Public Commons

• Possibly, a better way to govern public space

Part of Community involvement Getting Involved Governance and Effectiveness Parks, Forestry & Recreation

The conservancy ideas enumerated here have had no support from City Councillor Ana Bailao. Failing that, no such experiment can take place at this time.

See Conservancy News for August 2012

What do we want a parks conservancy to foster?

The basic idea of the Ward 18 Conservancy is to conserve the lessons learned by the staff operating certain Ward 18 parks (Dufferin, MacGregor, Campbell, Wallace) over the past decade or so.

These lessons include:

• work together
• support one another
• make do with what's available if possible
• stay in close touch with your co-workers and community
• always work towards supporting community involvement, fairness, and equity
• make welcoming places

These staff used to work as a semi-autonomous collective. This has now been stopped.

The benefits were: great results for the community (variety, efficiency, effectiveness), and a great working environment for staff.

What is at issue in the bureaucracy of cities

"Of course it is important to the political and social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of people, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is."

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Postscript.

For more detailed information, review the items in this topic (see the Contents page tab above).

Click to enlarge. Click on poster to enlarge

Kids in the sandpit at Dufferin Grove Park little engineers

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Ward 18 Parks, Recreation Centres, and Wading Pools, Toronto

Parks with wading pools have blue markers. The two ward recreation centres have fucia markers.

View Ward 18 Parks, Toronto in a larger map

A Ward 18 Parks Conservancy

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