Slow growth

I wrote this article and submitted it to the Uniter last month, but since they break from publishing in the Winter break, it did not appear until today's issue.

Link

Lots of great ideas for Winnipeg's increasingly barren urban landscape, such as this view from corner of Martha Street and Pacific, but so little means to enact them. Summer 2008. Photo courtesy of 1ajs


"Latter decades of slow growth... have rendered Winnipeg a largely ghettoized and misanthropic place. In spite of the best intentions of planners, and a great, heart-warming pool of imagination, art, holistic initiatives and community economic development, the population of the old City of Winnipeg has declined by almost a third since 1972. The luckiest traditional commercial thoroughfares have been pock-marked by strip malls, while the worst off have disappeared almost entirely. Portage and Main, the historical, geographic and economic heart of the city, has been barricaded to pedestrians for 30 years. Banal new suburbs mushroom at the city’s fringe, while the bounds of the impoverished inner city also sprawl outward.

A good idea is nothing but an idea without money. The desire and ability of individuals to make money in Winnipeg is the only thing that built soaring warehouses and commercial blocks in the Exchange District, or the beautiful houses that sit on tree-lined streets in the West End. It is also the only thing that will able to restore and reuse these into their second centuries..."