Read between the frames
Clive Doucet builds on greatness
BY Ron Nurwisah
Ottawa city councillor Clive Doucet is the kind of politician who I would want to represent me. He’s someone who cares about local issues like preserving old trees in a neighbourhood and public transit, but who also sees how these issues fit into the larger scheme of things. In short, someone who acts and stands up for me locally but also thinks beyond his ward.
In his latest book, Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual, Doucet argues that cities, with all their roads, factories and subdivisions, are dooming the planet to a slow carbon dioxide-fuelled death. But he thinks it will be the city dwellers that will come up with the solutions to stop climate change. It will be in cities that new technologies will be developed and, more importantly, where reforms to an unsustainable economic system and unresponsive political culture will take place.
Urban Meltdown is part call to action, part autobiography—a tale of Doucet’s evolution from a football-playing teenager to a poet and, most recently, a politician. All along the way, books have guided Doucet. He recounts going to the University of Toronto in the late 1960s and early 1970s and how he got involved in the movement to stop the Spadina expressway—a project that would have destroyed a number of downtown Toronto’s most vibrant neighbourhoods. Among all this there is also Doucet’s loving recollection of the written works that shaped him.
Like all writers, Doucet has metaphorically stood on the shoulders of other authors. Their books have had an impact on him and on his work. When he wasn’t busy going to class, bonding with roommates or being an urban activist, he was reading. “They weren’t on any curriculum, they were just books I picked up cheap, Dell paperbacks, for a buck,” Doucet says. “I’ve gone on to read all kinds of books, later on in life. None of them changed my structure of thinking the way those early books did,” he adds.
One of the not-small books that influenced Doucet’s work was Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. “[It] made sense of what I was seeing around me, that old neighbourhoods were lively and attractive, and robust and resilient. She gave me an intellectual framework.” Books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful introduced Doucet to the nascent environmental movement.
Another book he cites as an inspiration is The Autobiography of Malcom X. “He was at the time vilified in the press, painted as a demon. I read his autobiography, and the soul of the man—it was so clear that he was a sensitive, caring person. I just didn’t believe all the stuff I read in the paper anymore,” Doucet says.
He writes that these paperbacks made him understand that “society wasn’t something that existed in some independent way, like a tree; it was simply an invention of people, and like any invention it could change in any number of ways.”
Speaking with Doucet, it’s clear these books still excite him almost 40 years later. “I’ll just read pieces, a chapter here, a chapter there. I remember them. I even remember where I read them and how I read them.”
All these books and their effect come through clearly in Urban Meltdown, which reflects Jacobs’ passion for peoplecentred urban living, a serious concern for the environment, passion for social justice and a desire to change our society for the better. Here’s hoping this book will have an impact not unlike the ones that inspired its author.
