"Culture" in Brantford?

I understand and sympathize with the idea of reinvigorating the downtown. My only criticism, and a very general one at that, is that cultural rebirth cannot be combined with the *decivilizing* influence of political pandering and reliance on civil authorities for implementation. There is a feedback loop between creativity and prosperity, which has been interrupted by the unlimited state and its ever expanding network of stakeholders. Filtered through conventional mechanisms easily recognized by government bureaucracy, like action groups and delegates before council, real spontaneity and a shared sense of natural community is replaced by a kind of sanitized, pseudo, or even "counterfeit culture".

The solution, perhaps, is to think small scale, and to make every effort to *de*-centralize community involvement, to encourage an unbridled independence by emphasizing property rights as an absolute, rather than as a means to the “greater good”. The consequence of this kind of approach, I think, is that the neighborhood (almost obsolete now) is less “vertical” (with people looking to political authorities to plan from above), and more “horizontal” (with people increasingly looking to natural authorities, and each other, for enlightenment). Instead of culture as a cause of a city’s rebirth, it is a result.