For me Scaledown is a way of life and there’s an amazing TED talk this week about it. Great video for all scaledowners, the rest of this post may be old hand for most scaledowners

You see, I believe we’re going into an era of forced austerity and a transition to an economy that is not based on the growth principal of what really was a multigenerational pyramid scheme. For the past 50 years our economy was based on being able to draw from an ever increasing new base that was added that financed the upper levels.

Now I write this as someone caught up in consumerism myself but my ways have dramatically changed over the past 2 decades. Gone are the sea doo’s, ski doo’s and many of the trappings of our consumer society. Although I’d consider my house excessive, its 2700 ft2 is far from the McMansion that I might have built 25 years ago. Still love my toys, but they’re concentrated on information and experience rather than amassing non productive assets.

My favorite line in the video is consumerism defined as being “Persuaded to spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about”

Scaledown for me is a way of life, it is better living through simplicity not just for my family but for our city.

We are trying to ignore the fact that we really do know that our population is not growing in Windsor, the net amount of jobs is not growing over the long term. There of course are two exceptions

• the 3-5 year blip of the DRIC road
• and the Auto industry recovering unnatural lows. (I doubt we will never reach the all time highs of 16 million vehicles sold in a year but we will probably return to a more natural 12-13 million)

Its not about doom and gloom, and I’m sure our WEEDC will achieve new jobs in the future but this will happen while we continue to lose jobs in other areas creating little net gain. More of a transition from the jobs of the old economy to the jobs of the new economy.

That’s where the liveability, sustainability come in. We’re going to have to live on less money, work more years until retirement, see our pensions and benefits frozen at a minimum, possibly cut.

The only way to do that and live a great life, possibly an even better life is to scaledown Windsor.

In the end, we need to have a city whose economy is not based on some deluded promise of growth that almost every city councillor and mayoral candidate campaigned on. We need a city whose economy is preparing us for a very different future that can actually be far more fulfilling on every level