Place Making: Creating a Unique Identity in Your Community

On September 28, 2019 Londoners came together for the first annual Place Matters Conference: Strengthening Neighbourhoods, Building Community. One of the questions that face us as Londoners is how can we build on the uniqueness of our place? We invited city planners Cheryll Case and Sunjay Mathuria to discuss theoretical approaches to creating a unique neighbourhood identity. Moving from theory to practice, we also heard from local panelists, Sarah Merritt and King N. Jerome, on overcoming stigmatization of place and how to authentically build a neighbourhood brand that reflects the people living in the community.

Moderator: Wes Kinghorn

Keynote Speakers: Sunjay Mathuria, Cheryll Case

Local Panelists: Sarah Merritt, King N. Jerome

Wes Kinghorn: We’re about to get the final panel of the day started. To begin we have an exciting panel for you today. We are talking about something very close to my heart – placemaking. The specific idea of this session is to talk a little bit about how you can create a unique identity in your community. Many people struggle to figure out a way to unite a community, and one of the best ways to do it is to create a solid image that people can unite behind. But that’s not an easy task because neighbourhoods are by nature not uniform places there are people from all walks of life with all different interests, so you have to find something in that place that all people can agree on, and something that differentiates you from other neighbourhoods, that makes it special.

The first person I’d like to introduce is Sunjay Mathuria who is a City planner with four years of planning experience in public, consulting, and research roles, as well as several years’ experience working in communications and publishing. As a researcher in Ryerson he explored placemaking practice in suburban, ethnic, retail neighbourhoods. He has also led complex community planning processes for Parks and Recreation master plans, led stakeholder engagement for zoning bylaw review process, and has been involved in the public consultation projects across Ontario. Sunjay is currently a planner at Urban Strategies.

Our second planner is Cheryll Case, a City Planner with three years’ experience in consulting, community, engagement and research. She uses her skills to design inclusive conversations that dig deep into addressing the conditions that affect access to housing, work, and play. As a researcher she’s produced key documents that have impacted public policy conversations around housing and belonging. Her reports are produced by centring the lived experience of individuals and unpacking the details of their relationship with the economy and social society. Cheryll is currently a consultant providing planning services to a variety of clients including the Toronto Atlas of Neighbourhood Groups and Organizations – TANGO, which is a little like our Urban League for Toronto.

 Cheryll Case: What is placemaking? Placemaking is a creative process that facilitates community relationships. It is the making that is the most beautiful part of placemaking. Building relationships, getting to know your community members, and making something that reflects your relationship with the space, and each other. Much like you can design your home to reflect your personal values, you can do this with the outside. For example, you can build walls, front yards, storefronts, front walks, roads, fences, street furniture, utility boxes, and more. On the way here we saw a few utility boxes painted to reflect community.

Let’s move to examples outside the City of London. Take note of four qualities: the first is property – whether it’s on private or public land. This affects the requirements for permits, and sometimes the time it would take to go from idea to implementation. And interaction: is it something you look at, listen to, or actually touch? Also size. And draw: is it something that locals would appreciate most, or would it draw people from farther away? The more likely that a placemaking product is to draw people from afar, the more likely it is to have a relationship with gentrification, so that’s something to keep in mind.

This edible wall in New York was made on the side of a building, and is a great example of being able to provide green space. It’s on private space, it’s active, because you can pick and eat its edible fruits. It’s relatively small and something that locals would be drawn to appreciate.

Next, this is a front yard garden in Portland. The homeowner of this property decided to reinvent their front yard as a community garden because a local community garden actually had to close down. These are community resources people can come to produce food they can eat, but they’re also producing relationships with each other and with the land, which is important especially at this time. This is considered a local placemaking activity.

This is a little library. Does anyone have one of these in your neighbourhood? Wow, so a lot of you. These are a great way to make additional use of your ever-growing book collection. What’s important to note is that they’re on both private and public space depending on what your lot line is. So it would depend on how your city views little libraries, but you may need a permit to install one in your front yard.

These are some little libraries in Toronto. There’s a registry online where you can see the location of all of them.

These three examples show that placemaking is about sharing with your neighbours.

Sunjay Mathuria: My first example is kind of a bad example of placemaking, but it captures the idea of signage and banners. So these are common rebranding practices for placemaking, for broadcasting the identity of the neighbourhood. The active rebranding or renaming of a neighbourhood is a powerful tool. The process should be inclusive, sensitively approached, and reflective of the community. So unfortunately with this example, the community groups were not consulted with the rebranding of Jane and Finch, which is a largely stigmatized neighbourhood in Northwest Toronto, into what they now call University Heights. This process primarily involved school boards, developers, transit authorities, major institutions. Each of these groups had a major stake in this rebranding of something more palatable and appealing to the broader public of Toronto. University Heights is a name that aligns more with York University, which is sort of outside of the Jane and Finch neighbourhood, and ignores the strong community roots that already existed in Jane and Finch. In order to create a place where everyone feels a sense of belonging there needs to be involvement from residents and community groups. The process effectively erased stories and community voices that were already in this neighbourhood.

When you’re naming or rebranding an area, that it’s a community-led, collaborative process. It’s also important not to shy away from difficult conversations, especially if you’re in a community that’s already stigmatized by the rest of the city. What kind of stories or images are you trying to project or perpetuate? It’s definitely important to recognize that you don’t want to erase the local stories and initiatives that are already taking place in the area.

In addition to sharing, placemaking is also about being respectful of the people who already live there, and acknowledging their stories.

Placemaking is also about finding a way to activate all the senses. Maybe you’ve heard of [murmur], a documentary oral history project that records people’s stories and memories about specific geographic locations. This is a powerful tool that connects physical place with local narrative. How it works is [murmur] collects people stories about places in a neighbourhood, and they install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number, so a passerby can call it and hear a story told about that exact spot. This provides a unique experience for the local community as well as the broader public to engage with stories that might not be in public circulation or common knowledge about that neighbourhood.

Signage and plaques can also be a good placemaking opportunity to enable storytelling. This can happen on both public and private infrastructure and can be a simple message to a more robust story or narrative about a location or an individual how is important to that location. It can be a provocative statement. It can be a story about a building or individual. They can be important to bring to light a history that might not be visible in that space anymore but that is critical to acknowledge. So I’m thinking about reconciliation and Indigenous initiatives, and what we can do with our relationship to land.

So as evidenced by these examples, placemaking should be about sparking conversation and discussion, and not shying away from difficult conversations. Placemaking can be used as a launching point for people to delve into stories that they might not have heard about neighbourhoods.

Public art is very common in cities now, we see more and more of it. It can be a great way to engage local residents in a project that they can participate in different ways and have ownership over. It can also allow the community to reimagine a mundane piece of public infrastructure into something beautiful that reflects their values. An example of this that we see in London and cities across Canada is in the city of Calgary, they call the “Utility Box Mentorship Program,” where city staff work closely with local organizations and local artist to transform these utility boxes into interesting artworks. This can be replicated in other spaces as well, on a large scale: public roads and sidewalks.

Another example comes from Etobicoke, with an organization called Arts Etobicoke. This is a local arts organization whose priority is to support local artists in Etobicoke, but they also do a lot of community outreach, engaging residents in programming and classes, after-school activities for various age groups and skill levels. So this mural project in Rexdale involved building a relationship that didn’t actually exist between Arts Etobicoke and Rexdale before. It was a long process before they actually go to the mural stage of the project. It’s important to ensure community ownership in the project. Through this project they learned that it helped bridge a gap between the various communities in Rexdale, and also form new bonds and friendships that otherwise would not have happened.

Cheryll: This is an example from New York called Planter Bombing. It’s just having planters, finding a space that could be improved by having some more greenery, and setting down some of those planters. The opportunities are widespread: you can put this in parks and parking lots or in streets.

Similarly you can also bomb a bunch of chairs to enable more public seating. In New York people have put seats in front of a storefront, creating a new patio space. The draw for this can be local or broad.

What we learned from these examples is that placemaking is flexible. These examples are not fixed in space – people can move chairs, people can move planters. Placemaking doesn’t have to be a permanent installation, it can be installed and removed as needed.

This is the Heidelberg Project in Detroit. This is a very interesting example. This is taking place on a full street. The artist returned from the war and described his neighbourhood as looking as though a bomb had dropped and obliterated the neighbourhood. This was right after the riots had taken place in Detroit, so there was a lot of disrepair and abandonment in the neighbourhood. So rather than walk away, he saw it as an opportunity. And you can see some examples of his work: this is fifty years later, the neighbourhood street is still being used as an outdoor art gallery, and the artist has been called to talk about what he’s produced in cities across the world. Here is a painted house. Really, it’s a neighbourhood that’s turned into an outside art gallery. What we learned from this example is that placemaking is context-specific. You’d be hard pressed to find another neighbourhood space that could facilitate painted houses and piles of shoes and things like that in the public space as permanent art installations. It’s an opportunity for people to share ideas and build on each other’s strengths. IT’s not just the space, it’s the support networks that you have to produce the art.

Wes: Thank you. So we’ve seen a little bit about how you can… I hope this is inspiring to show the little things you can do. Somebody saying “my neighbourhood is falling apart and the city doesn’t care about it anymore, so I’m going to paint big dots on the side of it” and it’s now an art project and you can’t tear it down. This is the thing placemaking can do. Context specific. You have to know your place first though.

So let’s look at examples that are happening in London. Here’s a front garden, you can see the use of pop-up parks and living rooms and play areas. Of course, Woodfield Porch Concert series. Amazing mural work that’s happening in the Old East Village, we’ll be talking about that more in a second.

That just shows you a little bit about what’s happening around here, but we’re doing this. What’s interesting is there’s a lot of theory behind placemaking but really, people just kind of get it. They get what they need to do. That’s why I’m so thrilled today that we’ll be having a conversation about how places can be made, unique identities can be found, and I hope at the end of this, if you’re saying to yourself “how can I pull my community together and unite these people together in a single vision,”… first I’d like to welcome up Sarah Merritt. Many of you will know Sarah. She’s undertaken participatory education, research and development initiatives in Scotland, England and Canada. She’s lived and worked in London’s Old East Village for 26 years as a community worker with the London InterCommunity Health Centre, and then manager of the Old East Village BIA (Business Improvement Area.)

She played a major role in the initiation and implementation of the ongoing, capacity-focused, multi-faceted neighbourhood renewal initiative. Sarah believes that the success of Old East Village’s renewal to date is the outcome of the intentional mobilization of the community’s capacities, through initiatives designed to reclaim the community’s history, reinforce its unique identity, and recruit its knowledge and skills. Such an approach provides a foundation for procuring experts who participate in ongoing, reciprocal knowledge sharing with the community to formulate plans, access resources, and implement initiatives. This is the process that underpins place reclamation, placemaking, and place maintenance in the Old East Village. Please welcome Sarah.

 So many of you are familiar with the Old East Village as a model of what we’re talking about today. I hope many of you are either aware of or becoming aware of – but I guarantee will soon be aware of - a place called Midtown. The next person I’d like to invite to the conversation is King N. Jerome. Originally from Mississauga, King relocated to the Forest City late fall of 2012 to pursue the opening of his retail location, The Jump Off London. It’s located at the corner of Dundas and William. He found his niche and doubled down on the retail initiatives, opening a stores in St. Thomas in February of 2019. In the years spent in the Midtown neighbourhood, consistently hearing about the Old East Village, Wortley, and others, King grew tired of wondering “why not us?” initially the brainchild of Ben Collymore, a former Midtown business owner, he called upon King and Joel Jacobs to launch the Midtown District Group, representing the interest of the community as well as leading initiatives to highlight, improve and uplift the quality of living of those within Midtown’s borders. Please Welcome King.

I’ve got some questions to begin, and then we’ll move on to more of a discussion. We’ll start with Sarah. Sarah, could you tell us a bit about the Old East Village and those that live there, and how you got to know the people of this neighbourhood better as you began to consider the authentic identity of this unique place.

Sarah Merritt: Up until 1914, there were six women in the Old East Village neighbourhood who helped women give birth and laid out the dead. The last real “doorknocker” in the Old East Village died in 1992. That was a wee boy that used to go round and knock all the doors, get the workers up out of their beds. Patterson Ewing, famous artist, had his studio behind U-Need-A Cab. Some of the examples of what we learned a little bit about, who used to be in the Old East Village, through an initiative that I’ll talk about. I don’t think it’s possible to say “this is who the Old East Village are.” What I will say, is that it’s a community where people banded together through a variety of initiatives with a lot of help to get their fair share of municipal resources.

So talking about people is one thing: we’re a very mobile, active community. Strong, diffuse networks. So that all roads don’t lead to God, which is really important in this kind of work.

So this is something that I’ve learned from John Fleming and Jason Gilliland. What I thought was important was that if we were going to be talking about both Midtown and our district, to give people an idea of where they are. [Shows map.] So, the dividing line between Midtown and Old East Village is actually Adelaide Street, and it’s really a psychological dividing line, because people move back and forth between these communities. What we know about boundaries is that artificial ones are put in place for maybe planning reasons, bureaucratic reasons, the distribution of resources. But people actually move across boundaries all the time. So you can see what the stretch of the Old East Village Community Association is. When we first started out doing the work in the village it was one block on Dundas Street from Adelaide to Elizabeth, which was the BIA block, which was eventually expanded to include a Community Improvement Plan area. That’s a whole other story for how they got that going – thank you, John Fleming.

What I’ll say about everything you’re seeing on our map, the local neighbourhood – we’ve been involved in every planning initiative that’s occurred in our neighbourhood since professional planners’ action team came in in 2001 to develop this plan with us.

[Shows photo.] This photo was taken by my husband Frank. It’s part of an initiative that we did when I was a community worker of the Intercommunity Health Centre. The fancy professional term for it was “a participatory research, social investigation” using the camera as a tool. Really what it was was a bunch of us got together, with the help of Beal Art, asked our neighbourhood two questions: what do you like about living in this neighbourhood? And could you suggest a photograph that could help describe it?

We did that for two years, for the first year most of the photographs were of things standing still. We were still learning as photographers. But when we put the exhibition on, we selected photographs that Paulo Freire would talk about as generator themes because the work that we have done in this neighbourhood has got very serious theoretical underpinnings. And I think one of the things we have to be wary and careful of is that when people in communities come together to do their art projects or whatever, they are an expression of people’s artistic intentions, but when people are doing that it’s because they’re mobilizing their communities and because they also have theoretical knowledge and understanding of what needs to happen in the communities. The issue, when you start thinking about what knowledge and theory is, is that certain kinds of knowledge are accepted as “true” knowledge, academic knowledge, expert knowledge, and then there’s the community knowledge. So these kind of projects are designed to put a different pedagogy on the table when it comes to who’s the expert and who knows.

So we selected photos that were generator themes. Basically a generator theme is a physical construction of an image that has inherent in it issues that people feel strongly about and want to act on. Now whether it was true or not, this photograph which by the way is called Heavenly Wash. We wanted to mobilize and generate. People said to us, did you know it’s like the wild west down here? There’s no bylaws, nothing, to the extent that this municipality cares so little about us that we’re the only community in London that’s still allowed to hang their washing up! Now, whether that was the truth or not, it really didn’t matter. That was what people told us. So what it did was open up opportunities for us to talk about how separate and marginal and neglected people felt by the municipality. And by the way people are still hanging their washing up.

Now what we engaged in was less about placemaking and more about place reclaiming. This idea was actually from the Community Association out in Nova Scotia. So what I’m going to say to you is that anything that you’re going to see in images with us, they’re expressions of people’s artistic abilities and people’s spirits. So I think it’s important that whenever you’re placemaking with an artistic endeavour, that by itself will not be enough. It’s very easy to think if we put the planters up, if we put the flags up, then we’ll all be alright, and I can say that for certain because we tried and it didn’t work. What you need are parallel activities that support this kind of engagement, but that are designed to mobilize the community so that it can become politically active. So for me, placemaking is about how we create opportunities and places and initiatives that facilitate participatory democracy.

So these ones, you can see in our neighbourhood, everybody’s got a political point of view. What we discovered when we started this initiative – [shows photos of signs on houses] this is the original owners of the houses and what their occupations were. So what we discovered was that at that time women weren’t allowed to be owners of homes if they were married. So they could be as a widow. So there was a great absence of women’s history on these signs. So you can see car builders – because we relied on the railway. Street conductors. And then one wag who I love, who is Kate Graham, I don’t know if you know her. She’s just a remarkable woman. Kate and Jesse Helmer, our politician. Kate put up the sign “Josephine Jones, mother of six”] her point being that women’s labour was ignored. Now people are starting to have fun with them because now we’ve got a neighbourhood vampire. But you get the point, that we started reclaiming history and identity using buildings and if you walk around the neighbourhood you really get a feel for who was there, and being that we’re the neighbourhood that we are, we’ve got a variety, a psychic, a spinster on the signs.

Everything that we’ve been doing to a certain point, we’ve moved on now. The photography exhibition created momentum to start mobilizing the community so that we could move on the revitalization of Dundas Street. We knew that we couldn’t do it by ourselves but we already had the community mobilized before we went to the city and asked for any help, because we’d gone previously in 1991 and we were told, look, we’d really like to help you but we’re just starting to work with the downtown renewal. Let’s get that done, and then we’ll get to you. Well, we all knew that that kind of work was a work in progress, so we started ourselves. Everything we’re doing in this neighbourhood started out of the two questions. Any plan that we developed by ourselves and then subsequently with the help of John Fleming and the professional planners’ action team was all built on our existing capacity. We did not import an idea from anywhere. We looked at what we had, what we knew, what it was we could do really well, who among us could do it, and we built everything else on that.

So this kind of placemaking – the mural’s being created by the London Clay Art Centre. Susan Day lived and worked in the Old East Village, had a business there. Key was that.

These two images by a local artist called Simon Schegelman who lived in our seniors’ affordable housing, well-known Latvian artist. He’s moved back to Toronto now. Very famous. So we had him create images for us. What we tried to do is create art wherever we can but put it in places that are normally drab and ugly, but the whole idea is to really express – first of all to ourselves – who we are, and then to others who we are. Because our story had been coopted. I’m sure I could go around this audience and get you to tell us who you thought Old East Village was in the eighties, nineties and two thousands. We’ve gone from being residents of hell’s kitchen, to residents of God’s drawing room, and we’re still the same people.

The main thing that’s changed is we got our fair share of resources, and we learned how to recruit good people who understood reciprocal learning. So with John and the planning team and Jason, who’ve taught us so much about planning and placemaking, they also understood that knowledge is reciprocal and that they could only do what they could do if they learned from us and vice versa.

Wes: The conventional wisdom about place branding is kind of disputed, the idea that you come up with this simple brand like Coca Cola has, and that it can somehow define a neighborhood. IF you had to define the identity of Old East Village in just a sentence, is that even possible, or is it too complex for that?

Sarah: Well I think there’s the inside brand and outside brand. And you know, we’re not marketable commodities. For me, I think that I’m not comfortable with the brand notion, we’re constantly inventing and reinventing place, and once we establish place, we reclaimed place through reclaiming our story and profiling among ourselves what it was we knew and could do well. Now we’re in a spot of place maintenance, because you create all these wonderful public spaces and beyond, and then political scenarios change, health issues wave all over us, and work that we’ve all done is being challenged for example because have so many unsupported, under-resourced, people with addictions in our urban cores. So that should never be happening and we really need to have a better response to it, but it’s one thing to arrive at a place, but I think that when we’re engaged in planning exercises, placemaking, we’re only learning this, that part of that question should be “how are you going to maintain it” and can you anticipate waves that are coming forward that might interfere negatively with what we’re doing. If the wave comes forward and changes it and grows it, then it’s great, so for me, the only thing I would say about our neighbourhood is it’s a “do for yourself” neighbourhood that mobilizes and understands now how systems work, so that we can get our fair share of resources and help others to do the same.

Wes: I think a lot of you who are starting out on this place-branding idea… The Old East Village looms large in London. WE all know that brand. Many of us know that east of Adelaide used to be a stigmatized term and now it’s been so turned on its head. What Sarah’s shown us is this doesn’t happen through a top down immediate brand that we lump on top of a place. It comes out of what we’ve been talking about all day today, which is little tiny things, little baby steps, and slowly you come towards something that unifies a neighbourhood.

King is just starting out. So had anyone here heard of Midtown? That’s awesome. So Midtown has a similar issue, and I’m going to let you start there. Could you define Midtown and the people who live there?

King: [Shows geographic location of Midtown.] So it’s much smaller than Old East Village, it borders Colbourne to Adelaide, Queens Avenue all the way down to the train tracks. It’s a wide variety of different people. It’s business owners, influencers. The businesses and organizations in our neighbourhood range from the police station, to schools, like Beal and CCH. There are also different programs like SOHAC and St Leonard’s halfway house. There’s a lot of rehabilitation as well.

I think we counted over eighty businesses just in that small region alone, and it varies from real estate agents, funeral homes, retail locations, restaurants. There’s a wide variety of different places in our neighbourhood. What myself and Joel, Joel Jacobs is my partner who has a music school just down the street from me, are trying to do is shed light on what is offered. By and large our neighbourhood is used as a conduit to get from downtown to Old East Village, people passing through. I think what’s largely overlooked is that there is quite a bit of talent and resources in our neighbourhood, and it’s up to us to shine a light on that.

Wes: I thin what’s really interesting is that much like the photograph project that led to a way for Sarah’s team to get to know the authentic place, you’ve got something like this in mind now and you’re just about to embark on this.

King: Our first initiative is we did a barbecue. Last Labour Day we held a barbeque in the parking lot of CCH, we gave away about 500 hotdogs and hamburgers with the help of Ryan Craven from NeighbourGood. He helped us out a lot, he’s our mentor. So we did this because there are a lot of disenfranchised individuals in our neighbourhood, so if we can lend a helping hand or show people that somebody does care, that’s what we’re trying to do.

Tail end of the school year we started what we called Midtown Minutes. We’re highlighting business owners, long-term residents, as well as influencers – people with a lot of tenure in our neighbourhood. We want to actually share their stories. So we’re doing these intimate interviews with people from Midtown [like Amal Mahmoud from the Cross Cultural Learning Centre, and Bill Spigos, owner of High Lunch and Prince Albert’s Diner]. We utilize Beal’s facilities. What we’re doing with these is basically we want to share people’s stories. What is your experience in our neighbourhood? How do you define our neighbourhood? What are your origins? Tell us about your store, its growth, its origins, things like that.

To make it all encompassing and really about Midtown, it was important for us to use a Midtown resource which is Beal High School. Using the brightest and the youngest people, which are the students in our school. So we partnered with the program directors of Beal Art, Beal Film and so forth. One of the things I always push for is for things to be mutually beneficial. One of the things that I push for is I wanted the work and the time and the energy that the students put into the projects – I wanted them to get credits towards their actual school curriculum. So it’s not just some arbitrary task or favour that they’re doing for us: it’s tangible work that will boost the community but also in turn goes towards their credits for school.

Wes: You can see the similarities between these two places – although they were decades apart – we have places that were stigmatized. Midtown has always been this little weird box with no name on it. And it had occasionally been called Midtown in the past but there was no representation .So you had that to deal with, which is a forgotten area. And you both [King and Sarah], instead of doing some kind of imposition, what you did was get out there and talk to the people to figure out what this place was. So what are you doing next?

King: When it comes to art… art is something that makes you feel better when you’re around it. We’re lucky enough to have the leading art school in our neighbourhood. So we partnered with the director of Beal and we’re putting murals and so forth around the neighbourhood. We want to do the utility boxes. We want to do murals on the sides of buildings.

We initially started as the Midtown Junction. One of the slides I saw earlier was about reflecting the neighbourhood correctly. We initially started as Midtown Junction. My partner, Joel Jacobs, has Junction Beats, which is his music school. That could be perceived as a conflict of interest because it could seem as though it leans towards representing his business more than it is the community itself, which is a challenge that we had to overcome. While our intentions were innocent, we understood that it did actually rub some people the wrong way. It’s growing pains, something we had to overcome. So we renamed it the Midtown District.

[Shows photograph of Beal High School.] This was when Doug Ford was in the middle of doing the budget cuts, reducing teacher’s wages, increasing class sizes. And this photo shows how involved the students were, they came outside and marched all the way to City Hall and caused quite a bit of a stir to make their voices be heard.

Sarah: Can I just say one thing?

Wes: Sure.

Sarah: My caution to anybody is this. Right now in the Old East Village we’ve become the “cool place to be,” the place where everything is happening. That notion of who we are could be whipped away in a minute if our local media decides that something is going wrong. Here’s the kind of reporting we used to get: “Aeolian Performance Venue Opens in Drug-Addled Community.”   “New Market Opens in Drug Addled Community.”

So I’m always very cautious about being invited to talk about us as reinvented. What’s critical is to know who you are and hold onto that. AT some point you have to stop worrying about the outside view of you. Because once you really get into it, people will find their way to you anyway .And if they don’t find their way into you because of what they’re reading in the Free Press, well then you don’t want them there anyway. They wouldn’t fit.

We did what we did because we had the ability to recruit incredibly skilled, gifted people within the City of London. We had these huge networks of people who understood that they’re job was to bring their gifts and skills to helping our community get to the vision that we had created. And once we created that vision, we didn’t just talk about the plan. We talked about how we were going to implement it. It was things like “alright, what are we going to do when we fall out with each other?” “What are we going to do when we hear gossip?” Very, very hard things. Like, Okay, if we fall out, we’ll go back and fix it. If we hear gossip and don’t intervene in that negativity, we’re part of it. And those were really difficult things to do – and believe me, hardest for me because I fall out with everybody because I’m so passionate.

But it’s not enough to have plans. It’s also: how are we going to engage and re-engage with each other as human beings, as we do what we do?

Wes: Perfect. I think that’s what I wanted everyone to hear. You look at Old East Village and think it’s impossible, I’ll never get there. But it’s about taking the first few steps. And you help us understand that you can get there.

And with King, the same idea. You’re starting out. Do you have any advice for folks who want to do this in their own neighbourhood?

King: Advice.. just do it! Get out there, reach out to people. Joel and I knocked on a lot of people’s doors, business owners and more. We had that invisibility issue, where people didn’t really know who we were, what was there, things of that nature. It’s really just about getting out there, because what we discovered was that people wanted to be approached and recognized. I think one of the core desires of human beings in general is the desire to be part of something bigger than themselves. You want to be a part of something, whether it’s religion, politics, school. You want to be a part of community. We’re grateful enough to be those people that are able to bring people together and create a common thread between the residents of Midtown, that’s what we’re looking to do. And I encourage anybody in any community to do exactly that.