The Granola Theory of City Building

This is a story about a broken window, a gift-to-others knack for making granola, and a way of looking at the world that I crave to pass along to others.

Urban planners love neighbourliness. I’ve never had a single student or colleague who doesn’t have a crush on getting to know our neighbours, or designing cities to help others in doing the same.

So it’s no surprise that a lot of city planners help to organize block parties—not just helping residents who reach out to us, when we work for local government—but actually organizing the block parties for our own blocks around our own homes. I did that for years, despite or perhaps because of my young kids, who adored drawing on the street with coloured chalk, and playing ball between (closed-off) lanes of traffic, and racing around on the kind of toys that like a hill (and give a parent heart palpitations). The low-mobility seniors on my block loved these block parties even more than my kids. Potlucking, sitting on tables mid-street, talking with neighours they didn’t otherwise get to meet; finally, completely, away from their large TV monitors, which I would see blinking in their windows for hours on most nights.

Then there was that time I shattered the back window on my hatchback trying to bring back the street barriers I’d borrowed from city hall. The deductible for the insurance was steep. Ouch.

I found another way to give back to my ‘hood.

What does granola have to do with city building? Nothing, except when it does.

Several years ago, I turfed my sourdough starter and concentrated instead on making the ‘perfect’ granola. My trick to making a skookum granola has been to find the freshest ingredients, undertake a great deal of experimentation, and make incremental improvements to my recipe over time. I love sharing my granola with friends, family and especially neighbours. In the past week alone, I’ve run into two neighbours who expounded on the quality of my granola, and yesterday I got an unexpected text of gratitude from an old friend who I’d gifted a small sample to take home to northern BC when she was passing through Vancouver. I love that.

Homemade granola is one way to ‘give back’ to my neighbours, but I also realize my gratitude with gifting neighbourhoods is correlated to this: I have spent a great deal of my life grinning when I walk anywhere. Everywhere I go, I’m noticing the small and large gifts from local government: the much-improved curb cut here, to improve accessibility, or the experimental pocket park there, working to bring strangers together. I’m also noticing the small and large gifts from my neighbours to their neighbours. Even in hard times, I love how neighbours and residents in all sorts of ‘hoods find reasons to celebrate and to give back. There are the ubiquitous free little libraries, and then there are the exceptional gifts: a display of dog sticks, a fridge humming in an alley, or a house that believes — with full conviction — that Valentine’s Day deserves an exterior lighting design.

This search for neighour gifts to the ‘hood culminated in my article for The Tyee, published over the weekend, and I love being able to share it with you, and share my joy: https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2026/04/24/Little-Library-Dog-Sticks/