The Comeback by John Ralston Saul

Author:John Ralston Saul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

Housing, housing, housing. One crisis after another. I have seen a lot of those houses. They are sometimes better than they used to be. But even then they are usually southern suburban models minimally adapted for very different conditions. Many are no more than wood rectangles that wouldn’t pass for starter cottages. And where is the idea of community in the planning? What are the sources of the contracts and contractors that produce these buildings? What I hear again and again is that the central problem lies with the impenetrable bureaucracy of Indian Affairs and its long established “culture” of treating reserves as temporary internment camps.

Is anyone developing models that have something to do with the place? Yes, here and there. But not often.

Let me give a small example of the problem. In a northern town I was given a tour of three generations of housing for Aboriginals. The first were shacks, with a few tiny windows. The second were straight out of working-class suburbs in southern Canada: adequate small houses, but inappropriate in shape and in almost every detail for the north, and almost reckless in concept for small communities turned toward nature. The third had some of the details right: a place to store a snowmobile, good insulation. But the architecture still stood out like a foreign infection. The materials showed no local consideration. The living space told you nothing about how people might like to live there. One small detail: to save energy over the long winter, most windows could not be opened, which is very unhealthy in a crowded house. As for the few that did open – and here is a revealing detail – they used a southern wind-out system that would snap the first or second time it was used in severe winter conditions.

What these sorts of details tell us – and there are thousands of other examples – is that no broad effort has been made to think about modern living in isolated and more northerly communities. Modern living that is meshed with indigenous culture and northern isolated communities. This is not a problem. It is a wonderful civilizational challenge. Instead, the few stories of good initiatives are treated more as happy local accidents than as precedents and indicators for further action.

There are architects in all three territories trying their best. There are good buildings here and there – a cultural training centre, for example, on the east coast of Baffin Island – that demonstrate what is possible and appropriate. In the near north, at Laurentian University in Sudbury, a new architectural school is devoted to the idea of living in the north and in isolated communities. This could be seen in the same light as the medical school created early in this century at Laurentian University and at Lakehead in Thunder Bay to focus on health in isolated northern communities. So a few things are happening, but not fast enough. Inefficient funding is another obstacle. Look at the tiny budget for the northern medical school.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.