AEGD

Have You Heard of the Looming Giant?

by Jeremy Parsons

Student at Redeemer University College and local resident

It’s happening and it’s happening fast. Look around you, things are about to change. The greater community that surrounds Redeemer is on the cusp of a series of unprecedented changes that will swallow up hundreds of acres of farmed and wooded land in upcoming years. The project, authored by the City of Hamilton, has been in the planning process for years, and planners have been inching ever closer to construction ever since. The proposed development, known as the Airport Employment Growth District (AEGD), is anchored around the airport and is being planned in order to generate jobs and attract manufacturers from around the country. This “aerotropolis” plan, as some refer to it, involves changing vast amounts of farmland and residential areas to industry and what are being called “prestige business parks”.

The whole idea of building around airports was based on a theory by John Kasarda, the Director of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. The aerotropolis concept is based on the argument that convenience manufacturing trends favour air transport and that twenty-first century cities will grow around airport-oriented development. However debatable that theory is, the City of Hamilton has jumped on it and has used the idea to push the AEGD plan in an effort to increase the employment and marketability of the Hamilton area. The project is being backed by public interest groups and corporations such as the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce. In fact, the group created by the city to do the work of gauging public sentiment towards the project has been made up of selected members who seem to be almost unanimously in support of the new development. Hamilton City Councillor Brad Clark called the project, “a very, very subjective process”.

The project itself is part of a larger drive led by the provincial government under the new “Growth Plan”. The province-wide plan is intended to “reduce development pressures on agricultural lands and natural areas by directing more growth to existing urban areas” (www.placestogrow.ca) and yet the development about to be built in our backyard would push the city’s urban boundary more than six kilometres southward. The enormity of the district is without comparison, extending from Fiddler’s Green, all the way past Glancaster to Upper James and then south to Carluke Road. Rolling fields of corn and soybean will be translated into industrial areas, with new four-lane highways being built to connect the out-of-place development to the 403. Questions abound with this project… as in what will happen to Bennett’s Apple Farm? How about the Glancaster Golf & Country Club? Or even the area surrounding Hamilton District Christian High? All of these are within the boundaries of the AEGD.

A number of weeks back, I had the opportunity to attend a public meeting about the AEGD held at the Masonic Lodge on Queen Street. At the meeting I was fortunate enough to meet and interview a family who have lived on a horse farm on Glancaster Road passed down for six generations. The couple’s farm is located inside the proposed development land and any map of the AEGD will tell you it is a “prestige business park” and not a farm. Yet, the family refuses to move. Questioning one of the head media representatives for the planners at the meeting, they pressed her to answer why the map displays their land as purple industry. Being flustered, her only response was, “well, you have to understand this is anticipated many years down the road.” Despite questionable intentions from planners the family is resolute that their farm will stay, regardless of the pressure from politicians or developers, “We’re not gonna budge, this is our farm and the city can’t have it. I can understand that they need land for more jobs, but look in the city, there’s plenty of room there. Out here, it’s farmland not city.” Ann Joyner, the Project Manager for Dillon Consulting, states that, “we’re going to encourage those residential areas to convert to employment, this process will happen over the years as we gain more and more land”. No doubt, it is a sad story. Many farmers and residents will be pushed around until they sell, and many more will be holding out until their land becomes boxed-in by industry and business parks.

An alternative to expanding the city’s limits and contributing to devastating urban sprawl is to re-focus our energy towards the city’s core. I know, it’s been said many times before, yet we still haven’t done the necessary studies to discern the plan of action the city should take. Hamilton has a beautiful, but un-kept downtown core that is crying out for revitalization. There are acres of unused plots, old buildings that need renewal, and vacant brownfields that are ready for the shovel. Instead, the city has opted for developing “prestige” employment for the richest community in the area, leading to another case of the downtown core unemployed being left out. In similar fashion to the cookie-cutter McMansions that have been built throughout Meadowlands, the AEGD fallows suit by catering to this wealthy demographic on the mountain and leaving those downtown without the same attention. “Hamilton’s downtown needs some heroes,” says Roberta Gratz, an American expert on cities’ economic ecosystems. “The process of rebirth in a devastated core tends to be slow, incremental and citizen-based. Usually, where it tends to go right, you have a couple of really forceful citizen leaders.”

Many of the residents and employees living and working within the gigantic proposed development are surprisingly unaware of the details of the project—raising questions as to whether city planners and consultants have hurried the process along so as to minimize the debate and avoid widespread resident confrontation. One thing is for sure: Redeemer sure hasn’t made a fuss over it. As in previous years with previous developments, the institution sits idly by and continues to keep its nose down, without making a sound. I am interested in making this project known to those who haven’t been informed and calling for ethical principles and process on the side of the developer in this whole situation.