If you’d like to contribute to the preservation of the garden as a wild space Emily posts community updates on her blog. And imagine (le) mile-end has been doing lots of great organizing. Here’s their report from the last meeting.

From the introduction:

Lot #2334609 is a terrain vague — owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, owned by the City of Montreal as of June 2009, used and cherished by the community, the only green space in the Mile End. People feel free in this space. They don’t ask for permission to picnic, grow things, create art, or gather around a campfire. It’s open and wild, unlike most city parks.

To outsiders, it may look like an abandoned field. But, as you will read here, the community has appropriated this space and wants a say in how it will be developed. Development is scheduled for 2009-2010, as part of the city’s $9-million revitalization of the neighborhood.

Emily Rose Michaud, through the Sprout Out Loud! gardener’s collective, created the Roerich Garden project in November 2007. Using this project as a starting point, this book provides a history of the meadow and documents the many ways the community uses and relates to this space. It then connects what’s happening in the Mile End to similar local, national, and international initiatives. It documents what the community wants for this space, as captured through a series of participatory consultations. And it asks questions about how we engage as citizens to imagine and create more open cities.

If you’d like to get (infrequent) updates about this project and the book you can sign up.

Apparently François worked with a bunch of Drupal hackers and social scientists and day laborers to create the site and make it work with cheap phones. Together, they’ve created an great web presence. People text in their stories. The research team shares their results via social media. They made all their decisions transparent. As Joe said: “It’s complete, cool, and credible. All the bits from everyone involved start to accumulate online into a rich picture.”

I found a NetSquared intervew with François about the project. Some excerpts:

When people talk about “the great democratization of public discourse” via blogging and so on, it is often forgotten that many people don’t have access to an advanced phone, or even to a computer or connection to the Internet…. The workers we’re working with have cheap phones and [those phones] are often prepaid… One of the big driving principals of the project was for us to take a look at these factors and then do as much as we could with as little as possible.

We have been experimenting with doing what we’re trying to do safely, anonymously, and cheaply. Also, the advantage of using prepaid phones is that day laborers occasionally lose their phones. Since prepaid phones are almost disposable, if it is lost, it isn’t the end of the world.

What is also very interesting is to look at cell phones as gateway technologies. The laborers will take pictures and record sounds and then they will come to computers in our labs because they are interested in looking at the pictures, reprocessing them, and remixing them. They make movies with the sounds they recorded and the pictures they have taken. First they take the pictures and they record the sound and then they want to come and use the computer to manipulate them.

And I went to look at the project site. I found this:

We have a weekly workshop at IDEPSCA where the popular communication team meets to analyze stories, develop shared knowledge, design the system, and create training materials. The popular communication team is composed of day laborers and a domestic worker who have been volunteering for IDEPSCA for many years and who take their role of writing their own history very seriously. We also meet each week at USC to develop research and writing about the project.

I feel so happy when I learn about projects like this.

I’m not a soloist, I’m a song leader. And a song leader starts songs but you can’t finish without help. Singing does not make sense to me without the congregation because the point of the singing for the congregation is the form “the community” — it is like the song is not in and of itself a product. The song is not a product. The song exist to get to singing. And the singing is not a product. The singing exists to form the community and there isn’t anything higher than that that I’ve ever experienced.

— Bernice Johnson Reagon

I’ve more thoughts on this… related to how people come together, creating public goods, and the tragedy of the commons. But too many other things to do now.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to make your own way and I keep hearing this phrase from one of their songs:  “You gone catch hell if you don’t do it the way they say do it.” So true. Here’s the context:

It’s good news when you reject things as they are, when you lay down the world as it is, and you take on the responsibility of shaping your own way, that’s good news. Everybody talking about spirituals, and they say, Oh Lord, black folk singing about going to heaven. No, this lesson is for you, tonight, November the eighth, 1980, in All Souls Church. Lay down the world, pick up my cross — and they don’t say it’s good times, they say good news. It’s hard times when you decide to pick up your own cross. You gone catch hell if you don’t do it the way they say do it. But when you lay down the world and shoulder up your cross, that’s what? Ain’t that good news?

— Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Good News,” from Breaths (Flying Fish, 1988).

I wasn’t thinking of this phrase in terms of activism. Rather, I was thinking about how hard it is to be different. I’ve been struggling with this recently and have observed some dear friends struggling with it too. I’m not marginal (well, some folks might think so) and yet even I feel the pressure. The worst is the judgment that comes from inside — from a set of norms that I’ve internalized through socialization. About what I should have achieved by now. About relationships, sexuality, family, work. I can only imagine how those who truly live on the edges feel. What they must battle with daily to feel good about themselves.

The reverse is true also. When you follow the rules — the dominant narrative — you get support and approval from all directions. You get to be good.

Following your own way, asking questions about the container and not just what you can do within it, means opening yourself to scorn, condemnation, and perhaps even exile.

black sheep
–noun
1. a sheep with black fleece.
2. a person who causes shame or embarrassment because of deviation from the accepted standards of his or her group.

How do we deal with those who are different? It’s hard. People who are different are manytimes annoying. Ultimately, though, how we deal with those who are not like us is defines our beauty. It is what makes us just and compassionate. When I think about difference I often go back to an essay by Audre Lorde that I’ve been carrying around since Peggy gave me that tape. It’s called The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Here’s an excerpt:

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. ..we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. …community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Lorde also talks about survival as the strength to stand alone and be unpopular, as well as the capacity to make common cause and form community. Which brings me to e.e. cummings and his essay, A Poet’s Advice, where he says

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

So I hope that I — and those around me — can ignore unsupportive judgments, keep asking questions, keep focused, keep trying to figure out what works and how to do things better, and find solace and strength in each other. I hope for resilience.

Station C is a space that fosters community, collaboration, innovation. People come here to work and connect. We are a hub for creators and innovators: entrepreneurs, geeks, artists, social activists.

Station C is part of an international coworking movement, which brings together the best elements of the office, cafe, and salon. This movement is built on a set of common values:

• Community — We are a community that thrives on connections and mutual support. Everyone participates, contributes, and benefits. Station C members take the initiative to care for our collective space, welcome visitors, orient new members, start conversations, and host events. We also reach out and contribute to our local community.
• Collaboration — We work together, intentionally as part of project teams or in an ad-hoc way when  someone needs a hand. We help each other out by sharing ideas, learning, solutions, resources.
• Openness — It is beneficial to share and build on each others’ ideas and knowledge. We encourage this in a concrete way by working at shared tables in an open space. We’re a modern agora, providing a public space for informal community gatherings and encouraging folks to drop in and work with us for the day.
• Diversity — We want people with different ideas, perspectives, and ways of working. People from different backgrounds. People at different stages in their life and career. Diversity means occasional misunderstandings, annoyance, and arguments — all of which are a small price to pay for sparking creativity and avoiding groupthink.
• Sustainability — Financially, Station C was designed to sustain itself and the community, not to make a profit. Each of us is responsible for finding our own work. Environmentally, like everyone, we are still learning and finding ways to lower our impact and promote sustainable products and behaviors. We need to do more and welcome help with this.

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