The connection between Toondah Harbour and verge gardens
Last week’s newsletter (link) about Toondah Harbour unsettled some subscribers who thought the Shady Lanes Project was just another greening project.
You can plant your verge garden as a stand-alone project and stop there. That’s a greening project and ideally you’ve used native plants for habitat and biodiversity. Every verge garden helps. But you’ve left a lot of opportunity lying on the table.
I see the Toondah Harbour debate in the same way. It’s being treated as a stand-alone project - to do the usual commercial tourism development on one hand, and the campaign to stop that development on the other.
You can see my suggested starting points for a more innovative and less adversarial solution for Toondah Harbour on the new Regen Brisbane Substack.
What’s Toondah got to do with Shady Lanes?
If we want to become a more sustainable society, the streets are an ideal place to start because they connect everything and everybody together.
Verge garden projects bring us out of our silos and provide the opportunity to build the skills and networks needed to collaborate on innovative solutions for messy, complex, wicked problems. If we can learn to collaborate on the verge, we can do it anywhere - like deciding what to do with Toondah Harbour.
Different Levels of Involvement
Of course, not everyone wants to go into the theories of change-making and collaboration at great depth. There are many fields where I know enough to get by, but I also realise that there’s much that I don’t know. There’s too much for anyone to learn so we find people with the passion and expertise to fill the gaps.
In collaborations, everyone contributes their unique experience and expertise. The more diverse the participants, the more likely opportunities for new solutions will emerge.
Do Your Own Thing
If you just want to do a stand-alone verge garden to help biodiversity in your area, the Understanding the Space articles will give you an insight into the issues around gardening in the space. This should be enough to stop you getting into a dispute with your neighbours and council.
When you’ve done that, you might be inspired to join others in a group project, using verge garden projects as the public activity to connect with and inspire others.
Group Projects
The Group Projects section of Shady Lanes deals with the logistics of managing your group and a group project. In the process, you learn many of the skills and ways of thinking needed to recognise complex problems and turn them into opportunities.
All groups and organisations run their own independent, localised project. When groups connect and share ideas and resources, they create more than the sum of their parts - much like verge gardens connect to create green urban corridors.
In Brisbane, Tony has posted a story of his verge garden on the ACF Brisbane Northside Group’s Substack.
Combining and leveraging assets and activities to get more benefits and to promote and strengthen your group is just one of the skills you can learn and practice in a group project.
What do you think?
Can we stop shouting at each other and learn to have the sort of conversations that produce collaborative solutions? Are you willing to try? Please share your ideas and questions in the comments.