Creating something out of nothing:
Hay-on-Wye town, UK

Until 1961, Hay-on-Wye was a fairly unprepossessing Welsh border town, dependent on declining farming and agricultural markets for its economy. Richard Booth owned the half-ruinous castle and started to deal in second-hand books, which quickly filled up the castle, and when other buildings became reduntant and went on the market - the cinema, the fire-station - there was always a ready buyer. The idea that a whole town full of bookshops could become an international attraction was before its time. The Cinema Bookshop quickly became the ‘biggest second-hand bookshop in the world’ and was later sold on to a London businessman. By the early 1970s Hay had established an international reputation and there are now 42 bookshops in the town. They cover specialisms as diverse as cinema, the arts, the occult, history, militia, poetry, children, Americana, philosophy and economics. The publicity (and visitors) which the town and its eccentric trade attracted allowed more and more bookshops to be established, by Booth and others.

Richard Booth’s personal investment in Hay - with his staff of 26 workers and around 220 employed elsewhere - has brought it economic sustainability in a way that no chemical agriculture, factory farming, or supermarket retailing would bring to a rural area. Hay’s population is now just over 1400. It supports 15 large guesthouses and four hotels, plus plenty of bed and breakfast accommodation in the town, with more such places in the adjacent surrounding countryside. A dramatic rise in the number of cafes and restaurants has been seen, with 12 opening in the last four years. Ten antique shops have sprung up in Hay over the same period. Over 110,000 visitors come through the town each year; with a slight concentration during the weeks of the Literature Festival in May. Hay has not suffered the retail blight experienced be many rural towns in the 19802.

Richard Booth has helped set up an international book town movement as a means of revitalizing small towns, which include Montolieu in Southern France, Bredevoort in Holland, Redu in Belgium, Becherel in Brittany, St. Pierre de Clages in Switzerland, Stillwater in the US, Fjaerland in Norway, Kampung Buku in Malaysia and Miyagawa in Japan.

Source: Landry, 1996

So, what is Windsors “nothing”? What is it that will wrest this city out of the doldrums it finds itself in?

One of the things I get frustrated with the most is the fact that Windsor doesn’t seem to have a vision that guides its municipal decision-making process. Sure, you can point to our Official Plan as a guiding document, but ask anyone on the street what Windsor wants to be when it grows up, and you will receive a blank stare. If there is one, it’s a well-kept secret, and how do you rally a city in distress around a vision that they don’t know exists?

It’s a tough thing to ask a politican to do - show us their vision. It’s much easier to jump from low-hanging fruit to low-hanging fruit in a bid to prove your success as a leader. Once you bare your soul and tell the electorate what’s in your heart and mind, you give them a yardstick with which to measure your competence. Yeah, that a tough thing to ask a politician, especially at election time.

For if we are to make to discover what our “nothing” is, that things that’s going to bond us together, we’re going to have to do it together. We need a common vision to rally around.
 

The first in a series of Official Plan Review Official Plan Amendments (OPA) is scheduled to be TABLED at the Planning Advisory Committee (PAC) on Thursday August 19, 2010 and will be considered at the Thursday September 16, 2010 PAC meeting.

Please note that any members of the public who wish to express an interest in this OPA may submit written comments to the Planning Department or appear as delegations at the Thursday September 16, 2010 PAC meeting.

The OPA is available for download by clicking here.

Anyone wishing to confirm the date and time of the Planning Advisory Committee meeting should contact the Planning Department (Tel. 519-255-6267). 

A sabbatical is what I’m calling this summer.  With the recent purchase of my new (to me) sailboat, the Great Lakes have been a playground whose call I haven’t been able to ignore.  Am I shirking my civic duties?  Probably, but everyone needs to step back once in a while.

You have probably noticed the lack of activity on this website as of late.  I don’t know the reasons why my fellow SD contributors have “scaled back” (you have probably just read Mark Boscariol’s) on their posting, but I do know mine.  Part of me has been questioning whether Scaledown is forwarding the mission/vision statement that we set out for ourselves three years go.  Another part of me questioned whether we could accomplish our goals better by changing things up a bit.  Are we preaching to the converted?  Our hits have plateaued the past year, with our community of urbanists staying pretty consistent.  We don’t seem to be broadening our reach, and I do not think that SD in its present format will do so.

So, I want to hear from the readers we still have.  What do YOU think needs to be done to forward the goals of a more humane and civil Windsor?  Is the dream of a walkable community that values civil discourse and a thriving arts/local business community still viable?  How can we reach a broader demographic when it comes to reaching these goals?  Is ScaleDown still a vehicle for implementing this change, or do we need to praise it for what it’s accomplished, close this chapter and start a new one?

P.S. This being election time, I think we all know what needs to be done in the immediate future.  Get involved in someone’s election campaign and attempt to draw in a many other citizens as possible in a bid to reclaim our city.   This is a pivitol election, and our future as a city depends on the visions of the decisions makers we elect. 

Why do I do it?

Why do I let myself be reduced to these schoolyard tactics?

Why do I feel a compulsion to call out issues and people I feel need called out?

Why can’t I just let it go?

Friend looks at me and asks, “Mark, were you ever bullied as a kid?”

My response; “As a matter of fact, Yeah”

I spent Much of elementary School and a year of high school getting picked on pretty heavily. I remember my father teaching me the lesson that people will take advantage of you as long as you let them and the day you say “NO MORE” is the day you’ll become a man.

I remember standing up to the bullies and turning my life around.

My friend said that my behaviour now was of someone who felt compelled to stand up to bullies because of that background.

I don’t know or much care exactly who the bully in this case is.

Is it these other bloggers themselves?

is it the fact that they exhibit the behaviours of bullies?

Is it their name calling (Edgar, eminence greasie, whatever other names they call people)

Is it their willingness to threaten me by threatening boycotts of my businesses, investigations into health inspections (BTW, we got another 5 star on Friday) that affects my employees or my friends who write on this blog?

Is it their real or perceived associations to the Ambassador Bridge company (failure to criticize or assess any of their actions could be enough to make the association)?

Is it the behaviour of that company is that of a bully?

Is it simply all of the above?

Either way, there must be something to their bullying behaviour as I felt compelled to do what I did in the face of whatever threat I received (real or perceived or whether intended as a threat). I apologize to those readers and writers on Scaledown. I think this probably something that will prevent me from writing as long as these Windsor square bullies are around to comment back. I still feel no remorse or regret for the actual act of standing up to Bullies and calling them out.

The world needs less bullies and more of those who stand up to them.

I’ve removed myself from the site on the bio’s and other places but I don’t know how to get my name off of the “contributors list” cant find it on the admin.

Shutting comments off for this post as the bullies seem have a compulsion for getting the Last word.

The tweet is cryptic!, Tom Lucier is elusive and teasing on his Facebook page! What is going to happen? It all sounds exciting!

1. The House is now occupied! Downtown Windsor, look out!about 4 hours ago via Tweetie for Mac
2. @phogtom @spotvin @windsor_rino Today I get pwned!10:19 AM Jul 16th via Tweetie for Mac

3. Now I have POWER! Vroom! #utilitiesnotegomaniac2:25 PM Jul 14th via Tweetie for Mac

4. Now I have gas! #utlitiesnothygieneproblem2:07 PM Jul 14th via Tweetie for Mac

5. rino’s kitchen - specialty items & cafe moving into the house this summer. eat, drink, shop.9:39 PM Jul 11th via web

6. I looking forward to four wonderful Windsor business to move inside me6:00 PM Jul 11th via web

7. phogtom

   Visited @thehousewindsor today with @spotvin, @windsor_rino, and @tobyleftly . We picked offices and tried to envision the finished product.7:44 PM Jul 10th via TweetDeckRetweeted by thehousewindsor

8. @windsor_rino @phogtom @tobyleftly guess who I am, I’m awesome! I want to be more awesome2:59 PM May 27th via TweetDeck

Rino Bortolin is moving Black Kettle Bistro to thehousewindsor tweeted #thehousewindsor!

What will thehousewindsor be? Guesses? Hunches? Rumours? Tom gave me a cryptic answer weeks ago but I can’t reveal it because I think my guess was just somewhere in the ballpark! And I really don’t know! But I am excited in this new venture for Downtown Windsor!!!

Oh the mystery!!!

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

It’s Time for America to Get On the Bus

New York magazine recently had a fantastic story on NYC’s plan to focus on improving the quality of its bus system:

Buses are what most people think of when they think of not getting anywhere: senior citizens waiting in lines, guys counting out change, double-parked cars. They are less sexy than subways and tend to be ignored until the MTA announces another round of service cuts. The last time buses were new was in the forties, when they were installed around the city as a cheaper, more flexible alternative to streetcars….But over the last decade, in a few transit-enlightened cities around the world, the bus has received a dramatic makeover. It has been reengineered to load passengers more quickly. It has become much more energy-efficient. And, most important, the bus system—the network of bus lines and its relationship to the city street—has been rethought.

If New York City, the ultimate American city for rail transit, can see the wisdom of reinvigorating its bus system, then every other city in America should as well. No, New York is not cancelling its subway expansions. But it realizes that in a world of financial constraint, New Yorkers can’t wait decades for the relatively small number of projects that it has in the pipe to come online, much less develop new ones.

Too many American  transit enthusiasts, especially outside our largest cities, harbor a deep hostility to buses for some reasons. There’s been an interesting alliance for light rail between transit advocates who pooh-pooh buses and the traditional rent seeking interests that brought us things like many local stadium boondoggles. Especially for smaller cities, light rail is, like pro sports teams, just another accoutrement of the “big league city” that they need to have in order prove they are one.

I’ll be the first to admit that some who advocate buses actually don’t like transit much at all. Promoting a bus alternative to a light rail line is simply a convenient way to try to sink the whole thing. Also, the bus in many cities isn’t that great, and isn’t well patronized.

But with the financial realities we face in America, and the need to create an actual network of service, not just a couple of showpiece light rail lines, we ought to be giving bus a hard look. This is doubly the case because rail construction costs are simply out of line in the US versus the rest of the world. No one cares to solve this problem – not the FTA and certainly not the consulting engineers, construction companies and rolling stock vendors who are doing just fine indeed off the current system – so we should really be thinking twice about rail anyway until we can rein in the costs.

A friend of mine once said, “People claim folks won’t ride buses. I agree. So why don’t we work on fixing that problem instead of jumping straight to the conclusion that we need to spend a billion dollars on light rail?”

Actually, people will ride the bus. In London, twice as many people ride buses as the famed tube system. In Chicago, despite its well known and extensive L system, more riders take the bus than all CTA and Metra trains put together. And there is nothing even particularly fancy about Chicago’s bus system. It’s what I call “Plain Old Bus Service”.

Still, with poorly designed systems and poor service levels, buses in many cities aren’t well patronized, particularly by discretionary riders. So how do we fix that? Jarrett Walker over atHuman Transit has been on fire lately. He always has some of the finest transit writing anywhere, and if you aren’t reading, you’re missing something.

Lately he’s been writing about Paris, and Europe generally, and how their approach to bus design differs from the US. In Converging Vehicles, he writes:

European systems present buses and trams as part of a unified system, with amenity choices that minimize the difference between the bus experience and the tram experience. This is a striking contrast to US “streetcar cities” such as Portland and Seattle, where the streetcar is as differentiated as possible from the bus system, as though it’s expected to serve a different clientele.

In a lot of cities they do seem to be designed for different clienteles. And I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to imagine who those might be.

He then describes the similarities:

Look again at the [bus] interior above. Note details like the ticket readers next to the first set of doors. Note, just visible in the upper left of the photo, a strip map showing every stop that this bus makes along its route. Note the whole look and feel…. [On the tram] the continuous open space is wonderful. But there’s nothing else about this design, in terms of overall level of amenity, that differs from the bus. This vehicle isn’t trying to serve different people than the bus serves, or to provide a higher quality experience. This vehicle is on rails for one good reason: The corridor it serves needs huge capacity…In Paris, light rail is just what you do when you need a really, really long bus.

In part two, Jarrett goes on to talk about how you can board that Paris bus through any door, with proof of payment just like light rail. The New York magazine piece picks up this theme, talking about the Bx12 Select Bus Service in the Bronx:

All of the sudden, though, here it comes: the Bx12. Right away, you see it’s different. A different paint job—new branding, as the transit people like to say—and bright-blue lights flashing on the header. Buying a ticket is different, too: You pay before you board, from a little box like a MetroCard vending machine that offers you a receipt. In the world of transit planning, boarding time is everything, and the receipt streamlines the process. “You just hold on to it,” a woman offers, shouting from under her earbuds. She smiles. “It’s much faster.” Waiting on the curb, you notice that the bus has its own lane, painted terra-cotta, with signs to deflect non-bus traffic.

The relatively new head of the MTA used to work in London, where he was part of a change that saw a big upswing in bus popularity.

About a year into his tenure at Transport for London, Walder achieved the satisfaction of watching his neighbor, a London business executive, decide to make his primary mode of daily transportation the bus. It was simply the easiest, fastest way to get to work. “He would say to me, ‘Hey, the bus goes where I want to go, and it gets me there, and I’m taking the bus!’?”

And that’s what a heck of a lot more US cities ought to be doing too. Of course, if there’s a legitimate case for rail, then go for it. I support rail projects ranging from the Second Ave. Subway to the Cincinnati streetcar. But clearly there is enormous opportunity in the US to start transforming the transportation infrastructure of our cities with high quality bus service in a way that is faster, cheaper, and much more pervasive than we’d ever be able to achieve with rail.

As NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, principal architect of that city’s remarkable public space transformation put it, “The bottom line is buses are back.” They need to be back in a whole lot more cities than just Paris, London, and New York.

PS: Again, if you care about transit, you should definitely have Human Transit in your reader. Here’s a link to another piece on Paris, about bus lanes to help convince you.

From what I experienced and remember from many of our summers in Windsor in the fifties, is what we are experiencing right now, with high temperatures and humidity, it was hot but we got through it!

The war time houses weren’t insulated, many at the time still had coal fired boilers in the basement. Our food was cooled by an ice box, with ice delivered every other day buy the Ice Man, driving a truck with large blocks of ice under a tarp, which we kids always tried to sneak pieces while he was making a delivery. It also meant that our mothers shopped more often for perishable goods, thus less food in the house for snacking! I remember when my Mom got her first refrigerator, she thought she died and went to heaven! And the first, what appeared to us, to be truly miraculous! - Ice cubes!

A lot of mothers on our street (Olive Road), including mine, got up earlier in the morning to cook the evening meal, because, by four in the afternoon, those homes were intolerable in today’s standards. Seemingly tons of potatoes were cooked for a week’s supply of potato salad, cuts of meat for cold cuts later. There was no such thing as “ice cubes” but chilled lemonade or the new thing at the time, Kool Aid!

In ground or above ground pools, what were they? We had hoses and sprinklers, and if you were rich in our eyes, an inflatable rubber pool, with every kid on the block running through it!

Sun screen? Most of our mothers smothered us in tanning oil, so that we could burn better! The first almost full body burn in the summer was a kids right of passage! “O! That’s a big piece for a skin sandwich!” Each trying to pull the biggest piece off each other! No boy wore sissy shorts, like girls! It was jeans, t-shirt and sneakers! The only time our legs got out was when we were wearing our swim trunks! And girls wore bathing caps to protect their hair!

I lived in a two story war time house, with two bedrooms up, the master down and one rather small bathroom (it might make for a second bathroom today) at the back door. The two upper bedrooms during a heat wave were cookers! You went to bed sweating, spent the night with sweat laden sheets and woke up still sweating. There was no such thing a personal fans, they were almost unheard of and if you could find one, they were too expensive. It wasn’t until my grandfather showed up with two army surplus canvas folding cots, and put them in our basement for us to sleep on, did my sister I get some relief from the heat at night. And no one had a “finished” basement, or rec room at the time, they were basements, dark and cool!

No store or office building had air conditioning, no cars, buses, nothing!  At school before July, the windows were opened. Popsicles, pops and ice cream were a luxury!

It got so hot one time, my Dad and Mom put my sister and I into our pajamas and took us to the movies. Yes, the movies! It was, the now torn down Centre Theatre, on Wyandotte just east of Pillette road. They had this new thing called “air conditioning!” We all sat through the first double bill, and when that ended, I remember my Dad going up to the front to buy new tickets for the next double bill. I remember my Mom waking me, and my Dad carrying my sister asleep in his arms home, to what was still an overly baking home!

So! Are we wimps and wusses now? Could we live not a minute without air conditioning everything? We complain about our short dashes of exposure, from one air conditioned  thingie to another, and still rant about the heat!

All the above storytelling makes this book review below very relevant for today:

“Losing Our Cool”: The high price of staying cool

I was in the Phog Lounge last night on the eve of Canada Day and the first night of a three week vacation, devouring Frank’s great Poutine, drinking Guinness and talking with friends and listening to the great music that the Tom always seems to book.

I like the Phog for many reasons but the one I like the best, is its nearness to the street, with the big windows right on the side walk. You can be inside but watch the city walk, bike, roller blade, strut, in gaggles, in pairs, shuffling from somewhere to somewhere else, slowly, hastily, strolling, looking in waving, with us on the inside waving back, or paying no mind, or just going on about their lives, in all seasons of this city.

The big windows seem to create mini really short videos, framing those on the street in very short stories that we inside give their lives or suppose of their lives. Spinoza would say Monads of life, as if it is one very long movie film, frame by frame by frame, ever changing, ever moving. A movie without a beginning nor an end.

Well, the evening came to an end for me, when I couldn’t swallow another mouthful of Guinness and the clock was tomorrow already. Time to go home.

Getting home, I decide just to take a quick look at Facebook and see what everyone was up to, when I posted some quick thoughts from the night onto the white of the page.

I wrote these:

City, such a simple word for something so dynamic and complex at the same time.

City, has as many definitions equalling all the individuals living in it.

Sity, a place you like to sit in a city.

I don’t know how Sity came out of me but it describe what I was feeling, that we all have places other than home or work that we like to sit in a city, thus Sity. I don’t know if I created a new word but I like it.

For me the Phog, The Milk, Mick’s Irish Pub all have that in common, a big window right on the street.

So dear friends and readers where is your favourite Sity in this city?

Although it seems that every city in the world is chasing, enticing the Creative Class to live in their city and developing Innovative Centres of Excellence blah, blah, with these people, we still need stuff, someone still has to make it. Although Canada seems to be in the world spotlight right now and our natural resources are soaring, we still lag in the world in manufacturing and productivity, where the real money is made. Kotkin below still thinks that once America gets its act together on energy, it will still be the pre-eminent economy in the world because it will make stuff the world wants.

“..This contempt for production underpinned the decline of Britain as a great power, and could prove disastrous in mid-21st entury America as well. In the America envisioned by the advocates of the “creative economy,” our productive facilities would serve mainly as tourist attractions, much as we now visit restored pioneer villages. ..”

Repost via newgeography.com

THE G-20′S NEW BALANCE OF POWER: THE PRODUCTIVE ECONOMY STILL MATTERS

As world leaders gather in Canada this weekend, the nations with the most influence won’t be the high-tech mavens. Joel Kotkin on why traditional industries still matter in the post-information age.

Are we entering the post-information age?

For much of the last quarter century, conventional wisdom from some of the best minds of our times, like Daniel Bell,Alvin Toffler and Taichi Sakaiya—in both East and West—predicted that power would shift to those countries that dominate the so-called information age. At the time, this was the right call, but it may increasingly be, if you will, old news. Although there’s no question that iPhones and 3-D movies are nifty—and hedge funds generators of massive wealth for investors and operators—we now may actually be entering what might be called the post-information age.

As the ministers gather in Toronto this weekend for the G-20, we can see how overblown the efficacy of a virtual economy might be. The current star players on the field in terms of economic growth and fiscal strength generally derive their power not from information technology, media, or financial savvy but by the mundane but still important basic underpinnings of economic growth: agriculture, manufacturing and energy production.

This is true among both the advanced countries as well as the developing ones. The stars of the West are not the brainy Brits or the entrepreneurial “creative” Americans but places like host Canada and Australia, whose place in the world economy relies heavily on the production of raw materials like uranium, iron ore, oil, timber, grains, fish and beef. Sure, they have some cutting-edge companies, nice (often heavily subsidized) film industries, and lots of smart people (after all, my wife is from Montreal!). But it’s the basics that drive their economies.

So much so that Australia, braced by rising exports to Asia, has been growing well enough to let its interest rates rise, something that is all but unthinkable for the U.S. Fed, at least until the November elections. Due in large part to its commodity-based economy and more enlightened regulation, Canada’s banking system is widely considered the most stable in the advanced industrial world, with a rate of leverage 18 to 1 compared with the U.S.’s 26 to 1 and the EU’s scary 61 to 1. Budget deficits? Hardly an issue. Bank bailouts? Nary one.

The flip side of the Canada-Australia coin are the high-performers who now excel in the field most of our high-tech pundits—starting with Megatrends’ John Naisbitt 20 years ago—generally disdain: manufacturing. Naisbitt called manufacturing “a declining sport” and was roundly applauded by Wall Street and other sources of economic “wisdom.” The most obvious contrary example is China, the modern equivalent of 19th-century Britain’s “workshop of the world.” But other, faster-growing economies among the G-20—Brazil, Turkey, India and South Korea, for example—also are rising fast largely on the back of manufacturers.

None of this suggests that high-tech or information are unimportant. But by their nature industries like software are exceedingly mobile. In contrast, the basics in these rapidly growing economies involve large-scale investment and the presence of the right resources. It’s easier to move software development to Bangalore than soybean production or natural gas.

In any case, it’s not smart to give up the basics—unless perhaps you are Liechtenstein or Monaco—and hope to have enough money left to sustain your drive into high-tech industry. Do you really think that the rising industrial powers have any intention of ceding media, finance, and technology to Americans, Japanese or Europeans? I would not count on it.

History serves as an excellent guide here. Take the example of Great Britain—home of the Industrial Revolution—which should be considered a cautionary tale. In the 19th century and much of the 20th, even though the country depended on manufactured goods for its livelihood, British elite schools, financial institutions, and media all worked against “the needs of industry” to create what historian Martin Wiener has called “two unequal capitalist elites,” the more powerful of which had little interest in, and even disdain for, industrial activities. The “best” talent, and the most social prestige, favored the financial sector over the industrial. Production was particularly looked down upon: it was “the Cinderella of British industry.”

There are also more recent examples supporting the notion that hard work and attention to the basics still matter. In the 1980s, Japanese firms that were widely written off as “copycats” eventually became primary innovators, particularly in automobiles, semiconductors, and computer games. Koreans were often then dismissed by both Americans and Japanese as unimaginative imitators; today South Korea’s electronics and car companies are surging not only in America but across the world. Now they have their gaze fixed on biotechnology and videogames.

In the coming decades Chinese and Indian companies will seek to move from low-wage work to more specialized, and increasingly innovative, kinds of products—in everything from pharmaceuticals to fashion and finance. The enormous profits to be made from less “sexy” activities—ranging from manufacturing to call center and code writing—will provide the funds to invest in both the hard infrastructure and the necessary training to move decisively into ever higher-end activities.

This contempt for production underpinned the decline of Britain as a great power, and could prove disastrous in mid-21st entury America as well. In the America envisioned by the advocates of the “creative economy,” our productive facilities would serve mainly as tourist attractions, much as we now visit restored pioneer villages. The problem is that it may work for a small, highly educated class and some financial managers, but not for the vast majority of Americans.

In reality a more prosperous future is possible, but only if the country focuses both on developing the intellectual prowess of its citizenry and on maintaining the physical infrastructure necessary for key basic sectors like agriculture, energy, and manufacturing. A single-minded emphasis on nontangible industries—notably finance—is a dangerous delusion, as is particularly clear in both the Wall Street disaster of 2008 and the current devastation of the even more finance-dependent British economy and its exchequer.

Fortunately, there is still time for America—still by far the world’s pre-eminent economy—to adjust to the realities of the post-informational economy. We remain the world’s leading agricultural power, and global demand for food, particularly proteins, will soar as the global population expands from six to nine billion by 2050. Many of these people will be more affluent, and provide prime markets for such American exports as soybeans, nuts, fruits, wine, beef, and chicken. Only a small number of Americans may work on farms, but over 10 percent are involved in some way with the marketing, processing, financing and research of agricultural-related activities.

Similarly America can also enjoy the kind of energy-generated wealth that underpins Canada, Australia, and G-20 members Russia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. Our ruinous trade deficit in energy is largely a failure of will, faulty regulation and lack of proper incentives. In the short run, we have ample supplies of relatively clean natural gas—particularly in the Great Plains—as well as significant on-shore oil supplies and a prodigious capacity for renewable energy. In 10 years, with a pragmatic focus on these industries, we might not be an energy exporter but we could be fairly self-sufficient, perhaps only importing from our close Canadian cousins.

At the same time, there is no compelling reason why America needs to abandon industry. Unlike Europe we will have an expanding workforce and growing domestic market. The manufacture of hard goods, which requires a sophisticated infrastructure and is generally energy-intensive, could turn out to be relatively easy to salvage for American workers. Like agriculture, manufacturing directly may employ a relatively small number of people, but many others benefit from the service industries that depend on it. Manufacturers also boost the tech sector; roughly one in four U.S. scientists and engineers work for industry.

Although it may not be obvious to our trendy information-age pundits and their admirers among economic journalists, or perhaps some in the current administration, the U.S. is well-positioned to meet the requirements of the emerging post-information age. If we add our natural resource base and industrial capacity to our prodigious ability to innovate, the U.S. could not only compete against, but out-perform every major country in the G-20. The key now is summoning national and political will to exploit our advantages, assets that America sadly now appears to have in short supply.

This article originally appeared in TheDailyBeast.com.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.