WINDSOR, ONT. -- The welcome signs at the city limits identify Windsor, Ont., as the "Automotive Capital of Canada," so it's no surprise that the auto industry's recent struggles have meant hard times for the city.
The announcement in early February of the closing of an auto-parts plant jointly operated by Ford Motor Co. of Canada Ltd. and Nemak of Canada Corp. shed 600 more jobs from a municipality with an unemployment rate of 8.7 per cent (the second highest in urban Canada); Ford alone has cut 3,600 jobs from its Windsor work force since the fall of 2005.
Meanwhile, the response from the city's civic leaders and its allies in the Ontario government has been to embrace business as usual.
City Council has rezoned land on the suburban fringe for another big-box retail development, putting the promise of 1,500 new jobs ahead of its rhetorical commitment to inner-city revitalization.
And Queen's Park has ponied up $17-million out of the Ontario Automotive Investment Strategy - a fund dedicated to investment in new, "green" automotive technologies - to help Ford reopen an assembly plant in Windsor that will employ 300 autoworkers to build more-efficient V-8 engines.
Such stop-gap measures, however, utterly fail to acknowledge the fundamental crisis Windsor is in. A city built almost exclusively by and for the premier transportation method of the 20th century now faces the 21st century's core socio-economic challenge: the urgent need to move beyond an automobile-centred, gasoline-driven way of life.
Stuck in an outmoded American car with a sputtering engine, Windsor can either continue along familiar expressways until it runs out of gas for good, or it can try to find some other way to get by - on a new, sustainable path. Its salvation, in anything but the short term, will rely on the city's ability to reinvent itself completely.
If this thorny truth is rarely acknowledged at City Hall, it has been fully embraced by an increasingly influential website called Scaledown Windsor, launched in February by prominent downtown restaurateur Mark Boscariol and laid-off Ford worker Chris Holt. Initially hatched as Mr. Holt's personal blog several months earlier, Scaledown is based on the dissident premise that Windsor's status quo is headed nowhere fast.
"It's definitely no way to plan for the future," Mr. Holt says of Ford's V-8 plant. "I look at it sort of like a methadone treatment for a city that's addicted to a huge amount of money from the automotive industry. It's not going to save my job."
Mr. Holt is, on the surface, an unlikely dissenter: He's a single father of two and a fourth-generation autoworker; his great-grandfather was hired off the street in 1914 to work in Henry Ford's very first Windsor plant.
Before the calls of family and job security lured him back to Windsor, however, Mr. Holt had studied urban design at Fanshawe College in London, Ont. There, he had awakened to the wisdom and durability of mixed-use development and walkable-neighbourhood planning.
When Mr. Holt talks about Windsor's salvation, he makes no mention of the assembly line at Ford. He looks instead to a gaping 20-hectare expanse of vacant lots and parkade pavement in the downtown core called City Centre West, a derelict district that has languished in an urban-renewal stasis of big ideas and bureaucratic bungling since it was annexed by the city in 1990 with the intent (since abandoned) to build a hockey arena there.
In 2006, City Hall endorsed a plan, whose champions included Scaledown co-proprietor Mark Boscariol in his role as president of the Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Association, to turn it into a mixed-use "urban village" - a New Urbanist design built to human scale. The plan contrasts starkly with the megaprojects - a $400-million convention and resort complex currently being fused to the mammoth downtown casino, for example - traditionally favoured by the city's leaders.
The City Centre West project is a prime example of the regenerative, human-scale urban design beloved by Scaledown's coterie of contributors - a "flagship model," as Mr. Holt puts it, for the city's rebirth as a knowledge-economy player. "I don't see that project in and of itself saving Windsor," he explains. "But what I do see it as is maybe sort of the crack in the dike - the glimmer of something different."
Mr. Holt's endorsement is particularly impressive given how handsomely he profited from business as usual in Windsor, drawing a six-figure Ford income as a tool-and-die maker until he was laid off last November. In a city where success has always been counted in auto-industry paycheques, it's understandable that the overwhelming majority of his former co-workers still look to those 300 new positions at Ford's revamped V-8 plant for salvation.
