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Jane's Ideas - Then & Again · CityTalk Canada

0:03
Mary Rowe: This is the City Talk Podcast brought to you by the Canadian Urban Institute or CUI.
0:09
Mary Rowe: I'm Mary Rowe, CEO of CUI, and an urbanist.
0:13
Mary Rowe: If you've taken urban studies at university, as I did, one of the standard, perhaps the standard reference texts is Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, which catalyzed a critique of the urban planning practices of the time and laid out a series of principles that would inform her community-led battles to stop urban renewal projects in New York City and eventually here in Toronto.
0:40
Mary Rowe: She and the many others who would eventually follow her were concerned that those practices over decades had begun to destroy the essential fabric of urban living.
0:51
Mary Rowe: After her move to Canada in the late 60s, she continued to write books to document the importance of place-based community-driven urban development, which has continued to inspire generations of urbanists, including me, and the two guests you're about to hear on this episode.
1:08
Mary Rowe: These days, Toronto resident Lloyd Alter publishes a regular column on Substack titled Carbon Upfront. (check it out) which continues his work collected in a 2024 book, The Story of Upfront Carbon.
1:19
Mary Rowe: But he's accomplished much more than that, which you're going to hear.
1:22
Mary Rowe: Lloyd, welcome to City Talk and give us your oral CV, if you would.
1:27
Lloyd Alter: Okay, I am originally an architect.
1:30
Lloyd Alter: I was trained as an architect, and then I became a real estate developer in Toronto and didn't like that very much.
1:38
Lloyd Alter: And so I got into prefabricated housing and started writing about it and found that I was a better writer than I was sort of a prefab builder and ended up writing for a major American website called treehugger.com and got introduced to teaching at Toronto Metropolitan University.
2:02
Lloyd Alter: So I morphed from being an architect and developer to being a writer and a teacher, which I was considerably better at.
2:12
Mary Rowe: You're like a you're like an architect in exile or an architect in recovery or something.
2:18
Lloyd Alter: Recovery is the appropriate word.
2:21
Mary Rowe: I mean, what's interesting about it though is I've had more struggles, I think, finding a way to engage the architectural community in Canada in conversations about their communities.
2:32
Mary Rowe: Is that just me?
2:33
Mary Rowe: Maybe it's they don't like me, you know?
2:36
Lloyd Alter: No, no, it's part of the heritage of the way architects are regulated here.
2:40
Lloyd Alter: For years you weren't even allowed to criticize the work of another architect, or you could get hauled up in front of the complaints committee and things.
2:48
Lloyd Alter: And they're very architects were always very, very touchy about these things.
2:54
Lloyd Alter: You know.
2:55
Mary Rowe: And also, I would say, I think only one municipality in Canada, I wonder if you know this, only one municipality in Canada has a city architect.
3:02
Mary Rowe: Do you know that?
3:03
Mary Rowe: And do you know do you know where they are?
3:05
Lloyd Alter: Well, it's not Toronto anymore.
3:06
Lloyd Alter: It used to, it had one forever.
3:08
Mary Rowe: Yeah.
3:08
Mary Rowe: But I don't know.
3:09
Mary Rowe: Is it Guelph?
3:10
Mary Rowe: Let me guess.
3:10
Mary Rowe: Edmonton.
3:11
Mary Rowe: Edmonton.
3:11
Mary Rowe: Edmonton.
3:12
Mary Rowe: Carol Belanger is the city architect in Edmonton.
3:15
Mary Rowe: And you can see the impact of that when you're in Edmonton and you look at all the public art, and a number of Toronto architects have done the work, but it's uh, you know, you look at the caliber of the work and the priority that's been put on design in public infrastructure in Edmonton.
3:30
Mary Rowe: Uh, I want all the architects that listen to City Talk, and I'm sure they're legion, that we want them to know that we believe in uh the power of design and the importance of folks that have skills and training and understand context.
3:44
Mary Rowe: And I guess that's partly the thing that I appreciate about architects is that they see how things fit together.
3:50
Mary Rowe: And I think that's maybe where I see your skill set.
3:53
Mary Rowe: You were trained as an architect, then you went into uh what's now called modern methods of construction.
3:58
Mary Rowe: Uh you went into prefab and now and then but but you also have this very wide uh analytical capacity.
4:05
Mary Rowe: You're well read and you think about things.
4:07
Lloyd Alter: So one of the reasons all over the map, it's true.
4:09
Mary Rowe: But I think it means that you know, one of the other things that I appreciate about architects, again, part of my exposure in the US, is they're terrific problem solvers.
4:16
Mary Rowe: Like that's what they're trained to do.
4:17
Mary Rowe: They are trained to find ways to make things happen.
4:20
Mary Rowe: And I, at least to a layperson, that's how it feels.
4:23
Mary Rowe: So I want to just call your attention to a few things and then let's just see where we go.
4:27
Mary Rowe: CUI is focused on local.
4:31
Mary Rowe: We're focused on how do you incubate and try things locally, how do you then scale those up.
4:37
Mary Rowe: Uh, and scaling doesn't mean replicating or duplicating, it just means how do you learn something that might be working in one community, could be an inspiration or have a few clues that would inform another community, that kind of thing.
4:48
Mary Rowe: So CUI is kind of in the connected tissue business.
4:50
Mary Rowe: But the other thing that we're interested in is when there's so much uh attention being put to and paid to global international uh concerns and things that over which most people have virtually no control, we just sort of read about it or hear about it.
5:05
Mary Rowe: What why does the local matter?
5:07
Mary Rowe: And you wrote a couple of uh weeks ago in your Substack, you wrote about Jane, Jacobs, and you talked about import replacement.
5:16
Mary Rowe: And I'm wondering if you can just run people through that because uh, you know, I always tease Americans that they think that Jane stopped writing when she left there and they think Death and Life was her only book.
5:26
Mary Rowe: But Canadians know that she continued to write and continued to publish books uh and and honed in more and more in terms of what she observed worked in the economy.
5:35
Mary Rowe: And she observed a lot about local economies and import replacement.
5:40
Mary Rowe: So just lay out for us what it was that made you write that piece a couple of weeks ago.
5:45
Lloyd Alter: Well, um, as you say, a lot of people's understanding of Jane Jacobs ends with the death and life of American cities, but she went on and was quite particularly strong about theories about economics, that she really believed that cities were the economic engines of countries.
6:02
Lloyd Alter: Yeah.
6:02
Lloyd Alter: And that what mattered was what they generated within the city.
6:08
Lloyd Alter: So uh if all the money's flowing out into other places, then you can't actually use the money from things within the city that you're in.
6:16
Lloyd Alter: You're not employing enough people.
6:19
Lloyd Alter: And by the city, she's not just meaning the geographic, you know, city of Toronto.
6:23
Lloyd Alter: No, no, no.
6:23
Lloyd Alter: She's meaning the sort of zone around where the factories are and where the agriculture is.
6:30
Lloyd Alter: And I first really learned about this from a former mayor of Toronto, John Sewell, who was very, very big in his time, as he knew Jane quite well, and he would go on lecture tours talking about import replacement, and you know, everybody thought he was nuts.
6:48
Lloyd Alter: Yeah.
6:48
Lloyd Alter: Uh he was also doing it very weirdly with overhead projectors and transparent slides in a stage when we were already using newer technology, and it just seemed like he's from another era.
7:00
Lloyd Alter: But I went back after um reading.
7:05
Lloyd Alter: You can see the bookshelves.
7:06
Lloyd Alter: You can see bookshelves behind me there.
7:08
Lloyd Alter: There are bookshelves behind the Lloyd Alter, just saying, recording.
7:12
Lloyd Alter: Yes.
7:12
Lloyd Alter: And I happen to have the economy of cities there, and I took it down to read again to see if it's still made sense in this era.
7:20
Lloyd Alter: And in fact, it makes more sense than ever because the global economy we've got right now is hitting a big crunch with diesel fuel being unaffordable, that everything that we're importing is going to be sketchier and harder to get and more expensive and less dependable.
7:41
Lloyd Alter: And then you've got a certain president south of the border who's putting in all of these tariffs that are making all of these things more expensive.
7:50
Lloyd Alter: And one of the big answers to dealing with these international problems is to go back and think like John A.
8:01
Lloyd Alter: McDonald and Jane Jacobs, both of which you said And John Sewell.
8:06
Lloyd Alter: Three J's.
8:07
Lloyd Alter: John, Jane, and John.
8:10
Lloyd Alter: Yes, all saying we should be promoting local businesses, we should be promoting local everything, and that this is the key to having a vibrant economy.
8:21
Lloyd Alter: And Jane takes it much further because she believes that this is what's driving every economy everywhere now.
8:29
Lloyd Alter: We just don't realize it.
8:31
Lloyd Alter: That New York City is generating the economic value of the states, and Toronto is generating the economic value.
8:38
Lloyd Alter: That's where the creativity is, that's where people put together the business ideas.
8:43
Lloyd Alter: And if they do it right, it's pretty close to where they build the factories.
8:48
Lloyd Alter: So I just thought it was a good time to bring Jane back and talk about that.
8:55
Mary Rowe: But let's just talk a little bit about what you just said about the economy and that money is generated in a place to serve the place, to stay and to be in reinvested in it.
9:06
Mary Rowe: And is this one of the challenges we've got is that globalization has meant that that money actually wasn't staying in the place, it's leaking out.
9:17
Mary Rowe: Uh so how do we reimagine that then?
9:20
Mary Rowe: I mean, that tell me how import replacement keeps more money here.
9:24
Lloyd Alter: Well, right now, if you want to, I was just having the dis this discussion at our local brewery yesterday.
9:32
Lloyd Alter: As one does.
9:33
Lloyd Alter: I thought you were going to say this morning, which would have been an interesting way to start your debate.
9:36
Mary Rowe: But as one does, yes, you were talking at the puppet.
9:38
Mary Rowe: Yeah, yeah.
9:39
Lloyd Alter: Yes, because they uh serve their beer, they sell their beer in aluminum cans.
9:43
Lloyd Alter: And here's an example of what's happened.
9:46
Lloyd Alter: Almost all aluminum in North America was made in Quebec and in British Columbia because the major ingredient in aluminum is electricity.
9:55
Lloyd Alter: And we have a lot of hydropower electricity.
9:58
Lloyd Alter: Right.
9:59
Lloyd Alter: But the last rolling mill that could actually take aluminum and make sheet stock out of it in Canada closed 25 years ago.
10:08
Lloyd Alter: Because with free trade, what we were doing is we were taking the aluminum and shipping it down to somewhere in the States where they would roll it into can sheet and they would stomp out that lid in the top, and then this would get shipped back to Canada.
10:22
Lloyd Alter: Yep.
10:22
Lloyd Alter: So what's there's one company that makes the standard 355 milliliter cans, the smaller cans, but the trendy thing is all the tall cans, the tall boy cans, and nobody in this country makes a tall can.
10:37
Lloyd Alter: So we're paying a 50% duty on every aluminum can that is made with Canadian aluminum.
10:45
Lloyd Alter: Yeah.
10:46
Lloyd Alter: Because the aluminum goes south, it gets tariffed, then it comes back and it gets tariffed as the product coming back.
10:52
Lloyd Alter: Yeah.
10:52
Lloyd Alter: Whereas historically in Ontario, 95% of the beer that we drank was sold in refillable bottles.
11:02
Lloyd Alter: And the bottles were made here, and it was a very local industry because it's expensive to transport bottles, especially when they go in two directions.
11:12
Mary Rowe: I think it was a closed loop recycling system, wasn't it?
11:16
Lloyd Alter: It was incredibly effective cold loop.
11:19
Lloyd Alter: And none of the breweries liked it because they would like to centralize.
11:23
Lloyd Alter: You know, O'Keeffe Ale, I wrote about this, had five breweries just in Ontario.
11:28
Lloyd Alter: Now, how many O'Keeffe Aleweries are there?
11:30
Lloyd Alter: Zero.
11:31
Lloyd Alter: Because the whole industry, once cans came along and refrigerated trucks came along, they could consolidate, consolidate, and consolidate.
11:39
Lloyd Alter: There's one Molson Coors plant in Colorado that can make enough beer to serve almost the entire continent.
11:47
Lloyd Alter: And this is where we've gotten to.
11:49
Lloyd Alter: So what happened with cans?
11:51
Lloyd Alter: Well, Doug Ford happened with cans.
11:54
Lloyd Alter: The premier of Ontario wanted to kill the beer store so that all the buddies and the grocery stores could sell canned beer.
12:01
Lloyd Alter: And so everybody switched to cans that you can walk into, as I do in the summertime, into the you know, beer cooler in those country beer stores, and you might find two kinds of beer in bottles, and everything else is in cans.
12:16
Lloyd Alter: Wow.
12:16
Lloyd Alter: And the cans, no woman of childbearing age should drink beer out of a can.
12:21
Lloyd Alter: They're lined with BPA, which is a toxic epoxy ingredient.
12:27
Lloyd Alter: It's banned in null gene plastic bottles, and yet it's an integral part of the epoxy that lines a beer can, so it doesn't taste like aluminum.
12:35
Lloyd Alter: You've just spoiled a whole bunch of people's Saturdays understanding.
12:38
Lloyd Alter: Yeah, I tell my daughter this, you shouldn't be drinking out of beer cans, and she looks at me like I'm nuts.
12:44
Lloyd Alter: They all do whenever I complain about that.
12:47
Mary Rowe: You know, that's where we are today.
12:48
Mary Rowe: I'm always struggling though, Lloyd, with you know, we're not Neanderthal.
12:53
Mary Rowe: We're not saying no, no, no, we're gonna just make our all our own clothes and do everything ourselves.
12:58
Mary Rowe: But there is some kind of action that you're describing, some kind of economic process that can grow an economy locally by focusing on how do you replace things that you're having to buy somewhere else.
13:13
Mary Rowe: You look for a local supplier, you adapt your your supply chain somewhat, and then you grow, and then you may export it again.
13:19
Mary Rowe: But that's I think that was what Jacob's view was was that you were refueling the economy through a process of import replacement, import replacement.
13:27
Lloyd Alter: Exactly.
13:28
Lloyd Alter: You're putting local people to work who are then making the money that they can buy the local products.
13:32
Lloyd Alter: Right.
13:33
Lloyd Alter: Because we're not exporting the money, we're exporting the jobs.
13:35
Lloyd Alter: I was shocked the other week.
13:37
Lloyd Alter: I used to love Strubb's pickles, you know.
13:39
Lloyd Alter: Yes.
13:40
Lloyd Alter: Nice, nice Canadian pickle, and they went bust.
13:43
Lloyd Alter: And we saw them on the shelf a few weeks ago, and my wife bought a jar of Strub put pickles, and I looked on the side, and they were made in Germany.
13:51
Lloyd Alter: Yep, yep, yeah.
13:52
Lloyd Alter: With the Strubb's label on it.
13:54
Lloyd Alter: Yeah.
13:55
Lloyd Alter: And I was furious because here's a brand that they've made in Canada for a hundred years, and they buy the brand name and they fill them with German pickles.
14:04
Lloyd Alter: Go figure.
14:05
Lloyd Alter: So the best thing that's happened, of course, to all of this is, and something that I talk about constantly, is the whole boycott of American products that's happening now, the people's drive to buy Canadian.
14:19
Lloyd Alter: For years as an environmental writer, I would talk about personal actions, and everybody would tell me personal actions don't matter.
14:27
Lloyd Alter: It's the oil companies, it's a hundred oil companies.
14:30
Lloyd Alter: And I'd say, well, you're not drinking, you're buying the oil.
14:35
Lloyd Alter: You know, your decision to buy the oil gives them something to sell.
14:40
Lloyd Alter: Personal actions do matter, and everybody say, No, they don't.
14:43
Lloyd Alter: Well, you just have to look at how personal actions have added up over the last year when people have started doing it.
14:51
Lloyd Alter: Nobody's traveling to the states, imports from the states have dropped.
14:55
Lloyd Alter: Canadian sales of Canadian products have gone up fabulously.
15:00
Mary Rowe: I heard a stat this morning that you know, in the last year, our exports to the U.S.
15:04
Mary Rowe: have dropped by 10%.
15:05
Mary Rowe: And that's it was 75, and now it's 65 in a year, which everyone at the table I was at, they were all saying that's a huge drop in a year.
15:12
Mary Rowe: So, you know, obviously the the winds of change will change again, uh, and uh and we won't always be dealing with this level of noise.
15:20
Mary Rowe: But there is something about strengthening the you know, the connect, the local connective tissue of our economy so that we have businesses that trade business to business, that people are more conscious as consumers, that we look at the regulatory barriers that may have been, as you're suggesting, sending offshore production when it could have been re-shore.
15:39
Mary Rowe: Again, going back to Jacobs and her notion of refueling that how do we how do we actually take this historic moment, this pivoting that's going on in an extraordinary way in the Canadian economy, ushered in by a whole bunch of factors, as we know, but probably long overdue?
15:56
Mary Rowe: Is there are there ways that we could can systematize this or make it stick or make it less make it be become more general and less sort of the because I think there's lots of folks that think, oh, that's very quaint.
16:09
Mary Rowe: Yeah, yeah, sure.
16:10
Mary Rowe: You have money, you can make these decisions, or they isolate it, they don't see it as the norm.
16:14
Mary Rowe: What do you think?
16:14
Mary Rowe: Is there a way for us to not let's not waste this crisis, shall I say?
16:20
Lloyd Alter: Exactly.
16:20
Lloyd Alter: And we are in a lot of ways, we are not, and that when you look at all the maple leaves on foods at Sobies and at Loblaws, and Loblaws took them off because it was complicating their purchasing.
16:32
Lloyd Alter: They didn't want people picking the Canadian stuff, and they were forced to put the maple leaves back on because people demanded it.
16:39
Lloyd Alter: And so that I think has become a I won't say a permanent part of our culture, but people are really getting into it.
16:47
Mary Rowe: Do you think we can turn a corner here and not be anti-American and not be anti-international, but somehow turn a corner where we think local first, we buy local first, we invest local first?
16:58
Lloyd Alter: I do.
16:58
Lloyd Alter: I do.
16:59
Lloyd Alter: I mean, I was we were doing this before the whole America crisis came up because it was part of the low carbon lifestyle.
17:06
Lloyd Alter: Right.
17:07
Lloyd Alter: And um I do believe that people are taking it seriously and it is becoming habitual.
17:15
Mary Rowe: So before I leave you, I want to ask you something completely different because I know that you're an original thinker and you're an observer, and so you're probably gonna have something to say about this.
17:24
Mary Rowe: But here's an interesting habit, two of them that we're seeing in cities across the country.
17:28
Mary Rowe: Many, many people are out of the habit of going to the office, and they're going less frequently or they're maybe not going at all.
17:36
Mary Rowe: And that means that we have downtowns that are repurposing before our very eyes.
17:41
Mary Rowe: We have commercial spaces that are repurposing, we have all sorts of interesting things that are manifesting as a result of that habit that we're not going downtown as much.
17:51
Mary Rowe: Related, we are maybe out of the habit of taking transit as frequently as we once did for a whole bunch of reasons.
17:58
Mary Rowe: And getting back onto transit, you're deterred by a bunch of circumstances.
18:03
Mary Rowe: So, what's your observation about how we're going to reimagine repurpose downtowns?
18:10
Mary Rowe: Mean, and I don't just mean central business districts, because you know lots of places, like including the city you and I live in, there are several downtowns in Toronto.
18:17
Mary Rowe: Several.
18:17
Mary Rowe: And uh, so what are we imagining?
18:20
Mary Rowe: What are you imagining for the repurposing of downtowns or the reimagining of downtowns?
18:25
Mary Rowe: And similarly, how we get around.
18:28
Lloyd Alter: Well, what I was excited about in the real work from home period was that I felt when you look at what happens in downtown, you've got a whole lot of people who are commuting very long distances that you might because you might be taking your clothes to the tailor and there's a tailor in the bottom of your office building.
18:47
Lloyd Alter: So that tail that tailor is slapping down from Brampton and you're carrying your clothes.
18:52
Lloyd Alter: And I just thought the wonderful opportunity that came out of this was in fact to make our suburbs much stronger, to reduce that if people now would get their services locally, they'd go back to buying food on the main street.
19:09
Lloyd Alter: Uh, they would start that all of this would strengthen the suburbs.
19:14
Lloyd Alter: You know, where I live along near Davenport Road, you can see like 50 storefronts in a row that have drapes on them, that people are living in the storefronts because the tax structure was set up so that the owner has a much better deal renting to for residential than for office, which has far higher tax rates.
19:36
Lloyd Alter: And there weren't enough businesses.
19:38
Lloyd Alter: You don't need with refrigeration, you didn't need a corner store in every block to buy milk.
19:44
Lloyd Alter: Right.
19:44
Lloyd Alter: And so I thought that this would actually strengthen the fabric, the overall fabric of our cities, at the slight cost of weakening the central core of the city, which I thought so many of the grade B and C buildings would make fabulous residential conversions.
20:03
Lloyd Alter: Yep.
20:04
Lloyd Alter: You're speaking you're speaking past tense, you thought.
20:07
Lloyd Alter: Well, the residential conversions turn out to be quite expensive.
20:11
Mary Rowe: Yes.
20:12
Lloyd Alter: But like um and haven't happened at the rate I thought, but they are happening.
20:16
Lloyd Alter: You see it happening in New York, an insane number of conversions happening so fast that they've had two buildings almost collapse because they added stuff on the top before they'd strengthened the bottom.
20:27
Lloyd Alter: Yeah.
20:27
Lloyd Alter: Go figure.
20:29
Mary Rowe: But but it's interesting as you say, maybe I mean, during the pandemic, you know, I was dealing with people saying, oh, cities are dead, the core is gonna die, you know, that urban doom loop narrative started.
20:41
Mary Rowe: And and yet I always, I'm never a prognosticator.
20:45
Mary Rowe: I'm very skeptical about I'm skeptical about people being skeptical, but I but I was, you know, I'm I'm convinced that we have existing assets, Lloyd, that are built.
20:54
Mary Rowe: And back to our hearkening of Jane Jacobs, adaptive reuse, you know, sh they could have just torn those factories down, but they didn't.
21:02
Mary Rowe: They actually repurposed them, and maybe some of them now are gonna come back and be factories again.
21:05
Mary Rowe: Like that's what's or be manufacturing spaces again.
21:08
Mary Rowe: So that's part of the beauty of the self-organizing impulse in urban life is that you repurpose and repurpose and repurpose and repurpose.
21:15
Mary Rowe: So that's what I and I hear you.
21:17
Mary Rowe: I don't know whether there's been a boon for tailors in the suburbs, you know?
21:22
Lloyd Alter: I think the big demo the big thing that's gonna change is gonna be because of demographics.
21:26
Lloyd Alter: Like I go on all the time quoting David Foote, about two-thirds of everything can be defined by demographics.
21:33
Lloyd Alter: And what we've got is a rapidly aging population.
21:36
Lloyd Alter: Right.
21:37
Lloyd Alter: And what a rapidly rapidly aging population needs, you know, what it's gonna double in size in the next 10 years, the number of people over 65, and then also the leading baby boomers are just turning 80.
21:50
Lloyd Alter: Yeah.
21:51
Lloyd Alter: And what they need are hospitals, and they need accessible, walkable communities, which they can.
21:59
Lloyd Alter: Can get to stores without having to drive.
22:02
Lloyd Alter: And they need other people to talk to and to do things.
22:06
Lloyd Alter: And to do this properly, you need density.
22:08
Lloyd Alter: Right.
22:09
Lloyd Alter: And you where we've got the density is in the cities.
22:12
Lloyd Alter: So what I want to see, what I would love to see, is so many of those buildings being converted into um at least seniors houses.
22:22
Mary Rowe: Or co-living or some kind of co-living, some kind of alternate arrangement.
22:26
Mary Rowe: We know we have a wonderful concept in Toronto, and we we're going to have the person who's who's working on it earnestly on City Talk.
22:33
Mary Rowe: Her name is Jen Rick Nagel, and she's got this whole thing about naturally occurring retirement community.
22:37
Mary Rowe: Occurring retirement community.
22:38
Mary Rowe: It's a beautiful thing that, again, it's self-organized, that doesn't have to be institutional, it doesn't have to be mandatory.
22:46
Mary Rowe: It can actually happen, as you're suggesting, organically, which is back to our concepts of main streets and downtowns as the spines and hearts of communities.
22:54
Mary Rowe: And what are the services and what's the right curation of uses for those to serve the aging population?
23:00
Mary Rowe: Listen, as we finish, I just want to thank you for joining City Talk.
23:04
Mary Rowe: And are there any words of final wisdom you'd like to offer at this interesting juncture?
23:11
Lloyd Alter: Well, I will just reiterate the point that I was going to try and make that I think that the coming urban crises we have are crises that uh revolve around sort of people in their 70s like me who, you know, I think that's going to create like housing crisis, transit crises, health crises, and governance crises because we're the people who vote, and we're voting in so many ways to keep our taxes low.
23:37
Lloyd Alter: And who why am I paying for schools and libraries and transit that I don't use?
23:42
Lloyd Alter: So I we've got a huge set of problems facing us just because of the sheer number of people like me.
23:49
Lloyd Alter: And we have to start really addressing it when all we want to do now is avoiding it, avoid it, and we're really running out of time.
24:00
Lloyd Alter: Mic drop on that note.
24:02
Mary Rowe: Lloyd, thank you for joining at Citytalk and for being as provocative as ever.
24:06
Mary Rowe: We'll put uh your Substack link in the notes uh so people can read you, which I do, and I appreciate all the imaginative ways in which you you draw your vast experience as designer, observer, builder, developer, writer, all the different lives you've had.
24:23
Mary Rowe: And now, septugenarian, uh all the different ways, perspectives that you're bringing to this is very uh very thoughtful and appreciate and I appreciate you taking the time to be with us.
24:33
Mary Rowe: So thanks for joining us.
24:34
Mary Rowe: A pleasure.
24:35
Mary Rowe: As Lloyd mentioned, he learned of Jane Jacobs' ideas about place and place-based economies from her books and from her friend and colleague John Sewell, former mayor of Toronto, who has remained a fierce force for good in the city.
24:54
Mary Rowe: John, welcome to City Talk.
24:56
Mary Rowe: And tell us what's on your mind these days, these tumultuous days, when it comes to the state of our cities.
25:02
John Sewell: Well, I mean, the great problem in Toronto is that we've got a constitution that was made in the 19th century when cities were nothing and the world was all rural.
25:14
John Sewell: Um, and we made our our our economy was was basically a farm economy with some forestry and a bit of mining as well.
25:22
John Sewell: Uh, but nothing about cities.
25:24
John Sewell: So, in fact, we got a constitution that gives cities no power whatsoever.
25:29
John Sewell: And we're living with that, which is absolutely insane.
25:34
John Sewell: Since you know, the wealth of Canada and and most other countries is produced in cities, and they drive the culture, they drive the politics, uh, and they have no power.
25:47
John Sewell: Um, and and that's the biggest problem.
25:50
John Sewell: And therefore, cities are totally broke, they don't have the money to to provide good services to people, um, and and they have no political muscle.
25:59
John Sewell: The rural areas in Canada still rule.
26:03
John Sewell: In Canada, we have really terrific cities compared with, I mean, let's United States as an example.
26:11
John Sewell: You know, so people come to our cities and they say, wow, aren't they interesting?
26:16
John Sewell: And you think if only they were well funded and could actually address the problems they've got, they'd be really, really interesting, but they aren't.
26:26
John Sewell: So, you know, we go to Europe instead because those cities seem to have a bit more money and therefore they function a lot better.
26:33
John Sewell: Um, it so it's it's very, very discouraging.
26:36
John Sewell: Very, very discouraging.
26:38
John Sewell: I mean, if you just to bring in Jane Jacobs here, of course, she was the one who noted that, you know, 60 years ago.
26:46
John Sewell: Yeah.
26:47
John Sewell: And she wrote a lot about it.
26:49
John Sewell: I mean, she uh got right onto it and talked about the real importance of cities and how they worked and how they could work really, really well if we wanted.
26:59
John Sewell: Uh, we haven't paid much attention to any of the things that she said.
27:03
John Sewell: I mean, she talked about the need to have really good city design to increase diversity, because diversity is the thing that leads to innovation, and innovation is the thing that leads to growth and to more equality in society.
27:19
John Sewell: Um, and in fact, and and so she she set out the four rules about how you design urban space to make sure that you were encouraging diversity and have mixed uses rather than single-use areas like giant great residential suburbs.
27:35
John Sewell: Um, you'd preserve old buildings, so that's where you have to start new businesses because new old buildings are less expensive than new buildings.
27:45
John Sewell: Um, you had to have short blocks so that people could find different ways of getting around.
27:52
John Sewell: Uh, and you had to have uh a reasonable amount of density so that that people could inter, you know, work well together and so that municipal services could afford themselves.
28:04
John Sewell: I mean, as we've had all these studies about suburbs, about how they can't exist without subsidies from someone else.
28:11
John Sewell: I mean, yet we keep building them over and over and over again.
28:14
John Sewell: So, you know, she talked about those kinds.
28:16
John Sewell: She talked about the economy of cities and how do cities grow?
28:20
John Sewell: They were grow by people looking at products that you're buying from somewhere else and saying, we can make that here.
28:27
John Sewell: It's called import replacement.
28:29
John Sewell: I mean, and the best example of that we have in Canada is the wine industry.
28:34
John Sewell: We've got wine industries in British Columbia, in in Ontario, uh now in Quebec, I mean, even in the Maritimes at this point.
28:43
John Sewell: And that's reducing the amount of wine that used to be brought into Canada.
28:50
John Sewell: I mean, it's a real simple thing.
28:52
John Sewell: Import, let's make locally what we're now buying from somewhere else.
28:57
John Sewell: And that's how the economies actually get larger.
29:00
John Sewell: We don't have an import replacement program at the national or provincial levels in Canada.
29:06
John Sewell: We just don't have it.
29:07
John Sewell: And that's absolutely crazy.
29:09
John Sewell: I mean, if you look at it, renewables, that's an import replacement program when at the end of the day, you're making locally.
29:16
John Sewell: And I mean, there's a lovely article recently in in Sweden where they've realized that grids, uh, electricity grids are not the way to go.
29:25
John Sewell: What you want to have is locally produced electricity that serves a few, but and then you can have networks.
29:32
John Sewell: Well, that's about renewables.
29:34
John Sewell: We ain't doing it.
29:35
John Sewell: So I, you know, we're missing, we're it's crazy, but we're missing in a lot of that stuff because we aren't paying attention to the absolute benefits of people living in cities.
29:49
John Sewell: And we should be doing this, we should be paying the same kind of attention that that cities need, which we which are not getting to smaller communities.
29:57
Mary Rowe: It's a good spiel.
29:58
Mary Rowe: There you have it.
29:59
Mary Rowe: So much for me to pick up on.
30:00
Mary Rowe: One thing, when you speak about cities, I think you're meaning municipal government.
30:04
Mary Rowe: Are you?
30:05
John Sewell: It is municipal government, but it depends how you want to do that.
30:08
Mary Rowe: You are totally calling out the essential, the I always say the C word, you know, how long till we talk about the Constitution.
30:16
Mary Rowe: And what's so striking to me about your creed occur that you just provided there is that uh we had Sean Spear on here a couple of weeks ago, and and he and I've had conversations before about it it feels sometimes like the Federation isn't really working for anybody.
30:32
John Sewell: I think that's probably true.
30:33
John Sewell: You know, political parties aren't serving us particularly well at the moment either.
30:38
John Sewell: The lovely thing about cities, municipal government, is that every decision it makes is made in public, except for some things about uh negotiations on contracts and and you know, negotiations with labor unions.
30:55
John Sewell: Apart from that, everything they do is made in public.
30:58
John Sewell: Right.
30:59
John Sewell: You get to hear how fragmented the and crazy the debate is, but you get to hear it.
31:05
John Sewell: And that holds people to account.
31:07
John Sewell: Whereas in the federal and provincial governments, all the big decisions are made in cabinet and everybody is sworn to secrecy.
31:15
John Sewell: This is a crazy way to run any kind of democratic society.
31:20
John Sewell: Yet that's what those guys do.
31:23
John Sewell: And it means that the political parties get to control everything.
31:27
John Sewell: And it's not really political parties, political leaders.
31:30
Mary Rowe: Can you talk a bit about a fancy word, fancy concept, but really a basic concept that you're speaking to that Jane spoke to as well, which is subsidiarity.
31:40
Mary Rowe: The level of transparency and accountability.
31:44
Mary Rowe: My my short-form layperson version of subsidiarity is the order of government closest to the people that delivers the service is the one that should design it and be held accountable for it and implement it and be resourced for it.
31:55
Mary Rowe: It's I think it's what you're suggesting, is that when you have these things brokered at the hyperlocal level, you have greater accountability, greater uh transparency, obviously, and hopefully the policy is more uh well suited and made to the particular challenges.
32:09
Mary Rowe: Is that what you're talking about?
32:11
John Sewell: There's no question that that is very important.
32:13
John Sewell: But the other thing is that other decisions should be made in public as well.
32:17
John Sewell: Okay.
32:18
John Sewell: I think it's interesting that in most cities in Canada, you don't have political parties operating.
32:25
John Sewell: Or if they you have some political structures in some place, but they're pretty loose and they ain't like political parties.
32:34
Mary Rowe: You know that it uh uh your your former colleague, and I was gonna call her your nemesis, but I bet she wasn't.
32:40
Mary Rowe: I don't know what your relationship was with Hazel McAlian, but I often quote her in the in Canada, under the system, the federal government has all the money, the provincial governments have all the power, and the municipal governments have all the problems.
32:52
Mary Rowe: And I always add the fourth, which is and communities have all the solutions, because it's I don't think it's just about power.
32:58
Mary Rowe: I hear you, clearly it is, but isn't it also that communities know best, have the best bead on what the solution should be in their local community?
33:07
Mary Rowe: And we don't have public policy that is able to reflect that.
33:11
John Sewell: I think that's true.
33:12
John Sewell: If they have the appropriate leadership, I think that's true.
33:15
John Sewell: I mean, I I believe very strongly in uh communities having a big say, but I think that they need particular leadership as well.
33:25
John Sewell: Let me give you a very, very small example.
33:28
John Sewell: Regent Park in Toronto was a community that was uh designed by a bunch of planners in the 1940s and then built as a public housing project, and it was really badly, badly designed.
33:43
John Sewell: And if you went and asked people in the neighborhood, what do you need here?
33:46
John Sewell: they'd say, we need more park space.
33:49
John Sewell: Well, sorry, that ain't a good answer.
33:53
John Sewell: It's an uninformed answer as to what they need.
33:56
John Sewell: And if you sit down with them and have real serious discussions and bring in some other ideas so that people can flesh out what's happening, they'll now realize that's not what we need.
34:07
John Sewell: We need more diversity, we need more density in this area, we need, you know, maybe some very well-designed playground, but we don't need a lot more park space.
34:17
John Sewell: So there's no question that getting communities involved is really, really important.
34:22
John Sewell: But it's not just taking the stock answers from them.
34:25
John Sewell: You need people who can work with them and talk about it.
34:28
John Sewell: I mean, in Toronto, just to use the example, um, after the Reform Council got elected in December of 1972, Howard Cohen was set up as the neighborhood planner.
34:40
John Sewell: The very first thing that he did was he said, I'm gonna set up neighborhood planning groups in all sorts of neighborhoods in Toronto.
34:48
John Sewell: He set up 35 of those groups within the first year with local people sitting around saying, What should happen in our neighborhood here?
34:57
John Sewell: Most of them said really interesting things.
35:00
John Sewell: Well, if we could get a bit more housing that was affordable for people, that would be terrific.
35:04
John Sewell: What would it look like?
35:05
John Sewell: Well, let's look at so it'll fit in with what we've got.
35:08
John Sewell: Oh, that's interesting.
35:10
John Sewell: Well, maybe we can use uh do the road system here so it's not totally dominated by cars, but we well, that's what made Toronto those neighborhood groups.
35:20
John Sewell: And they're the one, I mean, I just to give the example, one of the other groups that was set up about that was around libraries, where at that point, you know, the the library officials are trying, we're gonna centralize libraries, we're gonna have six big, huge libraries throughout Toronto.
35:35
John Sewell: And people in neighborhoods said, no, we want to keep our neighborhood library.
35:39
John Sewell: We want to, in fact, we want to have uh, you know, we've got a lot of Hungarians in our neighborhood.
35:44
John Sewell: Why don't we have Hungarian books in our library and Hungarian newspapers as well?
35:48
John Sewell: Oh, well, that has led to, I mean, we now have the best library system basically in the world because of community people saying all those things.
35:58
John Sewell: So, you know.
35:59
Mary Rowe: And they were they were enabled by the structure that Howard put in place.
36:02
Mary Rowe: He was a per he was a municipal chief person.
36:04
Mary Rowe: That's right.
36:05
Mary Rowe: That's right.
36:05
Mary Rowe: I want to go back to sort of a theme of Jane's, which was which I hear sort of you echoing here, which is I think what you're suggesting, common sense, local knowledge.
36:14
John Sewell: Local knowledge, exactly, where people say, hold on a second, you know, there's a better way of doing it, but it's probably less expensive.
36:21
John Sewell: Jane's line on this was you want to trust anecdotal evidence before you trust statistics.
36:28
John Sewell: That'll really help you get a real handle on the problem.
36:34
Mary Rowe: What did she call them?
36:35
Mary Rowe: Unaverage clues, I think.
36:38
Mary Rowe: There was same the idea that you're suggesting that you pay attention to what actually happens and what people tell you the way we're trying to do.
36:46
John Sewell: You trust you, you trust your experience.
36:48
Mary Rowe: So talk to me about NIMBY because of course we're in a housing crisis apparently, and everybody says we are, and now everybody seems to be echoing this.
36:56
Mary Rowe: NIMBY is often put out as one of the challenges to us to address housing intensification.
37:03
Mary Rowe: Thoughts on that?
37:05
John Sewell: I think people make pretty good decisions about housing.
37:07
John Sewell: And most of them are I don't want that great big high-rise building in my neighborhood.
37:13
John Sewell: And I think, yeah, they're probably right.
37:15
John Sewell: Um, you know, what they like is something that actually fits in.
37:19
John Sewell: And uh it seems to me that the way to approach it is to say, okay, we want to build some housing in your neighborhood.
37:26
John Sewell: Let's get together and let's figure out what we want to see built.
37:29
John Sewell: Most people would like to see that housing built because it fit in with their neighborhood.
37:34
John Sewell: So not in my backyard, often it's correct.
37:40
John Sewell: We don't need that in my backyard.
37:42
Mary Rowe: Except that we except people fight all sorts of things.
37:44
Mary Rowe: Like they'll fight a sixplex, you know.
37:46
Mary Rowe: They'll fight, and you and I know it's back to your comment about supporting communities, because as you and I know, lots of designers and really imaginative folks can create units, six units, eight units in a residential neighborhood, and it can be beautiful and it can fit in perfectly.
38:02
Mary Rowe: That's right.
38:03
Mary Rowe: But people knee-jerk think, oh my God, I'm gonna get some concrete monstrosity.
38:09
John Sewell: Well, because often they do.
38:10
John Sewell: That's the problem.
38:11
John Sewell: I mean, just in terms of that, I mean, we've seen some examples, at least in Toronto, of this of the sixplex, which is an awful narrow little building that's just six stories high.
38:22
John Sewell: I mean, you think who wants that?
38:25
John Sewell: And it's because the planners, they're all working in these old zoning rules.
38:29
John Sewell: Yeah.
38:30
John Sewell: I mean, let just going back to Jane for a moment, she said, let's throw out these zoning rules you've got, and let's get into performance standards, such as, okay, the building should be this high and it should be this far back from the street.
38:44
John Sewell: And apart from that, if you meet those, you can do what you want.
38:48
John Sewell: Knock yourself out.
38:49
John Sewell: And and you know, that's what was done at Queen the on Spina South of Queen in Toronto, um, in in the uh, I guess it was in the 90s.
38:59
John Sewell: Very, very successful until, of course, the planners and the developers started to break all the rules.
39:06
Mary Rowe: You know, the uh uh one of the sort of I want to go to import replacement because I want to talk about the economy, because of course we have a we have a national narrative now which is all about big uh uh industrialized uh subsidizing pipelines, these kinds of things.
39:23
Mary Rowe: And I often think of conversations I had with Jane where I was where she would talk about standardization being the enemy of innovation.
39:33
Mary Rowe: I never really got it.
39:35
Mary Rowe: I still feel 40 years later I'm still struggling to understand that because when you talk about the development cycle, you can see that developers figure out what works, how they can turn something around, how they can make it profitable, and then they just do it and do it and do it and do it.
39:51
Mary Rowe: And there and there are lots of folks that you and I are surrounded by, and that the narrative in the country, it seems to me, is largely a scaling, replicable, standardization kind of agenda.
40:04
Mary Rowe: And and I'm concerned that that's going to erode the sort of unusual, you know, serendipitous nature of neighborhoods, but also in business that innovation is doing things differently.
40:17
John Sewell: And the other problem, and Jane talks about it, is money, cataclysmic money.
40:22
John Sewell: You know, she talks about that when you allow large chunks of money to come into the neighborhood, they wreck everything.
40:31
John Sewell: You want it to come in in small bits and pieces.
40:34
John Sewell: And certainly, you know, when Carney's talking about the need for international investment coming into Canada, guess what?
40:42
John Sewell: It's gonna be large chunks of money, folks.
40:44
John Sewell: And it's gonna be hard to fight.
40:46
John Sewell: We don't need that, we need smaller chunks of money.
40:49
Mary Rowe: I recently spoke to this a new thing, a new group called the National Apartments Council, just formed up and in the last seven or eight months.
40:56
Mary Rowe: And I went to their AGM and the guy got up at the front.
40:59
Mary Rowe: He's a guy, there were mostly guys, but there's some women in there, and he was saying, he told his family story that his parents were immigrants and they moved to, I think, Edmonton and they found an apartment.
41:11
Mary Rowe: They lived in an apartment, and then they realized, oh, they could get into the apartment business.
41:16
Mary Rowe: And he described the apartment building industry as largely still families who have small numbers of units.
41:24
Mary Rowe: It was a way of building wealth.
41:25
Mary Rowe: And he said, We're really the F-150 crowd.
41:28
Mary Rowe: And I thought, wow, I wanted to remind people that well, you and I know John, all around the world, lots of people live in apartments.
41:36
Mary Rowe: And it's totally acceptable to live in an apartment.
41:39
Mary Rowe: And somehow we snuck in this notion that the Canadian dream had to include ground-facing house, single family.
41:49
John Sewell: How did that happen?
41:50
John Sewell: With with a great big lot.
41:51
Mary Rowe: With a big yeah, with a lot of things.
41:53
John Sewell: In a place where there's nothing happening on the sidewalks, you know, where you're isolated from everything.
41:58
John Sewell: Yeah, yeah.
41:58
John Sewell: No, no.
41:59
John Sewell: And well, it we've been subsidizing them.
42:01
John Sewell: That's why.
42:01
John Sewell: I mean, I'm not sure.
42:02
John Sewell: Well, that's the interesting thing.
42:03
John Sewell: Yeah.
42:03
John Sewell: The shape of the suburbs where I actually went through how did we build all the suburbs around Toronto?
42:10
John Sewell: Well, we did them all with provincial subsidies.
42:12
John Sewell: And if we didn't have the provincial subsidies, they never would have been built.
42:15
John Sewell: It was the province that gave all the money for water and sewage and roads.
42:20
Mary Rowe: And and and it and doesn't this go back to your first argument, which is that the structuring of municipal government, the way it's being paid for, is wrong.
42:28
Mary Rowe: It's inadequate.
42:29
Mary Rowe: And so govern municipal governments got into this pattern where the only way they could build their own stock revenue stocks to provide their services was to do more permitting and more building lots and more.
42:40
Mary Rowe: And so that's it's sprawl became their survival mechanism.
42:44
John Sewell: Yeah.
42:44
John Sewell: Well, apparently that's the case.
42:46
John Sewell: Yeah.
42:46
John Sewell: I mean all right.
42:48
Mary Rowe: Let's go to import replacement if we can briefly, because I I'm fascinated with this.
42:52
Mary Rowe: I I want you to talk a little bit about when you did regional sourcing.
42:55
Mary Rowe: And I love your suggestion about the wine industry.
42:58
Mary Rowe: What a great example.
42:59
Mary Rowe: Because I'm old enough to remember when Canadian wine was terrible.
43:03
Mary Rowe: Oh, yes, really.
43:04
Mary Rowe: Right.
43:05
Mary Rowe: And right.
43:07
Mary Rowe: And and that's a perfect example.
43:09
Mary Rowe: And of course, it's playing out very dramatically at the moment because the border, they're not letting booze come over on either side.
43:15
Mary Rowe: Uh so talk to me about you did do regional sourcing, and I think you were looking pretty at you were looking at institutional procurement, right?
43:22
Mary Rowe: Hospitals and stuff.
43:24
John Sewell: Hospitals.
43:24
John Sewell: Hospitals was the only thing I was looking at.
43:26
John Sewell: There have been some studies done about hospitals and how they they uh were buying a lot of stuff from from foreign markets, particularly American markets.
43:36
John Sewell: And maybe we could be making some of that stuff here in Ontario.
43:40
John Sewell: Um but what hospitals generally did is they signed a contract with an American company just to buy all their stuff.
43:46
John Sewell: And and the the company would provide a computer program for everybody.
43:50
John Sewell: Oh, I need some more of those.
43:51
John Sewell: Bingo, I just sued on here, and it would all come in relatively easy.
43:55
John Sewell: So I went around and looked at what they might be able to.
43:58
John Sewell: Buy locally that would be easy.
44:02
John Sewell: And I I hit on the idea of sharks containers.
44:05
John Sewell: Every hospital has a little that's right, a little box for used needles.
44:13
John Sewell: They're sharp sharps, they're called sharp containers.
44:16
John Sewell: Okay.
44:16
John Sewell: And I looked at and I said, wow, hospitals buy a lot of those.
44:19
John Sewell: A lot of them.
44:20
John Sewell: They're in every room.
44:22
John Sewell: And you know, I don't know how long it takes to fill them up, but then they got to buy new ones.
44:26
John Sewell: And I thought, hey, they're plastic things.
44:28
John Sewell: And I found a couple of companies that would be willing to make them.
44:32
John Sewell: And I got some prices out of them and compared them with what hospitals were doing.
44:36
John Sewell: And I tried to interest hospitals in looking at it.
44:41
John Sewell: And I remember going to the CEO of one of the largest hospitals in Toronto and having a meeting with him and saying, look, it, you know, you could be buying these sharps containers.
44:50
John Sewell: And I've given them data ahead of time so he knows.
44:53
John Sewell: What he said to me was this okay, you're right.
44:56
John Sewell: I can save $100,000 a year on the Sharp container procurement.
45:01
John Sewell: But that is absolutely nothing in my procurement portfolio, and therefore I'm just not going to upset it.
45:09
John Sewell: It was only $100,000 on one single product in one hospital.
45:14
John Sewell: So I didn't do very well.
45:17
John Sewell: The one thing I managed to get made locally are the little bracelets that say I'm on these kinds of drugs, and if you find me PNOCDA, I got that made locally in Canada.
45:29
John Sewell: But that was all I did.
45:30
John Sewell: Now, part of my problem is I'm not a business person.
45:34
John Sewell: I was exploring an idea.
45:36
John Sewell: But the point is it was a very feasible idea.
45:38
John Sewell: You know, it it's a great big system, the hospital system.
45:43
Mary Rowe: Well, that's the thing.
45:43
Mary Rowe: I mean, you didn't, it's not like you chose the easy stuff first, John.
45:46
Mary Rowe: Like it's a big monolithic system, as you say.
45:49
Mary Rowe: But I understand why you were attracted to it.
45:51
Mary Rowe: You know, we have a series of data products at CUI that are data dashboards to help BIAs and businesses across the country know who their customers are and where their inputs are and what their profit margins are.
46:03
Mary Rowe: And and local uh businesses haven't had access to this data.
46:06
Mary Rowe: We're able now to, just as you're suggesting, we need to make money smaller, we're making data smaller so that people can.
46:12
Mary Rowe: And one of the things that we're talking about is how do you replace your customers?
46:16
Mary Rowe: If you're cut if you have been selling a lot to American consumers online, or you've had people coming into your shop, where are they coming from?
46:26
Mary Rowe: And are they no longer coming?
46:27
Mary Rowe: Now we know that Americans are still coming.
46:29
Mary Rowe: So you've got 30% of your businesses online from Americans.
46:33
Mary Rowe: Can you replace them with Canadians?
46:34
Mary Rowe: Can you do can you do customer replacement?
46:38
John Sewell: Yeah, yeah, that's the other side of the problem.
46:40
John Sewell: I'm just looking at the product, you're looking at the buyer.
46:43
John Sewell: They're both the same thing.
46:44
John Sewell: They're related.
46:45
John Sewell: It's both.
46:46
Mary Rowe: So at the at the large scale, as we finish, we're at a point where we have a really muscular federal agenda.
46:54
Mary Rowe: Very ambitious narrative around economic sovereignty.
46:58
Mary Rowe: They don't work from the ground up.
47:01
Mary Rowe: I think they work from the top down, and they're making large, large scale investments, attracting large, large scale investments to those large, large projects.
47:11
Mary Rowe: I loved your comment about electricity grids.
47:13
Mary Rowe: You know, that actually that's these large schemes are the wrong way.
47:17
Mary Rowe: Really want a bunch of small schemes that are networked together.
47:20
Mary Rowe: So, where do we fit now in this weird little transition moment we're in?
47:24
Mary Rowe: What's your advice to people like you and me who are fundamentally localists and want to strengthen the local capacity in every way?
47:31
Mary Rowe: What should we be focusing on?
47:33
John Sewell: We somehow have to make the point that more powers must be given to cities.
47:38
unknown: Okay.
47:38
John Sewell: So cities can start making more decisions for themselves and have the revenue sources that are now stolen by the provincial and federal governments.
47:46
John Sewell: How do we do that?
47:47
John Sewell: How do we do that?
47:49
Mary Rowe: Because they don't people, you know, governments like people, they don't give up power.
47:52
Mary Rowe: They have, you know, how do we make like is there?
47:55
John Sewell: We've been trying to make it at the at the court level, which is often how big changes are made.
48:00
John Sewell: And and I mean, the point is we can't even get any leverage with with uh city politicians.
48:06
John Sewell: They aren't willing to take up the issue either.
48:08
John Sewell: Right, you know, this whole idea of needing a charter city where you know the city could be given power very simply by a vote of the House of Commons uh under certain sections of the Constitution.
48:20
John Sewell: It's easy to do, but we can't even get city politicians to make that argument.
48:27
Mary Rowe: Because again, they're part of that system, the dependence system.
48:29
Mary Rowe: That's right, that's right.
48:30
John Sewell: And culturally they oh, you know, we're just little subsidiary people here.
48:34
John Sewell: And if if you gave cities powers, they could actually start to resolve some of these problems instead of seeing them fester away.
48:43
Mary Rowe: I mean, it's an interesting, it's an interesting moment we're in, though, John, because I guess time's gonna tell, right?
48:49
Mary Rowe: Uh it's because we're at a point where lots of big decisions are being made.
48:53
Mary Rowe: There's lots of challenge across the country in places, in rural places as well as in urban spaces.
48:58
Mary Rowe: And I loved your uh line where you you you laid this out.
49:04
Mary Rowe: Design, good design, good density, great innovation, economic growth, we could even say inclusive growth, leads to better places and fundamentally, I think, a better democracy.
49:18
John Sewell: No question about that.
49:19
John Sewell: Right.
49:21
Mary Rowe: John, thank you for joining us on City Talk.
49:23
Mary Rowe: I'm just gonna add that John is the 2026 recipient of the Jane Jacobs Prize.
49:29
Mary Rowe: So you'll be hearing more about him.
49:30
Mary Rowe: We'll put lots of links in the notes here of some uh books that John has referenced, his own and David Miller's, and of course we'll put Jane Jacobs' books in there just to remind people.
49:40
Mary Rowe: John, don't you find it fascinating that Jane wrote 60, 70 years ago, and it's still remarkably resonant, eh?
49:47
John Sewell: Oh, I wish people would pay more attention to her.
49:50
John Sewell: Her books are really, really I mean, one book we didn't talk about is Systems of Survival.
49:56
John Sewell: Yep.
49:56
John Sewell: About the two big syndromes in our world, the commercial syndrome and the Guardian syndrome, and how that really structures an awful lot of our society.
50:07
John Sewell: I mean, it's a real revelation to keep reading her.
50:09
Mary Rowe: John, so great to have you on City Talk.
50:11
Mary Rowe: Thank you for joining us.
50:13
John Sewell: Enjoyed it.
50:31
Mary Rowe: So, just as a reminder, the CUI State of the City Summit is just around the corner, November 12 and 13 in Ottawa.
50:38
Mary Rowe: Folks are coming from across the country from many streets and a few other places, including the US and the UK, to talk and learn from each other how we are navigating local and on-the-ground challenges.
50:51
Mary Rowe: And how city building is nation building.
50:54
Mary Rowe: We are, in aggregate, a big project, essential to Canada's future.
50:59
Mary Rowe: Infrastructure, investment, housing, mobility, climate, regional leadership, data, tech, and AI, of course.
51:08
Mary Rowe: We've got it all.
51:09
Mary Rowe: Ottawa, November 12, 13.
51:11
Mary Rowe: Register now, register often.
51:13
Mary Rowe: End of plug.
51:14
Mary Rowe: We'd appreciate knowing what you think of this episode with Lloyd and John.
51:18
Mary Rowe: And on any episode, drop us a line at CityTalk at canerv.org.
51:22
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51:26
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51:33
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51:36
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51:37
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51:39
Mary Rowe: I'm Mary Rowe.
51:40
Mary Rowe: See you next time.