Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 97: Post-Disaster Urbanism — with Mary Rowe
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Mary Rowe
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Kathy Feng 0:06
Hello, I'm Kathy Fang with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. This episode features an interview with Canadian Urban Institute president and CEO Mary Rowe. A self proclaimed accidental urbanist, Mary joins Am Johal to chat about urbanism in a post disaster context, and building collective solidarity in our cities. I hope you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:40
Hi there, welcome to Below the Radar. I'm here at 312 Main Street in Vancouver and I'm really happy to be joined by Mary Rowe, who is one of the fantastic urbanists here in Canada. I met her years ago and currently works as President CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute. Welcome, Mary.
Mary Rowe 1:00
Thanks, Am. I'm delighted to be with you, under trying circumstances, but still, maybe it's good because it's forcing us to really focus on real conversation and real challenges.
Am Johal 1:10
Mhmm, I'm wondering if you can just start by introducing yourself a little bit in terms of prior to arriving at the Canadian Urban Institute, you've had a long history of thinking about working related to cities, but also in post disaster context as well.
Mary Rowe 1:27
Well, I'm, I'm a dual citizen. I'm a Canadian and American citizen, and I've worked in the US for 15 years, well actually, I've probably worked in the US for 30 years, but I lived there for half of that and you're quite right. I was in New Orleans immediately after Katrina for five years, six years. And then I was in New York and happened to be there during Hurricane Sandy in between New Orleans and Charlottesville, Virginia and near Washington. And you know, I'm an urbanist by accident. I'm an accidental urbanist, I'm not an urban planner. I don't have any formal training in urbanism. I'm an urbanist like anybody else that lives in a city and I pay attention and was drawn early to patterns, you know, how do things actually work together. And if you think of a city as a system, or as an ecosystem of a whole bunch of interrelated things, so it's got built environment, things like streets, and roads, and buildings, and then it's also got all sorts of social things, ways in which we interact with one another. And when you think of the history of cities, you know, cities came together as markets, they were gathering places settlements, to allow us to trade and you know, that may have had an economic implication, but it has all sorts of other ways that we trade, we trade ideas, we trade help, we trade perspective, we trade experience, and all of those interactions are really what a city enables, it enables what people refer to as self organization, that's kind of what I'm interested in. Cities are a kind of container. It's a form that contains all sorts of interrelationships that allow you and I to accomplish things or experience things collectively that we couldn't do by ourselves. So, you know, cities are probably humanity's greatest achievement, and they will endure, and have, they outlive corporations, they outlive private companies, they outlive governments, they certainly outlive governments. So I think it's a really remarkable time for us to pay attention. When I was in those other cities that you mentioned, I really learned the hard way that you need to pay attention to detail and watch how people respond to challenges. And that cities are, even though I described you know, there's all sorts of physical assets, but cities in those container cities are fundamentally about people. And people express themselves and their needs and their aspirations in the way that they operate in the context in which they live. So if they're in a high rise building, or they're in a single family home, or they're living on the street, or they're employed in an office tower, or they're working in shops, these are all ways in which people cobble together their lives. And all of that, globally, is being sent into a car cat. And the interesting thing is, even though I was in those other cities, during times of extraordinary stress, certainly Katrina was an extraordinary assault on 1000s and 1000s, and 1000s and 1000s of people, but it wasn't a global reality. And now we've got this situation where we've got so many different contexts in which people are dealing with COVID and with the efforts to contain COVID, that I think it's a really important moment for all of us to really use our eyes and our ears and listen and learn to see how people adapt. And what is that going to tell us about as we emerge as we get used to and then we eventually emerge from the constraints that COVID is placing on us. How can we retain from those observations, things that we need to do differently? Do we need to do engagement differently? Do we need to think about inclusion much differently? Do we need to think about urban design and urban planning much differently? These are all the ways in which those systems were compromised?
Mary Rowe 4:59
Prior to COVID where we have neighborhoods that were overcrowded without adequate amenities, or we had monocultural neighborhoods, meaning only one use of the neighborhood. If you look in downtowns, right now, across the country, they're in pretty desperate straits. And part of the challenge there is that there's not mixed use. So anyways, we look at all these things. And we say, I don't want to turn COVID, you know, into a teachable moment, because I don't want to diminish the tragedy that this is having on people's lives. So I want to be cognizant of that. But at the same time, I think it's going to be an extraordinary teacher for us about the things in urbanism that fundamentally have to change. And then the things that, you know, may have been hiding in plain sight, aspects of urban life that we took for granted that suddenly have become lifesavers, and how do we enhance those? How do we get more oxygen to those? How do we help those kinds of practices and patterns of life to be copied in other places, so that we're one thing that may be working really well in one community or another? I think this is what my current role is at the Canadian Urban Institute, is that we're the connector, we're the platform that's going to align to condition learn from Abbotsford. And prior to COVID those conversations and lessons would have been harder to extract. But now, we can't get anywhere. So there's no impediment to engaging, you know, we can get everybody on a zoom call. Not that you really love them, but you can. So you can technically make it happen. People have time. But I also think that we have a kind of, I was thinking about this this morning, I feel like we have a kind of collective humility, that has crept into our lives, it hasn't really crept, it has descended into our lives, because nobody really has this figured out. And so that means that people I think, and I don't know how long this window is going to be the case, we have a window where people will accept your call to say, we don't know, do you? Do you have any answers? And so for us to kind of, this kind of collective muddling through. And I think you really feel that at the neighborhood level at the city level. We're all just trying, it's like everybody is in, I said to somebody the other day, it's like we're in a global pilot, you know, Urbanists talk about pilots, because it's this way that you can try something. So you don't have to do it at a big large scale because if it fails, then you've really made a big mess. But if you do a small pilot, you can tweak and alter it. And if it doesn't work, you just shut it down. I feel like we're in a global pilot now where everybody is kind of in DIY mode. I don't know what it's like in Vancouver, but here in Ontario, I've been in Ontario and Quebec during the pandemic, and people are doing renovations, house renovations, like crazy, you know, you I see it every morning because I walk by neighborhoods, and I see people putting little lien to stuff in laneways and doing other stuff. And I feel like those are the kinds of experiments and we have to be trying these things and then how do we extract really good learnings from that. So I think it's a really rich moment for us, people who care about how we live together. But it's also an extraordinarily urgent moment for us. We can't wait for this chance, I think, you know, I'm 61. I feel like this is going to be the seminal event of my professional life for the duration of how long I will work. And if I was starting my little, I don't use Twitter very much, but I have an affection for #enoughtalk, you know, or #nomoreexcuses. We have to emerge from this in a way and do things, do things better. [laughs] Do things right!
Am Johal 8:27
I love your term collective humility, it resonates with me far deeper than kind of resilience discourses in others, I was just on a talk put on with SFU. And I had this one paragraph calling resilience, the bullshit word of the moment, because it was really being thrown around in every context, and I value where it comes from but I definitely got a bit of blowback around ait but collective humility does feel like the right zone of where the conversation ought to be coming from. I'm just reading around the Spanish flu, John Barry's book, The Great influenza that talked about cities and parades going on, and how spread happened in here watching it in slow motion, where we all know that there was going to be a second wave happening, but still seeing the numbers rise and all around the world. In terms of looking at disaster planning for cities here in Vancouver, there's a lot of work and thought being put into earthquake planning, for example, but not so much what happened here. I'm wondering in terms of your experience in New Orleans, New York, what can be learned from those places within this context, but a pandemic, I guess, unleashes something very different, which is sort of the duration of how the disaster unfolds, carries out over a longer period of time, the systems that's required, as you said before, this is also a global phenomenon rather than localized geographically within one place. And so all of these externalities come to play. And so even though there are all these planning things in place, the World Health Organization had identified the US as being one of the most prepared for a pandemic, and we can sort of throw that out the window, whatever indicators that were there. Pandemics do come right into the blind spots and seek out the weaknesses in the system. And wondering in terms of the kind of reflections that are happening on the fly with people who are sort of working on the, I've got friends who work at Vancouver Coastal Health, and planning on the political side of things and conversations, and the kind of messaging around what is going to work. I have friends who have immigrated into the Canadian context. And one of the things they say to me is that they don't see a sense of social solidarity here, that they see back home when it comes to collective disaster. That's an interesting observation, probably in the Canadian context, we have maybe a greater sense of solidarity than compared to the US more individualistic approach. But wondering if you have any reflections on what the pandemic has shown us so far in terms of how we might think about this because clearly, there's going to be further disasters in our lifetime. We have climate change, we have many other things on the horizon. But in terms of disaster planning itself, how does it make you think differently?
Mary Rowe 11:07
Well, first of all, I'm delighted you're citing John Barry, because not only did he write the Great Influenza, he also wrote Rising Tide.
Am Johal 11:13
Yep, beautiful book.
Mary Rowe 11:14
About the Mississippi and, you know, there's a whole literature and lots of smart people who've been writing about this, you know, the September of 2005, when the levees broke in New Orleans, Rebecca Solnit had an essay that was in Harper's, but it came out that month, and of course, it had been written months before. And it was called the effective use of disaster. So there are prescient voices who've been saying these things for some time. And, you know, it just it takes kind of reality check for us to dust these feelings off and realize and it's always the case, you know, art, people in creative pursuits often foreshadow what's actually happening, or will happen. On the term of resilience, you know, in 2005, when we were in New Orleans, the term resilience wasn't being used in the context that it's now so as you say, it's ubiquitous now. So that kind of means nothing, but it wasn't being used then. And we in New Orleans, started to use it, because what I liked about the term resilience, as I understood it, is that it was more like a muscle, you know, whereas sustainability felt like a fixed state, you know, you're either sustainable or not, whereas resilience was a capacity. And if you go to the psychological literature, which is where resilience, I think, has been present in the discourse for decades, that was really how you build children's resilience. And I liked how it scales, you know, you build, build resilience in children, you as I said, you build it, a lifetime of building resilience as an individual and then you build resilience in your household and in your family, and then in your neighborhood, and then in your district, and then in your region and your city. And where I would say, the collective solidarity point that you're mentioning. Well, first of all, before I get to that, I want to just say a disclaimer about resilience, that even though we were using the neurons in that way, and trying to get people to understand what that term would mean, and then as you know, it just became the buzzword. There were lots of people advocates, and people in communities who were saying resilience is becoming a term, it's used to sort of explain away chronic inequality and poverty. And so advocates would say, just stop calling me resilient, because what you're saying is that I'm just going to get screwed over again, and my life is going to get more difficult. And you're going to be admiring me, because I'm so resilient, because I can continue to cope with terrible inequality or terrible, inadequate conditions. You know, First Nations communities are resilient because they survive not having potable water, like it's just so it started to become, I think, a weaponized term for some people. So I appreciate your questioning of it, you know, and any word that starts to become just sort of, as you say, the kind of buzzword of the time. And as soon as it gets instrumentalized, then, you know, all of us just say, "let's not talk about it anymore." I hope that doesn't happen to my collective humility
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Mary Rowe 13:51
In terms of the point you just made around solidarity. Here's a weird thought Am and I don't know whether you're thinking about this. But I think that solidarity does exist at the most local. I think that in those early days of the pandemic, we put up something called citysharecanada.ca, which is still there, and it's still actively used. And it's people in communities, all sectors, posting examples of ways in which they're responding in new and innovative ways to particular things. So it's about libraries and corner stores and new ways of delivering meal service and all the different ways that people were kind of making it up on their own to be responsive to their neighbors needs. And I think there is tremendous solidarity at the hyperlocal level, neighbors helping neighbors, neighborhoods helping neighborhoods, and where it all just starts to break down, the further away you get from people. So as you have these approaches that are highly improvisational and often full of compassion, and inner resourcefulness and I just went into a store this morning. A couple blocks for me just opened a new bakery on Queen Street in Toronto, a big commercial main street that runs pretty much through the whole city and has different components to it in different parts of the city. And, you know, they're they are, they're a new bakery, it's a Turkish bakery. And it's opening during a pandemic. And I had a whole conversation with them, you know, the baker, it's a woman, and she's using your grandmother's recipes, and they've done a renovation, her husband's an architect, it's quite beautiful. And I just looked at those people, and I thought, Oh, my God, here, you are opening a new business under these circumstances. I mean, it's just remarkable. And as I stood there and had my little chat, and spent some money and talked to people, I said to them, you know, what, what remarkable things you're doing. And they said, Well, you know, all the neighbors are coming in. And I thought, yeah, this is what we're going to be reminded of, you know, I was thinking about just simple, simple things. I was thinking about, I go to a place a block for me five mornings, we can get a chai latte, and I was doing the math, you know, it's $6.52 or something like that something and go, that's 30 bucks, I'm spending time four, 120 bucks a month, I'm spending at that price. And I know their names, they know my name I walk in, they know what I want. And, you know, normally you just would do that. Because you know, I feel like a coffee, I'm gonna go get a coffee. Well, now I'm saying, okay, that 120 bucks kept somebody employed for two or three days at that place. And that's how tangible I think our actions need to become. And during this period, maybe they will be, maybe we will be conscious of this. And so I think my experience in New Orleans, the largest lesson I took from the New Orleans experience was that resilience is community based. It comes from the ground up, and I had a different reflection on it now than I had at the time, more poignant because I'm so embedded in it myself now. Because I also realize it's an antidote to hopelessness and helplessness. If you focus on your community, and you focus on really granular interventions, how can I help that restaurant have a patio? How can I help that restaurant have more takeout? How can I assist that doctor's office in providing more telemedicine services? How can I reach the people that live in single room occupancy dwellings along Main Streets, and they're above stores? And they live in very small spaces. Sometimes they have more than one person in very small spaces. What are their choices in terms of getting out safely and healthily? How do they get access to the services they need? These are all really, really local, granular things. And if we can just find ways to engage each other in doing that kind of mutual problem solving. They have lots of eyes, you know, Jane, Jake Savage was the best public safety measure that's around, is putting eyes on the street. And you can introduce police forces and do all that you want to do but in fact, lots of eyes on the street make that street a safe and vibrant place. And I feel like we just need lots of eyes on this dilemma we're in coping with the pandemic. So can we create new forms of kinds of social infrastructure. And that's what happened after Katrina. And it's interesting watching it now break down differently. After Katrina in New Orleans, you had divided cities varied by race and divided by income, and certainly divided by values. But everybody was in that challenge of rebuilding that city. And it became this extraordinary mobilization of collective will. And I think that the dilemma we now have 15 years later, is that certainly, and we're in Canada, we're just so much part of it. The American narrative has become this archetypal, macro narrative that's so distant from people.
Mary Rowe 18:46
And that tends to soak up so much of our energy and time, you know, and we get preoccupied with it. And the media doesn't help because the television shows reinforce it. And before you know it, we're living up there. But in fact, you and I, right, these days are living with our neighbors. We're living with the guy across the street that has a dry cleaning business, or my colleague who's got a mentally ill parent, and a child that needs help. And that's where I think we need to try to remind ourselves that there is a moment here, we do have something, you know, whether it's the pandemic pause or whatever the hell it is. It's a kind of reckoning moment. And I hope that resilience planning, and I advocated for this during the New Orleans piece, and I advocated for it during Sandy, that it'd be focused on people and people's immediate capacity to have some agency people need a chance to, they need to be given opportunities to do things for themselves and for others. And if we pull it too far away, and Canadians do this, "Oh, government will do that." Well, you know what government is overwhelmed. It's got enough to do. So if we could just keep it at the granular granular resilience. I don't want to abandon the term because I feel the granular it means something.
Am Johal 20:00
Yeah, in the context now where cities are running deficits, they have incredible social issues that have been put onto the table where they've been asked to put in resources or adjust policy. I certainly see that here in the City of Vancouver and Surrey, just having to make policies on the fly to make the situation on the ground better. And I'm wondering from the Canadian Urban Institute perspective, what are the kinds of advice you're giving to EDs? Or what are the ways that municipalities who are going through these challenges? What are the kinds of policies and things that you think are innovative in this context, while we're still in the middle of the pandemic? You know, the federal government had a national housing strategy that it unveiled a couple of years ago. And, it was a very ambitious strategy. And it involved provincial partnerships and municipal contributions and various things, very sophisticated, tons of stakeholder engagement, big ambitious goals. Is it maybe four years ago that they did that three years ago? Now they're facing the reality of how hard it is to get units built, and that you've also got, you know, millions of people, not millions, but certainly 10s of 1000s of people who are living on streets now with inadequately housed and inadequately sheltered because shelters are closed for COVID. And they introduced [sound cuts out]
Mary Rowe 21:19
the right response to this, but they wanted to get money out more quickly. So I think what we have to try to really have a serious conversation about is how can we get government to be responsive more quickly? And how do we get public policy and investment, public investment that is tailored to local needs more quickly. And so for me, that means a serious rethinking of who does what and how it's getting financed. And there's been an awareness of this for a couple of decades, certainly, that municipal governments are constrained because they don't have earned revenue streams that they have control over, or they have limits, they may have transit, and they may have user fees, but they don't have the same kinds of tools available to them that other orders of government have. And of course, because everybody knows there's only one taxpayer and nobody wants to raise taxes. That is a dilemma. But that also is the two other levels of government to other orders, the province and the federal government are very unlikely to give up resources, you know, they want to have the resources they've got. So all of a sudden, then how do you actually create enough understanding and then political will to say, well, actually, municipal governments need more resources, and they need more authority so they can act swiftly. And I think that there's a serious question for us about this, you know, municipal staff, through COVID, have had to, planning department staff have gone out and run shelters, you know, they've had to multitask like crazy librarians have become social workers, they were already moving in that direction but now they're logistics managers doing food box delivery. So it's a rethinking of how you and I, as residents in an urban environment, how do we interact with the services that we require? We need the garbage picked up, we need the streets to be cleaned all the sort of traditional things, but then we have a whole lot of other things around economic development, social supports, around well how do you get washrooms into parks? All these things that we have an expectation that someone is going to make happen. Someone in the collective will make it happen. And do you or I know whether it's a provincial or municipal responsibility? And you and I are more informed than lots of other people, I'm well informed, and I have no clue. So I think can we reset this table now? Is there a moment? And do we as taxpayers need to come to terms with this, that, you know, the, you know, the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, "I pay my taxes, it buys me civilization?" You know, do we need to get to a place where we understand that the level of government closest to the recipient of the service should be the one designing, implementing and financing that service? And so if they screw up, you and I can hold them accountable, where without affordable housing, why is that not working? And right now, it's so clouded and unclear. And I'm back to the national housing strategy, the federal government set some lofty goals, and they're the ones with the resources, but the implementation of that is completely dependent on the provinces and the provinces disposition, and then by the time it literally trickles down to the municipality, which is actually the order of government that is dealing with people being homeless, dealing with the fact that it doesn't have the housing supply it needs. They're the ones at the very end of the pipe. And I think the pandemic is showing us that they're actually at the front of the train that's coming towards them. And you and I are very reliant on them. So I'm hoping that those conversations can take place in a serious way. It's difficult though, because as I suggested to you around this narrative, the dominant narrative in the media is always that national narrative. And I think this is changing. I think people are gravitating much more, you see it, the United States you see it here too.
Mary Rowe 24:32
They're gravitating much more to the mayors, to their premier, their governor. And so I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to emerge with a stronger commitment to community based problem solving, and having public investment in public decision making, reflecting local priorities. That's how we're going to win. And I know people don't want to talk about winning or losing, but we'll win if we're empowering local communities to figure this out and improvise, and come up with good solutions. And then people like you and I can start highlighting, there's something that's working hey, look, Abbotsford look what Antigonish has been doing.
Am Johal 25:33
Yeah, one of the questions I have is sort of around the relationship between government and civil society, essentially, like when the disaster comes into view, and starts rolling out into communities, governmental systems can be very slow in potting where the systems aren't ready to deal with the responsiveness that's required. And there ends up being this sort of almost division or a difference between how nonprofit media organizations are dealing with things on the frontline, and how government systems respond. I imagine you would have seen that tension in New Orleans and New York when the disasters were there. I think things are in a better place now than at the very beginning. But when you have these health authorities, civic agencies, provincial ones that deal with health, these gaps become very magnified very quickly. We do have foundations here, set up by a Community Response Fund, they got money out the door very quickly to community organizations on the front end, but the government seemed to be a little bit slower in terms of how it rolled out. And I'm wondering how you think through these questions in terms of disaster planning? That relationship between government and community on the ground or service delivery from community organizations.
Mary Rowe 26:41
That's so complicated, you know, because we have so little trust. I think this is a dilemma. You know, I used to say that in New Orleans, if when you look at all the remarkable resources that the federal government and the state government eventually poured into that region, you know, if they just cut a check, for $300,000, to every person that had a cell phone with a 504, area code, you know, those people would have done remarkable things. I mean, sure, some of them would have gone out and bought cars, but people, I don't know whether we can get to a place where we'll trust people more. I think we have, the CERB to me was a remarkable act of trust, where we said, we're going to give you income support, because we're imagining things are going to be difficult and here it is. There wasn't a lot of scrutiny or anxiety about what those people are going to do, you know. So I'd like to think that we will, I mean, this is an extraordinary rainy day occurrence, you know, save for a rainy day, well we're in the rainy day. And so will that have an impact on governments going forward? For instance, will we invest in infrastructure differently? Will we invest more in social infrastructure? Will we provide more stable funding and sustainable steady funding for libraries? The fact that libraries are in municipal budgets, and often face cuts to me, is just a bizarre thing. It's a really perverse pattern of oddness. And will we be able to recommit to getting money into local intermediaries hands, so business improvement areas, business improvement districts, for instance. These are critical networking organizations that provide support to independent businesses in main streets along neighborhoods, there's 300 of them in Canada, most people don't even know they exist, you know, so are we going to have a better understanding of that? I'm a big advocate for decentralization. I think that the more that we can get public health and health responses at the local level, the more that we can have community health centers, and we can start to repurpose schools to be 24/7. And understand that the school could become my respite center, could be my, you know, some people want to call them resilience centers. You know, those are community anchors, community amenities, Every neighborhood has some version of that. Some neighborhoods don't have enough and so that would be something you'd want to correct. If you realize, when you see that there are neighborhoods that lack those kinds of community amenities, then you have to double down and invest in them. And boy, boy, you know, in 2005, during Katrina, we didn't have the mapping expertise that we have now. Every morning, you and I open a newspaper, open the internet, and we see more maps. So we can really see these COVID incidence maps are just maps of vulnerability. They just stare at us don't they? Shows you where the income inequality is, shows you where often there are communities of color, shows you where the amenities are inadequate, where the services were inadequate, etc, etc. And I was listening this morning to a broadcast from the New York Times talking about is this really a service economy recession? So you have to really ask yourself, cities are dependent on services, completely. Group living and congregate living is dependent on a bunch of services. So how does that need to get restructured? So I think pushing money, putting more investment and more planning authority and more resources at the local level that then do what I was saying earlier, challenge you and me and mine and all of our neighbors to be engaged directly in building the community we want. This bring back main street piece of work that we've been doing at CUI, bringbackmainstreet.ca. It's really about how do you move to local resourcing local decision making to create the main streets that we need in the future. Main Street being a metaphor for the community amenities and services and vibrancy that why I live here. And what do I need on my main street? Do I need co working space on my main street? Do I need government services on my Main Street, because I'm not going to schlep down to City Hall, you know, probably, I'm going to have more government services through the internet, do I need to have digital capacity so that I can order a product from a store that's actually only two doors down for me, but I don't have to actually go in and shop and look, I can look online, see what they've got click click, click, and then walk down and pick it up. So I think all these things are about going more to the hyperlocal, hyperlocal, hyperlocal. And I'd love it if our other orders of government, the provincial and federal levels could mobilize people that way. You know, my sister is in New York State. And she reminded me the other day, she works for the Air Force. And she's in an extraordinarily intense job. And she said, I just keep reminding myself that, you know, we have, all of us have, not all of us, but lots of us have ancestors that got through World War Two, where they were hunkering down in what you were talking about a kind of collective solidarity. And that's where I think we need to mobilize ourselves to get back to local, local, local, what do I need to remember, when things go back to whatever normal will be? What do I need to remember that I really counted on during this period of chronic stress?
Am Johal 31:33
Any final thoughts you'd like to share, Mary?
Mary Rowe 31:37
You know, I think I mean, I have highly personal ones. Kindness. This is why people love your Medical Officer of Health, because she talks about being gentle and kind, Bonnie Henry. I mean, I'm sure they love her for other reasons, too. But she's tremendously competent and articulate. And she's been a really, really important voice in the discourse in your province and across the country. But I think we can all work on this personal kindness. I think we need to think about how we're spending our money. The vendor who's blocked from you is more than just a shopkeeper. That's a person with a family and resources and responsibilities and how are we spending our money? And then I think we need to think about how we use this moment as an opportunity to get it right about which services, delivered by whom, funded by how, and then we just reset the table. Let's just, let's agree that we're going to reset our tables in a way that makes sense. You know, this is why humans are, we're natural improvisers and we're constantly changing and altering and making things work. And so I think we need our public structures to be flexible like that, too. And that the only way that will happen is if we start to really talk about these things at a local level, and start doing some things and start trying some things. And then we'll see what works. And then those things can grow and spread. Thanks for giving me a break where you and I could just chat and think about how we make sense of this, how we make meaning. We started a third platform called citytalkcanada.ca For that very reason that we realized we didn't want to do it too early, because we realized that we're people on the front line. So we're just trying to keep people alive. But after a number of weeks, we thought, let's just see if we can create a collective humility. Let's create some platforms where we learn from each other and where we start to puzzle together what the questions are. So thanks for asking me Am. I'm always happy to chat to you and always interested in what's going on in Vancouver and how people in academic institutions who are engaged in the city like you are emanating a whole different level of discussion. So we always look to you in Vancouver for really smart, smart connection ideas. So thanks for asking me.
Am Johal 33:34
Mary, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. It's always lovely to speak with you.
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Kathy Feng 33:44
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for tuning in to our conversation with Mary Rowe. Learn about some of the Canadian Urban Institute initiatives she mentions at the links in the show notes. Thanks for listening and be sure to like and subscribe for more Below the Radar.
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