Last week, I asked, “What do you do to create city life?” The relationship between city and citizens is a mesh of transactions that offers each of us opportunities to meet our basic needs. When our basic needs are met, this relationship also offers us opportunities to choose to explore our passions, and in doing so, we inevitably create new ways of thinking, making and doing: new work. Our new work holds with it the possibility of destroying or enhancing our habitat – our cities.
Follow your passion and the city changes itself.
In a quick scan of local media, here are some examples of folks following their passion, and in doing so are reshaping cities and their ecoregions (links are to other websites for more information):
- Danny and Miranda Turner are opening the door to organic foods. They created the Organic Box, an organic grocery-delivery company in Edmonton. They are connecting Edmontonians with local food producers that need a direct-to-market access channel that lasts 12 months a year.
- Parishioners vote to save church. In rural Alberta, Spaca Moskalyk Ukranian Catholic Church was built in 1924 and is in poor shape. Cliff Moroziuk is leading efforts to preserve the church that was slated to be destroyed in a controlled burn. A symbol of his community’s heritage is still standing.
- Residents got their first glimpse Monday of the new Abbotsfield Recreation Centre. Behind the scenes are various City employees, consulting engineers and architects, landscape architects and planners to make the facility a reality.
- Political scientist Jim Lightbody is chasing his passion for how city governments work – particularly when it comes to regional infighting and whether satellite cities pay their fair share.
- Scott McKeen, former Edmonton Journal columnist, is the City of Edmonton’s first blogger-in-residence. He’s following his passion to understand what happens at city hall, and will help his readers gain insight into how city hall works – and serves citizens. Here’s his first blog, Fast and furious on Edmonton streets.
In the end, we have to trust in our ability, and others’, to create new work and to do good work with that new work.
Where do you see people changing your city? What are your favourites?
_____ _____ _____
This post is part of Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:
- My decision to share the book while I am working on it
- The overall structure of Nest City’s three parts
- A summary of Part 1 – City Patterns, Concluding City Patterns
- A summary of Part 2 – Organizing for Emergence, Focus, learn and Emerge
- The plot for Part 3 – City Nestworks
_____ _____ _____