Cities like to form on water. It follows that there are thousands of cities out there struggling with their own version of North Side, South Side. The phenomenon reminds me of Jane Jacobs on border vacuums.
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Given how important food production and water use are to the strength of a place, one of the best things we can do as Strong Citizens is to plant a garden and catch and store the rain. I've been slow to the rain barrel game, but it finally happened and I'm delighted.
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This week, I attempted to give my first urban design walking tour of Fredericton to about a dozen friends. Before hitting the road, I asked my partner if I've ever mentioned something about urban design that made him see the city in a new way. Then, I revisited my own highlights from dog-eared books that have guided my own thinking and compiled a best-of list.. I'd like to practice, improve, and repeat this walking tour going forward. What else would you add to this list of concepts that cover the basics and 'aha' moments of urban design?
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I was asked to participate in a public art festival using rain-activated art. It took me a while to decide what to do and how to do it, but the process is remarkably easy once you know what to expect. Here's a how-to if you're interested in trying your own stencil rainworks. It's pretty much the same for spray chalk.
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The Power of 10+ is a heuristic to help target placemaking activities. It seems to be aimed at more institutional placemakers but after a visit from my family, I've started thinking: what am I doing to add to that list? When my neighbours entertain guests from out of town, what am I doing that makes them proud to show off the town?
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Sadly, I sense PACs have been stuffed into the growing suite of orderly but dumb solutions. Imagine if we had to throw away the trendy instruction manual on how to become a "world-class city" and instead demanded of each other to just think. Imagine if we looked at our constraints (people, cash, geography, climate, culture) and then decided to work within them, creatively. That's what has always made places interesting and remarkable!
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Somewhere inside you is that childlike itch to make-believe or draw funny faces on things. Play is such an amazing way to engage with the city and people around us. It creates an atmosphere of light-heartedness and curiosity. It humanizes an environment instantly and can lend your city a sense of humour. It's also good for you!
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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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