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North, by North-east Coast? What Halifax can learn from Austin, Texas
By Jon Tattrie
Jonny Stevens was staring wide-eyed with delight at the
thriving city of Austin, Texas, when he had a revelation: Halifax needs to get
weirder.
Austin is weird. That’s not an insult – it’s the city
slogan. “Keep Austin Weird.” It boasts a Cathedral of Junk. It has a Graffiti
Park. It has a Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata, described as a
“treasury of stuff that may exist.” It is an odd place. And for Austin, weird
works.
Its South-by-South-West (SXSW) festival started off drawing
700 people for a few songs in 1987, and the city rallied around it. It now
draws 200,000 people, including Jonny Stevens, for its bonanza of music,
technology and culture.
When Stevens is not being wowed by Austin, he’s organizing
the Halifax Pop Explosion. It’s growing by 20 per cent a year, but is still a
long way short of SXSW. Stevens thinks Austin can assist Halifax, so he’s
flying a city planner from Texas to Nova Scotia to offer us an education in
eccentricity.
“We saw what was possible in a city that was a similar size
and history to Halifax,” Stevens explains. “We saw some of the great things
that were able to happen when a city’s council, government and people got
together and made sure they had a cohesive cultural plan for Austin.”
Both are capitals, both are university towns, both are the
13th biggest cities in their countries, and both have undergone awkward
growth spurts of suburban sprawl. Austin is a convention centre city; Halifax
is building a new centre. While Halifax is crazy for density and smart growth
now, Austin did it a decade ago and is reaping the rewards.
When Stevens evangelizes for Austin, it’s not surprising he
starts with music. When Austin City Hall
puts you on hold, you listen to local musicians. If you go to council early,
you get a free concert. In HRM, you get muzak and a pre-council prayer. When
Halifax did spend big-time in live music, it brought Paul McCartney and the
Black-Eyed Peas, rather than investing the money on building the local music
scene.
Stevens points to details, too: street closures for big
events and multiple live-music venues, complete with special loading zones for
bands.
“We see the similarities, but we also see where Halifax is
falling a little short,” he says. “We are focused on some old debates and some
old way of thinking. Wouldn’t life be great in Halifax if we were just a little
closer to Austin, Texas?”
A big shift he’d like to see is mental – to take the “No”
out of Nova Scotia. Instead of debating street closure endlessly, why not try
it out and see what happens? “Have everyone say, ‘Yeah, how can we make
something great happen?’” he says. “Let’s make Halifax a little bit weirder.
We’ll all have more fun.”
One of Austin’s chief weirdos is Don Pitts. The former
Gibson Guitar employee is Austin’s music manager and he’ll divulge his secrets
as part of the Pop Explosion’s HPX Digital Conference in October.
“I’m hoping that we can share some ideas. Kind of share what
works for us and what didn’t work for us,” he says. “Austin has really grown a
lot in the last six or seven years and the way that we were conducting our
business, it was kind of like we were still that very small town, and then
we’ve woken up and said woh, we’re now the 13th largest metropolitan
city in the United States and we need to start acting like it.”
The first step was to attract more downtown residents. Once
densified, the city could grow up, rather than out. “As my grandfather used to
say, they’re not going to make any more land. We had to figure out where to put
all the people.”
Five years ago, the city skyline was cranes – a sight not
unlike Halifax today, with its new library, Kings Wharf in Dartmouth and other
developments finally moving forward.
Austin also grew by retaining its university grads, a
perpetual challenge for Halifax. Pitts points to past graduates who started
Dell Computers. It remains an important company in Austin.
He’s coming to Halifax to learn, too. “We constantly get
called and looked upon as, you guys have got it figured out – what’s the secret
of your success? We’re kind of scratching our heads, because internally, we’re
still trying to figure it out.”
