Future City - Hamilton Next
 

Tomorrow the special section is published in the Spec.
Then on November 1st we get to begin playing the game - Future City.

http://www.thespec.com/specialsectio...ion/futurecity

^^ ewwww @ the Monorail they have on the cover :S
I think this was a Morrow/Wade/DiIanni idea... thank GOD Eisenberger can see past Disney World/Epcott and see that Monorails are GHETTO (Hi, Detroit).

Of course the Spec is still living in the past! haha

Any idea of what this "game" will consist of?
^ wow, I just clicked on the "Play The Future Game" link and it seems pretty neat!?
Wonder how to play / what it does? haha

we'll find out Nov 1st I guess.

hahaha I'm trying to examine what I can see on this "Game Board" and it seems as though the Spec has added a Tunnel to (Toronto?) under the water... hahaha
they also have an Amusement Park w/ a rollercoaster where Confederation Park is!?

u/water tunnels, Monorails & Theme Parks OH MY!! Is the Spec really THAT out-of-touch with which direction the city is actually going!?

http://media.hamiltonspectator.com/i...s/368009_3.JPG

There was a chance to have a Monorail system instead of the Linc. My mom's uncle has the papers and I remember seeing it a few years ago.

Even without the roller coaster I do like the Ferries Wheel idea for Confederation Park.

Thx Steeltown! Great screen shots!
I love how the Monorail in that pic is going right into Stelco Tower... how Detroit... how ghetto! hahaha

JUST SAY NO TO MONORAIL... say HELL YES to Light Rail instead ;)

Got a screen shot without the countdown box

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y21...uturecity1.jpg

Here's how the game works....Sounds like fun! Seems like Sim City meets the Spec.

Hamilton ages 100 years in 100 days

Report typo or correctionIt’s the year 2022 and Hamilton looks a lot different than it does today.

It’s Future City, and it's coming to thespec.com Nov. 1

Part reality and part fantasy, Future City is an online web experience that you can play and help chart the future of Hamilton through the next century.

The premise of this web experience is that the city will age 100 years in 100 days. And you get to influence and vote on how the city morphs and adapts to dramatic changes in climate, shifts in the economy, new patterns in population and immigration as well as through many unpredictable events.

Each week from November to February, a key event will occur in the city.

And you get to vote on things like whether the city builds an underwater highway on the lakeshore to Toronto to solve gridlock, or whether a new airport is built in Flamborough, or whether ... well, we don't want to spoil the surprise.

After votes are counted and an event occurs (or not) in the city, these new landmarks appear as high-impact visuals on an interactive map that lets you click and play individual map graphics of buildings and other icons to see how the city has evolved.

There will be other equally dramatic changes on Future City that tell how the city is evolving.

Pictures and background in the form of stories from a newspaper of the future will accompany each week's developments. These stories will bring game players quickly up to date with what has happened in the past seven years. Did James Street North real estate values quadruple? Did Hurricane Hazel II hit the city or glance off? Is a prehistoric civilization discovered under the harbour?

Graphics depicting changes in population, tax base and the environment help explain how the city compares with other cities in the region and the world. Projections and game premises are based on consultations with professors from McMaster University and urban consultants.

With every big vote, opposing sides of an argument will be presented in two separate video testimonials. As well, blog discussion will attempt to influence the vote. This is your chance to have your say on change.

Looking into the future is a fun and serious prospect and it's a people project. We want to hear from you and to prepare you for Future City. It's a big new project on thespec.com and we're all quite excited and anxious for it to begin.

People get to see the new city on Oct. 31, the day that the Hamilton Next special section is published.

Watch for installments in the Hamilton Next blog in the weeks ahead, and get ready for Future City to arrive Nov. 1 on thespec.com

The future is almost here.

Wow... sounds like fun.
At least The Spec is trying to get people ineterested in HAMILTON again! I'll give them that much.

They did, however, leave my bldg out of the game board :( They also have 100 Main on the wrong side of Main hahaha

They should have ONE game for everyone and ONE game for us... see how much better WE (minus BCted) can build the city's future vs Typical McResident... Hmmm.

Imagine what our city would look like if we controlled everything? Pure utopia! haha

I suck at Simcity. Every time I create Hamilton in it, the city ends up like it does in real life except it doesn't get any better. High pollution, high traffic, no jobs, tons of abandoned buildings, no money in the city coffers. So basically I can emulate Hamilton up to 1990 something pretty well :)

haha...I think you made a great point here. even sim city knows a crappy-planned city when it sees one.

I LOVE Harry Stinson's piece in todays paper...the guy comes from TO for 6 hours and immediately identifies these one way "blade runner" streets destroying downtown.
He hit the nail on the head when he said the scariest thing is that nobody seems to care. If they did they'd change streets to two-way, start enforcing property standards, courting investment etc..... it starts with deadbeat Hamiltonians who don't care and results in a deadbeat city hall (politicians and staffers) that doesn't care either...they care more about saving 6 minutes on their trip into work than the health and vitality of our entire city.
Harry even talks about possibly returning with some investors, but won't if he doesn't get the sense that people in charge don't even care. so true. it's not the banks faults for not lending downtown. It's city halls fault. Tell the suburbanites to shut-up and go to Walmart and let's get on with rebuilding our city.

Oh it sucks that I have to wait until after work that I'll be able to read the Spec. I wanna read it right now! haha I saw on the front page the proposed stadium, does it have a page towards the stadium?

not much...some of the articles suck, some are good.
really depends on the writer. people like Steve Arnold and the like always bash downtown.
Paul Wilson has 2 great pieces in today's paper.

Downtown needs more folks like Gary


Ron Albertson, the Hamilton Spectator

Gary Buttrum perches on the roof of his James Street hom ...

• Downtown needs more folks like Gary
He says more people should live downtown, so he's making his home there - literally
October 31, 2007
Paul Wilson
The Hamilton Spectator
(Oct 31, 2007)
Today's paper is plumper than usual, and it's not just flyers. Tucked inside is a 48-page section called Hamilton Next.

It's a look at where this city needs to go and how it can get there. As far as downtown Hamilton is concerned, there's agreement that we want to have more people who call the core home.

And in a derelict three-storey walk-up on James North, we find a country boy who's come to the city to do his part.

His name is Gary Buttrum. That surname will be familiar to many. There have been Buttrums at the Hamilton Farmers' Market for 160 years.

This Buttrum is 32 and grew up on a farm in Waterdown. He was on the fields from the beginning -- tucked in a melon box, strapped to the cabbage planter.

He drove tractor as soon as he could push in the clutch. He picked, weeded, packed, worked the stand at the market.

Looking back, he'll say this about farming: "Accomplishing things really does get in your blood."

It came time for higher education. "There's no money in farming," Buttrum says, "so I decided to go into something where there's even less money." He went to McMaster for Fine Arts and Comparative Literature.

That led to graphics work with a glow-in-the-dark mini golf outfit. He supervised painting crews at sites of new centres, including Memphis, Tenn., and Chicago.

But the company's art department got laid off. And in truth, that work wasn't really stoking Buttrum's fire. He started doing painting and reno work.

Seven years ago he moved onto James Street North, to an apartment over the Hamilton Pipe Shop. He eventually got the third floor too and began turning it into his art studio.

After ripping up a few layers of linoleum, he discovered some fine hardwood floors and realized the place was too nice for him to be slopping around with his paints. He would open a gallery instead.

"It turned into an excuse to have parties, and sometimes 150 people showed up." And talk often turned to downtown renewal and preserving historical buildings.

"I was constantly saying, 'I've just got to buy one of these buildings,'" Buttrum says. "Then Kieran caught the bug, too."

That would be Kieran C. Dickson, junior partner with the old downtown law firm of Evans, Philp.

The two friends were always talking about fixing up some old gem. Others got weary of hearing them plot and said, "If you haven't bought a building by Christmas, you have to leave the city."

Last November they found just the place, on James Street North near Cannon Street. For decades it had been the European Meat Market. You may have noticed the pigs' feet and fresh kaisers in the window.

It closed some years ago. As for the top two floors, they had been empty since the 1960s.

When Buttrum and Dickson saw the place, there was no furnace, no hydro and many of the windows had been boarded up. But the two knew the shell was sound and bought the place for something under $100,000.

Buttrum is the labour in this partnership, though Dickson does come down after work and slug out bushels of old plaster.

The plan is to rent out the storefront and turn the top two floors of this space into a custom-home-quality apartment that will be Dickson's home, at least until it's time to move onto the next reno project.

The high ceilings, the generous windows, the door casings and wide baseboards all stay. But there will be new plumbing and wiring, a large open-concept kitchen, ensuite bathroom off the master bedroom with double sinks and laundry facilities. On this day, they're punching out part of the back wall on the third floor for a set of double doors that open onto a patio in the sky.

And now Buttrum has bought that building where he lives, the Hamilton Pipe Shop quarters just doors away.

"We need people living down here and shopping down here and walking down here," he says. "That's what's going to save downtown."

DC83, you have no idea what you're talking about (in regard to Detroit)--it's plainly obvious you haven't been in Downtown Detroit in a few years--so quit throwing around the "ghetto" word--and if you want to get critical about the Detroit People Mover system in some serious way--get your facts straight--it's not a freaking monorail! It is the identical to the automated system used in Vancouver (Skytrain) and the same as the one proposed in Hamilton in the early 1980s. It makes me absolutely livid to see people on here making flippant remarks about other cities--the very sort of "joking" that has hurt Hamilton's reputation for so many years--do unto others man...seriously.

I'd prefer a street level light rail instead of an overhead thing.
I think they're ugly. Detroit may be 'sub-par' and Vancouver may be 'number 1 in the world' but the transit system is ugly in both places.
And expensive for all those concrete bridge/lines.

Best face forward
What do investors see in our downtown? Does the core attract or repel?

Through the objective eyes of outside business people, Hamilton is two places at the same time.

One is a blighted place of neglect and decay. The other is place of unrealized opportunity and potential.

Perceptions count. Hard facts such as square-foot costs for buildings are critical in deciding where to invest, but businesses must also consider what customers, employees — and bankers — will think when they announce they’re planning to set up in a new place.

When it comes to perception, it seems Hamilton could use a good scrubbing — quite literally.

Last month, Toronto developer Harry Stinson, sometimes called that city’s “Condo King,” came to Hamilton for a stroll around downtown. He ended up walking for nearly six hours — from the bay to the foot of the escarpment, from Wellington Street to Hess Village — fascinated, as he tried to figure out
what was wrong and what was right.

Stinson had come at the invitation of Hamilton architect John Mokrycke, who was wanting to talk to him about speaking at an industry function.

Stinson’s most recent project, the redevelopment of a bank building and adjoining condo-hotel tower at King and Yonge streets in downtown Toronto,
is wrapped up in receivership and legal snarls. Stinson has been in the news for months over his public battles with David Mirvish, backer of the 1 King West project.

But his trip to Hamilton left him eager to return and test the waters for working here, especially downtown, where a checkerboard of neglected and underused buildings and empty lots, dotted with pockets of success and creativity — he noted King William Street as one — left him intrigued, and somewhat puzzled.

“It’s a far more interesting city than people think,” he said. “It’s got a lot of potential. It’s got a lot of nice features, but I don’t know — it seemed sort of,
despondent, if I can put it that way. It’s like people are resigned to it. I thought the downtown core was a bit scary, in the sense that there really was no visible effort by anybody to do anything.”

Stinson thinks the basic structure of downtown, especially King Street from Catharine to Bay streets, is a template for village-style urban living, with a human scale, pleasing vistas, a good helping of history and a potentially productive balance of commercial, office and living spaces.

But the reality of today’s downtown is dirty, dark and forbidding, he said, and it will take courage to mine the potential there. “If you look at the city, it’s like a giant doughnut. The perimeter, which isn’t that far away, is pretty conventional and stable. Then you hit the core, and it’s like you go through a time warp. There’s this malaise. You know how when you’re swimming in the lake and you hit these little cold patches? It’s like you walk into Hamilton and all of a sudden you hit this giant cold patch, and it’s the downtown core.”

Before he goes to City Hall to ask what planning support he might expect, he plans to meet informally with community leaders to test their will to create change. He will need all the support he can get, he said, before he even thinks of bringing lenders downtown and asking for their backing.

But if he and others like him can get broad support, he said, downtown could become a pleasant place to live, work, eat and shop, especially with what he describes as the inevitable westward migration from overcrowded and overpriced Toronto. Like so many, Stinson says the timing and the effect of that migration will depend on establishing all-day, full GO train service to downtown Hamilton.

Ron Adams sees much the same double edge. He has spent half a century in the business of scouting, selecting and leasing commercial sites in Canada.

Now based in Burlington, Adams describes his job as “real estate counsel.”

His experience includes finding the site and helping to develop the White Oaks Mall in London, Ont., selecting sites for seven Holiday Inns across the province, finding sites for 50 Goodyear tire stores across Canada and participating in redevelopment of the Historic Properties in downtown Halifax.

Like Stinson, he sees potential, though he believes the richest area for development is along its highway corridors, especially the industrial lands between The Spectator building near Main and Frid streets and the nascent McMaster Innovation Park at Longwood Road and Aberdeen Avenue.

Like Stinson, he says the potential is obscured as Hamilton has failed to correct old perceptions, which it could easily rectify by creating welcoming entrances, especially where Highway 403 joins Aberdeen Avenue and Main Street — which he refers to as Hamilton’s front door. It would only take a little, he said, to change perceptions a lot.

“Hamilton, it seems to me, is a hell of a lot more than the image of the steel plants that you see from the QEW, but I think that image still lives. The image people have of an area is what they get from a car window or a bus when they’re driving by.”