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22 May 08

» Book Review: Urban Nation, by Alan Broadbent • Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape

Book review of Alan Broadbent's Urban Nation, by Spacing's Dylan Reid. From May 2/08 (missed this when it came out).

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With the publication of his book Urban Nation, Broadbent is stepping our from behind the scenes into the limelight. The book succinctly summarizes his thinking about the role and challenges of cities in Canada, developed over years of discussion with experts, advocates, and politicians.
The essential premise of the book is that, as the title indicates, Canada has become an urban nation, but our self-image and our government structures have not yet caught up to this new reality. Broadbent traces the transformation of our nation from a largely rural one into an urban one, with almost 80% of the population living in cities, over the course of the 20th century.
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- Particularly interesting is his distinction between two phases of urbanization. With industrialization in the mid-20th century, all cities expanded rapidly, both large and mid-sized. From the 1980s, however, he shows that urbanization has been concentrated in the largest cities, especially Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. He argues that they are becoming a new kind of city in Canada, with distinctive needs, and require new powers and a new way of thinking if they are to sustain their leading role in Canada’s economy. These are the cities he focuses on (he fluctuates between the cities themselves and their larger metropolitan area, depending on the issue).
- Broadbent shows the shortcomings of the current model of large-city municipal governance, in which cities of millions of people, with complex social and infrastructure needs, are governed according to rules set out in 1867 when Canada’s largest cities were little more than towns. While there are many individual problems, such as revenue sources restricted to property taxes and fees, the crucial problem is that cities are entirely dependent on provincial governments for permission to do anything new in any field of activity.
- This situation makes it impossible for Canadian cities to develop coherent, long-term programs and infrastructure to deal with the challenges faced by jurisdictions with millions of residents and billions of dollars of economic activity, because funding and powers can be arbitrarily changed or removed at any moment. The various current programs and proposals to “share” federal and provincial revenues (gas taxes, 1% of GST) are not much use because they can be taken away at any time, wrecking whatever programs were dependent on them. Broadbent argues
  
  Control of destiny is at the heart of the new deal for cities. Cities need to be able to have a vision of their future, to create a credible plan to get there, and to implement the policies and programs that make that future vision a reality. (76)
- But his most spectacular proposal is that the three major cities should get province-like powers, or even become provinces.
- One possibility Broadbent does not really examine in detail is the intermediate idea that cities could get more complete power over those areas of jurisdiction they are currently assigned, becoming genuinely autonomous municipal governments. What if cities had the power to assess any kind of user fee within their boundaries, such as congestion charges, without referring to the province? What if cities could develop their own system to assess properties for taxation, or to organize their government structure?
- People worry that cities would make mistakes, but, as Broadbent notes in a key passage:
  
  The practice of provincial and federal governments treating city governments like children tends to make them act like children. And anyone who has raised children knows that they become responsible people by being given responsibility. (77)
  
  It’s time that big city governments were allowed to take full responsibility for managing municipal issues as they wish, with all the risks and possibilities that entails.
- Ironically, Broadbent unwittingly provides the answer himself in his own exploration of the importance of big cities. He notes that big cities are where people go to get the best jobs, where the economy is directed from and managed. While big cities may be emasculated politically, in economic terms they are dominant — more so than at any time in the past. This fact is crucial to understanding why big cities get no sympathy. Such dominance inevitably creates resentment and resistance from the rest of the nation.

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