Downtown Communities

I'm going to start off this blog by saying that I hope that this doesn't come off as just a bunch of my thoughts scrambled together.

I want to talk about downtown communities. Not any certain city in particular, but just simply downtown of any city. Perhaps I have just thought of this most recently as I'm living in a downtown "community" for the first time.

We have been speaking in my sustainability class about measuring how sustainable a community is. I find that downtown of any city is a strange place to consider a community and here is why. When you think of any downtown, think of the people you see there when you're walking through. You see people of all walks of life. You see people of all different races. Of all different ages. Of all different interests. Mostly I believe this is because downtown has a lot to offer to everyone from shops, restaurants, offices, shelters,churches, clubs, libraries and schools to name a few.

The downtown of any city is the perfect mix of everything the city or town has to offer. So how could you measure how sustainable a downtown community is when it has so much. Perhaps it needs to be measured in a smaller scale.

I think of where I live and I can hardly consider it a community for many reasons I won't bother to discuss. However I think of my building alone and start to wonder how my building couldn't be considered a community all on its own. How can anyone really define a community when there are so many communities of all kinds, everywhere. If I were to measure how sustainable my community (i.e. downtown) is compared to all of Victoria. I would be that you would see results that vary greatly. Especially given how cities measure their sustainability.

Unfortunately that's all I have for now and I'm hoping that I can shine a little more light on this and make some more sense of it!