Public Places
The morning news affords the usual opportunities - the unprecedented raid on Tory headquarters, Kevin Falcon's lame kvetch to the BC Ferry Board for their huge salary increases - but there is something else on my mind.
I've been thinking since yesterday afternoon about Public Spaces/Public Places.
Unlike every city and village in Italy (and France and so many countries in the world), we have have none here in Vancouver.
Every twenty paces or so, Venice offers if not a piazza, then at least a small neighbourhood campo, where children boot soccer balls, parents compare notes on the prices of real estate and groceries and grandparents sit on benches. I realize I am creating an idealized, romantic image of a society in harmony.
But of late this mud town has been carrying on from every direction at once the noise called "Civil Society."
The usual suspects were hauled in by the Sun to "edit" a special Saturday edition embracing this notion. I was spared these pronouncements from the Mike Harcourts among us by a timely visit to Winnipeg.
If there are no places to stop and chat, if discourse is unnatural and an interruption rather than a daily pursuit, how can we speak of a civility?
What would it take for us to build stopping places - public spaces, mini-parks, breathing places that might even include fruit and vegetable stands or stores and cafes - in this cold, unwelcoming community?
Is this a silly dream of transplantation?
Is this one old culture plopped will-nilly on a newer one?
I'd love to see us try.
