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The Resilient City
The Shared Experience Of Resource-Dependent Communities
Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, began life with the great hope of being a model resource industry town. In the mid-1970's, when coal prices and global demand were hitting record highs, British Columbia eagerly supported a $3 billion coal mining mega-project in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to export massive amounts of coal to Japan. British Columbia had everything it needed except a workforce near the mining area: an instant town had to be built to provide mining labour. Aware of the historic Canadian industry practice of enabling helter-skelter development in boom times and then abandoning the resulting communities when the natural resource depleted, British Columbia worked with the mining companies to build Tumbler Ridge, a planned town that would provide a stable workforce for the mines and state-of-the-art infrastructure that would attract and retain a permanent, thriving population.
Planning for Tumbler Ridge began in 1976, the same year Vancouver hosted HABITAT, the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. Construction began in 1981 as the open pit coal mines swung into operation. Houses were built, schools opened, workers and their families moved in. The instant population of 1,200 people in 1981 rose within a couple years to 4,400 before peaking in 1991 at 4,800 people.
 Town Hall, Tumbler Ridge, BC Source: District of Tumbler Ridge |
Even though Tumbler Ridge was a planned community with many built-in safeguards to avoid the pitfalls common to single-industry towns, foresight could not entirely insulate the town from decline. By 1991, the air was beginning to seep out of the coal mining bubble. As production volumes decreased, fewer workers were needed and families moved away. When first one mine closed in 2000, three years ahead of schedule, the shocked town went into a crisis that deepened further when the second mine closed in 2003. The population plummeted to about 1,900.
With the loss of more than 70% of all local jobs and 65% of the municipal tax base, Tumbler Ridge began to trace the downward arc so many towns depending on a single resource industry have known. As the population shrank, the demand for goods and services diminished, further eroding the economy and accelerating community-wide job losses. The demand for schools and teachers waned while the need for health, social and recreational services shifted to meet the needs of a smaller and on average older population. Bleak economic prospects and a glut of houses on the market caused property values to fall, eroding the tax base and reinforcing the need for service cuts. The community members developed a mounting sense of helplessness in the face of events beyond their control. They struggled to maintain a sense of hope in the town's future.
Tumbler Ridge's recent transition experience resembles the past and current experience of many other resource-based industry towns across Canada. Small communities that depend almost exclusively on single resource industries like mining, forestry, fishing, agriculture or energy are particularly vulnerable to resource depletion, the cyclical fluctuations of commodity prices, world events and government policy that combine to impact industrial operations at the local level. Small towns face the fearful prospect of industry closure and with it the disappearance of vital jobs which leads to population loss, economic and social decline, and a debilitating loss of hope in the future. It is a pattern that has been repeated in resource-based industry towns across Canada.
Far from being unique, the Canadian experience has been repeated around the globe. North, south, east and west – from the United States to Ukraine, from Spain to South Africa, from Australia to China and Japan – resource-dependent towns are struggling to survive the shocks and aftershocks of industry closures. The global trend of urbanization, in which people living in rural communities migrate away gradually from small towns and rural places to find jobs, better economic prospects and educational opportunities, has been accelerated by sudden industry failures that hasten the decline of resource-dependent rural areas.
Around the world, small resource-dependent communities face a dire future when their major employer closes its doors. Kok Zhangak , in southern Kyrgyzstan, is one such community. Left imperilled by the 1991 bankruptcy of the local coal mine, Kok Zhangak is a shadow of its former self. Founded in 1943, the community quickly grew to a population of 20,000 as the local mine produced up to 1 million tonnes of coal per year. Today, its population has shrunk and the people are poor. In an area where the average income is $20 US per month, Kok Zhangak has unemployment rate of more than 70%. What little work there is involves working in illegal and highly dangerous makeshift mines using only pickaxes and shovels, or in demolishing buildings to sell for scrap. There is no public transportation, power outages are frequent and the water supply for many people comes from irrigation ditches. Apartments sell for between $100 and $150 US. Officials estimate that the area has coal reserves to last hundreds of years; the difficulty appears to be not in supply but in finding and getting access to markets. The community is working with the national government to develop markets and to diversify into manufacturing and agriculture. But despite being located near the beautiful Tien Shan mountains, there seems to be little prospect of developing an alternative economy based in tourism. ( Solovyov, 2004 )
Globally, all small towns facing an unexpected industry closure must deal with similar issues. Dependent for so long on a single industry and a few spin-off businesses and services that provide jobs, these communities have had their oxygen cut off and are gasping for air. Expecting that the quality of town life dependent on a mine, fisheries, a lumber mill or farming should always remain the same and go on forever, they are unprepared for change. They fail – or have been unable because of a lack of resource options – to lay the foundation for a more robust economy by diversifying into new industries and businesses that would sustain their communities in the absence of their primary industry.
When their single industry dramatically diminishes, these communities begin to implode. Peterhead, Scotland is an example of this chronology of events. The collapse of the North Sea cod fishery and over-fishing of other species of whitefish threatens Peterhead's economic future. As the largest whitefish port in Europe, 50 kilometres north of Aberdeen, fishing has been Peterhead's economic mainstay since 55 AD when a tribe of Picts built sod huts near the harbour and made their livelihood from the sea. In modern times, more than 100,000 tonnes of whitefish have been processed every year in Peterhead's four harbours. However, international landings of North Sea cod dropped from a high of 341,000 tonnes in 1972 to a new low of only 41,000 tonnes in 2002. Over the years, bans on the cod and haddock fishery have been imposed and lifted again, causing the economy of this town of 18,000 to oscillate. Currently, scientists are recommending a ban on all cod and haddock catches in the North Sea and in March of 2004 the British government imposed a 13% reduction in the whitefish fishing fleet in 2004. With an economy dominated by fishing, Peterhead is attempting to improve its attractiveness to tourists but has developed few other economic options to date. Today, the entire Scottish fleet dedicated to whitefish fishing has been reduced from 290 in 2001 to just 120 in 2004, putting the livelihood of Peterhead's 865 fisherman and thousands of fish processing and indirect jobs at risk. Peterhead is now attempting to diversify its economy to attract tourism. (McCarthy 2002)
Unemployed workers, scrambling to find new jobs to support themselves and their families, usually leave small towns like Peterhead in search of jobs in similar occupations elsewhere. Youth looking for a brighter future leave for the bigger cities in hope of finding work or an education that will lead to employment. They almost never return. They leave behind a much smaller, older population that has less need of schools and education but greater need for social and health services. Those who remain are usually of an age to make finding new employment difficult. Since it is usually the most educated and skilled workers who leave, those left behind have less capacity to find work or to support the community in its attempt to recover from an industry closure and to diversify the economy. Doctors, teachers, dentists and other skilled professionals migrate to more convivial surroundings – meaning fewer services are available for those who remain and making it more difficult for overworked service delivery providers to cope.
The economic losses caused by massive worker layoffs are worsened by an inevitable reduction in housing values. Newly unemployed workers who may no longer be able to pay for their homes and mortgages and who may need to relocate to find jobs now find that they own houses worth a fraction of their value prior to the industry closure. Furthermore, they usually have a very difficult time selling their homes because the bottom has dropped out of the market and no one wants to move into homes in a town with a debatable future.
As the economy hollows out, the smaller, poorer population has a harder time paying for services, either through taxes or directly. As a result, the availability and quality of services and infrastructure declines further, making it more difficult to stop the population from haemorrhaging further as they seek these services elsewhere. These dwindling services make it harder for the community to attract new residents who could help the economy develop.
This vicious circle can be compounded by environmental decay, especially for towns based on non-renewable resources like metals. Environmental damage in the wake of industry closure can harm a community's prospects of economic diversification and make it unappealing to businesses and people who might otherwise think of locating in the community. Consider Rolim de Moura , a frontier town in the national territory of Rondonia, Brazil. A lumber boom town during the 1980's, the town was established as a rural service centre by the Brazilian government in 1975, part of the government's efforts to colonize its western region. Throughout Rondonia, roads were built and families of migrants were promised land in a ‘March to the West' similar to the expansion of the frontier in the United States in the 19 th century. The rain forests provided the economic incentive for tens of thousands of migrant workers who took part in slash and burn forestry on a massive scale that sacrificed less valuable tree species to harvest the prized mahogany tree. Once the land had been clearcut, the workers began subsistence farms on the nutrient-depleted, easily eroded soils. On such land, corn and wheat farms were unsustainable, so farmers moved on by clearing more rain forest and continuing to follow deforestation with quickly abandoned farms. Rolim de Moura, once a thriving city with an economy based on clearcutting, has lost more than 87% of its original rain forest in just 15 years since 1990 and, with it, all but three of its 180 sawmills, which now process the little poor quality wood that remains. Although many loggers and migrant farmers have moved on deeper into the rain forest, Rolim de Moura has been able to stabilize its population at around 37,000, albeit with reduced services, poor employment opportunities and deteriorating housing stock because it has become a centre for providing regional government services. (Forest Conservation Portal, 2004)
Faced with these types of daunting challenges, most resource-based rural communities begin to enter a spiral of decline from which, too often, they cannot pull out. It is against this backdrop that a group of Canadian ministers responsible for local government decided to examine Canada's experience with decline and recovery. In Canada, a country with a federal form of government, most responsibilities of a local or regional nature are constitutionally assigned to Canada's subnational governments, the provinces and territories. The subnational legislatures in Canada have jurisdiction over local government institutions plus jurisdiction respecting non-renewable natural resources, forestry resources and electrical energy. This amalgam of responsibilities has placed the issue of declining rural, resource-based communities into the domain of the provincial and territorial ministers for local government. Accordingly, the ministers commissioned the Community Resiliency, Transition and Recovery Project in January 2003.
The Ministers intended that the project would provide valuable insights on the context, circumstances and actions influencing recovery – or the lack of it – in small, rural, resource-dependent communities across Canada. They also sought information that would provide a better understanding of the tools and strategies that could be replicated by other communities as they manage the transition from crisis to recovery.
Facilitated by a steering committee led by British Columbia and assisted by the Intergovernmental Committee on Urban and Regional Research (ICURR), this research project was a collaborative effort involving a number of jurisdictions from across Canada representing every region of the country. British Columbia took the lead in surveying a sample of available North American literature with support from the other provinces and territories, while ICURR used its information resources to analyze trends relevant to resource-dependent communities. Individual researchers from the provincial / territorial governments developed and analyzed 16 case studies where communities experienced a severe and in most cases immediate downturn in their local economy resulting from an industry closure. The case studies chosen represent all regions of the country and all major economic sectors: mining, fishing, forestry, energy agriculture and transportation. A steering committee comprised of British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, and ICURR guided the process throughout. The final report, Facing the Challenge of Industry Closure: Managing Transition in Rural Communities , will be published in 2005. The full report is available through ICURR's Muniscope website. Information on how to obtain a copy of the report can be found at www.muniscope.ca. The following discussion of Canada's experience with resource community transition is largely derived from this work.
It is worth noting that resource-based communities facing industry closure have much in common with other communities based on single industries, such as manufacturing. As well, the plight of these communities bears some similarities to the challenges faced by communities struck by natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes or human-caused calamities like terrorism and war. The illustration above positions natural and human events on a continuum from crisis to catastrophe. Although these events are separated for viewing purposes, it should be recognized that the events may not be discrete and that the lines between events are permeable: some natural events have human causes and that some communities must confront more than one event simultaneously. While acknowledging that the causes and impacts of these upheavals differ significantly, it is important to recognize that all of these communities share a sense of devastation and loss when threatened by any of these events. All must face the need to overcome and adapt to the upheaval. In many cases their preparation for worst case scenarios and their response to these events will be similar to or overlap the strategies adopted by resource-dependent communities facing industry closure.
In 2003, about 20 years after its inauguration, Tumbler Ridge faced bleak economic prospects because of the closure of its two sustaining mines. Yet the town existed in a beautiful natural setting, surrounded by renewable and non-renewable resources, and had potential to diversify its economic base through tourism, forestry, agriculture, coal, oil and gas. Though the town was remote from any major population centre, many people found the town attractive, with its modern housing stock and infrastructure, safe small town character and well-protected public services. Strong, positive local leadership and a recent history of collaboration with other regional communities strengthened economic development opportunities, developed a robust sense of identity and encouraged volunteerism.
Tumbler Ridge still has its challenges. Access to markets is not easy, while its poor telecommunications infrastructure makes e-commerce and e-learning difficult. Nevertheless, local government leaders have acted to restore confidence in the town. All levels of government have united to implement a transition plan – selling surplus housing, retiring infrastructure debt, preserving public services in the face of turbulence, and working to broaden town revenues.
Since 2003, new residents have been attracted to Tumbler Ridge because of its beautiful location and low house prices. Today, the opening of the Dillon mine 90 kilometres from Tumbler Ridge coupled with rapidly rising coal prices and the promise of new natural gas exploration in the area have attracted many new residents and created such a demand for housing that prices have tripled since 2001. By all accounts, Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, will begin to prosper once again with an economy that includes coal but has expanded towards a more diversified and sustainable economy with considerable hope for the future.