Oak Bay Councillor Tara Ney has called for more community gardens for Oak Bay, saying that there need to be places for food production. Community gardens beat paved space any day, but attributing more public space to them would only take away from the little park space and wildlife habitat still remaining in Oak Bay.
The place for growing food is the back yard, but these are exactly what the current Council's rush to residential densification are going to destroy. Council's program of paving, lot subdivision and residential densification sacrifices the private garden. Even if space were to be found for community gardens, most people would not trek off to an allotment at a distance. Gardening is an individual and private occupation and the backyard a canvas for personal creativity -- or so it was in the original conception of sub-urban living. That vision valued privacy, but the innate human need for private space and time is being devalued in current eco-communitarian thinking.
People long for personal access to the earth, to flowers and birds and privacy behind serviceable hedges. That is why,
at the recent Official Community Plan Open House at the Oak Bay Recreation Centre, most notes posted on the information sheets provided asked for more green space and less density. Most comments ran counter to the developer-driven agenda for densification and commercial/residential crowding that the current mayor and council seem determine to push through.
Villages and towns historically grew out from the centres of trade for a district. People came to a weekly or daily market to buy and sell. The spread of living spaces around these urban cores we call "sub-urbia", but maybe what we actually want is "super-ruralia". If we labelled residential family-raising neighbourhoods differently, we might value them differently.
There is a gradation in land use from wilderness to rural to urban, sub-urban being somewhere in the middle. What people miss as spreading cities engulf them with noise, pollution and brutal architecture, is the natural, spacious and less commercialized environment. Houses (ideally of a measured, not monstrous size) originally dotted landscapes among fields and woods, which children in past generations could access for healthy outdoor play. This is super-ruralia, not sub-urbia. The latter implies some sort of demotion from the hectic excitements of deep urbanism ... but the environment most healthy for the human animal is a modification of the wild, rather than a fringe of commercialism.
Too many people on Planet Earth suffer a life in crowded housing from which they travel to a crowded workplace in a crowded crush of public transport. Never alone, never quiet ... no wonder crime rates and mental disorders increase as cities grow.