Top Six about the Rock -- Part One

I'm back from Newfoundland (just in time for cankerworm season... way to welcome me home, Regina) and despite the weather being pretty awful the whole time we were there, I had a great time.

Now I must confess, I'm biased. I've wanted to go to Newfoundland for, basically, ever. I don't know if I could live there -- it's waaaaay too far from friends and family, for one --- but boy-howdy did I ever frickin' love it.

And as awesome and stunning as it was to see the ocean again and scramble about rocks and hills, it was St John's that really left an impression. I think all these city hall meetings and downtown plan sessions are starting to get to me.

With that in mind, here are my Top Six Things Regina Should Import From St John’s NFLD....

1. COLOUR: Seems here, whenever a new house goes up, it gets painted beige. Oh, they’ll tell you its Sandalwood or Wheatsheaf. Khaki, Oatmeal, Buff or Miami Sand. Café au Lait. They’re lying to you. It’s beige. Which is really just brown washed out to the point where even the brown almost disappears. And you know how they make brown, don’t you? They mix the sludge left over from all the good colours.

Beige is the garbage colour. It’s pandering neutrality. They paint houses beige because they say it’s the best way to maintain property value. A prospective buyer sees it and there’s no risk they’ll see a colour they don’t like. They see... no colour. A non-colour. It’s the shade of the lowest common denominator. And while each individual house, by not standing out in any way, may benefit from being beige, as a city we are reduced by beige. We are brought low by it.

St John’s is not beige. Not within the downtown and a few neighbourhoods out, at least. I don't know what they're doing bylaw-wise to enforce it, but even new condos going up near the core are painted in vibrant hues.

For pedestrians, it means you get to walk through streets textured by warm and cool shades. It makes residential neighbourhoods more interesting to wander through. And as a result, even very simple, plain architecture -- a wooden box with a peaked roof, say -- becomes part of the tourist attraction that's downtown St John's.

I wasn't the only person taking pictures of row houses.

(Cathedral, for the record, if you ignore the infill housing, is similarly not beige. It's part of the reason I chose to live here. And the reason the streets of Cathedral are regularly featured in those glossy brochures promoting Regina to tourists. We need more neighbourhoods like Cathedral is all I'm saying.)

I've heard the reason St John's is so brightly hued is because the fishermen would come home tired of the drab colours of the Atlantic and paint up their houses in cheerful colours.

Regina is on the prairies for christssake. You'd think we'd be sick to death of beige. And you'd think the last thing we'd want to do is camouflage our city so it'd blend into the grasses.

Okaaaay....

Seems my hatred of beige got a little out of hand there. Sorry about that. I need a breather now. And this post is long enough. I'll finish up items two through six later.

THE ARCHITECTS ARE HERE

I have always said that when the College buildings go, so do I. One sniff of a wrecking ball and I am out of here and never coming back. I mean it.

It was distressing to hear almost the same thing coming from Dakota McFadzean at last night’s Regina Public School Board meeting during his presentation about the coming demise of Scott Collegiate. I didn’t know that Regina’s continual self-destruction depressed other people to the point they start thinking of packing up and moving on, but of course I can't be the only one. Each building that is destroyed is one closer to the limit of what I can stand, not just for the architecture itself, but for the unthinking motivation behind it.

One of the statements that seemed to stick in the Scott supporters' craw yesterday was RBE member Russ Marchuk’s pithy statement “If the horse dies, get off,” in reference to Scott’s supposed failure to support its students architecturally.

I can’t help but think about the hundreds of slum houses around the Scott facility – each a tiny marvel of architecture in its day – that have been used to pump money out of North Central residents and into slumlords’ pockets for decades, with the complicity – if not the outright blessing – of policy makers in every level of government.

Who knew it was all architecture’s fault? Thank goodness the architects are going to come and fix it for us. So glad that's sorted.

Maybe we needed to have the dead horse image planted in our heads whether we want to see it or not. If that’s how the school board sees its buildings, we’re better off knowing.

How do we communicate back to our representatives that the horse isn’t a building, a learning model, or even a school board, but the city itself? Who sees us as we step off and walk away?

NB: One of my recent favorite books is Michael Winter’s The Architects Are Here. The title of the book is fictional shorthand for a kind of impersonal, lurking force of doom, like accidents, distruction, and poverty.

Walking to School: A Radical, Dangerous Idea

I kicked off a really glorious Wednesday of wandering around the city at 8:30 this morning by taking my daughter out to join the Walking Schoolbus.

The event was put together by Carla Beck and others through the Real Renewal group. It was a dry run at something they're hoping will take off this September. Basically, the idea is that kids will get together in the morning with some chaperons and walk to school together, gathering more and more kids along the way. Going to school in a big group is a way to mitigate all those nasty parts of walking there that parents fret over -- cars being the primary threat.

And, there are other benefits, like keeping kids active and fostering a local community. Plus, it can reduce the number of cars needed to shuttle students to and from school.

The kickoff event this morning was a big success. Over 70 kids and parents showed up to make the trek from the Holy Rosary playground to Connaught school. And some of the local media made it out too. Didn't hurt that it was just about perfect weather for it.

You'd think this would be the kind of progressive, feel-good, cost-them-nothing kind of idea our public school board would be getting behind. Promoting even.

Sadly, no.

According to Beck, she was advised that for "liability issues" Regina Public Schools could not get behind or promote the Walking Schoolbus.

In fact, Beck mentioned that she was contacted on Monday by Regina Public Schools director, Don Holum. In what she described as a cordial conversation, he told her how he supported the "idea" of kids walking to school but that so much has changed in the last 50 years that he couldn't support the Walking Schoolbus. He cautioned her about liability issues and suggested that she didn't know what she was opening herself up to liabilitywise.

Beck counters by pointing out that the Walking Schoolbus is hardly a radical idea.

"I didn't make this up," she says. "It's well established around the world."

She notes that organizations across Canada are supporting Walking Schoolbuses in their communities. Organizations such as Safe Kids Canada, the government of Manitoba and the city of Saskatoon.

Of course, one has to wonder if there isn't more to RPS's opposition to the Walking Schoolbus than mere concern for student safety on the wild and wooly streets of Cathedral. The event was organized through Real Renewal, afterall. They're the group organizing against the school board's 10 year plan. And RPS are noted boosters of that 10-year plan.

I asked Carla Beck if the Walking Schoolbus was something of a polite protest against the plan. She replied, "It is."

While she notes it's an idea she's been intrigued by for years (and she thinks she first read about it in Today's Parent magazine), she says, "What solidified the need in my mind to start [a Walking Schoolbus] here as a broader movement was what I heard around the board’s 10-year plan and community response to it."

She says that her children go to Connaught School where they're enrolled in French immersion. if the board's plan comes to fruition, they'll be bused to Massey, a forty minute ride.

And, she notes, the goal of the plan is that at the end of its 10 years, 46 per cent of elementary school kids will be bused to school.

It's an alarming idea if you're one of those people like me who believes in the considerable benefits of walkable communities. And thanks to legitimate concerns over global warming, energy scarcity and peak oil, making communities more walkable is a cornerstone of most city and neighbourhood plans these days. (Take our own Downtown and Core Neighbourhood Plans for instance.)

Keeping schools small, numerous and one of the central features of communities is essential to making neighbourhoods pedestrian friendly.

It's a no brainer, then, that building a school plan around the idea of shipping kids out of their communities is short-sighted and half-baked.

But the public school board seems hell-bent on getting their 10-year plan through. No big surprise then that they wouldn't be big fans of the Walking Schoolbus. As one parent I was speaking to during the walk pointed out, if you have a bunch of people organizing around the idea of walking their kids to school and then you try to get rid of their school, you have a group of people already mobilized against you.

"It was trippy," says Beck, "at last night's Scott [Collegiate] meeting, [Trustee] Russ Marchuk was saying if the horse is dead get off. Well, excepting [Trustee and prairie dog columnist] John Conway, the dead horse they’re riding is not the small school model it's this 10-year plan."

"I think the only way to stop them," she concludes, "is to change the board."

And October 28, Regina will get a chance to do just that.