Jeff Lederer in downtown Cambridge, a few steps from the Architecture building where he works. Photo by Bob McNair.

Architecture manager studies cities . . .

When Jeff Lederer defended his thesis in May to earn a PhD from UW’s school of planning, there was something unusual, and fitting, about the ritual. It was, as far as anybody can tell, the first time a thesis oral defence had ever taken place in the city of Cambridge, Ontario, where Lederer works and lives.

His job is in UW’s three-year-old Architecture building on Melville Street, where his title is “general manager” of the School of Architecture, and his home is a five-minute walk away through the city that’s vital to both his job and his PhD studies.

A graduate of UW (in geography) and the University of Manitoba (in planning), Lederer worked as a professional planner in northern Ontario and in Woolwich Township, just outside Waterloo, before deciding to return to the academic world and enrolling as a grad student in the School of Planning in 1999. His intention, he says, was to write a thesis on the role of professional planners in municipal politics, particularly in issues around downtown development.

Then he got caught up in the whirlwind that is Rick Haldenby, director of the UW architecture school and at that time a key figure in the City-University Research Alliance, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Lederer found himself managing a piece of the program based at a UW outpost in downtown Kitchener, heading research activities on the factors that leave some cities “hollowed out” while others develop vibrant downtowns with tourist activity, striking architecture and lively retail blocks.

He put his graduate work on hold for a while, then resumed with a new supervisor — Mark Seasons of the planning school — and a new focus: the importance of “partnerships” in developing downtowns. Eventually the thesis that took shape was titled “University, Downtown, and the Mid-Size City: An Examination of the Roles of University in Downtown Revitalization within the Context of Community-University Partnerships.”

Along the way he had a chance to live it as well as write about it, taking a full-time job as “administrator” of the architecture school while plans were under way to move it from UW’s main campus to a renovated heritage building beside the Grand River in Cambridge. “The day that we actually moved down here, my title changed to ‘general manager’,” says Lederer, sitting in the Melville Café at riverside and remembering September 1, 2004.

The job puts him in charge of staff (there are now 11) and resources in the architecture school and its building, where relationships with the downtown community are a 24/7 reality.

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. . . thesis work merges with the job

Lederer’s first-hand experience of a university moving into a downtown and forming “partnerships” isn’t the one and only topic of the thesis he produced, but it’s certainly a case study close to his heart. “I wrote the last part of my thesis sitting out here,” he says, recalling that as he drafted a postscript that addresses the Waterloo-in-Cambridge experience, “I looked over and I could see Rick talking to the mayor!”

That’s the sort of thing that happens in mid-sized cities, he says: you see the same people over and over on the sidewalk, you see them at public meetings and in different contexts, volunteer and business and civic. “It changes the way decisions are made,” and that’s been very much the case in Cambridge (population 124,000) in a way that would never happen in Toronto.

“My thesis is very simple,” he says: “what are the roles of universities in downtowns?” He was able to draw on research done while CURA was in operation — it has now folded, pending a rebirth if new funding becomes available — and in particular a tour of seven Canadian and American cities where he and several colleagues “interviewed everybody that was involved in downtowns”.

Eventually he developed a database, which became part of the thesis, listing universities across North America that are close to the downtown areas of mid-sized cities. “The successful ones,” he says, “are the ones that have made downtown an experience,” providing something that will attract people to the downtown areas. Two kinds of people are particularly likely to answer the call, he notes: returning empty-nesters and young professionals. No wonder, then, that UW’s architecture students have made themselves at home in Cambridge, as have most of the architecture school’s staff. (A sizeable number of the architecture faculty, on the other hand, live in Toronto, but that’s another story.)

“It took us two years to find out what we were doing here,” Lederer says of the school which now occupies a century-old factory a few yards from the historic Galt city square. “A lot of our studio projects are being geared to local issues now, and not just Toronto. . . . The university had to really change how it did business within the community, so then it changed the way that faculty taught.”

Students too are engaged with the people and places around them — not just eating in local pizzerias but learning from local buildings, and using the historic Queen Street bridge as a laboratory — and so is Lederer himself. He notes that he’s serving on a committee to help write the city’s “heritage master plan” and another that’s studying the three downtowns of Cambridge. (The city was created from Galt, Preston and Hespeler, each with its own business section and historic stones, in 1972.)

Now equipped with a doctorate, he’s added an “adjunct faculty” rank to his staff job, and has been advising students on projects and master’s level research. Four of them, under his guidance, have been studying Stratford, Ontario, where another UW branch campus is under consideration. Others, not forgetting the main UW campus 30 kilometres away, are interested in downtown Waterloo with its lively growth.

This fall he’ll be teaching a course in which students will create “installations” (a popular architecture word) in empty Cambridge storefronts, with support from the local Business Improvement Association. He wonders aloud whether UW ought to establish a “community partnerships office”.

“It’s interesting to be able to do what you research,” Lederer repeats.

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Signals snapping through the smog

Through the exam season, and then the quiet period of the year before the fall term roars into town, it'll be possible to get a cup of coffee or a sandwich here and there on campus. Mudie's cafeteria in Village I is open from 7:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. these days (8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on the weekends) but will close for the season at 7 p.m. on August 15. Tim Horton's in the Student Life Centre has 24-hour-a-day service through most of exams, except from 10 p.m. Sunday to 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. (It'll drop back to weekday daytime service as of August 16.) Otherwise, these food outlets are open Monday to Friday: Tim's in the Davis Centre and in South Campus Hall; Bon Appetit in the Davis Centre; Browsers in the Dana Porter Library; the Eye Opener in the Optometry building (but it'll be closed the week of August 13); Pastry Plus in Needles Hall; and the Modern Languages coffee shop (until August 10 only).

Gary Kosar of the plant operations department has some good news for drivers: the Columbia Street entrance to campus, closed entirely for the past couple of weeks, should be open to traffic by late afternoon tomorrow. But the ring road work is not over, he points out. “Starting Thursday morning, August 2, there will be rolling closure of the ring road beginning at the Columbia Street entrance for curb installation. The closure will move from Columbia Street to the University Avenue entrance. Signs will be erected directing people to parking lots L, M and N. The south end of the university can be accessed for service, delivery and emergency vehicles only. The curbing work will run for about 4 days (Thursday, Friday, Tuesday and Wednesday).” Still ahead: “The paving of the ring road is to commence on approximately August 20,” with details to be announced.

UW’s senate gave its approval this spring to certificate programs in Design, Fire Safety, and Green Energy, all to be offered by the department of mechanical and mechatronics engineering. Each will be available as part of the Master of Engineering program, a professional (rather than research-oriented) graduate degree. Objectives: “to produce engineers with more specialized technical training and a specific focus that is recognized by the award of a Certificate . . . to offer a course-work professional development graduate program for practicing engineers to be formally trained in the areas of design, fire safety and green energy . . . to provide new immigrant, foreign-trained engineers with a degree program that facilitates entry to the Canadian workforce in important technical areas of significant national interest . . . to provide newly graduated engineers with an opportunity to pursue graduate education.” There will be three mandatory courses for design, three for fire safety and one for green energy, with each option involving additional courses to be chosen from a recommended list or as options.

And . . . how are you liking the summer weather? Frank Seglenieks, coordinator of the UW weather station, is practically a media celebrity these days, and was on the local CTV news again last night talking about the drought of recent weeks. We've just emerged from "an average July for temperature and below average for precipitation", says Seglenieks's monthly report. June had been dry, with 26.6 millimetres of rain compared with the usual quota of 80 mm, and then July brought 50.8 mm against an average of 93 mm. "Most of this precipitation fell in the first half of the month," he adds, "so although the lawns in the area have been pretty green for most of July, they are starting to show some brown patches."

CAR

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