Today is the last Neighbourhood Yoga on Gottingen class before summer. And maybe for a while, because the JBO Community Centre will be closing down as the the North End Clinic moves into another building.
I don’t know if there will be community space or not there available for people like me. My classes are accessible – accessibility meaning, physically, geographically, culturally, financially – meeting people where they are at. It saddens (and pisses me off ) that another community space on Gottingen is lost. If we care at all about what happens in our uptown, to people who have been living in our city core, whose community this has been for a long time, we have to figure out, plan, resist, fight, vote, give a shit about things like the impacts of gentrification.
The municipality could have a big say. They could have given St. Pat’s Alexandra to the community but instead sold it to a developer. We need to do something to save or improve or grow community space. I don’t have the answers. There are many ways to address this. But we need to become aware that people are getting pushed further out of our cities. This is happening. We can start by least opening our eyes.
I’ve lived in cities such as Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, Toronto and each has had more community free indoor space available than what we have in Halifax.
This is serious: how to liberate space? The new community clinic won’t be offering space? But other than us all signing up for church, I can’t think of good community space in the north end– that we can use cheaply or for free…