Note: Building on Stuart's observation in the main essay ("Victoria History in a Nutshell") that "Victoria started out in the 1840s as an ambitious yet filthy, corrupt, violent, polluted frontier town," as well as some of the discussion we had in comments about the terminal for the trans-Canada railway being located in Vancouver, which effectively gave Vancouver an economic edge over Victoria, I have written up my thoughts about current economic opportunities.

I think that in this, the 21sth century, our "bridge" to the mainland could be the internet cable. On further reflection, I think Victoria could learn some useful lessons from a city that has some quirky affinities to our own history here: Salem, Massachusetts. I lived for 17 years in Greater Boston, 11 years on its North Shore, in Beverly, which since the 17th century was part of the famous Danvers, Peabody, Salem, Beverly townships nexus. In the late 18th and into the early 19th century, Salem was a very wealthy place, made rich from the China Clipper trade. Technology (fast clipper ships, built in Essex, Mass., which lies a bit further north of Beverly) and trade in desirable commodities (tea, China trade generally) is what made that city thrive. Eventually, of course, other forms of trade took over, and Salem, throwing itself into 19th century style industry, got a little rough around the edges, even as it tried (and tries) to shore up its economy through tourism ("Witch City" -- think Salem Witch Trials, and Arthur Miller's The Crucible). Tourism in Salem is classy, however, even if there are plenty of tackier pointy-hat witch souvenirs (made in China, of course): there is also a big shout-out museum (with new addition by Moshe Safdie) , centuries-old architecture and graveyards (take the excellent postcard tour here), great literature.

Of course Salem is today also well integrated into the Greater Boston economy. What powers that economy? Again, the answer is trade, and of course one can trade so very many things. Just as Salem's early 19th century economy was powered by trade, which led to rich legacy of architectural landmarks and cultural goods, so the modern economies have centered around hubs like Greater Boston that are powered by trade. The difference that makes a place like Boston stand out, however, lies in the nature of the traded commodities themselves. Today, information is the "new tea": it is information, "traded" (bought, sold, shared, used, made useable) across industries and continents, that powers the economy. And it's Boston's institutions of higher learning (Harvard and MIT to start, along with the 40+ smaller colleges in the area) that provide the people, ideas, and energy to keep things moving. This constellation isn't limited to Boston, of course: California has Stanford, CalTech, and Berkeley all within spitting distance of Silicon Valley. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Information is the new "tea." And it comes in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and formats. Instead of being an old teabag, one can only wish that Victoria would get good and steeped in the real thing. Consider, for example, the numbers-based universes described in the January 2006 issue of Business Week: "Math Will Rock Your World," which describes the gradual conquest of the world of words by numbers. (I'm on the side of words, incidentally, but instead of sticking my head in the sand, I think it's important to understand what the article is describing). There is, for example, a truly frightening beauty to the whole enterprise, summed up in this description of what can only be called sublime geometry:

How do you convert written words into math? Goldman says it takes a combination of algebra and geometry. Imagine an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information. It's called a polytope and it has near-infinite dimensions, almost impossible to conjure up in our earthbound minds. It contains every topic written about in the press. And every article that Inform processes becomes a single line within it. Each line has a series of relationships. A single article on Bordeaux wine, for example, turns up in the polytope near France, agriculture, wine, even alcoholism. In each case, Inform's algorithm calculates the relevance of one article to the next by measuring the angle between the two lines. (more)

At the risk of simplifying too much, I would say the endeavour is to use geometry and math to "map" a relationship that's initially verbal, by putting it into numerical (quantifiable) terms -- which can then be used to facilitate trade (buying and selling).

In the past decade, a sizable chunk of humanity has moved its work, play, chat, and shopping online. We feed networks gobs of digital data that once would have languished on scraps of paper -- or vanished as forgotten conversations. These slices of our lives now sit in databases, many of them in the public domain. From a business point of view, they're just begging to be analyzed. But even with the most powerful computers and abundant, cheap storage, companies can't sort out their swelling oceans of data, much less build businesses on them, without enlisting skilled mathematicians and computer scientists. (more)

A little further down we read:

...over the coming decade, each of us will give birth to far more fleshed out simulations of ourselves. We'll be modeled as workers, shoppers, voters, and patients. Some of the simulations will have our names and credit cards attached, perhaps a few genetic details. In others, our identities will be shielded. Many of these models will be eerily accurate and others laughably off mark. But companies and governments will use them all the same to predict how to sell us things, steer us clear of diseases, and ramp up our productivity. And yes, they'll try to use them to keep us from hijacking airplanes or detonating bombs.

This mathematical modeling of humanity promises to be one of the great undertakings of the 21st century. It will grow in scope to include much of the physical world as mathematicians get their hands on new flows of data, from atmospheric sensors to the feeds from millions of security cameras. It's a parallel world that's taking shape, a laboratory for innovation and discovery composed of numbers, vectors, and algorithms. "We turn the world of content into math, and we turn you into math," says Howard Kaushansky, CEO of Boulder (Colo.)-based Umbria Inc., a company that uses math to analyze marketing trends online. (more)

Admittedly, this is not the sort of stuff that will ring everyone's chimes. And there is a "dark side," as the article points out -- the invasion, perhaps usurpation, of privacy: "One significant challenge to the math revolution is to build new businesses from data without sacrificing privacy." But as the article concludes, however, it would be foolish to avoid grappling with the issue: "As more of the world's information is pooled into mathematics, the realm of numbers becomes an ever larger meeting ground. It's a percolating laboratory full of surprising connections, and a birthplace for new industries. Yes, it's a magnificent time to know math."

It also happens to be the kind of stuff -- and most importantly the kind of trade, the kind of business -- that is not dependent on geography, which, for an island, is no small issue. That's the beauty of an information economy, though: it doesn't matter whether or not there's a railway terminal in town, for example, or a bridge for cars and trucks to the mainland. With the internet, trade in information can spring up literally anywhere, if and provided that there are talented and skilled, highly educated people with drive and ambition around. If your human capital is deficient, on the other hand, you will have to leave and go where the people are. It's the talent pool -- the people -- that matter.

What this means is that we can't afford to focus on just the material stuff we're missing -- if we get the people here, if we get the density and the synergy, we improve our chances to rev up the economy. If we cling to the status quo, on the other hand, we fail to build up the needed capital. We want to attract more people, who are young (or still young), with drive and with brains and with ideas, perhaps initially by training and incubating them at our institutions of higher learning (and yes, we have a couple). And then we want to keep them here (albeit without letting them go soft in the usual "made in Victoria -- it's Lotus Land, eh?" manner...). Attracting only retirees and rich "resort" types will be, in the long run, a death knell for the economy, as will (dare I say it?) catering to a misplaced leftism that thinks that "government" should take care of every distress, and that "competition" is somehow "unchristian" or "evil" or "unVictorian." (As an aside: I detect more than a tinge of anti-semitism, incidentally, in the mentality that elevates the "genteel" underdog to the higher status of cultural or intellectual arbiter. Interestingly, there's plenty of that in Victoria -- I've noticed several times in recent months that it's not unusual for some "critics" of capitalism to espouse a vague New Testament Christianity, with an occasional but nonetheless astonishing potshot at "Jews," who are never defined but who in the critic's twisted thinking are probably American, and undoubtedly capitalist. In my opinion, this is also where the famous Canadian "meekness" of turning the other cheek and the infamous bred-in-the-bone anti-Semitism of its British, as well as French-Canadian rooted cultural identity shake hands. This is the subject of a different essay, however....)

I'm not arguing for "competition" as such, at any rate, whether "American" or "Canadian," as if such distinctions even existed. I am, however, making the case for openness, which creates collaboration, synergy, and creativity. "Success" is a byproduct, and it knows no nationality. The real difficulty is making it stick, and making sure it sticks around.

Some notable Victoria-based companies that are in the right "information-is-the-new-tea" groove:

Abebooks, which basically relays information between booksellers and buyers.

Genologics, which builds software that lets researchers in the field of proteomics figure out how their data stacks up to data elsewhere -- i.e., software that provides a common platform so that everyone is speaking the same language. (I'm undoubtedly bowdlerising Genologic's work here, but I think that's the gist of what they do -- and they could get huge doing this: it's another example of a company seeing a need and filling it, but not by manufacturing a new widget or by extracting and exporting yet another resource. It's purely knowledge-based.)

There are others (especially some incubator spin-offs from the University of Victoria), but the questions for Victoria are: (1) can more be created, and can these companies find the appropriate, qualified personnel and staff, whether locally or by hiring people who are willing to relocate to Victoria; followed by the really important question, (2) can Victoria retain these companies, or will they leave if they become too successful? After all, even Vancouver couldn't keep Flickr, whose founder, Stewart Butterfield, is a local Victoria boy (and whose father,David Butterfield, heads up the Loreto Bay Co. which developed Shoal Point, among other projects). Flickr now "lives" in Silicon Valley, and here we are in Victoria, thinking that Vancouver was the "big city." Ha.

The big city is dead, long live the big city. Without the right people, without the right density to create the needed energy and synergy, it almost doesn't matter what you build. If you don't like people, if you don't like density, please leave and go live in the woods. If you live in a city, you had better like people and their constant to-ing and fro-ing, and the pooling of talent they create. With enough people and enough drive, you can get a party rolling. What Victoria -- to return to the subject of origin here -- lost after its initial 19th century boomtown launch was human capital above all else. What our downtown lost again, specifically in the last few decades since the 1970s, was even more human capital. Slowly, slowly, it's coming back, and the energy might (just might) build exponentially as each warm body connects with another, and the information really starts to flow.

Addendum (to the "Addendum"?? ...hey-ho, eh?):
Here's a very interesting article, Enhancing the use of public spaces in cities, which makes some of the very points I'm making above (namely, that it's the people in the city who matter, not the look or simply the built form of the city), albeit in relation to city planners/ urban planners and their attempts to construct "useful" public space. First, note that the article starts by pointing out the following:

The issues that affect people's use of public spaces include the resources at their disposal, social norms and their individual values.

What this means is that if you put a public space somewhere, that doesn't mean it will get used just in the way you expected. In fact, it might not get used at all...

Following, in bullet form, some other key points from the article, which relate to whatever economic points I may or may not have been able to convey, as per above, insofar as they point out that it's people who matter. Without the people, you can pack it up and go home. (All bulleted points below are direct quotes from the article:)

• Many of the places that best supported sharing and exchange were not traditional public spaces. While parks and markets were often important, a wider range of places including car boot sales, allotments and supermarket cafés could also be significant social hubs.
• These more successful spaces showed that certain factors could stimulate interest and engagement between different groups of people. These factors included opportunities for novelty and surprise or for performance and display.
• Those spaces that most encouraged shared use included those which: left room for self-organisation, encouraged a broad range of users by encouraging diverse activities, and made spaces accessible at all times of the day.
• 'Public space' should not be defined by aesthetics or ownership rather by whether it can provide a shared space for a diverse range of activities created by a range of different people. In theory, any place, regardless of its ownership or appearance, offers this potential.
• Spaces that support sharing cannot be created by designers and architects alone. Public space works best when it is 'co-produced' by the people who control or manage the space and those who use it; only then can it fulfil its democratic promise.
• Policies which foster social behaviour might do more to create shared spaces and increase interaction in public spaces than regulating anti-social behaviour. [Oh, I like this point: stop the "no, thou shalt not!" rhetoric, and instead figure out what it is you're actually wanting to encourage!]
• ...increasingly public space is being pulled in opposite directions. At one end, the core ideal of public space – free and open access to all – is being undermined by a focus on safety. This is creating bland spaces with no real ability to draw in or retain people. At the other end, the increasing diversity of individual lifestyles is splintering public spaces into a patchwork of specialised enclaves, defined by income, age, ethnicity and taste.
• The public nature of our towns and cities is created by the interaction of people and their environment and would be impossible without people's everyday participation. Far from being delivered in isolation by an architect's design brief or the council's maintenance team, public spaces are 'co-produced'. This idea holds out a potentially powerful way forward in terms of closing the persistent gap between the promise and reality of public space, and countering the negative trends that are currently perceived to be undermining public space.