Aligning our city with what we want

Let's make life easier for us to live up to our ideals

The day I signed up to run for mayor was a busy one. I woke up early for a radio interview, got the kids out the door, ran around gathering my last nomination signatures, drafted an essay, went to City Hall, and then had a flurry of phone calls to deal with a close family member hospitalized at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (if I were running for premier with health care responsibilities you’d be hearing a lot more about that!)

When I finally got home, the last thing I wanted to do was make dinner. So I ended up cooking some frozen pizzas from the grocery store. The problem with that is, I felt really bad about it. Industrial frozen pizzas don’t align with my values. They don’t have healthy or regenerative ingredients, they have lots of packaging, and the money I spent to buy them goes to some giant multinational that pays their factory workers a tiny fraction of their CEOS, so the local return is minimal to say the least.

This may sound like a diatribe against frozen pizzas, but it’s not. What I’m pointing out is, despite my heartfelt commitment to the opposite of those pizza realities, it was way easier and cheaper to throw a frozen pizza than it was to either make a home cooked meal or order from a local restaurant. So, in a contest between my supposed morals and my pressing needs, I chose the latter, and felt the familiar dissatisfaction and discouragement that happens when my actions conflict with my values.

Contrast that with my trip back home today. I needed to get home fast. And the easiest, cheapest and most readily available option was to hop on a BikeShare and ride back. My ride was a joy. I got fresh air, exercise, and I felt in perfect alignment with my values - I say I wanted a bicycle friendly city, and I was getting to live that reality.

Every day so many of us struggle to live the life we want. We may march in the streets to demand for change, but with our daily activities we can’t seem to help to contradict ourselves. And our contradictions when we don’t put our money where our mouth is give rise to both self-judgement and cries of hypocrisy from those who disagree with our values.

So what I want out of our city is a place where we it’s easy to live the way we want to live. I want to be able to support local businesses, so let’s have a city where government does not get in the way of creating local businesses everywhere that people want to put them. I want to be able to ride my bicycle, walk and take public transit. So let’s change our streets so that transit and human powered movement is faster, more convenient and cheaper than driving. I want to stop contributing to landfill and contamination. So let’s make it easier to live without packaging than get mountains of garbage with our fries, and easier to give used items away than to dump in landfill.

Right now we still have systems that for the most part deliver products and services that are environmentally harmful and contribute to wealth inequality. But we designed those systems ourselves, and we can redesign them so that it is easy for us to act in ways that serve us in the long term as well as the short term.

Some changes are harder than others. Converting from a culture that produces cheap frozen pizzas not much more nutritious than the cardboard and plastic they come in is not an easy feat. Maybe if city zoning and permits made it easier for more businesses to locate right within our neighbourhoods, or cheaper for farmers to sell food than grocery store magnates. I’m in no rush to abandon frozen pizzas (they made the rest of the family happy that night), but I would like to make more of my choices line up exactly with my values. Make water fountains more ubiquitous and appealing than bottled water. Outside entertainment as easy to access as Netflix. Public places as easily accessible, beautiful and welcoming as private backyards.

Every time we notice that we are making a choice that makes us feel bad for betraying our good intentions, let’s look at whether we’d make a different choice if it was easier to do so. And if we would, let’s try to make those good choices the ones that are easy to make!

We expect people to be saints, live the “right” way, make good, sustainable, healthy choices all the time. But we also want to live our lives as easily and as comfortably as possible. Why not have a city where we can do both at the same time!