Here is a quick update on the development of collaborative villages. Hope you find it inspiring for what you are up to in your neighbourhood. Let me know if you and your neighbourhood would like to collaborate with the Bathurst and Bloor area of Toronto.
Councillor Mike Layton and I met January 6, 2014, regarding the Markham Street MuSE for living in a more creative Toronto. It is also a community-led innovation and social response to today’s creative
and learning economies. We noted the fact that the Canadian economy is now less
reliant on manufacturing, and that the City of Toronto wants to encourage citizen's to be leaders in today’s economies.
Mutual Support Enterprises are proactive member-owned
associations that develop and advance a neighbourhood vision of urban
living, or a ‘hyper-local’ vision for a street. A MuSE is an
association and hybrid of a social agency and a business. It makes
money to reinvest in social and economic development.
It encourages fulfillment of each person’s preferred roles, values, and
vision for their life. As member-owners we become more of who we are,
both individually and collectively. We develop further understanding,
creativity, and increased capacity for health, vitality and well-being.
A MuSE is also uniquely positioned to be first-in-the-marketplace for helping
corporations look at the wholeness in situations so as to benefit their
return on investment.
There is an opportunity for the City of Toronto to supply arts groups
with reusable material such as wood, metal, ceramics, fabric, etc.,
that would otherwise be sold or put in landfill. The councillor is
currently looking at options, say, when contracts with existing service
suppliers are up for renewal.
We live in an urban forest. Neighbours could use felled local trees
to make structures, such as gazebos and arbors, that could be sold for
beautification of local gardens and parks. This kind of logging would
be more enterprising and locally advantageous compared to the noisy
practice of reducing trees to wood chips.
The future of society depends to great extent on encouraging our
entrepreneurs. We had a conversation about establishing creative
economy hubs, and the need for neighbours to support entrepreneurial
start-ups. Practices of supplying office space and services to
entrepreneurs that support neighbourhoods (‘social innovators’) remain
part of the solution.
The councillor is a board member of Artscape YOUNGplace
which is an example of a new, multi-tenant arts & cultural centre
in the ward – at 180 Shaw Street, just west of Trinity-Bellwoods park.
We also touched on how Waterfront renewal as an opportunity to
demonstrate the advancement of larger scale creative and learning
economy hubs. Exhibition Place has always tried to showcase
innovations, such as wind turbine technology. Councillor Layton pointed
out how governments are now limited in what they can responsibly invest
in, in terms of supplying basic services such as sewage and drinking
water, when there is no immediate return on taxpayer investment.
We discussed the possibility of making Waterfront development ‘more
organic’, more responsive to community needs, more economically
sustainable, and less reliant on investment through financial
institutions.
China is building 1,000 new universities over ten years (source:
Roger Martin, past dean of the Rotman School of Management, U of
Toronto,) as a strategy for adapting to the learning economy. However,
‘developed countries’ in North America and Europe are making little or
no investment in new learning institutions.
This led to a discussion of our proposal for neighbourhood campuses
and the possibility of using underutilized local spaces. Ideas for
gathering and streamlining existing learning opportunities into
curriculum streams that develop new skill-sets necessary for today’s
economies could have been discussed further. However, we had talked for
over an hour and it was time to adjourn.
Our appreciation goes to the councillor and his staff for their kind cooperation.
Andrew Owens.
