Reasons for optimism

Ok, ok. I know. After my last post, the heading here seems a little paradoxical. But it's my birthday today, so I'm entitled to put on the pink glasses for a day. A perfect square birthday at that. A few minutes ago, I was explaining this to my children -- that perfect square birthdays come rarely, that most of us will only have 9 of these things, at best, and that this one is my seventh. That they come less and less frequently (thank goodness!). I'm not sure she saw the point at all, but then she's 11. She's going to live forever.

I spent most of my day on Friday at the new site of our School of Architecture. In a brilliant move, they left town, bought an old, unused textile factory in the nearby town of Cambridge and renovated in spectacular fashion. The thing about old textile factories is that the work requires big machines, big spaces and, at the time this factory was built, lots of natural light. These features having been preserved in the renovation means that these lucky students and faculty spend their day in a building that seems to float on the edge of the Grand River in a great vestibule of light, colour and space. It's exactly the kind of place you'd want to be in as an architect, I would think. I remarked to the person I went to visit that I would think the hardest thing about his day would be leaving in the evening.

The day generated what for me seem like spectacular and unreal ideas. Serious projects are still perhaps some distance in the future, but on Friday they came to life. One of my great revelations of last year was that architects and planners are in business of understanding how to apply the principles that govern how space works to the world of human affairs. This is an obvious truth that had somehow escaped me in all of my years as a scientist interested in how mental space works. In an era where technology is forcing us to rethink physical space, architectural theory is booming. More than anything else, my day, spent discussing these kinds of ideas with an incredibly wise and interesting architect made me realize that at least some of the craziness that is floating around in my head is a shared craziness. Unless somebody somewhere makes a slip and presses the wrong button at the wrong time, there's just some chance that the creativity of a new generation of young people who think about how to design buildings, machines, cities, and neighbourhoods to change social systems, to rectify some of our past mistakes, could put my children, and their children, into a world of undreamt of goodness and light. It could happen.

Our new government (now not so new, I suppose) and its new environment minister, is unrolling a series of very bold policy announcements dealing with energy conservation, environmental cleanup, carbon sequestration, alternative energy initiatives. The cynics say that these announcements are simply revamped versions of policies devised by the previous government. I don't care whether or not this is true. I don't care whether or not these policies are being announced solely for the purpose of enhancing this government's chances of re-election. I'm not sure whether I even care who is elected, provided that these policies are acted on. Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? Those who can figure out what a people really consider to be important, and to act on it effectively, should win elections.

Call me a naive dupe, but it's my birthday today and I'm going to keep these pink specs on until a minute past midnight.