What a glorious day for a walk in Calgary and this morning I had the great pleasure of a two hour ramble about my local neighbourhood with 25 residents and friends of Brentwood. The walk was in honour of the great urban thinker and activist, Jane Jacobs, and was one of ten Jane’s Walks scheduled for Calgary this weekend and more than 230 across Canada. According to the Jane’s Walk website, Canadian cities are hosting a “series of free neighbourhood walking tours that help put people in touch with their environment and with each other, by bridging social and geographic gaps and creating a space for cities to discover themselves.”
Jacobs was not a professional planner but had a keen eye for observation and believed that the people who live in a community inherently know what is best for their community. She advocated for grassroots, community-based planning long before it became widely accepted. I like to think she would have enjoyed this morning’s stroll. We took some paths that aren’t on any map but have been worn down by years of footsteps following the same preferred routes through parks, between buildings and across open fields. We paused to celebrate a playground built by local volunteers, murals painted by the young people in our neighbourhood and a wonderful natureground adjacent to and proudly tended by a local elementary school. And all the while we chatted with each other about stewardship of our local parks, about building a community garden, about proposed new development around the Brentwood LRT station, about what was working well in Brentwood and what could be improved.
But the most magical thing occurred at the end of the walk. Over refreshments at our local library, people sat or stood in groups of two or three or four, continuing to talk earnestly with neighbours they had known for years and others they had only just met. The conversations were warm and enthusiastic, people lingered, and email addresses and phone numbers were exchanged in the hopes of reconnecting over newly discovered common interests. Watching this unfold on a warm spring Saturday in May affirmed my belief that the energy is shifting in Calgary after our long, dreary winter. People are coming together in communities across the city, hungry to connect with each other and eager to engage in the building of stronger communities and ultimately a more caring, sustainable and vibrant city for our future.
CivicCamp is already part of that warming, that shift in energy, and we want to not only keep CivicCampers connected but to invite more and more folks to join us in making Calgary the city we know it truly can be. Those of you who expressed an interest in creating great public spaces, urbanity in communities, villages within our city, urban agriculture, child and youth friendly communities and all things Jane Jacobs-like, we urge you to check out CivicCamp on Google groups and continue your grassroots community conversations. And those of you who would like to join in one of these conversations or start your own, come on over – we’re a friendly group and look forward to hearing from you.
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