Many people escape to the suburbs hoping to find an area free of crime, litter, homelessness and other urban issues. What they also find there are often bedroom communities or neighbourhoods where neighbours rarely talk or know each other. There is no inherent reason to do so — nothing that breaks the ice.

In a transitioning inner city neighbourhood, there is no shortage of issues to get neighbours talking. In my case, it’s been the small community park across the street from my house. A few years before we moved here, the park was a scene for drinking and drug dealing, and occasionally shooting up heroin. It was also a place where children played, spontaneous soccer games errupted and a large contingent of elderly Italians appeared every day to play bocci (like lawn bowling, Italian style).

In an effort to remove the undesirable elements and prevent them from displacing appropriate park uses, the neighbours living near the park organized. Through regular meetings, the group evolved from organizing park and community clean ups, to discussing the problem with police and taking their suggested action (calling 911 every time we spotted illegal behaviour — drinking, drugs, etc. — in order to generate stats that the community police could use to justify more resources be allocated to the park). The group also lobbied the city for improvements to the park that would attract more citizens — a better playground, drainage, and repaired bocci courts — and succeeded.

Through regular meetings for several years, along with clean ups and take back the park events, the neighbours became good friends. We got to know each other, bonded through the tensions created by urban stresses of alcohol and drugs.

While things have improved, we still have a small group of middle aged men who show up in the park across the street from my house nearly every day and drink until they are “smashed.” But the more serious issues are generally gone. The drunks now serve as the tension that keeps us talking and us along with the police involved in thinkibg of new creative ways to work city policy, by laws and the justice system to solve the problem.

Tension generates creativity and community.

So, we need to add a fourth T, TENSION to Richard Florida’s three T’s of TOLERANCE, TECHNOLOGY, and TALENT in assessing what makes a city fertile ground for creativity.