Say Goodbye tothe Suburbs.

Have you noticed that we are in the middle of another almighty shift in human movement? We all learned in school about the Industrial Revolution, and how it forced the end of the Agrarian way of life for Millions in the West. You got the vision of millions of people being herded in never ending bedraggled columns toward the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of the soot-covered cities. The City where I was born was like that. Prior to the 1850’s, it was a few canal locks on top of a hill whose only claim to fame was that the valleys to its west used to be a country hunting estate for Henry VIII.

Of course, once factories started to require freight, canals became the preferred method of transportation, and this small town became a city in a matter of months, apparently.Growing up, I knew I lived in an automobile manufacturing city close to Europe’s largest Freeway exchange, with a large ‘green belt’ around it, just a few miles outside the suburbs where my family moved to – an actual 20 minute bus ride from downtown, how exotic!

These days I live in a city that has shrugged off it’s Lumber past for the most part, and has become part of what the more modern thinkers amongst us describe as a global cyber-network, more attached to a city down the coast in a different country than it is to it’s own nation’s capital. Among the most exciting real estate developments in recent years has been the transformation of a run down warehouse district (A relic of the port city we always were, but that has now moved to a more easily managed part of town), into a hip, young, cyber-entrepreneur type of clichéd downtown ghetto: Restaurants and bars that are way too expensive for what they sell, a Starbucks every ninety feet – that kind of thing.

This major shift in the migration habits of the current generation is due to the Internet. Now, kids are learning how to navigate spaces much bigger than the direct world they will graduate into. They are then using this knowledge to run their own businesses from a laptop and a cell phone, so they don’t need space to make money. With post-boom generations becoming smaller, there is no pressure to marry and have their own children, so the entire edifice of satellite cities, bedroom communities and the daily commute will be over in the next decade. Our current view of 2-up, 2-down semis in the suburbs will be the same as we now look at 4 story, 5 bedroom, and 4 bath Victorian mansions. OK for some, but way over the needs of most of us. As oil prices go up, and the automobile becomes too expensive to run, what will happen to the suburbs?

Of course, if they become too expensive to run by their city councils, eventually they will be swallowed up by their nearest cities – the very ones that birthed them in the 70’s. Whole neighbourhoods will be bulldozed to cut down on costs, and to save them from criminal activity. Eventually, they will be returned to farmland to promote local produce manufacture in the new, warmer climate.

In other words, the entire suburb culture in the 2040’s, could well look very much like it did in the 1950’s: A One-Century experiment in growth for one generation that was shown to work, but with many flaws that greed alone couldn’t answer.

The Olympics: Inside the Inner Circle

If you are looking for the perfect job, or a change of career, you could do a lot worse than joining the Olympic movement as a member of the board. Not only are you responsible for promoting amateur athletic sport both in your country, and around the globe (a very worthy endeavour), you will also live the life of a Banana Republic potentate by everyone you meet on the planet, with the possible exception of your wife. When you also consider many athletes are no longer amateur, but millionaires from their day jobs, you don’t even have to be very successful at your main purpose, either. It’s one of the easiest jobs on the planet – especially when you consider you are paid one of the best salaries in history, and are on expenses. But why are you treated the way you are?

 

Ever since the politic debacle’s of the early ‘80’s, when politics dictated an amateur athlete’s career arc, consider the size of the venues that have hosted the games. On the winter games side, Calgary, Lillehammer, and Nagano, and Atlanta and Athens in the summer months weren’t’ exactly global metropolises. After Moscow and Los Angeles, it looked as if a leaner, more stripped down games would soothe the diplomatic wounds we were all suffering from, and also get back to basics for the quadrennial celebration. Unfortunately, it also opened the experience of actually ‘getting’ the games up to local governments. In many cases these meant the very first time that the venue in question were going to be the focus of the world. So anything spent at the time to sway people’s minds, would be repaid exponentially in future tourism and investment cash. Therefore whatever these cities could do ‘above the table’ the better. Unfortunately, as is usual with human nature, these lessons were well learned by future venues, expanded, and therefore expected by the inner circle of a few thousand that make up the Games’ secretariat.

 

For this Olympiad, we have been shocked as host cities what we have to do when this Star Chamber gets here. First class travel, complimentary tickets to final events, penthouse hotel rooms, changes of traffic patterns in their favour, and member’s individual choice of meals during official Olympic events are not only expected, they are demanded – a necessary part of the host’s responsibilities. This is all for the handful of decision makers, and their support staff, and secretaries, their whole families, and members from their own countries. All in all, about 2% of all expenditure expected to be made by us proles on the sidelines is given away in order to make these people feel at home. Unfortunately, Vancouver is the largest city ever to host the winter games, so we are now using a different set of rules – and we have to do this by trying to make money from a much larger visitor number than those smaller towns. At what point is it our job to maximize profits? I guess it greasing palms after your product is bought, trumps any support the Olympic movement owes us for soldiering on through a huge global economic explosion to continue to present their product, and make less money from it. While paying more for it after these members of the sporting royal family have left for pastures and troughs anew.