Winnipeg could lead the next industrial revolution — but we need the vision our leadership lacks: Glen Murray

Winnipeg — the brilliant global centre of innovation and technology of the early 20th century — has lost its way, and the latest civic election needed to deliver a council that can take us back to the future.

Instead, in this lacklustre election — where tired old arguments about, pipes, potholes, policing and taxes occupied the debate — the big issues were ignored.

If we look back just before the start of the last century, Winnipeg led the economic transformation that was the Second Industrial Revolution in Canada (the period from 1870 to the start of the First World War) as a leading centre of innovation for new technology.

Winnipeg led many other Canadian cities in building the new general technology platform of that revolution — electric utilities with hydro dams, steel construction and advanced transmission systems, urban electric rail, advanced road, water and telephone systems.

We were global pioneers, risk-embracing innovators on a global scale, led by the most innovative civic leaders in the new world at the dawn of the 20th century.- Glen Murray

The Second Industrial Revolution defined Winnipeg, which was incorporated in 1873 and experienced its most substantial growth years during that period.

We were global pioneers, risk-embracing innovators on a global scale, led by the most innovative civic leaders in the new world at the dawn of the 20th century. Winnipeg built 12 skyscrapers between 1900 and 1916, erecting some of the most beautiful and tallest buildings in the British Empire and adapting steel-frame construction, fast elevators and groundbreaking building technologies.

Winnipeg had just followed Richmond, Va., in pioneering electric street railways as the foundation of the city's passenger transportation system. This was an astonishing project for a young, relatively isolated city at that time.

The city built two technology-leading hydro dams and generating systems supported by dedicated rail lines.

In 1908, the James Avenue Pumping Station, with just over 12 kilometres of extreme high-pressure pipes, introduced the most modern firefighting system in the world and was the first of two in North America.

It was also the first public-private partnership, with 80 per cent of it paid for by the buildings along the pipe that benefited from it. It paid for itself, as Winnipeg's infamously high fire insurance rates plummeted and the massive expansion of downtown development that it contributed to exploded, inflating city coffers and giving Winnipeg a huge capacity for city building.

It was the very essence of understanding that the city's most important job is to generate wealth.

A lack of vision

Today, too many civic leaders have either lost this vision or do not demonstrate the competency to realize the return on investments that allow city building to happen, and are chained to the options of raising or cutting taxes — and consequently cutting services — as the only levers of local government.

J.H. Ashdown and most of the mayors of the early 20th century realized they were in a full-on industrial revolution, and needed an activist public and private sector and the partnerships they could create. They more than realized a whole new generation of public utility infrastructure was necessary to build a successful 20th-century city.

They also realized they needed to create a beautiful city — that the built environment of buildings and parks were the manifestation of their civic pride and the strongest magnet for talent and capital.

This week's civic election, meanwhile, offered no such vision. Instead, incumbent politicians demanded more information to make decisions while, with great irony, passing off the potentially most consequential decisions — most notably the decision on reopening the Portage and Main intersection to pedestrian traffic — to citizens bereft of information.

Unlike the politicians, the citizens got themselves organized and educated and came up with a better understanding of the problem and many of the kind of practical solutions their government should have provided.

Rather than forming partnerships between civic and business leaders, it was left to business and community to organize a campaign with a ridiculous plebiscite question foisted on citizens by councillors disgruntled from circular paybacks that are the petty internal politics of city hall.

No one recognized, as was the case a century ago, that we are in the first two decades of a third, and even more consequential, industrial revolution.

This Third Industrial Revolution is about preparing Winnipeg to be a leading centre of innovation in the radical and disruptive changes that are coming with the new economy of this new century.

Winnipeg and the 3rd Industrial Revolution

Portage and Main was an emblematic debate and a litmus test as to whether or not civic leaders understand — and have a 21st century-ready agenda for — a rapidly emerging new economy.

This industrial revolution is more dependent on investing in visionary, ahead-of-the-curve infrastructure and technology, and most of those initial decisions are in the hands of local governments.

There is no pathway to prosperity without courageous, imaginative and visionary civic leadership across the public and private sectors — the activism of Winnipeg's first golden age.- Glen Murray

Of all these factors, an ability to develop beautiful and functional spaces that create a high quality of place and living may be the most important.

Unlike the Second Industrial Revolution, this revolution comes with two dramatically different challenges: first, money and wealth can be redistributed across the globe with a tap on a computer keyboard; and second, we are facing an existential climate crisis which requires us to reinvent our buildings, transportation systems and the planning of them to leave our children a livable planet.

Ironically it is these two characteristics — the need to attract and retain talent and to go to a high productivity and hyper energy-efficient economy — that leave Winnipeg where it was a century ago, at the geographic edge of the conversation, with an enormous ability to leapfrog ahead in the race.

Like then, this relies on a creative and risk-embracing citizenry with a shared old-fashion barn-raising attitude about city building. There is no pathway to prosperity without courageous, imaginative and visionary civic leadership across the public and private sectors — the activism of Winnipeg's first golden age.

As in 1873, we need a bold vision for the next 50 years. The extraordinary over-engineered buildings that populate the downtown and some of the main streets of Winnipeg's formerly independent towns and cities are the magnets for the information technology start-ups and mature information technology, creative, science and cultural businesses that populate our Exchange District and regional historic main streets.

Employment in cultural, entertainment and creative industries in Winnipeg is over 20,000 people, and these are big drivers of the city's economy. Today, most cities see 80 per cent of their new jobs coming from locally established creativity-based firms and individuals.

One of the biggest advantages a city has to build the economy of the Third Industrial Revolution is the legacy historic buildings of the Second Industrial Revolution — especially the historic warehouses and banking skyscrapers.

Our firm in the Exchange District, in a post-and-beam warehouse, is the envy of our competitors across Canada. We are part of an IT cluster that employs close to 16,000 people and employment in our sector grew by 2,800 in the last five years.

Leading the revolution

The new industrial revolution is driven by a shift from analog to a digital economy and the "internet of everything." The most important and foundational investment and jobs will be in transportation, buildings and the organization of space and place.

People will no longer be consumers of energy and heating and cooling of their buildings and homes. Our homes will have solar, geothermal, battery, wind and other advanced technologies that will let us sell electricity back into a new generation of micro grids, and we will shift from being consumers to prosumers of electricity and communications.

Jeremy Rifkin has written brilliantly about this shift in his book The Third Industrial Revolution. In a shorter time period than it took to bring the computing power of a large room full of computers to a small device that fits in the palm of your hand, the integrated internet of everything will see us managing our own communications, energy and transportation systems in a decentralized system of distributed services and production.

The autonomous vehicle revolution will see a car waiting at the end of a transit line, programmed off our smartphone, where it will have picked up our Fed Ex parcels and dry cleaning, and be waiting to take you, and likely your neighbour, home.

The online and on-ground world are about to converge in ways we can barely imagine and we, Winnipeg, could lead this revolution.

To give just one other example: the City of Winnipeg could decide to become the first net-zero greenhouse gas city in the world and decide we are going to retrofit our city to create the first generations of buildings that are power-generating nodes and networks, giving us all a self-sustaining, CO2-free energy system.

That would mean that our civic leaders would have to embrace the redistributive technology of this century the same way we built the centralized water and energy utilities of the last century. 

Let's get back to the future and embrace and lead the Third Industrial Revolution, the way Winnipeg succeeded to become a great city by leading the Second Industrial Revolution.- Glen Murray

Let's take Germany on! The Hydro building and Red River College downtown campus are on the "greenest buildings in the world" lists. Germany has government and private partnerships that have created a building node-and-network system that has seen over a million buildings converted into green micro-plants feeding smart micro-grids — the convergence of electricity and communication networks.

Imagine Winnipeg streets if our cars were a service and each ran 22 or 23 hours a day and got recharges for one hour — rather than the opposite. We would not need new and wider roads and car storage would no longer be the largest use of land in many parts of our city. This would create an unimaginably large new generation of jobs.

Let's get back to the future and embrace and lead the Third Industrial Revolution, the way Winnipeg succeeded to become a great city by leading the Second Industrial Revolution!

All we need is an imagination and leadership.

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