exemplary.
New investment has followed Wilfrid Laurier into the downtown, the vibrant presence of students has rejuvenated a once sad place, and a wider audience of citizens and public authorities have been instilled with a sense that good things can happen with the right vision. These benefits have followed the University’s bold commitment to what Leo Groarke calls “a new kind of economy.” It is one no longer dependent on sprawl and short-term retail big-box models either outside of the old town or in its downtown.
Brantford has become a poster child for the magic of restorative development.
William Humber
Leader of Seneca College’s outreach in urban sustainability and regional renewal
Toronto, Canada.
On June 7, 2008, the City of Brantford celebrated the death of its downtown. The funeral featured brightly coloured carriages, bicycles, and costumes. It proceeded down Colborne South, the city’s original main street, and came to a stop at a new public square that was christened Harmony Square. In the funeral that followed, representatives of the city, a new university campus, the arts community, and downtown churches blessed, eulogized, and toasted the old downtown. In a daring move the health authorities had not approved, the toast featured untreated water taken from the Grand River two blocks away. A fifteen-piece New Orleans jazz band provided music for the event.
The funeral celebrated the death, but also the rebirth, of downtown Brantford. It was organized and orchestrated by the Brantford Arts Block, a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to the role of culture in the new downtown. Its executive director, Josh Bean, one of the founders of a nationally recognized music venue called The Ford Plant, served as chair of the city’s Downtown Business Improvement Association. “If celebrating a rebirth,” he told the press, “then there should also be a funeral.”1
To anyone who lived in Brantford, the funeral symbolized the end of a downtown mired at the bottom of a downward spiral. Over the course of thirty years, an ailing economy, the flight of residents to the suburbs, and failed attempts at urban renewal had reduced a once-grand city centre to a bleak caricature of its former self. In an article in the Toronto Star, Brantford’s mayor, Chris Friel, described the downtown core as “the worst downtown in Canada.” No one liked the article but no one disagreed. At a time when the downtown included block after block of squalid boarded-up buildings, it was difficult to argue with this description. Scattered among them one could find once-grand edifices that had fallen on hard times. Like the ruins of some former civilization, their forlorn demeanor gave locals little to look forward to and even less to celebrate.
A decade is a short span in the life of a city. Ten years might seem of little consequence to a city that owes its existence to the American Revolution but it only took a decade for Brantford’s collapsed downtown to take the steps that allowed the city to celebrate its death and its rebirth. The crux of the story was a new presence in an old city. The new arrival was a campus of Wilfrid Laurier University. This book recounts how, in the face of many odds, the campus developed, and what impact this had on the city that embraced it. Building on a rich heritage, the city and the university found a way to negotiate the adverse elements of a derelict city core, the collapse of Brantford’s once-booming industrial economy, limited public funding, political debate, skepticism, and apathy. In doing so, they midwifed the new campus into being and created the tonic that Brantford needed to produce a more confident, reinvigorated downtown.
A “funeral” to celebrate the demise of Brantford’s old downtown was celebrated in June 2008. Here Tim Southern paints the coffin for the old downtown above a headline from The Expositor.Photo by Heather King.
The main events in the founding of Laurier Brantford, and the re-emergence of the downtown the campus embraced, incorporate two stories within one. The first tells of the founding of a new university campus and the way in which it managed, after a shaky and uncertain start, to find a way to thrive, prosper, and sustain itself. The second tells of the rise and fall of downtown Brantford and the way in which an experiment in higher education is bringing a city back to life. The one story feeds the other.
The protagonists and antagonists in this history are many and varied. They include a struggling city, a once proud but then derelict heritage downtown, and a small university with entrepreneurial administrators. Both the university and the city could already claim impressive histories, a myriad of leaders and would-be leaders, and critics and supporters. Mayors, city councillors, heritage advocates, journalists, community leaders, supporters and skeptics, professors, deans, students, vice-presidents, and presidents all played a decisive role in the developments, which were characterized by many false starts, outspoken differences of opinion that were manifest in politics in the city and the university, and frequent conflict and debate. However it may appear in hindsight, the path forward was never simple or straightforward.
The Brantford story is a new strand in the histories of both Brantford and Laurier. But it has a broader significance. For the changes in downtown Brantford have taken place at a time when countless North American downtowns — from Savannah to Vancouver, from Calgary to Dayton — are struggling with the same issues. As Pierre Filion, Heidi Hoernig, Trudi Bunting, and Gary Sands have written in a study of small cities, “Everywhere in North America, suburbanization has caused a relative and, in many cases, absolute decline of downtown areas. The effect on the downtowns of small metropolitan regions (small-metro downtowns) has been particularly severe …”2 Across North America, downtowns that were historically important centres of civic and public life have faltered, declined, and been deserted during the second half of the twentieth century. The families that resided downtown have moved to suburbia, retail businesses have moved to suburban shopping malls, and industries and warehouses have been closed or moved to major highways on the edge of town (or, further afield, to countries like Mexico and China).
What happened in Brantford is a case study that illustrates these trends. As a city, it emerged as an internationally important centre of manufacturing at the end of the nineteenth century, boasting a proud history of invention and innovation. Most famously, that history incorporated Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone. At the centre of “The Telephone City” was a bustling downtown that featured mercantile businesses, factories, banks, parks, theatres, courts, social clubs and fraternal societies, monuments, public buildings, and churches. Brantford’s wealth and significance was evident in superior examples of the best that Victorian architecture and design had to offer.
The collapse of Brantford’s city centre is but one instance of the decline of downtowns across Canada and the United States, a decline that has been decried by many commentators troubled by the fate of their own downtowns. “A case in point is Tampa, whose central business district has thus far resisted every effort at revitalization. Speaking in 1992, a year after Maas Brothers, downtown Tampa’s last department store, closed its doors, City Councilman Scott Paine declared, ‘You will not have a great city unless you have a strong, vibrant downtown.’”3 Other commentators have taken a different perspective, dismissing the downtown as “obsolete” — “a late-nineteenth-century creation that has no role in the late twentieth, a bad place to work, a worse place to live.”4 The latter view is evident in the lives of a perpetually increasing number of city dwellers who live their lives with little or no connection to their downtown, treating it as a place to be avoided.
The sorry state of the contemporary downtown has attracted much pious criticism. It is easy to lament streets of deserted, crumbling buildings that are home to poverty and crime. The lamenting seems all the more appropriate
