Service Contracts

Jane Jacobs

CELOS built a “community centre without walls” model in Ward 18 parks and documented the extensive staff/park user collaboration there for the ten years of its flowering. Park enthusiasts from across the city (and from other cities) came to Dufferin Grove Park, and continue to come, for many conversations. They experimented with some of our approaches in their own neighbourhoods, and influenced what we tried out as well. CELOS now wants to research how the promising projects that were attempted – but were blocked – could get another chance by devising workable service contracts for park programs.

Our guide here is Jane Jacobs. In particular:

1. “A city has to be responsible for keeping its own society endlessly involved with maintaining a city its own people can feel at home in and be proud of…..The more that cities can make of their own ordinary people’s capacities for economic and social invention and experiment, the more useful and valuable cities become – not only for their own people but also for their nations.”

2. Jacobs wrote that “stagnation” in cities is caused by (among other things) “unwillingness of local government to purchase experimental and innovative goods and services (e.g. for parks…)”

Both quotes from Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring, ed., Vital Little Plans; The Short Works of Jane Jacobs.

In the four years since CELOS handed over the Ward 18 park programs completely to city management, costs have gone up but many of the programs are faltering. We’ve documented the problems in detail, but now we want to take the next steps. If the working culture of local government is too restrictive, and the wall between the staff and the parks enthusiasts needs to become more permeable, how can this be brought about?

We believe that with the device of a new kind of service contract, it’s possible to grow an experimental approach that can gradually become part of the Parks and Recreation culture in Toronto.

Worksheets

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