I attended the third of three evenings with Jim Diers - former Director of the City of Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods - hosted by the City of Edmonton. Over the course of the evening, Diers shared some really interesting ideas about successful community building and power of neighbourhoods. I am planning to write about some of these ideas in future posts on this blog.
Mack Male, Tamara Stecyk, and George Watts attended some of the evening events and have posted recaps.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
neighbour power.
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5 comments:
And now our idiot City (is there nothing Edmonton WON'T try to copy?) is launching a Department of Good Neighborhoods.
How bloody Orwellian is that title? And exactly what value from money can we expect from the civic cheerleaders it is sure to employ?
Meanwhile the Mayor is content to defer decisions on the new LRT routes because, as he put it, "there's no money to build this anyways".
Maybe if we weren't constantly pissing away money on this other nonsense.
Oh and I also saw a site based around a movement called "Keep Edmonton Original". That's tongue-in-cheek funny since it's an obvious play on the "Keep Portland Weird" campaign down in Oregon. And when you're copying something to stay original...
My head hurts now.
And Portland copied Austin, TX. So on and on it goes.
What's wrong with taking good ideas from other cities and trying them out? I'm glad that there are people working in the Community Services Department who aren't afraid to look out of the box and bring new ideas into our city. I don't know how this post suggests anything Orwellian, the City of Edmonton has a strong foundation of community leagues and neighbourhood involvement, and a limited number of staff that help support these services on the larger level.
As Diers said last night, neighbourhoods are in a position to do a lot of things more effectively than government can. Let's let them do what their good at.
If you are worried about Orwellian prophecy, check out Premier Stelmach's Public Affairs Bureau. That is Orwell.
Anon 2:37 - The "Original" refers to independent businesses. Copying marketing from elsewhere doesn't make them any less locally owned and operated.
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