Hamilton’s Future: Positive Growth
Hamilton’s Future: Positive Growth
By Daniel Govedar (Feb 2016) Posted on February 5, 2016 by OnlineMind Hamilton as a city has made many advancements and is setting itself up as a modern, healthy, progressive, and advanced community. Here are some of the encouraging and constructive changes coming and ongoing within the city.
The story with pictures. http://onlinemind.org/2016/02/05/ham...sitive-growth/ |
When I read things like "The future of Hamilton is bright" I think about that old joke about Brazil: "It's the country of the future...and always will be."
I don't specifically disagree with any of the points. But I find that in Hamilton more than most places there are a lot of platitudes about how great things are going, without recognition of the serious problems the city has, and therefore effort towards solving them. |
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Hamilton does have a tendency to celebrate the starting blocks as the finish line without bothering to run the race. And, not to be unduly harsh, but there's a fair bit of that here — it's a fairly stock-standard list of bullets that you could get from pulping economic development talking points, straining out the data and skirting critical analysis. Subtract public investment from the summary and you're more or less left with condos, Jackson Square and the arts sector. Bright and gung-ho but a little lopsided (and, if you pay any attention to municipal politics, fairly myopic). |
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Edited to add... A not-dissimilar "Hamilton has turned the corner" narrative was wheeled out 44 years ago in the painfully folksy introduction to Pardon My Lunch Bucket, which praised the era's downtown building boom, arts community, green space, walkable core and diversifying economy. An extract: Now you were asking about Hamilton? Well, you see, a few years back this town had what you might call a bad case of inferiority complex. A real bad case. It was always 'Toronto's doing this, Buffalo's doing that and we're doing nothin'. You know, things like that. Down-in-the-dumps talk. Well, all of a sudden some of the boys downtown and the boys at city hall got talking and decided they were sick and tired of wearing Toronto's hand-me-downs. There was nothing wrong with the city that a new spirit and a few new buildings wouldn't cure... say a new downtown core... somewhere where the people could go and shop and look around, a place where they could take their friends from out of town with a little pride. And some new housing to get rid of those old decaying buildings in the north end, an urban renewal project, something that would perk up the people of the area yet would cause very little relocation. The city already had acres and acres of gardens and parks... things that the citizens knew about but that the casual visitor seldom saw. And they're going to get more. Before you know it, this'll be the finest city for taking your family out for a stroll in the whole of Canada. Now with this Lloyd Jackson Square project, the tall buildings, the pedestrian malls, separating pedestrians from all the traffic and such, the new stores and expanded old ones, well Hamilton is putting on a new face. Did you know this city has the same growth rate as Montreal's – 28 per cent every 10 years – one of the highest in the land? And it's got Boris Brott and the Hamilton Philharmonic, and the art gallery and McMaster out in the west end. Sure we've still got pollution but they're spending $75,000,000 on cleaning it up. Why one of these days, you'll be able to swim out in the old bay. The old Hamilton, the grimy old town, is disappearing. What you're seeing now is new money coming in, new people from abroad settling and bringing their cultures with them – and getting us interested in them as well. The people are slowly changing their ideas about the old town. A few years back, they'd admit they were from Hamilton all right, but only if you pressed them. Kind of apologetic-like. But not now. That attitude is changing to one of pride… People are getting out and taking a second look at their town, rediscovering it if you will, finding places and things they never knew existed. A lot has changed in the last few years and all for the better. Change one or two of the reference points and you could be reading brand-new City-issue boilerplate. |
The "Downtown Revitalization" point was the real head-scratcher for me. "Progressive city planning" is not something that generally happens in Hamilton. When there are some examples of it, it's usually a lot less "progressive" than Hamiltonians think- at the best of times, we're decades behind the leading cities, and years behind our neighbours.
The list says "The new MacNab terminal created an efficient place for public transit while also opening a new opportunity in Gore Park for it to act as a more solidified public space rather than simply a transit terminal." Well, I think you could make a real case that the MacNab terminal was not what it could have been, and it seems like LRT (depending on how things are organized) might make it irrelevant. As for Gore Park, maybe the "opportunity" is there, but it hasn't been seized. On the contrary, our council is allowing a significant part of that public space to rot... I think that, a lot of these types of lists are written by people who don't much get down to MacNab or the Gore. I think that there are a lot of realists in Hamilton, but that realism and experience has led them to temper their expectations- especially of council. There are far too many optimists, or however they should be characterized- people who think things are going great and that the work is done. |
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