The Block Connectors of Edmonton

In January 2013, Howard Lawrence launched an experiment on his own street in Edmonton's Highlands neighbourhood, explicitly inspired by McKnight and Block's 'The Abundant Community.' The architecture is small enough to memorize: one neighbourhood connector recruits roughly fifty block connectors; each block connector visits every household on their own block — not with a survey, but with a conversation guide of six friendly topics: what makes a great neighbourhood, what would make ours better, what activities you'd join with neighbours, what interests you'd pursue together, what skills and gifts you'd share, and what life experience you'd offer.

The results get compiled into what the block actually wants: interest groups, a skills exchange, shared priorities — and, mostly, neighbors who know each other's names. Carmen Lawrence served as the Highlands' neighbourhood connector; the city's community services department picked the model up and spread it across Edmonton as Abundant Community Edmonton, and other Alberta municipalities followed.

What it teaches: this is the gift conversation practice running at municipal scale with zero technology beyond a conversation guide — proof that the unit of neighborhood organizing is one person per block who agrees to knock on their own neighbors' doors. For builders, it's also the cleanest spec for what a tool should and shouldn't do: the conversations are irreplaceably human; what a tool can hold is the guide, the compiled interests, and the follow-through.

Details

• era: 2013–present
• place: Highlands, Edmonton, Alberta
• illustrates: gift-conversations, connectors-table
• source note: Model architecture and six-topic guide per the Highlands Community League's Abundant Community pages and abundantcommunity.com.
• practice kind: story