Community benefits
Leading community revitalization

NRU
Jan. 17, 2018
Olivia Da Silva

Behind every city’s changes, big or small, is a leader that pushed past the obstacles to make it happen.

Exploring how mid-sized cities can successfully revitalize underutilized spaces for community benefit, Evergreen and Civicplan collaborated to determine what the winning combination of factors is.

Case studies were undertaken of four cities—Brantford, Hamilton, Peterborough and Kitchener—all of which had local issues that needed solving. Hamilton needed a community centre, Brantford a revitalized downtown core, Peterborough was in desperate need of affordable housing and Kitchener wanted economic diversification. Each city had unique goals, assets and solutions.

“The series of case studies is to provide some recognition of those who have done it [as] examples of success,” Evergreen senior program manager Jo Flatt told NRU. “[It’s] for those who are looking to do that kind of work [so they] have models to look to, people to reach out to, and to learn about how they can do it themselves.”

In the case of Brantford, which once had a bustling downtown core, the city strived to fix what had begun declining in the 1980s after the city’s manufacturing sector hit hard times. With boarded up buildings and businesses that had left long ago, a massive overhaul was needed to reinvigorate its core.

Although Brantford council had previously tried—and failed—to bring a post-secondary institute to the downtown, its perseverance eventually paid off. In the mid-1990s, Wilfrid Laurier University was looking to expand its campus locations outside of Waterloo, and Brantford’s Carnegie Library—a heritage building that had been vacant since 1990—became the perfect fit for its expansion.

Civicplan principal Paul Shaker, who was one of the researchers, spoke highly of the residents’ resilience.

“There’s a commonality in the passion of the different communities to address whatever the need was, and really that was what fueled getting these initiatives across the finish line,” Shaker told NRU. “There was persistence, creativity, and collaboration. The ones that have been that much more successful, I think, exemplified those different traits even greater than the others.”

The report, Our City, Our Spaces, offers an analysis of mid-sized cities making successful moves towards revamping outdated community spaces. It is the focus of events in Brantford on January 30 and in Kitchener in February.

“It’s about knowledge transfer and being able to learn from the experience of other places to be able to inspire more people and more initiatives in other mid-sized cities to take up the same sort of challenges in their communities,” Shaker said.