A good New Year and hello.
I’m Gene Miller and I’ll be writing a weekly column here for the foreseeable future, which these days seems a bit less foreseeable or, well, panoramic.
I thought I would introduce myself.
I was born Aug. 2, 1943, at Woman’s Hospital on 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.
My mother told me that she could hardly hear my birth wails for the screaming on the streets during Harlem’s worst racial riot.
I grew up and perfected all of my bad habits in New York City; went adventuring on the freight trains, Woodie Guthrie ballads buzzing in my head (This Land Is Your Land); crossed the border at Blaine (“Just visiting”); spent a season working at the Nelson Bros. salmon cannery in Prince Rupert (very manly … for a season); drifted to Vancouver at season’s close; and, at the advice of a beer buddy, ferried to Victoria in the bright October 1970 sunshine. “It’s a little bit of Olde England,” he promised.
This land was my land.
In more than five decades here — my entire adulthood — I have used a small talent for creating cultural institutions including Open Space, Monday Magazine, the First Urban Conference, the Gaining Ground Urban Sustainability Conferences, Affordable Sustainable Homes (finally, a completed project on Richardson just east of Linden) and the Centre for the Design of the Future, and for writing.
I was given the years-long gift of a monthly writing slot by Leslie Campbell in her wonderful FOCUS Magazine (RIP). The column gave me a chance to explore with the reader Victoria’s physical and cultural terrain, its personalities and its singularities — notably, what I then legitimately called its “genius for inertia.”
In the interval between FOCUS and this column, nothing has waited and inertia’s more history than fact around here.
I can sum up the blanketing theme of this column in one word: community.
This won’t exclude several other topics, but all of my reading, current personal writing and communication with friends and colleagues convinces me that some long-accelerating social trends have eroded and seriously damaged the ability of people to find common cause, to make connections around the “project” of community.
David Brooks of the New York Times and The Atlantic cites troubling statistics about peoples’ diminished friendships and spreading outright loneliness.
Social reflexes and signalling, social conventions and institutions, including a shared history, that used to make this project easy or easier have, in my view, been critically weakened, scrambled.
I sense we — all of us — are caught up, right now, in a history book-scale change in conditions, an eruption, from the organic and remembered to the synthetic and algorithmic.
In a transformation of such a magnitude, nothing in society and personal identity will remain unchanged. Existential times, yes? Exciting! Scary!
Consider: Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “three godfathers” of AI (and a Canadian), can be heard in several YouTube videos discussing the, in his view, very real risk that AI will overwhelm humanity — essentially, enact the next evolutionary event— in 20 or so years.
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, shares his view. Well, that’s comforting! Means you have time to repaint the living room in that lovely warm grey.
Related to ideas of community, I’m very interested in how a place forms and sustains its identity: architecture, public realm design, public engagement in projects, public spending and social investment plans — really, how it sees itself and its future.
I have a particular interest in the state of and prospects for downtown Victoria. Ever the master of understatement, I note that these are challenging times for downtown, and worry that it has, in some significant ways, outlived its utility.
Here’s some park bench archives: In the early 70s, Humphrey was the town drunk. That’s how small, how familial, the city was back then.
He’d stumble up the steps of the subterranean Churchill pub onto Government Street and just yell a lot — a harm to nobody but himself at the curb edge.
That Victoria cannot be re-found. Small and parochial are gone, lost to technological urgency and highrises, aggressive (predatory, some say) development and defensive neighbourhoods.
For drama’s sake, I steal a line from elsewhere and call the place “a profoundly imperfect experiment in community.”
Let’s share it on these pages.
