Life As Performance Art 43

Anybody here remember Jane Jacobs? She was hot ten years ago. I don't mean that kind of hot and please pull your dirty little minds out of the gutter, Gentle Reader. She was already in her nineties and still writing and thinking. Even I got on the Jane Jacobs bandwagon for a while, bought, read and inwardly digested her last book, Dark Age Ahead. (I didn't actually eat the book, but I'm sure the merits of the dietary fibre could be argued!) She was a famous urbanist, noted for her many ideas and theories of how to humanize urban life, making cities and especially their downtowns liveable, attractive, interesting and community inclusive. She really took off at that time, just as real estate was already starting to escalate, and was soon the chosen guru of many a mayor and city council bound and determined to make their cities attractive and liveable and inclusive. Except for one or two little details, and we shall name those little details "Real Life". Jane Jacobs meticulously and carefully named and explored those details of Real Life: the importance of cohesive community, family life, good and accessible education, housing affordability, among other pillars of common sense. I find it curious that her loudest proponents coming from city hall were also the most oblivious to her warnings. So, our then famous and fatuous Mayor Moonbeam, shamelessly toadied to the international developer scum, while chanting the name of Jane Jacobs, as though these utterings contained in themselves a kind of magic mana that would excuse and absolve him of his egregious greed and shortsightedness. Yes, let's get people living downtown, he cried, and so his wealthy developer scum friends tore down heritage buildings in the downtown core and built, and built, and to this day, keep on building, even after they have run out of millionaires who can afford to buy their expensive condos. And all in the name of Jane Jacobs, who likely is turning in her grave by now. Now we have a downtown that people live in. A downtown that people can scarcely afford to live in. And it is a downtown that is still essentially unlivable. There are still few adequate resources for homeless people, and for those of us on low incomes, there is no affordable grocery shopping within walking distance, and for people with disabilities and elderly, this is essential. But there are lots of nail spas and dog boutiques. Our homeless still sleep, beg, and essentially live on the sidewalks, there is still not enough available housing for them, and so they do add local colour to our inner urban neighbourhoods, for brave well-incomed folk who want to buy into a neighbourhood that has a little edge to it, though the local homeless are still better behaved, more house-broken and toilet trained than the children of prosperous suburban burghers that descend on us in the evenings and on weekends, turning our neighbourhoods into communal toilets. And we won't mention the noise, which is everywhere: racket and din coming from sirens, construction, stereos, folks screaming in torment from mental illness and drug addictions, garbage and delivery trucks. But what really dissuades me from stepping outside, especially in the evenings, are the ongoing streams of people who walk and behave as though they are the only ones there, completely focussed on their little phones on which they wear out their thumbs like they are electronic rosaries, and generally moving along in zombie rhythm,as though no one lives here, as though they are scarcely alive themselves, and the self-absorbed indifference of those idiots can be downright paralysing, sometimes preventing me even from wanting to just walk to my neighbourhood Shoppers Drug Mart to buy milk and a carton of eggs. I don't think that most of us in this city really know how to coexist.