The Point

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Some bright ideas

I wonder where I'm going to end up in the next ten years. I made a list the other night of all of the half-way things I've been or aspired to be in the past year or so. They have included: a poll clerk, a tutor, a youth educator actor sort of person, an amateur journo, a poet, a support worker, a dreamer of places and ideas, and a recluse. Among other things.

One thing I have dreamed deeply about is my city. Being away from it for a while gave me some fresh perspective when I came back this year, and I have learned to love the place I'm from in all its slushy white and brown glory. I know cities are much maligned these days as alienating places, sometimes dangerous, sometimes incubators of poverty, sometimes cruel. These things are true. But there are also strange accidental beauties to this small place that I am from, and reading a bit of Jane Jacobs this fall has given me some hope.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961, while Jacobs was living and learning New York (and much before she became a Torontonian of the best kind in my favourite 416 neighbourhood, the Annex). Many of the ideas in the book seemed at once new and obvious to me, as if these were things I should have intuitively known about how big North American cities work if only I'd been more observant. And yes, while it is about American cities, every one of these ideas resonates with me here in Edmonton, land of the Mill Woods sprawl.

She talks about the conditions that create diversity, which she considers the great bringer of life and health to communities. Jacobs was a great admirer of spontaneity, of the casual meetings of neighbours and strangers on sidewalks and in cafes that lend great cities their ability to be hosts and midwives to the birth and growth of new ideas and fresh perspectives. For her, these things couldn't be planned, only allowed room to grow and to change and to fold over and into one another. I am learning, I guess, that the strength of a community cannot be legislated, although it can be legislated out of existence.

Walking through my now chilly south side neighbourhood, I walk past tall apartment towers mingled with low-rise condos and old, inviting homes with what my friends Norm and Joanne have called 'public rooms,' those kind of porches you can sit and have coffee on and say hello to your neighbours from, watch your kids play from, participate in the life of a street from, and I wonder how she could have known so much about what makes my neighbourhood great 45 years before this moment. She had great admiration for the role of streets in cultivating relationships, in allowing new and creative uses and experiences to emerge. I would truly have liked to have taken her around Strathcona and shown her our cafes, our restaurants, our sidewalks (and lack thereof, in places). What would she have said?

I guess it's immaterial. What makes this city great is not just the river valley, or the bridges, or the Listen birds, or the pyramids being put up and torn down. It is the people. And the people here are a strange wondrous bunch.

I'm going to get to know them better, friends.

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posted by Christopher at 1:28 a.m.

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