Survival a Creative Exercise in Bust Towns
June 09, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Craig Offman | Source: National Post
For more than a century, the Great Lakes region was a boisterous, self-sufficient and pungent powerhouse. Raw materials such as coal, iron and ore were shipped across a network of railways, canals and shipping lines to flourishing steel mills and bustling automotive plants. But cyclical downturns, expensive production costs and inferior product eroded its successes.
As more Ontario cities face the long, hard future of Rust Belt attrition, more ideas are bound to emerge. In fact, dozens of cities across the Great Lakes Region are struggling to come up with innovative solutions.
The most ambitious plan so far may be the one contained in a recent think-tank report that proposes a bold vision for the entire area: a bi-national economic union stretching through a swath of Canadian and American Rust Belt cities, a combined economy that would fuel a clean-technology revolution.
Other proposals abound, but most rely on quick-fix staples such as casinos and other conventional tourist traps.
Interesting proposals to a common problem at the National Post >>
