Dear readers: I assume most of you are reading this on the bus or the LRT on the way to work. Some of you are probably glancing through the pages of Metro as you wait for the elevator to arrive at your floor.
Others may be reading while you wait to pick up your morning latte before you head on to work. And that’s all I really know about you except that you live in this city. As a result, I often wonder who you are and what you think of this city in which we live.
I am not a journalist. I am a commentator. I do not hang around city hall waiting to interview councillors or city employees about what they are up to. I leave that to those for whom it is a full-time job.
Instead, I’m an urban explorer. I do a lot of walking and driving around waiting for something to catch my eye. I think I probably look at our city in much the same way as you do and ask myself some of the same questions you might. Some things I like and some things I don’t. Some things we do make sense to me, and some things seem beyond reason.
I’ll give you an example of something that doesn’t make sense to me — the use of paving blocks on many of our sidewalks. True, they look nice, but they’re not designed for our climate. Every year the freeze-and-thaw cycle pushes some of these blocks out of where they have been set. This means every year they have to be reset. Unless you are one of the people who make a living reseating the blocks, it makes no sense at all to use them in our climate.
So here’s what I’m thinking. I would like to know what you see that you like in our city and what you don’t. Maybe you love the new art gallery. Maybe you can’t understand why that big crack in your sidewalk hasn’t been fixed for more than two decades. I’ve set up an account at www.flickr.com/groups/edmontonimages.
By using a Yahoo account, you can upload images of what you love or hate about Edmonton. Every Friday, you find out what I like and don’t like about our fair city; it’s only fair that you get the same opportunity.
Terence Harding is a corporate communicator and a keen observer of all things Edmonton; edmontonletters@metronews.ca.
