Quote:
Originally Posted by davequanbury
Just thought it would be good to point out that Portage Place was funded and built as part of the Core Area Initiative. The purpose of the CAI had to do with raising people out of poverty and encouraging investment downtown. A lot of people criticized the tri-level agreement because the majority of the cash went towards building PP and the Forks, community groups and poverty activist groups felt that more of the money should have gone to 'the people.'
I was not old enough then, nor have I delved into researching the CAI to any extent that would allow me to pass judgement. However, in the context of that history, the mall kind of is somewhat of a community centre because tax money paid for it, and because it was built under the banner of CAI.
This is not the story of some pull-up-your-bootstraps tycoon building a mall and then the loser poor people acting like its their right to congregate there, this is a story of 3 levels of government investing in downtown Winnipeg under the auspices of improving the lives of poor residents.
I can sympathize with yours and other people's frustration about Winnipeg's social problems, yeah, we can be a bit of a shit-hole town sometimes. But I like to take the side of the poor, and when I read that "they should get a community centre built" it's only fair I point out that it takes all day to be poor and it is the wealthy amongst us that have the time and resources to make governments work in our favor. Let's not suggest that poor people can make the system work for them to that degree, they need folks keeping their interests in mind I believe.
|
This is an excellent point. The purpose of the Core Area Initiative was to revitalize downtown Winnipeg not so it would be cool for suburbanites but that it would recover for the sake of its then residents. But it quickly went off the rails. If they had followed a Jane Jacobs model, they would have simply helped the existing property owners and listened to the residents to find out what they needed. Instead, like everybody in the 1980s, they went for the quick fix. A suburban shopping mall to revitalize the north side of Portage, just like Eaton Centre in Toronto.
What needs to be remembered is that Main Street has also radically changed in the past 30 years. When I was a kid in the 1970s, there was pretty strict segregation in Winnipeg. The poor and indigenous population had the Main Street strip, with its bars, hotels, pool halls, cafes, stores, theaters. Portage was middle class and white. That broke down in the 1990s, not because of more enlightened social attitudes but because of bad urban planning. Main Street was destroyed as a viable neighborhood and where else but Portage Place could Core Area residents without cars congregate out of the elements?
Portage Place now serves an important social function. Its stakeholders should be consulted. But they won't be.
Prev
Linear Mode
