Municipally, couldn’t Victoria’s political and civic leadership foresee the risk of downtown decline triggered by fraying storefront and office economies — provincial employees working from home, Uptown, Amazon — capable of inflicting significant economic and social damage on the city centre?
How much would it have taken to anticipate such threatening what-ifs and design strategic responses (tremendous, comprehensive downtown beautification, arts and cultural intensification, education and community development training facilities, etc.).
I’d like to speculate about why this didn’t happen. I think it starts with civic culture. I believe it has been the city’s reflex to seek to manage rather than to encourage innovation and practise active partnership. Instead, the city’s first response to citizen-driven initiatives is “where’s the accountability?”
This is a bureaucrat’s sensibility. This is a city filled with ’em.
I try to imagine a strong city. It would be a Victoria that invited initiative at the community and citizen level. A city that figured out how to speed up its internal decision-making and approval processes — in other words, how to say “yes” real quick. Social process in most places is now moving at light speed.
All of this is step one in the development of vital communities in which people join to achieve social, cultural and public realm objectives.
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