sense beyond geometry and abstraction...visual noise. Nothing offered context, even a hint of connection. I wasn’t in Victoria, where I’ve lived for a half-century; I was anywhere or, more accurately, no ‘where’—a story-less, history-less collection of unfamiliar boxes, roads, street junk. Later, as I drove through Downtown on the way home, I had only a slightly reduced version of the same sensation: proliferating characterless residential high-rises and towers-in-progress; fast food, street-front convenience stores and dollarama’s; restless, roiling clusters of the street population, shopping cart and sleeping bag-festooned entry alcoves, bicycle-cruising trouble-oids; plenty of vacant storefronts for lease, and conventional service/retail in visual and, I assume, actual economic retreat. Also, lots of gating. If there was purpose, promise, social aspiration, continuity, identity, community, a living story Downtown, it was lost to me. Take story away from Victoria, fracture its narrative, and big surprise, you have one more placeless place on the planet. Sorry, what? Victoria’s transitioning, and this is just a new chapter? Horseshit. Victoria’s going, going, gone. Okay, I acknowledge (hopefully temporary) change overkill is taking place now: a building boom physically transforming (and uglifying, and dehumanizing) Downtown, plus pandemic-imposed protocols that make everything surreal; but still, a powerful demonstration that place identity—“This is my home”—is fragile and frangible. Think of spy movies and tv shows: when you want information or a confession, you disorient your opponent. You beat the crap out of him, you use psychotropic logic-looseners, you yell and threaten, you intensify risk, you isolate and disconnect, you reduce him to a state of frightened dislocation in which he doesn’t know up from down and, unmoored, will offer anything to repair normalcy, convention, proportion, connection…context. This explains (but doesn’t excuse) the so-called NIMBY response, makes change-anxiety understandable, and it reminds us that place-constancy is an essential feature of social definition. I had, earlier, been looking at online pictures of Barcelona, Spain. Here is an aerial perspective image that reveals an extraordinary urban geometry of tightly woven blocks, the buildings fairly uniform in height, like urban dough yeasted to five, six or a few more storeys. Barcelona, remember, is a centuries-old stewpot of European, Mediterranean and North African cultures and influences. And here are images that suggest how the above looks and operates at street level: “Most children are architects,” notes Darran Anderson in his extraordinary Imaginary Cities. “And destroyers,” he might have added. As children with blocks and play objects that come to hand, we make (and, minutes later, ruin) whole cities on the carpet. As societies, we recapitulate such tendencies. We attempt to regulate social behaviour to some standard; but there are times—inarguably, this is one of them—when the conditions required for social management break down or wear out, and habits of creativity and constructiveness are overwhelmed by reactive counter-values and behaviour. For example, the impacts and effects of climate change and the degradation of nature are not merely ‘natural’ and physical—happening ‘out there’—but also emotional, personal, internalized and felt by all of us as looming existential threat. Predictably, this triggers an ecological response, but also widespread counter-response: angry, destructive non-believer denial from contrarians and ideological repudiators. Yes, that’s a social reflex throughout history, but the stakes are terminally higher now. The media packages and objectifies it as politics, or policy, or practice, but it feels more essential, more subjective, more tectonic and cultural. Old terms and rules, accommodations and understandings are giving way to…we’ll find out, maybe. In a related instance, it’s crucial to understand that right now, compromise is a diminishing part of the political vocabulary, particularly for the right wing. Compromise has vanished beneath enmity. Such circumstances are not stopped by or at our southern border. They assail the Canadian social premise, too (and are more embedded in our culture that we care to acknowledge). You can catch a reflection of Canadian social danger in Colin Clarke’s commentary about the growth and risks of the far right wing in America (Clarke held positions in three Republican administrations): “The turbulence of the next several years should not be underestimated. Record-setting firearms sales, looming economic calamity and the continued fraying of America’s social fabric—exacerbated by declining mental health, rising domestic violence and worsening substance abuse during the pandemic—make for a worrying combination.” Underscoring Clarke’s concern is a May, 2021 New York Times piece about conspiracy theory-based belief and QAnon. A recent poll found that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters. The same share said that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to depose the pedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order. Victoria offered certainty and stability, social agreement. It does not at present. Such qualities were the meaning, in a sense the purpose, of the place. Who could miss the architectural messaging? Rock-solid Legislative Buildings, the Empress Hotel, and the imposing office/commercial blocks at the north end of the Causeway, all tethered to the landscaped “Welcome To Victoria” in the city’s symbolic entry, the Inner Harbour. A very pretty picture, not just on a postcard. Safety. Stability. Continuity. Is that social claim passé, no longer feasible? We appear to lack the social tools to produce and sustain such practices. Now, it’s “Churn. Confusion. Memory loss. Risk.” Want your money back? American social critic James Kunstler, in a piece for The American Conservative examined how communities could return to the “rich set of social and economic relationships” that existed in small town America a hundred years ago. “How do we get back to anything that resembles that kind of high-functioning society?” He answers himself: “Trauma: a set of circumstances that will disrupt all the easy and dishonest work-arounds which have determined the low state of our current arrangements. You can be sure this is coming.” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die, study the erosion of democratic norms coming from “extreme partisan polarization” that extends beyond policy differences into “an existential conflict over race and culture.” In the expanding library of such literature there is a spreading sense of worry projected both by thoughtful hysterics like Kunstler (and me) and by academics and intellectuals; a sense that national and municipal polities have ceded authority while promoting simplistic, patently false narratives to steer the public away from the uncertainty and ambivalence of our times. In Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth, social critic Sheldon Wolin unveils the phrase “fugitive democracy” to remind us that democracy is not a fixed state, but a political experience, and “fugitive” specifically because contemporary forms of power have made this aspiration such a fleeting political experience. We tend to think of our democracy as permanent, a given, not constantly challenged and requiring ceaseless regeneration at the citizen and community levels. After all, the social architecture of democracy was in place when we got here; and besides, don’t we have people looking after all of that? Isn’t that what elections are for? We’re busy, and we don’t stop to ask if our current political arrangements are still delivering, still able to deliver, the outcomes we prefer. In the setting of Wolin’s concerns, I would love to see some next Victoria mayoral aspirant force the conversation and, waving the banner of return and renewal, base his/her/their candidacy on a promise of utter physical beautification of Downtown (both the public realm and private architecture) and the restoration of near-perfect social safety throughout the central area (guess what, people prefer to be in pretty, safe places), and on new social architecture, too: the elevation of citizen to stakeholder, new opportunities (or requirements) for constructive engagement and collaboration, the tackling of local needs via proven strategies of mutuality and reciprocity which, as a package, are known as community (Kunstler’s “high functioning society”). It’s the point of this column to emphasize the connection between physical and social architecture. Truly, we live in the house of our dreams. Our challenge, to borrow columnist Thomas Edsall’s phrase, is to “regain control of cultural narratives and the mechanisms of government.” The “Welcome To Victoria” earthwork may still have room for “Back.” Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, and writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological.

Corporatism has invaded land use, producing a loss of authenticity and a failure of architectural expression, which in turn, weakens the basis for community and social connection. A MEDIA SOURCE generally not given to hysteria informs us that “a survey published in May, 2021 by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 15 percent of Americans—roughly, one out of seven—subscribe to the central QAnon belief that the US government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” and that 20 percent—one in five (essentially, the Christian right)—believes that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.” And from andrewturner.medium.com we learn: “The results of recent polls by Bright Line Watch have provided the first hard and frighteningly conclusive evidence that Americans are moving fast down the road towards a national divorce.” The accompanying map makes this assertion scarily real: Bright Line Watch polling results by region. Question: “Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with [list of states in a new union]?” And the gherkin resting on top of this crap sandwich is a recent headline in Huffpost: “Vaccine Or This Marriage: Conspiracy Theories Are Tearing Couples Apart. ‘He said if I take the vaccine I could pack my bags and leave his kids here.’” Confusion, spreading disappointment and hopelessness, and incendiary levels of public anger all point to lost, or misplaced, national purpose, with a diminishing ability to see a common future; and this invites deep worry about American social, emotional and even geographic prospects. Yes, it’s tempting to wave it away as just the most recent chapter in a long, fractious, democracy-is-messy US tradition, or to blame it on COVID-19 and the stresses of global warming; but whatever the causes, give thought to the potential local (Victoria) impacts of such spreading “mood” south of us. As you measure risk, consider Soufan Group security policy director Colin Clarke’s January 22, 2021 New York Times comment citing Trump-encouraged far-right violence in recent years as “missed opportunities to take the threat seriously.” I will guess that the threat runs much deeper and more to the heart of things than Trump himself, and that the election of Trump should itself be seen as a reflection of broad-based social anger and desperation. Let me guess…you believe: “That’s all US stuff, and nobody up here thinks like that anyway. Canada, remember? Peace, order and good government. So all of this US craziness has zero cross-border implications.” Now, can I sell you a cheeseburger that plays the accordion? I’ve opened this column with such unsettling thoughts to bring substance to the perception that we’re in one of history’s big chapters, and that Victoria might do well to initiate broad public conversation on the subject and lay the foundation for a contingent response. Actually, since it’s axiomatic that when the going gets tough, Victoria holds a workshop, maybe let’s skip the conversation and go straight to content. No, not wall-building or pop-guns, but strengthening social and community bonds—the sense of connection, of an us—via our civic structures, protocols and physical identity—what in its totality might be called social architecture. Within this column’s themes of urban design, architecture, land use and development, I have a special interest in the relationship between the social cues, the messaging, of buildings and public spaces—what feelings and human possibilities they encourage or dampen—and public pride in and identification with the civic project…matters of community identity and coherence, really. We don’t (or shouldn’t) need the threat of US social eruption to motivate us to make our buildings and public realm more inviting, more rich in social messaging, more animated and humane. But it may take such a prospect to remind us of the risk to our valuable but always vulnerable singularity. We are in the age of corporatism—a corporate way of seeing the world. It appears to have many of the attributes of ideology, and its sensibilities, its internal logic, invades the field of real estate development and land use as it influences many other areas of social practice. Among other effects, it produces a kind of smoothing, a dis-engagement, a loss of authenticity, a failure (or the death) of architectural expression; and this, in turn, weakens the basis for community and social connection, an us. And I pose this question: why is it so easy to get uninspired, mediocre buildings approved? Why is the city’s inner voice so still? There are, of course, many answers, but one is that such concerns need—but do not have—a political champion. To my way of thinking, the best reason for City Hall to be aggressively uncompromising and demanding of developers and of itself to deliver superlative buildings and public environments—friendly, warm, welcoming, stimulating—is that right now, every new building and civic project needs to remind people that this place is different from other places in substance and character; has to enlist or re-enlist us as citizens; strengthen our ability to define and recognize community identity and character...not to protect us if and when History’s big wave rolls our way, of course, but to give social definition, meaning and reason for pride to everyday life right now. None of this asks the City to take on a novel role, or to overreach in social prescription, to “tell us what to do.” The City, in our behalf, does it now. The entire zoning code, all those land use rules and regs, didn’t come from nowhere, but from the sensibilities and values and preferences of us the public. For example, our treasured and nearly sacrosanct R-1 single-family zone wasn’t heaven-sent, but came from people asserting (for better and worse) “family residential” as an important value not to be compromised by other co-permitted immediate land uses. The city, in other words, has always been deep in the job of arranging and sustaining social values and matters of taste via the tools of urban planning and design. Community, for various reasons, is very hard work right now. Community doesn’t just happen, or run forever. And hidden from platitudes about human interdependency and collaboration is the emergent fact of unprecedented personal autonomy which, in turn, is re-shaping and in some ways challenging the very need for social connection. It’s in the setting of such thoughts that I express concern about architecture and urban design. To put my beliefs most simply, good urban design and good architecture improve the grounds for social trust which, in turn, fosters greater social connection and greater subscription to the civic story—both its social facts and, equally important, the romantic idea of the place. “In non-places,” writes Darran Anderson, “history, identity, and human relation are not on offer. Non-places used to be relegated to the fringes of cities in retail parks or airports, or contained inside shopping malls. But they have spread. Everywhere looks like everywhere else and, as a result, anywhere feels like nowhere in particular.” David Denby, in a film review of Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her, writes: “you can’t have love without fable—every love affair is an improbable narrative wrung from non-being and loneliness…as true of the collection of individual souls that makes up a city as it is of a single person.” That is, it takes story, and you don’t get citizenship without story; you get only urban strangerhood and anomie: a loss of faith in the civic project. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, and writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological.

Isn't that proposed new building a soul-crushing piece of shit? WHY CAN’T I SING LIKE MARVIN GAYE? I won’t say that’s the only gift I’ve ever asked for, but it’s the most elusive. Listen to Marvin on YouTube singing Wholy, Holy: Jesus left a long time ago, Said He would return… He left us a book to believe in, In it we’ve got a lot to learn. Love, love, love, love If I had Marvin’s gift, that’s the very song I would sing at a local UDI (Urban Development Institute) luncheon. Room full of developers, money-men, architects, real estate insiders. I could be the warm-up for the transfixing keynote presentation, Real Estate Differential Income and Cost Calculation for Tax Profile Management. “Yes,” I’d start, “this song’s for you, so stop munching your breaded veal cutlets and swapping lies for just a minute and listen up: Jesus wants you to put a lot more love, love, love in your buildings. And if you won’t, or don’t, then you’re going to spend eternity in Hell: 320 square feet, third floor, north-facing.” And protests would rise from the audience: “What’s the matter with our buildings the way they are? What’s the problem? And even if there is some problem, isn’t that what the City’s design planners and advisory design panel and City council are for? Because they keep approving our plans and telling us ‘good to go.’ We’re just following the City’s rules and design guidelines, and if the buildings are okay with them, why come carping and moaning to us? Besides, we must be giving the market what it wants because people vote with their wallets….” Love, love, love, love. Generally, we don’t think of our sweet town as a battlefield (apart from the tussle over road space and bike lanes), but the battles of history and culture are being played out here as much as anywhere, the stakes are sizeable and the outcomes, which are taking on definition as I write, are not promising. How does it happen that developers are allowed to undertake projects capable of transforming the entire appearance, mood, social identity and character of a city—that is, the story of place that a city tells to the people who live there—with no expertise, training in or understanding of urbanism or urban design, no understanding of social history, impacts and consequences, no considered ideas about how physical architecture strongly influences social expression and possibility, but with only the business skills bearing on opportunity capture and risk management? Answer: “It’s the free market. Plus, I got an architect looks after design.” The day an architect looks his/her developer client in the eye and says: “This proposal is a soul-crushing piece of shit,” I’ll believe in architects again. Highly educated, open-minded and widely read are among the attributes developers need to produce beautiful, appropriately scaled buildings that add visual appeal and character to the city and amplify, rather than damage and diminish, its identity. This topic doesn’t receive a lot of public thought. It’s hard stuff to get your head around, and the malevolent, un-budging potency of how-we-do-things-is-how-things-should-be-done creates a high wall for attitude and value change. The public (affected individuals or small clusters, really) grumbles over this or that but seems generally unwilling to invest much social capital or outrage at the level of principle—a shame, because this is exactly where the battle for Victoria’s future is being fought. “The world is changing,” we say—a toss-away phrase with monumental import. The terms and the basic conditions of social identity everywhere are shifting; becoming in the moment more virtual, more externally managed. In Victoria, the city’s physical and social gifts—not just their numerical presence, but also the potency and reach of their messaging—are losing both amplitude and dominance. Our city’s distinguishing story—its identity, its why/because tied to place and to a shared life—seems in this mutable age less determining, less culture-shaping. Significant counter-forces—technological, social and environmental—are atomizing us and threatening our traditional city-making instincts and skills. In this setting, the meaning of “citizen,” a city stakeholder, turns ambiguous. Victoria offered home, place, a life together. The “little bit of Olde England” stuff was always just by-play, fluff, “patriotic mythology,” to borrow George Packer’s phrase—decorative icing on the cornerstone qualities of protection, identity, definition, security. Yes, times have changed, but urban design choices are also a factor. The city now operates with less of those qualities and increasingly leaves its people homeless at home. The tragedy and irony is that most North American cities, built up on some variant of the Calgary model and now a scary social chapter or two ahead of us, would kill to have more Victoria, while we seem not to know how to preserve and reinforce our remarkably successful urban design signature to serve us now and in the near-future. It’s as if we misplaced the recipe. Starlight's proposed mega-development for the Harris Green/Yates and Vancouver area Marc Bloch in his 1940 Strange Defeat explains France’s implosion in the face of German aggression, noting that leadership “worked with the tools which were put into their hands by the nation at large. They could be only what the totality of the social fact, as it existed in France, permitted them to be.” It’s rare for a civic culture to emphasize not just its gifts, but also a citizen’s responsibility to sustain the gifts. It needs a vision of a shared identity or future, and social tools—political, policy and otherwise—to perpetuate and to bring renewed health and energy to such a vision. Most of Victoria’s recent multifamily efforts are socially, morally unsure. They read less as homes than as contraptions that confusedly ask: how, and for what purposes, are people supposed to live together? What are we supposed to accomplish and create together? In other words, there is moral failure in architecture—failure of a building to celebrate and enrich its surroundings, to enrich the possibilities of shared social identity, of purpose. Failure to understand. Every moment carries its own urgencies, and maybe a city can be excused for failing the future, failing to articulate ideas and impose policies of urban design and place-making that ensure its citizens wake up next to the same city every day, to put it really inelegantly. Still, through the leadership and agency of the city, the present times require that developers be scholars, philosophers. And not because an answerless God is going to pat them on the head and say: “Good child!” They have to do this out of the realization that being a developer is not just opportunity-spotting, risk-managing and all the sub-arts of “putting up stuff,” but also a moral practice. The high-rises going up in Victoria? Sterile, mechanistic, loveless. Certainly not feminine or maternal, and not even masculine, but strangely post-gender and free of human juice. Conceived by developers, articulated by architects, advanced by bureaucrats and approved by politicians—insufficiently mindful of the city’s story, or the way in which buildings—their form and character—bind people to this city’s story. Might be time for a city name-change: Victoria to Vista 30, maybe. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, and writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological.

The fight for ecological limits is really the fight for cultural maturity; and that fight is never won for long. IT’S A CLOUDY THURSDAY, JUNE 3rd, and gusty in Beacon Hill Park. The onshore winds are having their way with the place; paper litter takes off on eccentric sailing voyages, and empty beverage cups invite you to chase them along the paved park drive. The peacocks are already in full strut at dawn, squirrels busy doing squirrel work, noisy crows making life miserable for the prehistorically large herons that nest in high branches near the bandshell. The number of tents is down to a dozen or so, one’s and two’s still boldly pegged on various lawns, a few cleverly hidden in the park’s forested sections. All of these will soon be gone if the City sticks to its intention to rid the park of daytime and overnight residents. The stated objective is to give the park two years to regenerate and free itself of the physical “scars” of intensive camping. What remains unknown is whether two years is enough to wipe the memory of the social occupation of the park from the public’s mind. The park, after all, is not just landscape, but mood, as well. The camping has altered the public’s perception of Beacon Hill Park. It’s not the same place it was; and now, if no longer a landscape filled with threat, still not safe, either; a psychologically contested ground, maybe; and whether the previous image and character of the park regenerates in park users’ minds, or long-term grooves are left upon the public memory, making users just a bit tentative—walk here, don’t go there—is hard to know at the moment. Tents on Beacon Hill Park playing field in 2020 There is extensive professional and popular literature about loss and (sometimes impossible) recovery from loss. Still, loss in this, rather than the profit-and-loss sense of the word, is an under-considered subject. There’s diminution, but also disruption and vacuum, something taken away, a hole where one didn’t exist. “Sorry about your loss,” we say from our hearts, if parents lose a child, or a spouse a partner, or a family home taken by fire. The discovery of the skeletal remains of 215 First Nations children in Kamloops defines loss. The 80-year-ago extirpation by the Nazis of European gypsies, Jews and others defines loss. Such loss represents something diminished and not restored, taken away and not returned. When a person’s loss is neither fatuous nor self-absorbed, we don’t say, “Oh, get over it.” We resonate and understand they may not get over it and we place them under no moral or emotional obligation to do so. In the case of the park, what was damaged was a social assumption about behavioural boundaries, freedom of use, safety; an assumption that not one square inch of the park required you to think twice about, or bring the skills of caution to, your footsteps. How did you receive those messages of safety? Atmospherically. Through your skin: itself a cognitive organ. Writes Lydia Millet in her extraordinary story, Thylacine: “Skin, he thought, was the organ that met the world. Everywhere on you, soft and porous and bristling with nerves. Easy to set afire.” By casual visual inspection, the park has returned nearly to its previous state. The tents are gone, more or less. The extraordinary quantity and spread of litter is gone. The sense of loss, though, has diminished, not vanished. He stands on a mowed area shouldering Heywood/Park Boulevard and screams: “FUCK YOU!” And a moment later: “FUCK!” And a moment later: “FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKIN’ CUNT!” No filter, nothing that says: “You don’t behave like that here.” He kneels, picks up a stone at the curb and heaves it at some cars parked beside the cricket field. Do I intervene, say something? What if he has bad brains? What if he has a knife? Look on the bright side: if all his circuitry melts, this isn’t the US and he’s not packing. As you’ve likely noted, the US these days is a powder-keg—and a reminder that social conditions everywhere are tectonic and that people can be moody, crazy, driven and dangerous. Yes, some of this is COVID-induced, or -intensified. Some of everything is, right now. Most of us have never had this experience, an almost wartime loss of normalcy, the disconcerting loss of facial reading and recognition. We’re all masked men and women, banditos, now, in this unusual state of proscription, prohibition and lockdown accompanied, contradictorily, by a comfortless holiday from routine. It’s weird, spooky, a dry run for End Times. No wonder alien sightings are up. VICTORIA, RECENTLY EAGER TO ACHIEVE, to accomplish something, to declare itself a fully-invested stakeholder in the 21st century, has severed its narrative, parted with its memory, abandoned its story, and is now busy transforming Downtown. Talk about alien sightings: a bad crop of 15-25-storey towers springing from holes in the ground. Character and singularity gone, the place feels more like every other city and ever-more-divorced from the civic identity that gave resident and visitor alike some redemption from the world’s despair. Sorry to deliver such a cold thesis but, as someone writes in a letter to the Times-Colonist, Victoria is being transformed into a “mini Toronto,” adding: “Victoria is getting uglier by the day.” How modern of us. This new class of towers Downtown is stealing something from us and reinforcing a deep set of worries. I borrow an idea from Greg Jackson’s Prayer for a Just War, that we are suffering an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation in North America, and that our urban design guidelines, zoning code and architectural requirements need more than anything to address despair. What else did you imagine Langford and Colwood as existential human acts were clumsily (and unsuccessfully) attempting to address? Why else do you imagine your heart breaks here in Victoria when you travel along a street of beautiful traditional homes or filigreed commercial frontages? Did you think it was to shop with the Government Street crap merchants that a zillion admiring visitors walked our streets? This city breaks hearts because it still, if diminishingly, holds promise in a world falling apart. It offers the gift of memory, connection, social compass. And what does the City do? It permits, if not outright encourages, developers and architects to create ice-cold buildings that steal the remaining warmth and emotional messaging, the embrace and maternal protection from the city and reinforce the same grounds for urban isolation perfected in a hundred other places. A worldwide mobilization will (presumably) eliminate the global pandemic health threat in another year, three years overall. But how difficult it seems to be to confront and counter the somewhat more ambiguous social health threats, matters more susceptible to opinion than verdict or vaccine. It is a tragedy that such threats present in the abstract, and not as specific acts or conditions with measurable consequences. But some trends and social threats—loss, pain and harm—won’t quantify, lack quantifiable features. I’d love, in Victoria’s behalf, to make something clever of the fact that “harm” is made invisible by “charm,” but I lack the wit. We seem to be caught in a time that feels heavy with metaphor. We, all of us, have been busy making our doom, manufacturing an ecological crisis; and to borrow a remark I’ve made before, catastrophe is ecological. It seeps into everything. That is, catastrophe is not just consequences, but purpose, too, not just what happens, but also what’s intended. The Great Fire of London, Lieve Verschuier (1627–1686) Victoria stood—residually, stands—athwart catastrophe. Catastrophe, at least in its gathering stages, as with global warming, is a caution designed to signal some pending greater damage or intolerable imbalance, and to stimulate conditions that make further damage more difficult or impossible. That is, catastrophe, within limits, buys time…until it can’t. Victoria said, and still in places says to all who would listen: “No, no, no, don’t go that way! Don’t do that, do this!” (Rachel Carson, remember, wrote Silent Spring in 1962.) Why Victoria’s fit of civic amnesia, when Europe’s best cities with their ancient roots show that it’s possible to achieve greater density without jettisoning history or losing identity? A fair question. It’s in the setting of history that you can begin to divine if not purpose or plan, at least pattern. And from its ability and willingness to embrace history, to be history, Victoria made and still, fadingly, makes one dizzy with excitement and hope for social possibility. This is a place where you are surrounded by dream, both human-made and natural, and where you can exhale, let the poison go…if right now through a mask. After all, don’t you carry a feeling, flickering just at the edge of intuition, that some epochal page is turning? Our changing relationship to nature; all the environmental damage; socially, culturally, the sense that we have hit the limits of freedom, despite the nagging hunger for more freedom—that is, altogether, some new and possibly concluding human chapter. The fight for ecological limits is really the fight for cultural maturity; and that fight is never won for long. I’m so sorry for your loss. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, and writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological.

Victoria’s story of stability and charm is now challenged by thoughtless development, mediocre architecture, and ill-considered land use policies. I admit, I enjoyed their visits and found the theatrical admiration entertaining. They always started with a ritual query about what I was working on, but in a minute we were talking about what they were working on. They wanted validation, not critique, and a chance, later, to say to others: “Bell loved it.” Yeah, Bell loved it. I conceived the programme for DoorBell to provide a tool for improved social connection and community-wide consideration of local concerns. It used Lingo, which I had designed a few years earlier to facilitate direct neural interaction, using SmartCap, between people who, in negotiation, were at risk of misunderstanding because emotional fealty to a value or viewpoint automatically produces oppositional brain chemistry. DoorBell permitted deeper intuitive capacity—we called it “thinking popcorn” because of its screen appearance—that facilitated sympathetic understanding in the hypersecond before oppositional chemistry flooded the brain. With high hopes, I sold the entire package to Vertical Cheese and it seemed to take no more than a season before DoorBell gave birth to NokNok/TSM (Total Social Management); which is to say that a tool originally designed to foster mutuality had now been modified to increase social surveillance…. I don’t write fiction, I write first pages, premises, and run out of story after 200 words. So let’s turn to something else. For weeks, I’ve been listening obsessively to Rachmaninoff’s moody piano Etude-Tableaux op. 33 no. 3 in C minor (try Vladimir Ashkenazy on YouTube) which begins (please note the visual complexity of musical information below): and also studying online images of architect Antoni Gaudi’s iconic Casa Milà (La Pedrera), an eight-storey principally residential building in Barcelona, Spain: Rachmaninoff composed the Etudes-Tableaux in 1911; Gaudi’s Casa Mila was constructed between 1906 and 1912. Both the filigreed music and the architecture took form on history’s hinge connecting two major (Western) cultural chapters: the soon-to-pass but still gorgeously ornamental Romantic Era to one side, and the clean and streamlined Modern to the other—each era using different expressive vocabularies and projecting profoundly different social visions. I lack study credentials in this field, but from limited reading I understand that the Romantic idea was structured around “the aesthetic”—that which concerns beauty and art—promoted as a quality (or a hopeless ideal) that should, where possible, shape and permeate human culture and experience. Such ideas and language seem mannered and curlicued to us now—aristocracy and powdered wigs, to stretch a point—and blind to social imperatives; but these were the views of serious and intellectually sophisticated 19th century thinkers, and were strong markers within cultural thought. Small wonder if the 20th Century seemed jarring and threatening to such sensibilities. Since those more-than-century-ago times of cultural change from Romantic to Modern, humanity has passed through sub-eras, one in particular likely well known to you: the Sixties, a widespread pro-social justice, anti-war reaction to the conformities and moral deficiencies of the era that came before. (Forgive my careless handling of the 20th Century, offered with the dilettante’s flaccid encouragement to re-watch Chaplin’s Modern Times on YouTube and to dust off your Beatles LPs.) THIS COLUMN BEGAN WITH SOME AWKWARD FICTION intended to suggest that we, the generations now alive, are crossing another bridge, our prospects dominated, defined even, by three current conditions. First, in a frenzy of appetite, the global “we” are committing ecocide, using up the world and damaging its natural systems, and now triggering the late stages of an environmental climax very likely to produce planet-wide ecological disjunction and complete risk to the human future. Tied to this, and an interesting side-note, is ever-mounting world debt, another name for which is borrowing from the future. You remember the future, the bank of our hopes, ever-expanding and never-imploding, yes? Second, in an unacknowledged failure at social architecture, we are pouring our experience, skills and intelligence, along with our consciousness and essence, into thinking systems and “machine life”—so-called AI. It’s hard not to read evolutionary metaphor into that. Third, we are in the American twilight, after seven decades of worldwide ideological, economic and cultural US hegemony. The conditions required to energize and renew the American social promise have disappeared or been very badly damaged, and the country’s pledge, however stirring the rhetoric, is becoming a near-fiction. Consider the Biden presidency a respite, not redemption. Trump himself may be a one-and-done, but ultra-right-wingers are now screaming for civil war. Notes social critic James Kunstler in a recent installment of his patented weekly outing, Clusterfuck Nation, “If you think we’re headed into a transhuman nirvana of continuous tech-assisted orgasm, social equity, and guaranteed basic income, you are going to be disappointed. Our actual destination is a neo-medieval time-out from all the techno-dazzle of recent decades.” As to all of the above: how, and how quickly? I don’t know, but I think it would be a mistake to miss the urgency. History does happen. Such conditions invite us to consider the idea of inevitability as a force within the rhythms of nature, a mysterious form of natural governance that pushes conditions toward some resolution, some “next.” Small wonder that we often seem unsure if we’re turning the page or closing the book. SUCH CONCERNS, SUCH A STATE OF TRANSITION AND RISK, in my view, must more fully inform the Victoria “conversation” about what this place is; what strategy, what plan, is appropriate to sustain this city in so parlous a near-future; and also how it might successfully promote the key features of community, very much including community’s physical expression. These concerns form a vital civic project. Civilization, whatever its future (assuming a future), needs even now, and will increasingly need, new capitals, places that are exemplars of sustainable ecological practice, showcases of successful social cooperation, physical models that energize and facilitate community renewal. In other words, we’re again on history’s hinge: new mindset, entirely new rules. Interestingly, the most difficult part is designing the architecture of authentic public conversation, very different from the social engineer’s “community engagement strategy.” “Community” sounds great, but if needs, intentions, values, social experience and even threats are not shared, culturally and viscerally, then what does community mean—a postal code? How then does a city ‘invent’ community? How do you get 85,792 people together to define and establish common interest? Let’s face it: a notice from the city in your mailbox is not community. All the squabbling over bike lanes is a perfect example. Bless bike mobility champion Mayor Helps who has an extraordinary and important talent for reading the future; but nowhere have I heard anyone explain, or raise for discussion, the idea that in 20 short years, owing to restrictive energy dieting and prohibitive costs, nobody will own or drive a car; which might motivate all of us to say “Oh! Let’s plan for that.” In other words, community is difficult if the “Why?” is missing. I here borrow Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Peter Turchin’s idea of a “society that is capable of perceiving, if dimly, the deep structural forces pushing us to the brink.” I try in these columns to address such matters through the lens of architecture, land use and urban design; and in that context I believe the city needs to ask itself what kinds of building types, character and appearance, and public realm designs and amenities best foster mutuality and human connection—that is, community. Excluding small pockets, this city is no longer tethered to yesteryear’s proprieties, but its DNA still contains a rare and special genius for inertia, a kind of strategic modesty, a disposition toward the small and manageable. In this age of the ever-agglomerating, this by itself makes the city a social hero—a hero with a job to do. Victoria, plodding far behind Vancouver, still converting goat paths into sidewalks while Vancouver discovers three new sexual genders, remains instinctively unconvinced that change automatically brings improvement. Change also means discontinuity, and this rubs the city’s fur the wrong way. Memory, particularly memory of its physical identity, and of times when there was more “we” and less “me,” is a quality that defines Victoria and remains a cornerstone of its narrative. Victoria, through some nearly subliminal visual alchemy, has managed to sustain a potent social identity, a sense of intention, an answer of sorts in a tilting world. To visitors and newcomers from various elsewheres, Victoria communicates a degree of stand-still certainty and stability, dressed as charm. These are precious civic assets, not handicaps. But Victoria’s story is now in trouble, challenged in part by thoughtless development, mediocre architecture, ill-considered land use policies and an absence of new public realm design triumphs. These factors threaten legibility, coherence and promise. This city’s palpable potential makes current self-damage heartbreaking and hobbles the city just when the world needs it to perform an important role in destiny: the exemplar’s task of community for which the city, along with sister-places, was conceived and sustained. Please, Victoria, let’s talk about this. Founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the seven Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an innovative affordable housing concept, and writing “Futurecide,” a book that argues that catastrophe is ecological.