Belonging Community

Two years ago, Belonging Community began. As poet Dionne Brand has said, this is a city that is in the middle of “becoming,” and my hope was to think about Toronto from the level of a city block.

How can schools serve students better? What lives do our neighbours live? What does inequality look like at the neighbourhood level? How do local institutions affect our lives?

One hundred and two posts later, the Top Hits from the past year are:

Crime hotspots across Toronto neighbourhoods	2,992
Toronto Community Partnership Strategy:	443
About me	428
The Ontario HST: a counter-intuitive remedy	385
Ethnic enclaves in Toronto, 2001 – 2006	365
“Are there limits to gentrification?	333
The TDSB’s Learning Opportunity Index	323
Toronto swimming pools: Class in session	317
Community Partnership Strategy: NWI	265
Crime and social cohesion in Toronto	261
Defining race (and racism) in the TDSB LOI	243

Crime as you can see is big, with an average of eight hits a day. Other topics are popular because not many people are writing about them. My favourite pieces are less about these big policy pieces than the stories which emerge from living in an urban neighbourhood.

I have also appreciated the new community of bloggers, activists, and researcher that Belonging Community has introduced me to, people like Kevin Harris, Christopher Leo and Leo Romero. Sometimes too, I have even gotten a laugh. Three of the funniest (or strangest ways) people have found the blog recently are by using these search terms:

• diane dyson emergency
• ugliest areas of toronto
• portland flag

Thanks all! It’s been a good year.

Posted on September 24, 2010 at 1:24 am in Neighbourhoods   |  RSS feed |   Reply   |   Trackback URL