ROOTS AND CULTURE
Today, I’d like to open with a song.
Working Man’s Cafe
Lyrics by Ray Davies
Looking for the working man’s cafe, in the shopping centre of the town.
Looking for somewhere to fit in, in among the retail outlets.
Bought a pair of new designer pants, where the fruit and veg man used to stand.
Always used to see him there, selling old apples and pears.
Chatting up the pretty girls, with the knocked off goods in the van.Chorus
Don’t you know? He was a working man.
Long ago he was a working man and he sat in the working man’s cafe.Everything around me seems unreal.
Everywhere I go it looks and feels like America.
Really come a long way down this road, improving our surroundings as we go.
Changing our roots and culture. But, …Chorus
Though I knew you then but, will I know you now?
There’s gotta be a place for us to meet, I’ll call you when I’ve found it.
I only hope that life has made us a little more grounded.
Hey man, I see you now.
Here we are at the working man’s cafe.It’s really good to see us come so far but, haven’t we forgotten who we are?
Talking about a larger loan, equity relief and mortgages.
Now we spend the time of day, on line at the Internet cafe.
And if you forget my face, in case you’ve forgotten just who I am.
I’m the kid with the greasy spoon, firmly held in hand.Don’t you know I was a working man?
Long ago we were all working men and we sat,
spending our time all day in the working man’s cafe.
I heard this last week, while I was getting ready for Saturday’s forum. If you want to hear it and an interview with Ray Davies about his new album - Working Man’s Cafe go here. I was struck by the message of this song and how easy it is for us, living in Windsor to see the loss of our “roots and culture”.
The architecture, culture and monuments in a city tell a story. It should tell the story of where the city came from, where it is and where it wants to go. Visitors should be able to understand the personality of the city they are visiting and its history through the “places” they experience. Veronika said that a “place” is somewhere people want to be. I think it also is where they are comfortable and feel at ease. People may want to go to a big box store to shop but, we don’t go to the big box store to meet friends and have a drink or watch the kids play or learn or experience life.
Citizens of a city should be able to pass on the roots and culture of their communities to younger generations by creating and maintaining “places”. When we build a Wal-Mart on a greenfield site (The same Wal-Mart store, from the same architect, from the same book of retail plans that exists in Baltimore or Montreal or Santa Fe.), are we creating a “place” that will help to explain our “roots and culture” to visitors to the Windsor/Essex region? When we tear down a place like the Grad House, are we removing a blight from a community? Or, how about the Norwich Block? Have we improved our communities identity and culture by replacing it with a development called “Richmond Landing” because it acknowledges the past history of our waterfront?
How does all this new development serve to improve the cultural understanding of our community? Do you have fond memories of the “old” Home Depot store? Should we start a petition to save this building as an historic site? No, of course not, it is of no real value to this or any other community and after it sits vacant for a few years a new developer will come along and knock it down and replace it with another cookie cutter retail facility.
So, I’m going to end this with a challenge to you. Ask yourself, ask your friends, what are Windsor’s “places”? How do we demonstrate to the rest of our neighbours that these “places” have value? Once we can get our neighbours and our leaders to identify what a “place” is and the cultural value of “places” to our identity and well-being then, the next step, will be to demonstrate the economic value of “places”. That is the economic value of culture and how the economies of our “roots and culture” manifest themselves in the economics of new technology and sustainable development.
Tags: big box retail, community building, economic development, local economic development, place making, revitalization, urban sprawl
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We sure as hell don’t have much left. In fact the city allowed another building to be demo’ed downtown for a proposed parking lot and plaza. Go figure on the hyprocrisy.
Check it here. http://www.internationmetropolis.com
Walking, driving or riding the bus around this city you will see one theme, a city of nowhere! The dregs of architectural and development thinking long past in other cities of the world, or mislaid plans of city planning of dated thinking from somewhere else, never fully understood or implemented. The city of Windsor has no originality what so ever when it comes to planning, building, designing, it roots around in the dust bins of better cities for ideas that it can do on the cheap. No investment in quality buildings or design, housing tracks built from catalogues that go on for miles, strip malls that stripped communities of their landmarks and cohesiveness.
The major and most striking architecture in Windsor is its parking lots and parking structures. What other city besides Detroit would build parking lots and parking garages on prime river front land…Windsor did and DOES and all you have to do is look across the river to GM and their parking lots and structures.Altars to the one true God…the Automobile!
From my balcony view, the new Casino hotel looks like a flushing urinal, with white borders, with a wall of blue in the middle like water and a big handle on top to flush it! This is architecture! And whole structure is done in white! It adds nothing at all to the streetscape, just that it is big and overpowering, much like a white elephant would be if it were dropped in the middle of the city. I not calling the new casino hotel and theatre a white elephant but that is what I see when walking downtown.
In the future I can imagine a child asking a parent, “why do all the buildings in this city have huge rings of black lifeless soil around them and poles stuck in them?” The answer will be, “well at some time in this city it was a normal thing to have clear sight lines for people when they got out of their cars to go shopping. People in the olden days didn’t have very good navigation skills, if it involved walking more than a few metres, that’s if they could walk child. Walking is ancient form of moving, something we don’t do in this city anymore, we’re to obese to do that anymore and it is very hard to shop if you have to walk as you know child, so we just drive through the stores now and don’t have to use those black lifeless areas anymore. That is why we park so close to our home, so you don’t have to walk all that far child.”
“And daddy you don’t have to leave the car to do work either..huh!” “No child, the steering wheel of our SUV has grown into my stomach! Much easier to talk and work if you don’t have to steer!”
“Yes, the city developers have thought of everything…Oh! Look at the fake pedestrians sculptures, they are so life like, walking in the parking lots and along the streets. It was a city competition long ago for artists to come up with the most realistic looking pedestrians for our streets, since so many have become extinct in our city!”
“Are those real trees daddy?” No child, they are fake also. Long ago when the city was desperate for jobs, they had the idea of making fake trees to keep people working but eventually we ran out of parking lots to use the trees on, with everyone now driving into and through the stores…kinda pretty aren’t they, even in winter with all their leaves..Eh!”
“is that a new building going up over there daddy?” Yes child, the other ones were too old, being built just twenty years ago and they can’t be used for anything else so they have to come down, they’re an eyesore.” “They don’t have that black area daddy?” “No, those are very old buildings child, another very old idea again that people use to walk to such buildings and or had to park and walk to them!”
“I’m very happy daddy that our home and city looks just like everybody else’s, can you help me onto the lift when we get home daddy?”
The architecture of Windsor is that there is no architecture in Windsor!
“OH look daddy! What’s that?!
“It’s a historical actor child, riding an antique bicycle, one of the few left in the city that knows how to do it! I wonder where they found that old thing anyways.”
“Why is he is making so many people mad at him?” “He is affecting the flow of our traffic through the mall child, causing people to become aware of him, so that he doesn’t hit them in their vans, we could be hurt by his foolishness!”