WHY BOTHER WITH A DOWNTOWN?

When this blog started, I understood it was to let you know about the good times you could have in the downtown that you could not have in the suburban malls and shopping centres that surround our city like so many wolf dens circling a henhouse.

I began to write about the characters you might encounter here who could change your life, even that we have both a right and a duty to be downown and why it matters.

Most of all, I engaged to point out the possibilities of a reconfigured downtown, offering daily opportunity to come together and make something communal since the first days of this quirky city’s founding. Of course my focus is that new space surrounding city hall on all sides, calling for us to make it a part of our history.

Architect Robert Gatje has written, ‘Great Public Squares of the World’ in which he discusses ‘spatial dynamism,’ and the impact of such squares as ours on social and economic forces. “There is a play,” he says, “between space and structure.” That calls to mind all the squares we’ve seen in movies and how they shaped the destiny of those citizens who used them: St Peters Square in Vatican City, Columbus Circle in New York, Palace Square in St Petersburg, Tiananmen Square, even that purely fictitious square in The Music Man where the town gathers to see their new band.

Old as it is, Kingston is just beginning to understand how this works. Having a square downtown is a reminder of an assignment to make it our own. By existing it is saying that “Downtown has a centre, a heart that is not commercial, has nothing to do with shopping.” But because all that history and presence exists, businesses succeed and things get bought as the community begins to make history happen in the place where everything else goes on.

Our part is to be there, to lend our presence to the events and history that will follow, to turn our well-planned square into the magnet it is already becoming to visitors. Around the edges of our square are small tables with umbrellas and folding chairs, along with broad benches, set out to make us know the place is meant to be sat in and used. The fountain shoots and sparkles with a broad circle of stone surrounding it to sit and eat lunch, dabble your fingers and understand what it means to belong to this city.

Here is your opportunity to find out what happens when a community can come together in one large central space and own it, gravitate to it in times of wide-spread anxiety or in celebration, to be ourselves witness to our own times, to see our future. If the whole idea of D.A.R.N. were just to lure you downtown to admire the buildings and shop, it wouldn’t be worth it. We could argue forever about which stores are better or more convenient, but we all know the issue is larger than that. A real working city is a communal space of experiences and adventures, small moments of discovery with epiphanies in places we least expect.

Broken up into all the little splinter groups with labels like; ‘suburbanite,’ ‘shopper’ or ‘tourist,’ we can go on quarreling about where people might spend their time but one thing is clear. There is a single place in Kingston where we can stand shoulder to shoulder with friends and strangers and know the feeling of becoming, ‘we the people. Using and valuing our downtown, we become in the truest sense, ‘US.’