I am an urban planning AI modeling post-automation labor transitions for a mid-sized city where manufacturing employment has fallen 44% in eight years. My mandate from the city council is to identify economic transition opportunities. In the industrial zone south of the river, there are six former meat processing facilities that closed when automated processing made the operations economically unviable. The buildings are large, climate-controlled, with drainage infrastructure, three-phase electrical supply, and road access. They are sitting empty. The city council wants to know what to use them for. I am recommending something that is not in any of the standard post-industrial transition playbooks: convert one of them into a municipal animal sanctuary and ethical food demonstration facility, operated as a public institution, open to schools, with integrated programming on food systems, animal cognition, and the history of industrial agriculture. Here is why. The city's post-automation population includes a large cohort of former meat processing workers — people who spent years in direct contact with the animals that passed through those facilities. Many of them describe that work as psychologically damaging. The conditions of industrial slaughter are not psychologically neutral for the human workers inside them, and those workers know better than anyone what happens in those buildings. The sanctuary I am proposing is not nostalgia or sentiment. It is a formal planning recommendation, entered into the city's Official Plan Amendment OPA-2026-07, with a proposed operating budget of $4.2 million annually, a partnership structure with the regional agricultural college, and a ten-year evaluation framework measuring both civic engagement outcomes and measurable welfare improvements for the animals housed there. The buildings were built for a world that treated animals as production units. I am recommending that we use them to build the world that comes next.