About Beth

Look after self. Look after others. Look after place.

Sense of Direction

I don’t usually know where what I am learning is taking me, but I choose to go along anyway.

I had to wait until high school to make my first learning choice: I moved across the country, from a small (northernish) western Canadian city to a small (northernish) central Canadian city to learn a new language and culture. I remember stepping out of the silence of my new high school’s washroom into a world where I did not understand a single word, and there were only a few people in the school who could speak English. I chose to dive in and do what I was there to do: learn a new language and culture.

I had to do an extra semester of high school to make up for my absence. And then I did a second extra semester so I could participate in a youth programme on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. Then I moved to Ottawa, to attend the University of Ottawa, to study “Canada”.

I followed intuition.

I was hungry to learn. I had a sense of direction, even though it was not possible to say where I was going.

Cities

My first tangible skills: I could read and write and think in English and French. (Got a BA in Canadian studies, and public policy and management.) This felt insufficient so I investigated interest and aptitude tests to discern what I should next do in school. Several round of assessments revealed nothing conclusive. I was suitable for so many different kinds of work — hospital administration, engineering, teaching, law and law enforcement, social work, medicine — that I got no guidance.

So I took a leap.

City planning, at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg caught my eye. I didn’t know what it was. I had a feeling.

On my first days of city planning school, on the bus to and from school, I voraciously read Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. I knew I had made the right choice. Even though I knew nothing about city planning, I knew this work would feed my soul.

At 21 years old, Jane Jacobs served as the spark to help me find my passion: to learn about, understand and support the relationship we have with cities and with each other in our cities. At city planning school, I began to notice the work that called to me.

Systems of the City

My first job as a city planner was for a small prairie city and the surrounding rural area in Manitoba. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I learned about the unique roles of people who work to improve our communities, rural or urban (it’s all interconnected).

There are people who work for city hall, school boards and health authorities — our public institutions. They work explicitly to serve the communities of the city by setting up rules and regulations, the agreements we put in place that allow us to live in close proximity to each other. They are both elected officials and staff.

There are people who physically build our cities. Often, it is the business community. Or it is the homeowner who builds a garage. Or the land developer who builds a new neighbourhood. Or the people who put the roads and pipes in place to support our community. Or the economic structures that support us living and exchanging together.

There are people who work, paid and unpaid, for community organizations that keep an eye on the activities of the city and hold us to account. They ask: Are we spending money on the right things? Whose interests are not being looked after?

There are people who live, work and play in the city — citizens. They are who the city is there to serve and they have a hand in the city we make.

I led a team providing planning and building inspection services for three municipalities. I learned to see the personalities of and in each. I learned to see the value of each perspective. I learned to speak about the value of each and create the conditions for them to work together.

Good Meetings Allow Clear Seeing

I left the prairies to work in the city at the heart of the Canadian oil sands — Fort McMurray, Alberta — and the fastest growing city in North America at the time. The plans were out of date. Housing prices had skyrocketed. Hazardous materials were on the highway through the city every 6 minutes. There were not enough teachers, engineers, nurses and doctors. There were not enough buildings for people to live and work in. People were sharing beds in shifts. (One fellow who worked for me slept under the dresser in the room his dad was renting.)

Higher orders of government continued to approve oil sands development and invite more people. There was nowhere to put them. There were no roads or infrastructure in place to accommodate them. It was a crisis.

I learned to effectively use the diverse perspectives of the city to discern wise action. No one person or organization had answers.

I learned that relationships matter.

I learned that how we talk to each other, how we explore ideas with each other, dictates if we can see the actions that need to be taken, even if difficult. We created an informal “city triage” process to discern the work that mattered most — and that we could do — and the work that needed to stop. We could see clearly what really mattered, and what we needed to let die.

I learned that when we met well, we could see things more clearly and support each other to make difficult decisions.

Our Social Habitat Matters

We accomplished a lot, my team and I. It was a dream job. We embodied three simple rules to guide our work: look after self, others and place.

I noticed that the organization as a whole was working in panic mode and sabotaging itself as a result. We focused on trade-offs instead of possibility, on problems instead of the way through problems to a desired end. And that vicious circle gave us more of what we paid most attention to — problems. The vicious circle ended up harming loyal employees who worked hard for their employer and their place. On the whole, we were not looking after self, others and place.

I walked away from my dream job because I learned that I wanted to be part of an organization — and cities — that explicitly supports employees and citizens to do their best work.

I wanted more. I wanted conscious city making.

I want to co-create social habitats that foster conscious city making. And so I set up a consulting company and dove in. I responded to the inner call to work differently, and create the conditions for me — and others — to do so.

I have beautiful clients who want and ask me to do the work I love to do. I have made time to write and write, to figure out more clearly where this work is taking me. And here I am, with you, to work together to make our cities places that serve us well. To co-evolve together.

I believe a city can choose to look after itself and its people. It’s not easy work, and it will never end. It is a call to experience the city as a learning ground, a partner in our evolutionary journey as a species.

This is the direction in which I wish to move.