Foresight from 2020: Through the Looking Glass
By Jennifer Angel
President & CEO, Develop Nova Scotia
Through the search for meaning in the face of incalculable loss, sacrifice, suffering, and the ugliness of all that was 2020 — we found a mirror. And the reflection staring back is much more frightening than the disease.
The most important thing I learned last year is that things have to change in fundamental ways. I knew that before, mostly. But COVID-19 has helped shine a very bright light on our deepest flaws and has made the path and the need to tackle them much more clear and urgent.
Through the pandemic, we’ve already had to accomplish and endure a lot of pretty dramatic change, and people have been working around the clock in a context of fear and uncertainty. We made big adjustments to individual routines and ways of working and schooling and socializing. Businesses have shifted in model and operation. Policies and programs evolved, with notable improvements related to pace of implementation and willingness to take risks in service of innovation (in some places). The healthcare system was tested again and again and again. We put in the work and, while we lost so much, we also saved many important things — including lives. And in Nova Scotia, we were very fortunate to maintain low infection levels, although the loss was still enormous, and every life is one too many. I think we should be proud of our effort to date and we should stop and catch our breath and take care of ourselves when we can.
Hopefully the end of this pandemic is in our sights. But the pandemic is a symptom of something bigger. And I think we need to dig deep, because we are just getting started.
Climate crisis. Systemic racism and xenophobic nationalism. Deep and widening inequality. Politics of division and dangerous rhetoric masquerading as truth. These are wicked problems, and they are not new. They are hard to solve. But we must collectively undertake to build solutions with the same urgency and resolve with which we tackled the need for a vaccine. With the same resolve that energized us to pivot to keep our businesses afloat, our most vulnerable alive, and our communities safe.
Everyone is talking about the need for change. But here’s the thing about change — it is easy to say and hard to do. Quiet passivity is much more comfortable, and while no one would blame us for being tired, nothing changes until we change it. And a really important lesson I am learning is that affecting change requires that I actually change. That you change. And inherent in change is an openness to relinquish experiences and things that we might enjoy — power, control, the floor, and some of the profit (just to name a few). But I think it is as much about building something new.
“You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” –Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics
The kind of change we need is not simply about making room within the existing system for a few others. It’s not bolting on a sustainability or diversity, equity, and inclusion program to the existing plan and project with vague commitments to improve. The kind of change we need is a new system. Because the one we have has not served most of us, or the planet, for a long time.
My greatest fear is that after so much loss and sacrifice, we don’t change. That we go back to “normal”.
We live in very interesting times. And I believe it is a time of change. And we have to be that change.
I have been reflecting on what this means for me and my work and I humbly offer the following as my reflection on 2020. It’s inspired by many others and will form the basis of my work with my extraordinary colleagues at Develop Nova Scotia in 2021:
1. Social infrastructure is critical infrastructure.
Nova Scotia/Mi’kma’ki is a beautiful place in landscape, in seacoast, in urban/rural proximity, and in diverse, creative, resilient people. Develop Nova Scotia aims to build on that natural advantage through the planning, development and, in some cases, operation, of economic and social infrastructure: platforms for business and places for people.
With place as a catalyst, and enhanced quality of life for everyone as an outcome, building on our differentiating, place-based quality of life advantage creates the possibility of more inclusive and resilient communities and contributes to our magnetism and capacity to attract new people — an imperative for a thriving Nova Scotia economy.
Many people who thought parks and waterfronts and main streets and sidewalks and squares and libraries were the soft infrastructure, the nice-to-do stuff you do only when all of the other important infrastructure projects (like highways) were done (they’re never done), don’t think that way anymore. Through COVID-19, these are the places where community can come together without being too close together. They are places of recreation and celebration and joy. They provide space for businesses to innovate. They are places of democracy and constructive dialogue. They are places where people go to find respite.
We know that if you build places for people with people, you will attract people. It’s really that simple. Research shows that social infrastructure can help fight inequality and polarization. Great places contribute in powerful ways to social determinants of health. They bring different people together in unexpected, serendipitous ways, which enhances understanding and also creates conditions for innovation by bringing different people with different ideas together. Social scientist Eric Klinenberg’s research (among a large and growing body of research) shows that in communities that have robust social infrastructure, people are more likely to build ties with their neighbours and invest in their communities. These communities are happier and more resilient.
We need to prioritize social infrastructure, which is economic infrastructure. The importance of places for people has never been more clear; how much they contribute to quality of life and community resilience. And quality of life attracts talent, which fuels the knowledge economy.
“While social infrastructure alone isn’t sufficient to unite polarized societies, protect vulnerable communities, or connect alienated individuals, we can’t address these challenges without it.” –Eric Klinenberg
2. We must all be anti-racist. (and Greta’s right, the house is on fire.)
This is an active, deliberate posture and every single one of us needs to take it up, to focus our actions and work in service of an inclusive, sustainable society and planet. We showed this year that we can do dramatic things, things that we didn’t think possible before, when our lives depended on it. They still do.
I am compelled by Ibram Kendi’s thesis that there is no such thing as “not racist”. One is either anti-racist or racist. That we either support policies and systems that promote racial inequality — with enthusiasm or our own passivity — or we fight them. In the context of our work at Develop Nova Scotia, one of the ways this shows up is when we build places without adequate participation by racialized and marginalized communities — when only a narrow slice of the population show up to engage in building plans. If we build it anyway, we not only leave an awful lot of good ideas off of the table, we also reinforce systemic barriers by baking a narrow perspective and lived experience into the landscape. In doing so, we exclude, detach and alienate people and we know this has profound effects. If diverse communities and voices aren’t showing up to participate in our engagement sessions, it is not them, it is us. Our policies and power structures have not created a space in which these communities feel trusted or relevant or hopeful that their participation matters. It is our responsibility to do the work and to build the trust, which takes time. As Jane Jacobs timelessly observed, to build places for everybody, you must build them with everybody. Again, easy to say, hard to do. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. And there are no short cuts.
This commitment to social inclusion extends to how our work affects the health of our planet. Unless a project is not only environmentally sustainable but regenerative, we need to challenge it to do more, impact less, or we need to consider that it might be the wrong project. Kate Raworth, in her doughnut model, outlines the safe and just space for economic activity between a foundation of equity and inclusion and an ecological ceiling. This is a fundamental reimagination and these are important boundaries that perhaps need to be non-negotiable.
3. The most important thing Develop Nova Scotia built in 2020 (and beyond)? A community inspired to act.
We built a lot of things this year. In 2020, Develop Nova Scotia undertook our largest capital project program to date, with more than $40M in infrastructure projects underway — platforms for business and innovation, places for community to gather, tourism differentiators, and magnets for people.
We negotiated projects valued at over $250M that will deliver high-speed Internet to more than 95% of Nova Scotians by 2023, with more than 22,000 homes and businesses in Nova Scotia already reached in 2020.
We have an additional $400M of strategic economic infrastructure and waterfront improvement projects underway through partnership, including Queen’s Marque, Cunard, and the new Arts District which will result in new places to live downtown, new places for business, a reimagined place for art for everyone, and approximately 6 acres of new public space, with uninterrupted public access to the water’s edge. This work will create places for everyone in spaces that were formerly surface parking lots for a few. And we have advanced planning on placemaking projects in communities across Nova Scotia with a focus on building local community placemaking capacity while revitalizing working waterfronts and main streets.
It has been a busy year and it has been a transformative year to the landscape of Nova Scotia. But the most important thing we contributed to building this year is a team, inside and outside of our organization, that is inspired to act; our partners across public and private sectors and community members are working together in common purpose. It isn’t perfect, but there’s better alignment than I’ve ever seen. The great irony and surprise for me in 2020 is the extent to which we were able to come together and deepen relationships and a collective commitment to this place, while we were apart.
Our team at Develop Nova Scotia realized our purpose — building places for people where everyone can belong. Our projects are not an end in themselves, but tools for bringing community together to build on the magnetism and resilience of Nova Scotia. So how we build things (with people, for people), matters at least as much as what we build.
We believe in the possibility of an inclusive, resilient, irresistible Nova Scotia, and that in 2021, we will realize important collective impact and we will (continue to) see inspiring participation and momentum from the ground up. Through our reflection on 2020, and with this collective commitment to the possibility of Nova Scotia — beautiful, diverse, extraordinary Mi’kma’ki — I am inspired and energized to act (and continue to hold up that mirror) in 2021.
