It was the first day I saw London’s issues.
Sitting in class, completing my master’s degree at Western two years ago, a fresh-faced member of City of London staff, a planner of some sort, was addressing the room. His team was targeting downtown for redevelopment, a plan to make it a vibrant centre where young professionals lived, worked and played. We would, at last, be hip and cool.
Condos. Cafes. Clubs. It was a vision for a London nobody would recognize. Finally, the city would retain its own young instead of attract others’ elderly.
“But where will these young people work?” a classmate asked following the presentation.
“Downtown.”
“No, where downtown will they work? What businesses?”
No answer. And that was the problem with the lad’s presentation. Like many a grand plan, his focused on the big picture without tending to those pesky details. And London is at a point where it needs to start solving – not simply talking about – some of those details.
Like a lot of older communities, London suffers from an obsession over what it used to be. I saw this attitude a lot in the U.S. Midwest and South. Too many communities locked their identities into being ‘textile towns,’ ‘oil towns,’ ‘auto towns.’ Then, as those industries slowly packed up and left, the community was thrown into an economic as well as an identity crisis.
And god knows, we can recite by heart the problems we have as London rehashes the hand dealt to it like an old drunk occupying a corner barstool. Last week’s terribly sad – but far from unexpected – shutdown of EMD was just the latest opportunity to rehash our woes.
It’s not that people aren’t trying to move the conversation.
Last spring, the London Free Press rolled out a yearlong project entitled “Who’s London?” The paper had been inspired to launch the project, in part, to answer one question: “Has the lack of something – an identity, an image, a love proclaimed loudly to others – destined London to a slow decline into a forgotten, second-rate city?”
Gotta admit, I was excited about the possibilities of what may have seemed like a silly newspaper project to some. But it never lived up to the promise.
Maybe the paper lost interest. Maybe the questions were too big to answer. But the series – either limping to its conclusion or dead already – devolved into an endless string of rants without suggestions or 2,000-plus-word essays without direction. Like London itself, the series turned into a cranky old man complaining about everything and waxing nostalgic for the way things used to be.
Too bad. It held such promise.
One part of the series, which generated a lot of buzz on campus, handed Western the blame, or at least the responsibility, for retaining university-educated people in a city that doesn’t seem to value them. To carry that conversation a step further, Western News picks up a small piece of the Free Press series today and offers something concrete beyond complaints.
We hand-picked 11 knowledgeable and engaged individuals in the Western community and asked: What can the city do to encourage Western University graduates to live, work and play in the city once they finish their studies?
Their answers, found on Pages 8-9 of this issue, are not a litany of complaints about what is wrong with the city, but a list of what could be done to make it right. It’s about time this conversation started getting a bit more prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Will they all work? I have no idea. But it’s an opportunity to look beyond the big picture, and focus on a few small details which could make a difference.