This is kind of an epilogue to Cheri’s post:
My community’s Jane’s Walk was Sunday, a glorious day for walking, and a few dozen of us made the trek from the Caffe Rosso parking lot (incidentally, one of best little coffee shops in Calgary and the best retail addition to the neighbourhood since I moved here five years ago) to the crest of Scotsman’s/Scotchman’s Hill.
Here, the Jane’s Walkers stop to ponder Dennis Oppenheim’s “Device to Root Out Evil,” which notwithstanding the hometown bias I consider one of the niftiest pieces of public art I’ve ever seen:
The industrial lands in the background are being redeveloped into one of Calgary’s most ambitious mixed-use urban villages. Jane would surely approve.
What I enjoyed most, though, was seeing my neighbourhood’s streets, sidewalks and public spaces occupied in such numbers. It struck me that one of the unfortunate things about Ramsay is that none of the designated parks is a genuine meeting place or transit point. We met in the Caffe Rosso parking lot because it’s a more “public” meeting place than any of the actual parks.
On April 18, one thing I heard several times was the problem with “segregation” as a barrier to complete community – the difficulty in simply locating a public space that isn’t so heavily programmed as to be unfit for anything but its designated purpose. (Not to mention the whole idea of putting parks in places that people wouldn’t otherwise walk past or through.) As we start thinking about how to go citywide with CivicCamp and makes this the summer of Calgary’s Public Spaces Revolution, this is worth keeping in mind.
