Raise the Hammer

Rusty/ Ben Bull:


>>> It's sad that Hamilton council cannot use their powers to create some demand for high end housing/retail/services/employment that the Hammer so sorely needs.

How does one create demand for anything?

The pat answer is always: Branding, Promotion, Advertising, maybe a website upgrade with a lot of cool flash or even a flash-drive... All that has already been done to a degree - with incremental results.

Fixing up the downtown -- is the other pat answer. Added to this mix most recently is: the insidious notion of cherry-picking 'class' to quickly dress up the downtown window for attracting beautiful people with money!

Cities are not formed, shaped, molded or crafted that way.

Cities are essentially "emergent patterns of complex systems"**.

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** "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" - is perfect book to start understanding how what we have taken for granted - really happens.

"Indeed, traditional cities—like the ones that sprouted across Europe between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries—are rarely built with any aim at all: they just happen. There are exceptions of course: imperial cities, such as St. Petersburg or Washington, D.C., laid out by master planners in the image of the state. But organic cities—Florence or Istanbul or downtown Manhattan—are more an imprint of collective behavior than the work of master planners. They are the sum of thousands of local interactions: clustering, sharing, crowding, trading—all the disparate activities that coalesce into the totality of urban living. (p. 109) "
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If we want meaningful understanding to emerge in our community with respect to our city's growth problems - we do need to stop shooting from the hips and start making a serious attempt to read, listen and talk more intelligently.