So Many Smart Ideas to Get People Engaged in Their City
Join Dave Meslin live this Thursday at 5:30pm at Centrepointe Theatre
Every once in a while you come across a book filled with insight after insight, presented in a manner that is completely original and untold elsewhere.
Dave Meslin’s Teardown is one of those books, with dozens of proposals for rebuilding democracy in Canada from the ground up.
(Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns is another example, focused on city building.)
Rigged against you getting involved
Government is about sharing power.
The heart of Dave’s argument is that, in contrast to the common wisdom, people are not apathetic about getting involved in democratic institutions. Rather, the systems we have in place are rigged against people getting involved.
I’ve seen this up close many times. People go to one public consultation, feel unheard and never come back.
That’s one way the system is rigged against people getting involved. The experience is so bad that people don’t return. One commenter on this Substack described his past experience with a City of Ottawa consultation as “intentionally bad”.
Or people can’t even figure out how to get involved in the first place because City Hall doesn’t have viable on-ramps for ordinary folks. So they don’t even try.
In person with Dave
Dave Meslin does not take the status quo as a given. He’s got a long list of ideas for how we “unrig” the system. At the federal level, but also at the local level.
I’m excited to attend a screening of the first two episodes of Unrigged later this week, with the author in attendance. For me, “unrigging” is all about returning City Hall to the people.
Thursday, 5:30pm at 101 Centrepointe Dr, in Ben Franklin Place.
You can get your tickets here.
Synapcity, the event organizers, have been kind enough to offer up a discount on tickets until Wednesday at midnight by entering the following discount code: the613.
Hope you can join me there.