The first time I came to Estevan was in 2013, and wow has this place changed since then.
One may say, 鈥淵eah, look at all the empty houses.鈥� But that's not where I'm going. (By the way, I started noticing recently that I see more "sold" than "for sale" signs.)
In summer 2013, the city was booming. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and how come so many people from all across Canada and beyond were attracted to this small community in the middle of the Prairies. I still remember talking to my folks at home and sharing my surprise about the availability of all kinds of goods and services here.
My home city has all Estevan has and much more, but it is a city of five million, and communities in Russia with 10,000 people don't have much of anything, so I was pretty impressed with how nice it was here. Of course, partially it is the case of all communities the size of Estevan in Canada, but another part to that wealth of options for everything was the need to satisfy diverse people living and working here during the construction of the carbon capture and storage facility and the oil boom.
It was fun here in the summer of 2013, but one thing that was seriously off for the eyes of a newcomer like myself was how the city looked. It wasn't ugly, but I'm sorry, it definitely wasn't beautiful. I've seen smaller and bigger communities here, and they all were cuter than Estevan the way I first saw it in 2013.
I remember wondering how come, with all the obvious wealth accumulated here, the city looked like a place that travellers pass through without stopping. Some storefronts looked like they've been through a war, there hardly were any decorations and the streets didn't look ... like anything.聽
And that's what has changed over the last years. Estevan the way it is today might be a bit quieter, but it definitely looks way better than it used to, especially in the summer. Clean and tidy, it's filled with thousands of flowers. It acquired numerous decorative pieces, and downtown completely changed its face. It's maintained and beautified.
The city has put a lot of effort and incentives into making Estevan look great, and has been really open to suggestions and ideas, making many things work for the community. Once the public areas started looking better, it seemed that the citizens also started putting more effort into beautifying and maintaining their properties, and altogether it changed the face of the community.
In criminology, there is a broken windows theory. It states that if there is one broken window in a building and nobody replaces it, then after a while there will be no windows remaining in that building. In other words, minor offences are not only a sign of the criminal atmosphere in the area, but are also an active factor affecting the crime level in that area.聽 I like projecting this theory over to other facets and assume it works both ways. The perfection is in details and the general atmosphere, to a large scale, is affected by those details, and stimulates the quality change. So once the positive changes start, they continue, spread wider and affect other spheres.
I believe that beautification efforts not only affect the city's image, the local tourism industry and thus the economy in general, but also result in safer neighbourhoods and a more positive state of mind for most residents. In a beautiful, tidy and neat community, there is way less crime than in a town where there are too many broken windows.
By the time the Saskatchewan Summer Games rolled around in 2016, the changes in Estevan were already underway, and many guests shared feedback about the beautiful place they got to visit. The next checkpoint will be the Centennial Cup in 2022. It will take place in May, and I have no doubt that the city will look spectacular, winning the admiration of thousands of guests.聽
But the point is not just to impress the visitors. To me, the main point is to turn this city into a place that's sweeter than any other part of the world, which in turn will attract more people and will keep making this place better and better. A lot goes into it and continuing beautification efforts, even though they may not seem so important, actually matter a lot as the surrounding beauty allows for a better emotional state and also changes how people act, resulting in further positive changes.
Fortunately, the effort to make Estevan more and more beautiful continues with more projects on the go and planned for the future, which in itself makes me feel happier.
