Do you save a broken city by fixing its hardware, its public space and infrastructure, or do you save it by fixing its software – the attitudes and behavior [sic] of its citizens?
Montgomery tells the story of two mayors of Bogata, Columbia – Antanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa – who in recent years have radically improved life in their cities. Mockus built a new culture of citizenship and respect. Penalosa built the culture of respect into the city’s body, its infrastructure (p. 231-234) with these big philosophical and political questions:
Who should share in public wealth of the city?Who should have access to parks and beautiful places?Who should have the privilege of easy mobility?
In his stories about urban innovations to share the public wealth of the city, to allow vast access to parks and beautiful places, and to expand the privilege of easy mobility, Montgomery finds resistance. Efforts to build infrastructure for public transportation and bicycles meets resistance. Efforts to provide access to beautiful areas of the city to the “riffraff” meet resistance. Choosing schools and sewers, over elevated highways meets resistance.
For Montgomery, citizens resist urban innovations for two reasons: “deeply held beliefs about the relationship between urban form and culture, and what it means to be free in cities (p. 240-241).” It shows up as an equity war where those that enjoy the benefits of urban systems are inconvenienced when the benefits are reapportioned (p. 241). The sprawling, dispersed city is embedded deep within us. It shapes how we think about our cities, and our streets and roads that allow us to move around our cities.
Take cars for example. For those of us that benefit from the car, any change to how we move about our city in our cars is a challenge to our deep beliefs in freedom of movement. The prospect of having to share our roads with bicycles and public transit, or lose car lanes to bicycles and public transit, sparks a war where car users decry that it is not fair. For Montgomery, this is an equity debate that the car can not win, because, “Today’s urban mobility systems are flat-out unfair, especially in North America… one in every three people [are] at the mercy of scarce public transit or dependent upon someone else to chauffeur him around (p. 241).”
We are not designing for everyone. We are designing for the privilege of the car.
So happiness is fairness.
Happiness is organizing ourselves in cities to share wealth, to share beauty. And the geography of the city matters. Stepping into Montgomery’s challenge to view the city as a share project means that the improvements we make are also shared. Physical improvements in only affluent districts, for example, is not equitable. Creating districts in our city that segregate incomes and cultures is not equitable. The shared city is a city where people are mixed. Mixing is the mark, the mark of civilized, democratic and ethical society (p. 248).”
Montgomery’s enduring lessons for cities (p. 250):
By spending resources and designing cities in a way that values everyone’s experience, life can get easier and more pleasant for everyone. We can make cities that are more generous and less cruel. We can make cities that help us all get stronger, more resilient, more connected, more active, and more free. We just have to decide who are cities are for. And we have to believe that they can change.
We just have to decide who are cities are for.
And we have to believe that they can change.
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Assume for a moment that the city is exactly where we need it to be, asking of us exactly what we need to better serve our city habitat and ourselves.
Assume for a moment that we are right on schedule.
City life is as much about moving through landscapes as it is about being in them.This is a critical point; not only does the city shape the way we move, but our movements shape the city in return.Charles Montgomery (p. 176)
Here’s the psychological appeal of the car: mastery. Charles Montgomery reports, in Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, that when the road is clear, drivers of their own cars feel “much more in charge of their lives than transit users or even their own passengers (p. 179).” This is how our relationship with cars started, with a sense of freedom and control. Yet over time, this experience of freedom and speed, on open roads, is not the truth of cities: “The urban system neutralizes their power. Luxury and sports cars might still offer their drivers a status bump, but the car’s muscles cease to matter when it is surrounded by other cars (p. 179).”
These are important words: the car’s muscles cease to matter when it is surrounded by other cars.
The result is this: people are not happy on their commutes.
Montgomery has found that self-propelled commuters “report feeling that their trips are easier than the trips of people who sit still for most of the journey (p. 181).” He goes on to note that these are sentiments of people in American and Canadian cities, designed in ways that make walking and cycling unpleasant and dangerous. Further, in The Netherlands, “where road designers create safe spaces of bikes, cyclists report feeling more joy, less fear, less anger, less sadness than both drivers and transit users (p. 181).” He reaches this conclusion (p. 184):
People are not maximizing happiness on their commutes.
People are overwhelmingly choosing the most polluting, expensive and place-destroying way of moving.
How we move matters because it shapes who we are. Remember this: cities design our lives, and the city is a happiness project of our own creation. Our time in cars diminishes our happiness and the social fabric of our neighbourhoods. Further, “They are by far the biggest source of smog in most cities. They produce more greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than almost any other way of travelling, including flying by jetliner (p. 184).” We make our city habitats. We can remake our city habitats.
Here’s what Montgomery offers as a way to rethink mobility in cities; our approach to design needs to embrace and explore:
Complexity in transportation and human experience (Eric Brittan via Montgomery, p. 198).
Multiple modes of transportation. “Each of us has a unique set of abilities, weaknesses and desires. Each of us is compelled and thrilled by a unique set of sensations. Every trip demands a unique solution (p. 197).”
Experimentation, thinking of the city as a laboratory that invites and rewards experimentation (p. 216).
Physics and psychology of mobility (p. 216).
With the above, design principles emerge that generate happiness:
Design for connectivity: more intersections mean more walking, and more disconnected cul-de-sacs mean more driving (p. 186).
Design destinations within reach (p. 189).
Feed active transportation and transit systems the resources they need. When starved, they are bound to disappoint (p. 193).
Design choice into the city. Can you walk to work, or ride a bike? Can you catch a bus or train? Can you get to the doctor or a restaurant for supper without a car (p. 194)?
Design for freedom for everyone, not just the brave (p. 211).
Design for multiple modes of transportation. “Each of us has a unique set of abilities, weaknesses and desires. Each of us is compelled and thrilled by a unique set of sensations. Every trip demands a unique solution (p. 197).”
What’s in the way? The private car that uses 7.5 times more space than a person on a bus or a bicycle (p. 221). In part, it is the habits of professionals. It is also the choices we make as citizens.
The reasons why we like the car won’t go away – the perceived control of the car can also surface as real-time arrival data for bus/train users. As a psychological intervention, the wait feels shorter when you know what is happening, when (p. 202). We might also find the rewards of freedom from owning, when we experience the cooperative benefits of extreme sharing (bicycles, cars, public infrastructure). We simply need to build in the sense of control and freedom we desire into other modes of transportation.
We can all work on this: city hall and our public institutions, the business community, community organizations and citizens. This is the new mastery: choosing the city we want to generate together.
We need the nourishing, helping warmth of other people, but we also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but we also need retreat. We benefit from the conveniences of proximity, but these conveniences can come with the price of overstimulation and crowding. We will not solve the conundrum of sustainable city living unless we understand these contradictory forces and resolve the tension between them (p. 106).
Our current design to resolve this tension is in the dispersed city. We are in retreat from each other, and we demand and create expanses of space between us. At the same time, we recognize that the most exciting city places are alive with people and activity. Charles Montgomery (Happy City) notes that the very purpose of the city, before refrigeration and the internet, was to “come together every day to trade, to talk, to learn, and to socialize on the street.” We can now meet most of our needs without a physical space, so Montgomery asks,
Can we build – or rebuild – city spaces in ways that enable easy connections and more trust among both familiars and strangers? The answer is a resounding yes. The spaces we occupy can not only determine how we feel. They can change the way we regard other people and how we treat one another (p. 156).
The question under the question: can we design and build cities that improve our social habitat, and deepen our connections with the people we know and don’t know? Can we improve city life by city design?
Below, a few of Montgomery’s findings.
Crowding (proximity) is a design challenge.
The city that feels like a conundrum is not stepping in to the design challenge. Charles Montgomery:
… the detached house … is a blunt instrument: it is a powerful tool for retreating with your nuclear family and perhaps your direct neighbours, but a terrible base from with to nurture other intensities of relationships. Your social life must be scheduled and formal. Serendipity disappears in the time eaten up by the commute and in that space between car windshields and garage doors. On the other hand, life in places that feel to corded to control can leave us so overstimulated and exhausted that we retreat into solitude. Either way, we miss out of the wider range of relationships that can make life richer and easier (p. 128).
Happiness is in our hands. We need to live closer to each other to be happier, yet we have to design our cities so they work, or we will not be happier. Density, crowding, proximity, whatever you want to call it, is not something we have to tolerate. We simply have to design with clear objectives in mind.
Nature is needed at every scale.
Designing for proximity means weaving nature into the urban fabric – at every scale. This is a prerequisite for architectural density. For Montgomery, here’s why:
Nature brings out the good in us. People who live in areas with more parks are more helpful and trusting than people who don’t, regardless of their income or race (p. 111).
Biological complexity matters. The suburban savannah of grass and a few trees is not good for us. The more varieties of trees and birds and nature, the better it is for our brains. (p. 111-115)
Nature needs to be woven into the urban fabric. We need to be able to see it and touch it (p. 120). Proximity matters, so we need to do this at all scales. Small things count.
He reminds us that the challenge of living in dense environments is not simply aesthetic; it is also social. And nature can help us with that. Montgomery:
… we know nature in cities makes us happier and healthier. We know it makes us friendlier and kinder. We know it helps us build essential bonds with other people and the places in which we live (p. 123).
Design for conviviality and control.
We can choose friendly – happy – design and have opportunities to retreat when needed. We are looking for a balance of conviviality and control – social spaces that are nourishing, allowing us to choose to be close to others, or be separate. Design matters.
Every plaza, park, or architectural facade sends messages about who we are and what the street is for (p. 160).
Nature makes us more trusting and generous toward other people (p. 161), but nature isn’t the only design offering for our consideration as we recreate our cities. Sharp architectural angles light up the brain’s fear centres (p. 161). Blank walls are antisocial spaces. This is what Montgomery’s book is all about – creating cities for people.
Traffic design can be about liveability. We can choose to integrate social life with velocity. We can choose to allow neat things to happen. We can choose to make places. We can choose to design roads for happiness. Montgomery:
Cities that are serious about the happiness of their citizens have already begun to confront their relationship with velocity. they are making what once seemed to be radical decisions about what – and whom – streets are for (p. 173).
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Montgomery’s work provides a window into how we can design our habitats to better serve citizens. He reminds us that we design cities, and in turn cities design our lives. We make our cities, so the city is our happiness project. In the mix, the habits of city-building professionals shape our cities; yet these same professionals are charged with serving the public interest. As the public interest evolves, so too will the habits of professionals. Ultimately, it is our job as citizens to engage with our cities, and professionals, to build a city to save the world.
We are retrofitting our cities to serve ourselves.
Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they’ve got handles, they’re rough and hard.Isabel Allende
Partly because sprawl has forced Americans to drive farther and farther in the course of every day, per capita road death rates in the United States hover around forty-thousand per year. That’s a third more people than are killed by guns. It’s more than 10 times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Here’s an image that sticks: imagine a loaded Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone on board. That’s how many people die on U. S. highways every year… A rational policy maker would wage war, not on other nations, but on traffic deaths. Charles Montgomery
Happiness never stands still. Happiness is inherently remote. “…the brain constantly adjusts its idea of what we need in order to be happy. It compares what we have now to what we had yesterday and what we might possibly get next. It compares what we have to what everyone else has. Then it recalibrates the distance to a revised finish line. But that finish line moves even when other conditions stay the same, simply because we get used to things.”
We are hardwired for active dissatisfaction. “Hunter-gatherers… compulsively looked ahead in order to kill more game or collet more berries than they did yesterday, were more likely to make it through lean times and thus pass on their genes. In this model, happiness is not a condition at all. It is an urge genes employ to get an organism working harder and hoarding more stuff. The human brain has not changed much in the ten thousand years since we began to farm.”
We make bad decisions all the time, and these decisions shape our cities. We are not equipped to make decisions that maximize utility because we are not equipped to make decisions with the longer term in mind. For example, we choose long commutes, even though the longer people choose to commute, the less happy people are with their entire lives. Extrinsic rewards trump the intrinsic rewards.
We generate unreasonable expectations. Our culture sends us messages about about what is important in our lives. “Our brains are pushed and pulled by the powerful synergy of memory, culture, and images. So our concept of the right house, car, or neighbourhood might be as much a result of happy moments from our past or images that flood us in popular media as of any rational analysis of how these elements will influence the moments of our lives.” You know the things that harm us in our cities – time spent in cars, lack of walkability and social cohesion, pollution – yet we are so attached the things that generate the negative that we ignore the information so we can live up to our unreasonable expectations.
The habits of professionals make the same cognitive mistakes as the rest of us. Everything described above applies to citizens and professionals alike – but the professionals (the architects, landscape architects, engineers and planners) build the city and give us our choices. Limited choices. This is true, but Montgomery does not acknowledge the power of the consumer and how as citizens we also shape our city. Where we choose to spend our money is where the developers will go… We all make the cognitive mistakes.
Presentism: “we let what we see and feel today bias our view of the past and future.” This is a cognitive error. Example: too much traffic on the road, so I want more lanes; lanes immediately fill up with cars; too much traffic on the road, so I want more lanes; I forget that the last time this happened, the solution did not help; I want more lanes.
The real issue facing us are the cognitive blocks that “prevent us from recognizing the connection between the way we live in cities and the massive risks now facing our world and our species.” There are clear safety and environmental threats to how we move in our cities, yet we are held back, “…in part by the autopoieisis of urban systems that have their own momentum and staying power. But we are also held back by our own imperfect minds.”
So what?
The sustainable city has got to promise more happiness than the status quo. It has got to be healthier, higher in status, more fun, and more resilient than the dispersed city. It has got to lure us together rather than push us apart. It has got to reward people for making efficient choices when they move around. It has got to be a city of hedonic satisfaction, of distilled joys that do not cost the world. The city shapes our decisions. It always has.Charles Montgomery
Now what?
Montgomery’s challenge is to build the city that will save the world. Pieces of that city are being born all over the planet right now. The innovative acts and activities where people are pouring themselves into their work that makes the world a better place; they are improving the physical and social habitats of our cities, and our economic lives.
Strategies you can use to create the city that will save the world:
It is audacious to believe that the city might build happiness just by changing its shape. But it is foolish not to chase the thought, because around the world, and especially amid the sprawls capes of modern North America, the evidence shows that cities do indeed design our lives. Charles Montgomery (p. 43)
A simple syllogism for you: A. The design of our cities impacts our social networks. B. The quality of our social networks impacts the quality of our lives. C. Therefore, the design of our cities impacts the quality of our lives. And since we design our cities, we are also designing the quality of our lives – our personal, individual lives and also the lives of others. The places we make shape us.
A healthy social network looks like the root of a tree. From the most important relationships at the heart of the network, thinner roots stretch-out to contacts of different strength and intensity. Most people’s root networks are contracting, closing in on themselves, circling more and more tightly around spouses, partners, parents, and kids. These are our most important relationships, but every arborist knows that a tree with a small root-ball is more likely to fall over when the wind blows (p. 54).
People are increasingly solitary and we are at risk of falling – individually and collectively – when the wind blows. For Montgomery, this is because of our changing social habitat (marriages are not lasting as long; people work longer hours; people move more frequently) as well as our physical habitat (increased commute times; less trust found in monofunctional, car-dependant neighbourhoods than in walkable neighbourhoods with diverse housing, shops and places to work). The research is showing that social habitats struggle when our physical habitat in cities allows for dispersal (see Chapter 3 – The (Broken) Social Scene). Our proximity to each other is important.
Here’s Montgomery’s take on how we got here:
Put everything in its right place. Zoning, the rules that tell us what we can and can not do on our land that emerged first in the 1880s to ban laundries from a California city’s core, have “ensured that first-generation suburbs closer to downtowns do not grow more diverse and dense. They have pushed new development out to the ever-expanding urban fringe and beyond… And they have ensured that these new developments will, in turn, resist most efforts to change or adapt them over time (p. 69).”
We lost the shared street. When cars first arrived on our streets, our streets were shared places for everyone: “The road was a market, a playground, a park, and yes, it was a thoroughfare… It was a chaotic environment littered with horse dung and fraught with speeding carriages, but a messy kind of freedom reigned (p. 69). As cars and trucks emerged in American cities in the 1920s, road culture was transformed: “more than two hundred thousand people were killed in motor accidents in the United States that decade. Most were killed in cities. Most of the dead were pedestrians. Half were children and youth (p. 70 [1]).” The subsequent design – and subsidized financing – of city streets put motorists first.
Freedom for cars to move. Futurama, “a vast pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York… showed people the wondrous world they would inhabit in 1960 if cities embraced the Motordom vision (p. 73).” Futurama was characterized by speed, “sleek highways propelling citizens from orderly cities to pristine open spaces (p. 73).” 24 million people saw the exhibit and the high speed philosophy; the cultural shift toward the automobile lifestyle was cemented (p. 73).” The sponsor: Shell Oil.
The momentum of autopoiesis. Cities are a system that, like many others, are prone to entrenchment, replication and expansion. “Once the system of dispersal was established in early suburbs, it began to repeat itself in plan after plan – not because it was the best response to any particular place, but because of the momentum of autopoieisis (p. 75).” It is easier to repeat work that has been done before – and it fuelled and age of unprecedented wealth.
But the choice is not between suburbs and downtown; “We must redesign both landscapes and the fabric that connects them in ways that answer the needs that led us to retreat in the first place (p. 77).” To do this, we must examine how our physical environment affects how we feel. To do this, we need to examine what influences our health and controls our behaviour. For Montgomery, we need to understand the psychology of the urban world and then make decisions about our place in the urban world.
We design our cities; cities design our lives.
We can choose to build places that make us feel good.
What are the qualities of urban places that make you feel good?
Note –
[1] Norton, Peter D., Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 21.
The city is ultimately a shared project, … a place where we can fashion a common good that we can simply not build alone.Charles Montgomery (p. 41).
“The city has always been a happiness project,” are the words that form the title of the first chapter, and the premise of, Charles Mongomery’s book, Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design. As a social project, the city gives us the challenges we need to thrive.
Drawing on Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia (contentment), and developmental physiologist Carol Ryff’s work, he found the following checklist for happiness, or what would best be referred to as the good life (p. 36):
Self acceptance, or how well you know and regard yourself
Environmental mastery – you ability to navigate and thrive in the world
Positive relations with others
Personal growth throughout life
Sense of meaning and purpose
Feelings of autonomy and independence
In fact, Ryff’s research found that there is a “synergistic power of living a meaningful, challenging, and connected life … A bit of heroic struggle can be good for you (p. 37).” This idea state is what Ryff calls ‘challenged thriving’. [1] For Montgomery, this means that a good city is measured “not only by its distractions and amenities but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work, and meaning (p. 37).” The tension in the city is necessary – for our growth and our happiness.
The tension in cities moderates our relationships with other people. Embodied in every citizen is the tension between selfishness and altruism: “… each of us benefits when some of us subsume private goals for the sake of the community, and everyone benefits when everyone cooperates… At the same time, the drive by each of us to promote our own interests creates a dynamism and wealth that can overflow through the city (p. 40-41).”
Cities are a shared project that allows us to thrive together. The city challenges us to do more than simply live together. Montgomery points out that “we are hard-wired to trust one another, in spite of our natural wariness of strangers (p. 39).” This trust allows us to move past simply living together and improve. The city challenges us to thrive together, and understand that our fate is a shared one (p. 42).
Montgomery also names potential accomplishments of the city, after it meets our basic needs of food, shelter and security (p. 43):
Maximize joy and minimize hardship
Lead us toward health, rather than sickness
Offer citizens real freedom to live, move and build our lives
Build resilience against economic and environmental shocks
Enable us to build and strengthen bonds between friends, families and strangers (bonds that give life meaning and represent the city’s greatest achievement and opportunity)
Acknowledge and celebrate our common fate, open doors to empathy and cooperation, to help us tackle great challenges
This list – his recipe – is an initial set of indicators for us to use as we ascertain if the cities we create are the cities we want.
How does your city fashion a common good?
Note
[1] Ryff, Carol D., and B. H. Singer, “Know Thyself and Become What You Are: A Eudaimonic Approach to Psychological Well-Being,” Journal of Happiness Studies, 2006:13-29.
People chasing their passions are changing how we see our cities. Patricio Davilo and Dave Colangelo, graduate students at Ryerson University reflected the weather, and homelessness, to the surrounding streets in a reactive architecture installation. How’s that for a feedback loop?
Our cities are transforming, and so is the role of planners in the midst of this transformation.
Last month, I hosted a conversation at the Canadian Association of Planning Students annual conference about transformations, to give them an opportunity to dig into what they know and see. Here’s what we found.
We are transforming into organizers. We think of planning as a linear, mechanistic activity but cities don’t work that way. What’s coming is a new social habitat, so we played with this idea using a World Cafe, using these new operating principles:
Create places for you and others to experiment
Know and trust that the transformation never ends – it’s a never-ending quest
Cities will forever learn and adapt, and they will only learn and grow as much as we – the component parts – learn and grow
What is the best stuff happening in our cities? What are we transforming into?
There’s great stuff underway in our cities and we are transforming into cities that are about people. We are paying more attention to public spaces, to diversity, to our cultures. We celebrate with food and festivals. There is a shift underway, where we share more. Technology and social media are changing how we look at our cities and planners. Everything is more visible.
And we face significant challenges.
What are the challenges we face? What are our vulnerabilities?
When we resist change, we are at our most vulnerable. We are lured by convenience. Small thinking and lack of vision make us vulnerable. We feel the pressure to do it “right,” yet it is not possible to know what is coming. We grapple with the unknown. The choices we make matter. The leadership we create and support matters.
There is a way through.
What role do you want to play to move through these vulnerabilities?
Look at the whole. Grasp a vision and keep it in mind. It’s not about sacrifice, its about choice, and choosing to be informed and to inform. It’s about facilitating understanding, so that we can hold and consider new possibilities. Its about respecting and honouring roles and responsibilities, but also challenging them to see and pursue new possibilities. It’s about improvement.
We have no idea what we are transforming into. We just know that its underway. And we can transform into what works for us, or what does not. The only way we’ll get what we want is if we choose to engage with the transformation.
What transformations are taking place that you wish to nourish?
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This post is a wee bit of the book I am working on, while I am working on it. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City – The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities:
In last week’s edition of Nest City News, I made a provocative statement – citizens choose to engage.
Here’s the rub – they do choose, but how do our decisions as community leaders encourage or discourage their choices to get involved in city decision-making? How can we, as leaders on city council, in city administration or in our community organizations and businesses create the conditions for citizens to choose to engage, and choose to engage well? As leaders, we need to look to ourselves, and what we believe, first.
Last week I shared 10 conditions that encourage citizens to involve themselves. Here’s a reframe of these for those of you in leadership roles. As a leader, you will best work with others when you:
Bring your best self. Leave the negative at the door and appreciate all points of view, all sources of information. When you bring your best self, so will others. You set the stage.
Create time and space for people to tell stories. Stories are ways for people to connect to what matters to them, and to each other, even when they have differences in opinion. This feels like it takes a lot of time, but its about moving slow to move wise and fast later. Stories allow us to see what is really going on.
Trust that people want to contribute and take responsibility. This is a choice for you as a leader. If you believe that people have something to offer, you will see it. If you do not believe this, you will not see it. Be open to be surprised.
Offer minimal structure. Too little structure means confusion. Too much structure stifles what people have to offer and closes off opportunities for communication and collaboration. Find the balance of just the right amount of structure for the processes you use to work with each other.
Pursue unusual partnerships. Get together and bust the silos right from the start. To engage a wide variety of people, you don’t have to do it alone. Partner with unusual people and organizations to broaden your reach. Integrate points of view from the outset.
Practice working with each other. It isn’t good enough to organize for a one-time relationship. Or even a series of meetings that will end at the end of a project. Build longer-term relationships and spend time talking about how you can work together, and under what conditions it works best.
Take action. All the possibilities in front of us can paralyze us from taking action. The specifics of how to proceed can also paralyze. If the intention is to build relationships, we don’t worry about specifics because we are also agreeing to learn to work together. We do not need a specific plan about how to work together. We just need to get started.
Pause to look at what’s really going on. Take time alone, and with the people you engage, to reflect on your relationship, what its for, what is working well and what needs to be improved. This allows you and your colleagues to bring your best selves.
City governments are making more efforts than ever to involve citizens in their decision-making, and it is not easy or clean-cut work. It is messy . The processes city governments use to make decisions are complicated and take years of experience to understand. Residents get frustrated. City governments get frustrated.
Many citizens engage themselves because of their interest to improve some aspect of city life. Others, get engaged when something is going wrong, there’s something they don’t like – NIMBY (not in my back yard). This needs to be said – there is nothing wrong with when a citizens chooses to engage. Everyone is busy making contributions to our city life and it is not reasonable to expect all people to be engaged in all things at all times.
Are we ready to involve citizens when they choose to engage?
In what ways do you go beyond the usual to engage citizens in your city work?
Ever notice how when something is on your mind, more of it comes to you?
I was looking forward to the start of a big meeting in Winnipeg last weekend, where we were bringing people together from across Canada to chart out a new path for a national organization. I knew we were going to sit in a circle to start our meeting, and the day before we started, as I was walking through Winnipeg to get to our meeting place at The Forks, I noticed circles everywhere I went.
It felt like Winnipeg – and The Forks – was getting ready to host leaders from across the continent, a role this place, where the Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet, has played for over 6000 years. I also felt Winnipeg was helping me circle up with my Self, and the place in which we were meeting, to prepare.
As a shape in which to have a conversation, the circle allows us to more fully see and hear each other.
