Sharing some of G.K. Chesterton's city-building metaphors from Chapter 5 of Orthodoxy. The general idea is that an admirable life is one of mystic patriotism. By this he means having a somewhat irrational, inexplicable love for the place you live (both the universe at large and your little home therein). You love it just because it's yours. And yet you recognize that it's pretty messed up as well. And SINCE you love it so much, you work hard to improve it.
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Last week, I was asked to join a panel discussion posed with the question, What role does placemaking have in building sustainable communities? This gave me a great excuse to break down and map out my personal theory of change. Here it is: love and working together. Have no doubt, the triteness is not lost on me - I grimace even writing this, but I really believe there's something to it.
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Smart retailers everywhere are experimenting with urban-format stores, despite it forcing them to squish their big-box tendencies. This is probably my favourite so far. I can't tell if it's Québec standing up to Rona and saying, "Thou shalt not parking lot," or if it's Rona deciding that they want to grow their neighbourhood retail presence by forcing smallness upon themselves. Either way, it does the job.
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What if we didn't transform an empty school through an expensive mega-project? What if we could break it down into incremental steps?
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I asked my facebook friends this. The comments poured in, and they were so interesting and beautiful that I felt compelled to do something with them. So I wrote them out by hand.
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Yesterday was a big day for me. I didn't need to wear mitts for the first time since November, which means I can operate my camera outside for longer than 10 minutes. I will be celebrating by riding the bus out to a strange and depressing landscape of density-gone-wrong. This will be the setting for a video about density and by extension, silly apartment locations. It's an important topic, and I would love your help making an excellent script. What do you say?
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1) Chuck made a video appearance in Fredericton!
2) Also, I had my first experience of going door-to-door on my street.
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I've explained before that I spend my days as the designer and coordinator for a business accelerator program, based out of our provincial university. It is a great privilege for me to have been able to shape and grow this program. In a nutshell, we provide funding (including living expenses) and coaching for talented people who want to turn their skills into a business. Being a city builder, this has been an amazing opportunity to work side by side with the people who fill storefronts, hire local people, open workshops and factories, and change cities through their presence. This week has been uplifting and exciting for me because our applicants for this summer are finally in, and we are now selecting our new cohort for the program.
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I've been trying to place the Strong Towns message in historical counterparts. I want to know in which other context these ideas emerged, who led them, how, and how did it turn out.
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Lots of fun from the field this week:
- A civic hackathon, inspired by burritos.
- Talking Strong Towns on the telly
- Neighbours decided to have some spray chalk fun of their own.
"What if we could attract some really good people here..."
Where I live, there's an explicit hope that someday, the world will see how great this place is and people will move here and spend money and talk about their A+ new home and mission accomplished. As a recruit myself, I have privileged insight into the shortsightedness of the rescue plan, in concept and execution. We do realize pretty much every place on earth is trying to attract good people, right? How does that work on a global scale?
I am weary of this conversation. And yet, I love this place and I DO want people to come here to share and enrich our happy lives. So I guess there is a recruitment strategy I can get behind; getting people to a happy place.
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In this week's field notes I want to share a couple sources of connectedness, kindness, and friendship that have been big for me this year. They seem like very self-serving communities from the outside, but they end up improving the city without necessarily having that mandate. In large part, I think it's because both of these communities are part of a dense web of connected groups and activities coexisting downtown. We all piggy-back off each other's energy to create sense of motion, and that's what pushes the city forward.
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Walking the tightrope of Strong Citizenship came to the fore this week after I re-read a short research article from grad school. At the time, I had highlighted the key points in a very theoretical way, ready to work them into an exam paper on the challenges of community involvement. Reviewing the paper again, I realized this is my life now. This is my life.
Make no mistake, we are not Tinkerbells. Hard work, not pixie dust makes a place feel magical. And while at times we enjoy this work immensely and it can even define us, the challenge remains, how to get paid?
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Last week, I was pulled into a task force conversation on affordable housing by a couple local champions. The situation is this: our government operating subsidies for affordable housing are drying up. I'm putting together a "next-steps" sort of document for this task force and my brain keeps running in circles. I'd love to crowdsource from the best. Please fill me in on your Strong Towns approach to affordable housing in the comments. What would you do?
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Fredericton is more or less Stars Hollow. It is like a caricature of a Big Town, with more quirky personalities than you could script. Some of my favourite characters are those that have stuck it out the longest. I could list a growing roster of older adult friends I've made this year that I'd love to recruit to Team Strong Towns. Since this is a largely online community, we may miss out on a lot of their wisdom on here. So what I've learned from experience after great experience is just to go make friends with older people! They've been one of my richest sources of information and inspiration in trying to improve my city.
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In the spirit of moving from an awareness-building organization to a movement-building organization, Strong Towns has a fun new corner of the website for me. This year, I'll be sharing field notes on my journey/research into Strong Citizenship. In this regular column, you'll get pieces of my life as a friendly neighbour in a quintessential Little City that Feels Like a Big Town.
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Signalized crossings are really starting to tick me off.
Back when I felt like a trespasser for crossing the street, I used to look at signalized crossings like peace offerings, little gestures from the city to pedestrians, "You are safe here." Now they seem like an infrastructural flippin' of the bird. My new walk to work illustrates this change of heart.
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Pretty much everything we talk about in our corner of the city-building world is correcting for the wreckage left by auto-domination. Driverless cars could potentially change the auto-culture and role of vehicles in our lives. What kind of impact might this have on the priorities and approaches of Strong Citizens?
Maybe this driverless talk is just hype and I'm speaking in extreme hypotheticals. But I think it's worth asking: if motorized transportation were cheaper, easier, more pleasant and convenient than ever - if it were electrified to boot, where do we stand?
Do driverless cars actually make any difference to a Strong Town?
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It’s easy to get caught up in the race to the youngest, wherein the best-positioned cities are those with the freshest faces. I understand the appeal of it. After all, these are my friends everyone is courting and I want them in my city too. But once again, I think we’re putting the cart before the horse.
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I want to live in a place built by legions of underemployed urbanists. Just like we would need a massive influx of small scale farmers if we want to substantively change our precarious food system, we need an army of small scale developers to build a nation of Strong Towns.
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