A reflection on community
The village doesn’t make the community, the community makes the village.
I live in Stittsville, a west-end suburb of Ottawa where I landed one day in 2018 through a daisy-chain of circumstances.
I spent most of my adult life in the east end of Ottawa, from the former military base in Rockliffe to Cumberland. All but the oldest of my 9 children were born in the east end. In 2014 my (now ex-) husband and I moved our family to Lanark Highlands to pursue dreams of self-sufficiency. When our homesteading and homeschooling dreams fell apart we moved to Stittsville to lick our wounds.
I made friends here but never found a community. I found work, went through a divorce, a pandemic, a major burn-out and depression, lost two jobs in a row, learned that my children had cognitive, mental, and academic challenges, had my heart broken and found love again, but never found home. When I separated from my husband and moved to my own place, my east-end friends brought plants and housewarming gifts to Stittsville. I still drive meals to new moms and grieving families in Orleans. If I am invited to a wedding or a funeral, it will be in the east-end 9 times out 10.
The suburban east end of Ottawa came together like ground cover, crawling away from the city alongside highway 174 in progressive slices of neighbourhood. The town of Orleans gave its name to the expanding suburb but not its soul: Orleans’ traditional main street – St-Joseph Boulevard – with its Catholic Church, stores, and farmhouses was absorbed in the eastward expansion of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton. Today, the Orleans BIA is called “Heart or Orleans” which is more a wish than a description. The township of Cumberland built itself a proper town centre with a town hall next to the mall in 1990, like the old towns built at the confluence of two rivers. But in the waning years of the 20th century, the shopping centre and the highway had replaced waterways as the nexus of commerce and culture.
The community in Orleans, Navan and Cumberland is not rooted in places but in people. The village of Cumberland has been trying to recreate itself in the image of west-end villages like Pakenham and Richmond for years, welcoming then waving off a succession of coffee shops, restaurants and convenience stores but never succeeding in creating places that people are attracted to. In the east end, communities are created around a shared experience and then find a place to come together.
In the west end, where rural villages and amalgamated towns retained more of their distinctive features and identities, there seems to be an expectation that places will create the community, that community is a feeling born of a certain physical disposition or buildings and materials. As a result, the “loss of community feel” is strongly correlated to the loss of a certain feature, a certain building material, a look. Like stone, red brick, gabled roofs, and white picket fences.
I moved to Stittsville during the municipal election campaign in 2018 and was hired to work as an advisor for the newly elected Councillor. It takes about 5 minutes working in the Stittsville ward office to understand that the “loss of village feel” is a pillar of Stittsville residents’ opposition to new development. It’s not unusual to receive comments about the loss of village feel from owners of new builds whose lawn has yet to be sodded. It’s as if the sense of community was a finite resource, diluted by more people partaking in it. Like a pie getting smaller rather than a new creation coming together under the pull of a shared experience.
Contrary to Orleans, Stittsville developed from its core out in near concentric circles, jealously guarding its identity as a far-off village — beyond the fringe — protected by a stretch of farmland kept out of urban expansion until it was forced there in 2003 by an appeal to the Ontario Municipal Tribunal. 20 years later, the last piece of former farmland between Stittsville and Kanata was purchased by a land developer in what is believed to be the highest-value land transaction in Ottawa’s history, finally closing the gap between Stittsville and the rest of the city.
Maybe it comes from having a beating heart, like Stittsville Main Street, this idea that the place creates the community rather than giving it a space to come together.
There are qualities to gathering places, but these qualities rest in what the space provides to the community: safety, light, shelter, a place to make noise or stay quiet together. I have been living in my house for 3 years, next to a beautiful park, on a street with wide sidewalks (a must according to Jane Jacobs), and I haven’t met any of my neighbours. There is a large Indian community here and I see them getting together daily. I see groups of older men sitting on landscaping rocks at the trailhead, women taking walks together, the backyard parties, the potluck dishes, the innumerable pairs of shoes left on porches, the Sunday’s Best, the meat roasting on the driveways. There are more houses with Dilwali lights than Christmas lights in my neighborhood. In this brand new neighbourhood, where parks, pathways, and schools are still under construction, members of the Indian diaspora are finding each other and creating communities.
In early October, Stittsville hosted 9RunRun, an annual race in support of the first responders foundation. The event marks the start of Fall in Stittsville, closing down roads and turning the traditional centre of the village into a hive of activity. Whether you are here for the race, for the cause, or for the spirit, everyone is here for a good time.
I was making my way to the dollar store with my son when we found ourselves in the middle of the end of the activity, as racers and cheerers were finding each other, the police was reopening the streets, journalists were wrapping up their segments, and kids with balloons were walking alongside their parents, returning to their cars or bikes, some walking over to Jo-Jo’s Pizza for the Pumpkin Festival. The cafes were full, the sun was shining, and the ambient good mood was impossible to resist. I stopped at a red light, taking it all in, reflecting on the “Village Feel”. The village square, the old railway crossroad, trees bowing over the Trans-Canada Trail, framing the leisurely procession of walkers, strollers, dogs, and cyclists. The place gave people a space to gather, but the “feel”, the “community” was in the buzz of human activity, in people coming together.
With every new residential development, people fear the loss of community. Since 2006, Stittsville has seen its population grow from 12,000 to 52,500 yet we still hear from people who come here on account of “the village feel.” Taking in the sights and sounds of Village Square Park as 9RunRun was wrapping up, I couldn’t help but think that the village may have grown out of the railway junction but that as long as people returned to it, the feeling of community would endure. “More people” in the village meant “more activity” , “more togetherness”, “more opportunities to gather and celebrate.”
Community is not a feeling to preserve, it is something that we create and recreate. We do not preserve a community by walling it off but by opening it up, by letting more people make more connections. The village doesn’t make the community, the community makes the village.