The kinds of goals we need for Bowen

There is a wonderful thread going on at Bowen Island Ourselves which Paul Rickett started by talking about the OCP process. It has morphed into a discussion about green house gas reduction, development and population growth which is very rich.

I added a few thoughts on Paul's initial musings that our OCP needed mesurable and attainable goals. Here are my thoughts:

It seems like this thread has concentrated largely on GHG and development, but I wanted to say something about the measurables. I think with our plan we have a chance to revisit how we measure things and discover new community indicators that would give us a sense of how we are doing without making us slaves to short term numbers. One of the dangers with choosing measurable goals (and even designing things that are "attainable") is that we fail to shoot high enough to change for fear that we will not be able to measure what we are doing, or that perhaps we might even fail. The GHG discussion is a good case in point: what is attainable or even measurable here? The concern I have is that specific indices and numbers work well for small things that are controllable, but a lot of what happens in a community is complex behaviour, even emergent behaviour, and not subject to control or measurement or management. In fact the "character" of a community can be neither controlled or measured, but it is as important a quality as any. b This is where "idealistic" goals as you call them come into play: they give us something to strive for. We could adopt self-sufficiency as a principle of our community, and commit to seeing that roll out in a number of ways, including trying for 20% food self sufficiency, 50% energy self-sufficiency and 100% water self-sufficiency within 20 years. We already have the water goal achieved! The goal would be to keep it there and not require water to be trucked from the mainland in the 20 year time period. Adopting self-sufficiency as a community principle gives us something to strive for and something to gauge our efforts against. Are we making decisions that take us in that direction or away from it? If we refuse to zone any more farmland, are we compromising our ability to feed ourselves, and lower GHGs in the process? So I am interested in finding community indicators that let us know that we are on the right path. For instance, a demand for more affordable housing in some ways is a good indicator of economic diversity: you don't have that indicator in exclusively rich gated communities. If that demand were to disappear, I would worry about the economic diversity of Bowen. So while it remains a pressing need, to me it is an indicator of a rich community populated by people who are trying to make a living in unorthodox ways. Increased demand for affordable housing is not a goal we want to pursue, but it tells us something about who we are. There are some very interesting community dashboards at Integral City which, despite its name, is an organization that is doing work with applicability to many types of communities. I have been using some of their work in a project I have been doing to measure the impact of Native public radio stations on Native communities in the US, and they have piloted some of their dashboards using Bowen Island indicators. It might be worthwhile bringing Marilyn Hamilton to Bowen for an evening conversation about different ways to measure community goals and host a conversation about what indicators make sense in this round of OCP discussions. What do you think?

How much prouder of Bowen could I be?

This has just been a fantastic month of community. If you really want to get a sense of how this island celebrates itself, you need to spend the last two weeks of August here. We have been celebrating, visioning, playing and socializing a plenty this month, and as Sally Freeman said "I'm in love with my island again!"

A couple of weeks ago, Bowfeast ran down in the Cove. In front of the library, two dozen stalls were set up featuring food from local farmers, gardeners and kids. We had everything from veggies to preserves, flowers, bees, honey and books. There was live music courtesy of us buskers, a picnic in the orchard and across the road, the weekend market was in full swing. There was a great vibe in the Cove that weekend, and I WISH WISH WISH we could do that every weekend all summer long. A vision of some great possibility there.

Also last weekend, the OCP review (follow the link to fill in the survey) on the island got going with the first public meetings, including a well run visioning session. The process seems to be off to a good start, and so far it's meeting my prime criteria of increasing social capital while designing and plan that works. There is a long road to go, but all is good so far. Our Bowen Island Ourselves site has been made a part of the process, and a community gathering we're sponsoring on September 13 will have some contribution to make to the overall process.

Yesterday we had our traditional end of summer gathering in Crippen Park, Bowfest. IN the last three years, the community has really taken over the festival and it has been outstanding ever since, with renewed life and energy. This year, I think for the first time in years, ALL of the musical talent was Bowen based (including honorary lifetime citizen Corbin Keep!). This included an excellent songwriters contest and a variety of music entertainment on two stages with rock and roll, folk, jazz, jugband, and all kinds of interstitial musical genres besides. The weather was beautiful and dancing in the evening to the Bowen Divas and Tony Dominelli was great fun.

It has been a summer of good stuff happening, and now we begin to wind it down in earnest and start to welcome back the fall, with hope for good rains and salmon.

Returning home, living in community

Got back early this morning on the 7:30 water taxi from Granville Island.  The water was flat the whole way other than a little chop in the Sound where the night's light Squamish was finishing.  I've been away for a few days in Springfield, Illinois, and coming how was a sweet relief.  I got off the boat and there was just silence all around, a little birdsong, sun beginning its day under a high hazy sky.  

I waited at The Sniug for the family to pick me up, and got into a nice conversation about the Cape and community and the long furture of life on Bowen.  Lots passed between us, but one thought I was left with was that no one can plan a neighbourhood.  Developers plan developments, but it is up to citizens to make them neighbourhoods.  We have fear about all kinds of scenarios of the future, but at what point do we find ourselves in those stories, helping to turn "developments" to "neighbourhoods."  Regardless of whether a developer has produced a "neighbourhood plan" creating neighbourhoods is the provinces and responsibility of citizens.  So my questions for the medium term and long term for the Cape is, what are we all prepared to do to make whatever happens down there a part of our community?  How do we act as midwives tothe new neighbourhood that will evolve with the new people that will ineveitably arrive?  How do we steward the future community we all want to live in?  If we find ourselves on one side or the other of the debate, can we see ourselves caring after the desicion is made?  Or if "our side" "loses" do we turn our backs on the Cape?  I find my own emotional energy these days invested in these questions.  

In other news, we're doing more work on the front of the house these days, building access to the garden from the front of our place.  Over the past few years we have made more an more of our lives in the out of doors, putting in a hot tub and a garden and patio and using the sleeping porch.  We have a small place, but since stretching out, we are able to make it much bigger, with some many more outdoor rooms and spaces and our lives have stretched correspondingly.  

The work on the front should be finished this week and when I find my camera I'll upload some photos.  

The shape of things to come

James Glave and I have been tossing around ideas about urban vs. rural since I wrote about what urban means to me a couple of weeks ago. Today I responded to an excellent post on his blog with this comment:

In my long term vision for Bowen Island, I actually see the neighbourhoods becoming villages, with some small commercial activity for example in Tunstall Bay, Cowan Point and other palces perhaps (probably at some point in the future the Cape too). I’ve always had in my mind that we could move from an island of neighbourhoods to an island of villages much like other islands of our size.

Last year as I was travelling through Belgium, I was struck by how close together villages were, only a couple of miles apart, and how focused each village was on it’s own things - a pub and a bakery and some uberlocal gardens and farms producing the villages food. Every few villages there were services like a garage, a building supply store, that sort of thing. The flow of things was not “everyone falling in towards a centre” but rather, lots of things happening around several hubs all with a reagional consciousness. This is what I can see happening to Bowen as a way to preserve mixed forms of housing, a more distributed village centre and large tracts of free land for various types of resource use (recreation, ecologging, non-timber forest products, agriculture, and wild lands).

What if we became an island of villages?

Community engagement

Last year I was invited to give a talk on the shapes of community engagement for a conference sponsored by the BC Treaty Commission called Forging Linkages and Finding Solutions. This is the slide deck I used and here is a transcript of my talk.

Given some of the stuff happening around here at the moment, I thought I'd share this with my friends and neighbours.

What is urban about our Island?

In a little Twitter conversation about some of the Bowen Island egovernment stuff that is alive right now, Boris Mann suggested that we look at Urbantastic as a tool for helping with community engagement.

The site itself is interesting, but I had an immediate reaction to the name and posted a little tweet about how Bowen is not an urban place, so "yes/and..." This was followed by a comment by Paul Ricket who runs our local specialty wine and spirits store, that indeed many Bowen Islanders want urban amenities. Which got me thinking.

Bowen Island is a rural place. We are an Island with a small commercial village hub, and several neighbourhood settlements. There are pockets of commercial activity along Mount Gardner, Grafton and Adams Road like the Building Centre, auto service and gas, garbage removal, the nursery, some kennels, Alderwood and the Ruddy Bakery, the last two of which are sort of combination farm/stores. There is agricultural activity throughout the valley's on the island, and some light industry as well.

Our small tax base relative to the costs of keeping things going here, especially when you factor in our rural roads network, ensures that the island will never be a city. Snug Cove is our village, and it could become even more so a traditional type of village in a rural landscape, and in the next few decades, other villages may sprout up as well. My wish for these is that they look more like traditional villages and less like "village developments" like you see in the revitalized centres of dying small towns, or in upscale places like West Vancouver. I'm not sure the moniker "urban" will never apply to this place in my lifetime.

Additionally we are an island municipality within the Islands Trust, which I happen to think is a good thing, but that extra layer of government (which many are unaware of) helps to shape the character of our island.

So what does urban, rural and suburban mean in the context of Bowen Island? We live next to the biggest city in BC, and many people who live on Bowen are escapees from the urban or suburban climes. For those that have never lived in small towns before, there is a culture shock when you move from a city to an island. Unlike places like Cortes Island, Galiano or Hornby (let alone Lasqueti!) it is possible to live on Bowen and still be an urbanite, with large parts of you life in Vancouver and your bed on Bowen. You can move here without the intention of becoming an Islander. Bowen CAN be your bedroom. We have a mix here now of people who consider themselves Islanders and people who are just living on Bowen, because the city is too expensive or too noisy or because its a great place to raise kids.

All of this makes for a very interesting mix, especially as we enter into conversations about community planning. I suspect that a variety of approaches and conversations will be used, reflecting the unique and changing character of our island community, one that balances rural values, land and marine stewardship, village life, and urban sophistication all on one rock. We have a chance to declare a unique voice for ourselves in the next few years, and I hope we can develop a unique way of doing that.