Place, Health, and Diversity by Melissa D. Giesbrecht Valorie A. Crooks

Author:Melissa D. Giesbrecht, Valorie A. Crooks [Melissa D. Giesbrecht, Valorie A. Crooks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367668327
Google: K3qvzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-09-30T05:10:03+00:00

Figure 7.1Distribution of socioeconomic status in the Winnipeg census metropolitan area (darker shading represents higher combined deprivation) Note: Combined (material and social) component of the INSPQ Deprivation Index at the dissemination area level.

Source: Canadian Institutes of Health Information, 2010, reproduced with permission

Such maps might appear intuitive to anyone who has had the opportunity to observe Winnipeg’s built environment, revealing a particular “truth” about the city in a simple and effective representation of its sociospatial gradient. When visualized in conjunction with outcome measures such as education, crime, or health, a wide number of population-based inequalities are confirmed.

These visualization techniques have provided important insights for practitioners and policymakers of many stripes (e.g. planning, public health, community development), to build cases and formulate strategies to resolve such problems. In Winnipeg, the problematization of the urban “Core Area” has been a long-standing rationale for large-scale social and health-related policy interventions, aided in previous instances by analogous analytic and mapping techniques which have served innumerable policy interests from policing to primary health care and poverty reduction in the city. In the most emblematic of these, beginning in the late 1970s, a long-term research initiative known as the Winnipeg Area Characterization Study (Department of Environmental Planning, 1978) undertook a project aiming to construct and map the city according to area-based typologies similarly produced from census data, which resulted in the identification of a highly deprived Core Area in the heart of the city.

In the hands of influential inner-city advocates, the statistical identification, mapping, and characterization of the Core Area would have a major influence in making the case for Canada’s largest scale investment in area-based planning, called the Core Area Initiative (CAI). The CAI was the country’s first tripartite (federal, provincial, and municipal) agreement aimed squarely at addressing persistent urban decline and its concomitant social problems. Beginning in 1981 and renewed in 1987, the CAI directed a total of C$196 million in public finance into the priority neighborhoods identified in the Area Characterization Study (otherwise known as the Core Area). Over the ensuing decade, investments were made in innumerable social and physical infrastructure projects, all ostensibly aimed at addressing poverty while simultaneously revitalizing the urban core. While the CAI did support many community-based organizations which have provided significant support to burgeoning low-income, immigrant, and Indigenous populations that (mainly at the time) had previously received little to no aid, since then the overall program has been deemed by many to be a failure insofar as achieving its original ambitions. Decades later, numerous legacy infrastructure projects in tourism and retail remain potent symbols of the shortcomings of this massive urban experiment, demonstrating the fallacy of a political imperative that claimed to mitigate social problems, but largely intervened in ways that emphasized municipal economic growth via “bricks and mortar” rehabilitation (Silver and Toews, 2009). Even the CAI’s original visionary and lead orchestrator, Lloyd Axworthy (Member of Parliament and Minister of Employment and Immigration at the time that the CAI was launched), was able to “read the tealeaves” halfway through the

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