Hamilton can become the city of the future if we can bravely face the reality of the future.
By Trevor Shaw
Apr. 30, 2008
Back in 2004, when our meetings and email discussions turned into the website you're reading today, one of main topics of discussion as it related to the City of Hamilton was energy.
Even four years ago, the evidence of peak oil was not as obscure as you may think. There were many books and energy experts warning the world that the current situation and consumption was not sustainable and very nearing a crisis situation.
The mainstream media and the status quo supporters did everything possible to ignore the subject, but the internet - the best thing to happen to democracy since Pericles - contained a wealth of information and a variety of studies from petroleum experts.
Raise the Hammer was born in part from the imminent Peak Oil crisis and the necessary paradigm shift in living and city planning to mitigate the crisis. The City of Hamilton was 'planning' for a future based on cheap oil/gasoline and to some extent still is.
Almost four years have passed and the denial of an energy crisis is still steering the city planning, even with surmounting evidence of present a $120 barrel of oil.
The City of Hamilton still believes that box retail centres with supply chains and business models based on cheap oil will be the employment opportunities that keep the next generation in the City.
Employment land use in Hamilton: new box-store near the Red Hill Expressway.
Much of the status quo denial is finding blame in anything but the obvious - supply not keeping up with demand.
The deniers chose to lay blame in an area of the world that is experiencing 'turmoil', as if the Middle East and Nigeria were ever 'stable' in the 20th century and striking workers in Scotland apparently is a new phenomenon.
Or they point blame to speculators who are driving up the cost of oil, as if capitalism didn't exist in the 20th century.
Or they claim that the tax on gasoline is too high and needs to be lowered to make sure we can continue our lifestyles of happy-motoring in our car-dependent cities.
Any gas-tax cuts will have to made up somewhere else. The best place for taxing gasoline is at the pumps as a user fee, and not another subsidy for automobiles by taxing everyone - including people who don't drive.
I'm afraid that the 'good old days' of $0.39/L or even $0.89/L will not return. No, it will more likely be a return to even older 'good old days' of the milkman, streetcars and walking.
Circa 1935: A milkman chats with a father holding a baby, as he leaves the daily quota of milk on the doorstep. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)
Ironically, it is the staunchest free-market advocates who are in favour of socialist-style regulations and who lay blame at the oil companies for making too much profit in a capitalist society.
It's time to make the necessary changes to our city now, changes that will include creating higher density, walkable, and mixed-use neighbourhoods (something that is illegal given the City's current building by-laws), light rail transit, and an immediate stop on City boundary expansions and greenfield development.
The City's current layout still has plenty of room to grow upward and inward for many generations. Just visit a European city to see how much further we can intensify Hamilton, resulting in a city that is more livable. Former industrial and underused 'brownfields' are an opportunity, not a blight, for Hamilton to reinvent itself.
Hamilton can become the city of the future if we can bravely face the reality of the future. If we were brave enough to have started planning for this crisis ten years ago, the pain of the adjustment would have been less painful and the paradigm shift more gradual.
Instead, the world's population risks being stampeded off a cliff like the American Bison hunts due to our shortsighted planning. The food-crisis is a domino from the Peak Oil reality and even now mainstream media was quick to say that it won't affect 'us'.
The truth is, this is how things start. They start small and almost seem insignificant until we are over the cliff and wondering what to do next.
By cjwirth
Posted 5/1/2008 9:29:50 AM
This is an excellent article. All governments are ignoring Peak Oil, and they are planning for an ample energy future that does not exist. My report is designed to convince local governments that catastrophe looms, and that most of the problems of Peak Oil will eventually fall on the shoulders of local government. See the 40 page report at Peak Oil Associates. I specialize in informing governments, as I was director of the Master of Public Administration program at the University of New Hampshire for many years and I am now "retired," working and specializing in Peak Oil. I am very convincing about the reality of Peak Oil impacts. It is hard to escape the reports of scientific and government studies.
By shastatodd
Posted 5/1/2008 11:16:00 AM
Here is a simple fact:
Unlimited growth cannot happen on a finite planet.
We are bumping up against those limits now and having overextended the earth's carrying capacity with cheap energy one wonders what will happen to all those people now that we are facing resource decline. This will likely not be pretty.
By flaver flave
Posted 5/1/2008 11:36:53 AM
i just wanna know why can't the govament just take away all cars and give us hybrid cars they got the power to do that booooiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
By Bada Bing
Posted 5/7/2008 3:51:39 AM
Trevor, that new box store near the Red Hill was a contaminated brownfield before Lowes spend hundreds of millions to locate there. So, don't criticize it. you should applaud it but youre skewed thinking has you criticize every good thing that is happening in this city.
The only thing that is wworse than planning over a hill is exaggerating over the top!
By Bill
Posted 5/7/2008 8:59:34 PM
“that new box store near the Red Hill was a contaminated brownfield”
That new box store is not a box store. It is a “JYSK” store. The 23,000 square feet store located at the Parkway Plaza - 200 Centennial Pkwy at Centenial and Barton. Other major retailers in this shopping plaza are Future Shop and Food Basics. It is where a White Rose store was until they went out of business. It is not a big store compaired to other stores. It has displays all through the store and stuff on the sheives just like any other stores.
By jason
Posted 5/8/2008 9:57:01 PM
sounds great.
now, hopefully my kids will be able to stay in Hamilton when they are older and work at Lowe's or JYSK.
Thank goodness for all that new employment land.
By Ted Mitchell
Posted 5/9/2008 11:23:53 AM
Can somebody pu-leeze put up some pie-chart stats about how much of a consumer dollar spent stays in the community (and country) by development type? Mom and pop coffee shop vs. chain store, local lumbar yard vs. home despot, etc?
This may reveal the solid arguments and the empty ideology.
Without this info, all I hear is static.
I think we dropped the ball on better communication, and - and we certainly would, um, do that a lot differently in the future." -- Tim McCabe, director of planning and economic development for the city of Hamilton, on the city's handling of the collapse and subsequent demolition of the Balfour Building on King William St.
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History Repeats: Public Subsidy for Property Development in Hamilton (May. 1, 2008) - History repeats. In Thir Town: The Mafia, the Media and the Party Machine, the seminal 1979 book on Hamilton Politics by Bill Freeman and Marsha Hewitt, a segment on page 24 sounds like it could h
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Happy Windsday (Apr. 30, 2008) - About a year and a half ago, Raise the Hammer wrote about a planned project to construct giant floating wind turbines offshore that can be towed into place to take advantage of the sustained winds
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By WRCU2 | http://wrcu2.static.golden.net/
Posted 5/1/2008 8:22:05 AM
Excellent write Trevor and great supporting images! You mention (of Peak Oil) that the mainstream media "did everything possible to ignore the subject" and "was quick to say that it won't affect 'us'." And that the food-crisis is "a domino from the Peak Oil reality."
Now what of the other dominoes lined-up in nice neat rose? Are they too thorny I suppose?
Massive mainstream media has an agenda to form, rather than to inform the public. The mainstream news has a chloroform affect and as a result, what's now appearing through the haze, is the more uniform shaped maize of things to come.
It is up to folks like us to reform the shape of that gloomy specter and convince people they're not just seeing a ghost. Doom is a very real apparition we will face as a city if we don't act now.
But there are many hurdles to overcome as status Quo is won of them. Business as usual must be maintained and the mainstream masters that men. We cannot move the hands which place the dominoes down hard but we can shove them aside or shore them up guard.
Food and our waters and our good attitudes
These we protect with our fond platitudes
No matter how many key words there fuse clues
Honorable sirs and respectable ma'ams
Lister carefully of alternative plans
Tell four friends when shaking their hands
We're to build here a cosm of grandeur not small
Not mini, eeny-meany nor remotely micro at all
It macro defacto depends we won't fall
Please don't uninstall!
The bees make us honey
Recollect as in money
Pride as horse ride
Stakes are tall!
Only a chump
Would jump
Y'all
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