OurWinnipeg "Call to Action" - a travelogue

Full disclosure: As you can see from my previous post, I was formerly employed by SpeakUpWinnipeg in order to collect qualitative data for the new city plan. I am no longer employed by them and had no role in shaping the plan itself.

Ian Hall sits in front of a table and greets visitors as they enter the hotel conference room. The walls of the room are plastered with pinstripe wallpaper; the carpeting bears a floral print. At the centre of the room is a cornucopia of fruit and cookies. This prosaic atmosphere belies the event’s ambitious purpose. For in this room is the embryonic form of an initiative that will shape the future of Winnipeg for the next 25 years.

“It’s not the Plan,” says Hall, a Policy and Program Planner for the City of Winnipeg, “It’s a milepost on the way to creating a plan.”

Mr. Hall sports a plaid shirt and red hair. He talks excitedly about SpeakUpWinnipeg, the City’s initiative to involve citizens in shaping the city’s long-term plan. This open house, he says, sums up what he has heard from the community over the past few months.

Hall insists that it is possible to build the future of Winnipeg on unanimous consent. “There does seem to be a consensus on the broad ideas here,” he says “and people are really keen to get down to the details.”

The most important issue by raw numbers is Safety. “A lot of that centres around different philosophies of how to create safe communities,” explains Hall. In other words, the old prevention-versus-cure debate.

In elementary school science fair style, cardboard displays of different topics are arranged around the perimeter of the room. Each poster bears a title from a section heading of the OurWinnipeg Call to Action, the document released for public consultation. There are six main posters with each with a title: Sustainability, Safety and Security, City Competitiveness, City Building, Communities, or City of the Arts.

Visitors are encouraged to post sticky notes with their comments on the poster. Sometimes the comments are posted on the wrong poster. One comment on the City of the Arts poster reads “Actually hire people to implement your Climate Change Action Plan. You have nobody.” Other comments are simply confused. “Put [these] actions in plain language so we can understand,” one sticky note begs.

Michelle Peters, Executive Director of the Association of Manitoba Book Publishers, ambles around the room, glancing at the posters, trying to digest the information. This is the second time she has attended a planning consultation. “Tonight seems to be a 3D form of the website,” she observes. Indeed, all of the information in the posters is identical to that on the City’s website. Yet the open house does seem to have more of a human touch. “It’s nice to be able to access people [from the planning department] to ask them questions.”

Walter Schurko certainly intends to take advantage of the open house’s human element. He spends about ten minutes talking about recycling bins with a representative from the City’s Water and Waste department. Schurko, recently retired, believes that it is his responsibility as a citizen and a taxpayer to know where Winnipeg is headed. But he has some misgivings about the draft plan.

“It’s very impressive,” Schurko says, “I take a look at this and say ‘Is this just a dream?’” He doubts that the plan will ever transition from dream to reality because the City continues to increase spending but does not increase taxes. “I’m retired,” he declares, “I’d like to see higher taxes. I’d like to see the city look a helluva lot better than it is now.”

A display in the corner of the room brags about the high citizen participation levels in SpeakUpWinnipeg. Thirty-thousand people have participated in the planning process so far through various media including the website and open houses. These numbers are not apparent in the barely-occupied hotel conference room. Representatives from the City outnumber attendees. The planners spend much of their time talking amongst themselves.

Ian Hall admits that the open houses have only attracted 40 to 50 people every night. “But,” he adds, “the quality of engagement is very high. These people spend a lot of time here and give good feedback.”

The Call to Action can be read its entirety at http://speakupwinnipeg.com/home/call_to_action/

Building cities with children

As part of my job as a city-planning-public-consulter, I decided to engage children at the Winnipeg Children's Festival in the concept of urban planning. After giving the children some plasticine and a paper plate, I asked them to build their ideal neighbourhood or city. While they were building, we talked about all the things necessary for a city to thrive. The day was blustery - the plates were blown away several times - but the children were persistent. Indeed, I observed that the children were much more thoughtful on the subject than many adults

I have recorded each child's explanation of their plasticine cities. You can see all of the photographs with their descriptions in my Plasticine Cities web album.

The Flickering Mind

A book review of mine was recently published at OLPCnews. It is about Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind. Here is an excerpt, followed by a link to the whole review.

About five years ago, Todd Oppenheimer published an extensive critique of the use of computers in North American schools. When I opted to research technology-in-education for a philosophy of education course, his book appeared to be an excellent resource. Having brought the book home, though, I became apprehensive.

Would I be able to read the book without making comparisons with OLPC? Had technology (and schools) changed enough in five years that the observations in the book were no longer valid? Would I really enjoy reading a 400-page book subtitled "saving our children from the false promise of computers?"

I needn't have worried. The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology is extremely readable and, despite the subtitle, not polemical. But spontaneous OLPC comparisons were inevitable.

Read more...

Much more scientific - are you happy now?

You may recall my unscientific attempt to find some correlation between happiness and small cities. I was able to contact the author of the happiness study, John Helliwell, and can now confidently present to you some accurate information on where to live.

Manitoba Vacation: Steinbach Mennonite Heritage Village

For Canada Day, I always like to get out of the city and visit a nearby town or park. This time, I visited the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach. At the turn of the 20th Century, Prime Minister MacDonald allowed a group of Dutch Mennonites, a pacifist Anabaptist sect, to emigrate from Russia (where they were being persecuted) to a rural reserve in Manitoba. They would be granted an exemption from military service and would be allowed to run their own schools (taught in German). The latter promise was broken ten years later.

Some traditional Mennonite foods for sale. But I brought my own food!

The biggest attraction is the Windmill. They actually use it to grind the wheat - which they grow - into flower, which they then bake into bread and sell to visitors. The original mill was a victim of arson a few years back, but has since been rebuilt.

The exterior of the awesome windmill. There wasn't much wind that day.

Inside the mill, the gears eventually connect to a grindstone, which pulverizes the wheat.

They also had some sort of saw mill operating. The saw was attached to a belt, which was attached to the motor of an old tractor. The people working there seemed to be enjoying themselves, cutting the logs and stacking the lumber in criss-cross piles (to allow for quicker drying). I think that the wood is used for repairing the old buildings.

The saw in operation. Not the best photo, I know.


This is the guy who lifts carries the logs to the saw.

As usual, I just walked around and photographed whatever interested me. Here are a few pictures I took:

A textbook inside the (English) government-run school. They packed a surpising amount of literature in there. Notice the hole in the desk for an inkwell.


There was a huge display of farm equipment. No, I don't remember what each one does.

A tractor up close.

Inside one of the houses.

The News: Condensed

This word collage is a statistical representation of words appearing on the Top Stories from CBC News. The more frequent the word, the bigger it appears. It was created using Wordle.

Interestingly, the word "million" was the most frequent. It is bizarre that we encounter this word so often but have little understanding of what it actually means.

Highly unsicentific...

Just for fun, here is some graphical analysis using the data from this news item. Take it with a grain of salt.


Edit: The graph has been upgraded with the correct population for St. John's , which actually improves the coefficient of determination.