Frankly, it’s getting pretty old, these constant comparisons.
You’ve heard ‘em. We better be careful or we’ll end up as the next Detroit. Not sure what that means exactly. Huge tracts of formerly occupied residential neighborhoods abandoned and being reclaimed by coyotes? Acres of rubble-filled lots where buildings simply felll down? The fourth largest city in America losing more than three-fourths of its population?
What would it take for that to happen to Toledo? A direct meteor strike?
A year ago, it was the “avoid Detroit’s fate” mantra that galled our bladders. It’s been replaced with this whole “Flint water crisis equals the twenty fourteen algal bloom” nonsense. Let’s be clear, folks. Lead never leaves your body. Ever. After you die, lead is still there. While you’re alive, it does dastardly things to your nerve function. There is no such thing as a safe level of exposure. Sorta like the zombie candidates in City Politics, but we digress.
Those are the cautionary tales, told with a medieval foreboding of doom for Toledo. Stop. Please.
Just as annoying are the ne-er do well little brother admonitions. You might have heard such scolding as a youngster. Why can’t you be more like that Al-amiri boy? He’s always so well dressed and does so well in school. You always look like a pile of wet laundry who thinks MC Squared is a west coast hip hop artist.
Translate that into Toledo bashing. Why can’t we be more like Grand Rapids? Or San Antonio? They’re so cool and progressive, blah blah blah.
News flash. We aren’t Detroit, or Flint. And we don’t need to be Grand Rapids.
What we need to be, kidz, is visionary.
Next year times a hundred
There’s this new group of heavy hitters that formed to discuss the future of Toledo. They are called the Twenty Second Century Committee. Hater nudniks chortle, “they screwed up the name! This is the Twenty First Century!”
Yep, that’s the point. We’re already knee deep into the millennium. Saying we need to be a Twenty First Century City says we’re almost two decades behind already. Let’s ask something novel instead.
What is the Toledo we want a century from now? What does that Toledo look and feel like?
We’re talking details here. What does the future Toledoan do on an average day? How does she live, work, eat, play? What is the economy like? How does food go from seed to table? How are goods produced and distributed? What goods and services are expected, or needed?
What does “work” look like? Is this even a concept in the future Toledo? Is there still a distinction between work and leisure? What is the role of the arts, and technology, in the answer to that question?
What does the physical layout look like? How far do Toledoans travel on a typical day? Who do they live with? How richly do people interact face to face, and where and how? How much interaction is done in virtual space? Has diversity grown to the point that the concept itself has become irrelevant?
How is policy made in the new Toledo? How has governance evolved?
And these questions are just a start.
Evolutionary tale
See, these are the productive conversations needed. The ones they didn’t have in Detroit and Flint fifty years ago, when it was assumed the dinosaurs would never go extinct and everyone could retire in their fifties with a stable pension and a vacay home in the yoo pee. Then the meteor hit, oil prices skyrocketed, automobile production left town, and what was bad for the dying GM dinosaur was bad for America.
We don’t need to avoid that fate by following the template of some existing city. That isn’t visionary either. We need to envision the Toledo we want us to be, then become it.
Can we start that process now?
