October 6th, 2009
OPPI / CIP Conference: Building a Better World
By Ian Malczewski // 3 Comments
Spacing contributor Ian Malczewski spent last week in Niagara Falls at a joint conference held by the Ontario Professional Planners Institute and the Canadian Institute of Planners. He is sharing some of the lessons he learned there and reflecting on their implications on public space, livability, and sustainability in cities.
My visit to Niagara Falls last week to attend the OPPI / CIP Conference, Building a Better World, was my first time to the city in a few years. I always find visiting Niagara Falls to be a bittersweet experience: the falls themselves never disappoint - especially in the cooler months when the number of tourists shrinks and you can stand in front of them in relative peace - but the city itself usually leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I feel like the touristy streetscapes, with their wax museums, houses of horrors, and fast food joints, reflect something sad about our society and the way it uses the built environment to theme park-ize places of natural beauty.
I had hoped that during my four-day visit I would have the opportunity to explore beyond those tourist-traps and find a neighbourhood where people lived and worked, to find a public space that wasn't dominated by a giant robot pharaoh cracking wise in a faux English accent. But a conference program packed with intensive workshops kept me inside most of the time, and by the end of a sometimes twelve-hour day, I only had the energy to walk to the falls to recoup some strength. (I should note that there were “mobile workshops†that offered attendees an opportunity to explore some of the region, but these often conflicted with a session I wasn't willing to miss).
Niagara Falls was an appropriate (if unintentionally ironic) setting for the conference theme, Building a Better World. Many of the issues we face in cities in Canada today are the result of previous generations of planners and policy-makers deciding that building things like highways, sprawling communities, mega-malls, and theme-parked cities, would create a better world. Can we use the same thinking that created these unlivable and unsustainable environments to reverse their ill effects?
I attended sessions educating planners about LEED Neighbourhoods, climate change action plans, food security, creative public engagement strategies, and several other topics that gave me both hope for and concern about our prospects for adapting our current habits and environments to meet the challenges facing cities. It also provided me with a snapshot of where the planning world sits on many of these important issues, both in Ontario and across the country. Over the next week or so I'll share some of these stories with Spacing readers, hopefully continuing some of the dialogues that began at the conference.
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It's a shame you didn't get a chance to explore the city a bit more. The last couple of years, downtown Niagara Falls has undergone a revitalization, more geared towards art and culture with galleries, cafes and interesting new stores. To go along with these new businesses there have been quite a few street festivals that have brought out a large variety of people. Niagara has a long way to go when it comes to use of public space, a lot of areas in the city are in dire need of revitalization, but after the success of downtown I'm hopeful the trend will spread throughout the city.
I am looking forward to your articles.
you could say that Niagara Falls already has a theme, being the falls, but that theme was quickly usurped or appended to by carnivalish theme streams and facilities to accommodate and to titillate the short attention spans of visiting hordes of people who are compelled to visit the breathtaking natural wonder.
in many ways it is too late for Niagara Falls, where the abundant theme streams are themselves a destination to compete with Las Vegas.
The care and feeding of visiting hordes being the modern domain of TOURISM(, and commerce in general for that matter) is a part of culture that extends exponentially over previous centuries of hospitality and entertainment.
I think entertainment has always been a bit perverse, but hospitality comes closer to the essence of the idea of a better world.
maybe the question is - how to accommodate "themes" (remember short attention spans), and how do we engage hospitable regulations into corporate charters without everything being reduced to a list of rules to be broken by crack teams of lawyers.
lots to think about...
Comment by jerry
October 6, 2009 | 1:27 pm