Gene Miller is the only person we can think of who could write such a biting, funny and true article about what it would mean to Victorians if the city goes ahead with cutting down this beloved tree. “It’s worth wondering how our electeds and our urban design brainiacs and public relations spin-meisters can be such fools.”

Courtesy of the Times Colonist
Photo: An artist’s rendering of a design for Centennial Square. “I can see parents from miles around bringing their little ones to frolic in a splash pool shared with bits of uncollected laundry, tinted with urine and feces,” writes Gene Miller. VIA CITY OF VICTORIA 

So, Victoria city council is going to spend $12 million — Victorian for $20 million — on a Centennial Square re-do. I’m advised that “this train has left the station.”

The city’s eyewash portrays a kiddie splash pool/water feature, and a sprinkling of benches, performance spaces and stages, a coffee kiosk and other paraphernalia.

In the image, it’s warm and sunny, just like Victoria all year round.

The labelled plan identifying these features includes a giveaway: “Bosque.” Bosque is spin for “a handful of rigidly spaced treelets.”

Bosque derives its name from the Spanish word for “forest” and its Spanish definition features “abundancia.”

Spanish. Spinish. Take your pick.

The only thing abundancia with this city crowd is jive and propaganda: “One City, One Plan,” etc., enough to shatter the needle on your crap meter.

Let’s take a moment to explore the design thinking of the planners who conceived this hellscape and the council that approved it.

A splash pool to entertain kiddies. I can see parents from miles around bringing their little ones to frolic in a splash pool shared with bits of uncollected laundry, tinted with urine and feces.

And this breaking news: the market in the old Bay building, less than a block from Centennial Square, has collapsed for lack of custom. Custom means people spending money.

But the square’s gonna rock.

Oh, and a not-to-be-overlooked feature of the Centennial Square vision: the murder of the sequoia.

To the many thousands who will be present, in fact or spirit, as witnesses when steel teeth strip the limbs and skin off that creature, before cutting the trunk to the ground, remember to wear your buttons, stickers and T-shirts bearing the message: “I vote in Victoria.”

It is so important that this mayor and council understand they have signed their political death warrants.

It’s worth wondering how our electeds and our urban design brainiacs and public relations spin-meisters can be such fools.

How can they miss the social signals, good urban design principles, and simple common sense?

I blame the city and, to be fair, a populace saturated with bureaucratic sensibility. Victoria’s a government town which induces passivity and obedience and trains us to over-trust, to assume, by reflex, that government will do it.

Citizens: when we don’t pay attention, this is the government we get — managerial, over-confident, underperforming, imperial, tone-deaf, hermetic, instead of imaginative, leaderly, responsive, tenure-insecure and dutiful.

I believe we have so lost touch with our role and purpose in the public realm, resulting in a vast gap between our everyday reflexes to one side and communitarian (in-common) thinking and behaviour on the far side, out of reach.

The public realm: where strangerhood and the poisons of isolation are confronted and defeated, 10,000 times a day. What? Did you think all this was on automatic, no work necessary? Did you think government should/could/would do it?

More on the sequoia. Diane McNally in a TC letter titled “Centennial Square tree deserves a chance to live,” wrote: “It lifts my heart to see it, one of the grand and silent ‘standing still people.’ ” She later notes the “continuing uglification of Victoria.”

Concerning uglification, I have this thought: when urban design is bureaucratized and consultant-driven, instead of idiosyncratic, inspired, brave, eye-catching, the results always will be mediocre.

If a city doesn’t practise a high level of urban design in the public realm, it loses the licence to demand it of property developers.

Look around.

What, then, might bring pleasure and hope to Victorians and civic pride, if brilliantly designed?

Convert Centennial Square into a beautiful, world-class urban park and integrate the sequoia and the fountain.

The results would be Edenic and actually visited by real humans, instead of the synthetic, smiling humanoids that populate Designerland.

The cost for the entire project — break up and remove the paving, put in topsoil, contour everything, bring in flowering plants, shrubs and trees, scattered seating, other comfort features (restrooms and seasonal weather canopies), decent lighting, a graceful network of earthen pathways — would be under seventy-five bucks (OK, a hundred), a rare act of budgetary sanity in these parlous times.

Various world cities feature small urban parks and pocket parks so beautiful, magical, potent and useful that they perform as arcadian heavens.

You can envision a sloping botanical journey from Douglas to Government, ornamented with a range of amenities.

The world’s getting harder, glassier, more dispirited. There is a great yearning (and need) for a public realm rich with parks, beautiful, ornamented streets, more public rituals of connection.

Given such needs, Victoria chooses “uglification?” God help us.

genekmiller@gmail.com

Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, founder/developer of ASH houseplexes, and currently writing Nothing To Do: Life in a Workless World. He’d be pleased to receive and respond to your thoughts.