The measure of a great city

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/11/2024 (352 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes, it seems like there’s a huge gap between citizens and their municipal politicians.

The politicians like to think big, arguing that launching and completing major projects is what is most remarkable, is what makes a city great.

To be a “major city,” to be “a world-class city,” they argue, there has to be a “world-class” convention centre. There have to be new multi-million-dollar roads. Sports stadiums must soar. Ribbons must be cut, and photos taken.

But those same politicians seem to forget that, for the ordinary citizen and taxpayer, what makes a great city is the spot where the city and the individual actually meet.

And they don’t meet in a shiny new seat in a new stadium or convention centre, with the citizen settling back into their brand-spanking-new chair and saying, “Wow, look that this place — our city has finally arrived!”

No, for most people, the measure of a great city is how it responds to individual, often small, issues that directly affect its residents.

It’s how a contractor hired by the city lays down a layer of asphalt so deep that a catch basin gets permanently blocked, flooding the same area year after year, and no action at all occurs until the Free Press starts asking questions.

It’s how partially destroyed houses can stand like a decayed tooth for years in otherwise tidy neighbourhoods, creating an overall impression that isn’t at all the true nature of the derelict property’s surroundings.

It’s trying to drive at night in the rain when the city has failed to repaint street lines for an entire season.

It’s when your garbage doesn’t get picked up, and when city contractors and staff seem so out of touch with each other during the summer construction season that roadwork blocks several east-west or north-south routes, apparently without any sort of co-ordination, so that your commute becomes a game of side street whack-a-mole — good today, blocked tomorrow.

It’s cracked and broken tops on catch basins that don’t get fixed for years, offering a scary glimpse of the pit below. Sinkholes on bike paths that linger for months. Flooding in underpasses that occurs year after year because of ice-blocked drains, without effort at solutions.

It’s not the big things. It’s the endless, grinding small things. It’s not the exclamation points — it’s the shrugs.

Citizens want to flush their toilet during a rainstorm, and not imagine that their waste run straight into the river. They want to drive to work without destroying the front end of their car hitting an unavoidable pothole that has grown for weeks with no attention whatsoever. They want to not be abandoned by magically disappearing buses on freezing winter days. They want, if there’s trouble, to call the police and have them come, without warnings that the Winnipeg Police Service is receiving so many calls that police are only responding to calls above a certain level of seriousness. They want splash pads that are open when the weather is hot.

It may not be the stuff of political legacies — probably no retiring politician would say “when I was on council, roadwork was scheduled in the way that least affected the easy flow of traffic.”

But it is crucially important to everyone else.

A great city doesn’t measure itself by the size of its major projects.

It measures itself by its nimbleness of its response to the needs of its citizens. Big things are important — but they don’t outweigh endless, daily frustrations.

Ask anyone who lives here about how nimble they think the city of Winnipeg is.