The Wild Wild... Downtown Kitchener

You can follow along if you'd like.

Okay, I've got a half hour. Let's see how well I can recount good old February 6th.

Hmm... I didn't even write anything down that day. It was just the introduction. We also learned a new pedagogy called the Circle of Praxis, which I later found (via Google) is used in various schools about the globe. We also found out that we knew very little about Mexico, probably along the lines of Talking to Americans but in a different direction.

On to March 6th, then, the day we walked around downtown Kitchener and met with some organizations there to examine the issues of the core. Here's what we were told by Mr. Schreiter, through my lense, of course:

There are crises in downtowns all over Canada. They are the threshold of change. 60% of downtown workers are professionals, 20% work in entertainment, and 20% work in the service industry. Normally the service industry has a much larger slice of the pie, and the solution seems to be to get more people living downtown to attract more services.

Hold on--St. George, just north of Brantford, has tons of people, and very few services. They have to come into Brantford for everything. Back to you, Kev.

As a city experiences urban sprawl, downtowns diminish. The private sector doesn't usually help prevent this, but libraries, schools (of any level), and public markets do.

Here is where the idea first clicked to me that perhaps this is something like the frontier theory I learned about in OAC North American history. I'll have to look up my old notes (what the heck, I may even try <awestruck voice>the Internet</voice>), but by the end of the trip, I again recalled this idea, and it seemed to have recurred in enough places to be worth exploring in an academic paper. I see urban sprawl as the frontier, with the downtown being left behind to decay in its ruts, except where fresh academic thinking is keeping it closer to the cutting edge in a decreasingly physical sense. How the public market bit fits in is unclear at the moment.

The Kitcher Downtown Business Association's independent, non-profit role, like that of most similar organizations in other downtowns, is to promote safety and rejuvination of the downtown. It approves or denies liquor licences and such, juggling the night club scene with senior care facilites and homeless support. It co-ordinates with a group of forty businesses that employ the homeless. This may seem to attract problems, but the group is ready to meet the challenges head-on, using an outreach profile out of Vermont. (Did I write that down right?)

This kind of program being in place removes the dilemma of choosing between being heartless by not giving to panhandlers (or otherwise helping them out) and giving them money that they're more likely than not to spend even more irresponsibly than oneself. We're told to tell them that panhandling is illegal, but that they can find something much more fulfilling at The Working Centre just down the street.

To be continued...