Last weekend I visited the ancestral suburban split-level homestead in dear Windsor, Ontario for Thanksgiving. There is no public transportation there, and walking is only for the foolish and poor. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was generally assumed that those dudes who rode around the city on their 10-speeds did so because they had been busted for drunk driving — the car culture in Windsor was that crazy. When I lived there I was in constant fear that my old beater Honda Accord would break down yet again, leaving me stranded in the almost-country.
So, last weekend, I mostly drove around town in my mom’s Grand Am — a beast of a car — listening to Detroit Radio (the Kanye West Golddigger song was in perpetual rotation on the hip hop stations, and I think that’s just fine). I miss Detroit radio. I have a theory that because Detroit has no real, livable, everyday public spaces its good radio stations try to make up it.
It was there that I read a James Kunstler blog post he wrote about a recent visit to Calgary that somebody on the Toronto Urban Forum linked to. If you scroll down to the October 3rd entry here, you can read his impressions of a city whose cheap sprawl reminds me a lot of what has happened to Windsor:
Calgary started out, of course, as the railhead for western ranching and a jump-off for various gold rushes in the late 19th century. Now it has become an archetypal city of immense glass boxes in a sterilized center surrounded by an asteroid belt of beige residential subdivisions — sort of what Rochester, New York, would be like if it had an economy. The vast suburbs ooze out onto the prairie to the east, along with their complements of strip malls, power centers, car dealerships, and fry-pits, and on the west they bump up against the foothills of the Rockies.
The real estate scene in Calgary is rip-roaring because newcomers are flooding in to work the tar sand angles. No doubt the tar sands will generate a lot of wealth in the years ahead. But those who think they will save western civilization from a Peak Oil clusterfuck are going to be very disappointed. We are not going to run the interstate highway system, Walt Disney World, and WalMart on the Canadian tar sands.
In Windsor, all the manufacturing money (it used to be people working for the Big 3 — but now it’s all the tool & die shops), and little or no regulations on growth and sprawl, results in these terrible landscapes. When the money evaporates, as it routinely does in Windsor, the cheap things fall apart quickly. I don’t really have a point here — but driving through it, and reading about it elsewhere, was depressing, and it turned the train ride back to the Toronto core into a sort of relieving escape. We have lots to fight for here — and if we don’t lead the way, it won’t happen elsewhere.
