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Dog Walking

Today, I planned I attended an all day event organised by the Southwark Alliance. Or so I thought. The event was billed as their November conference.

In fact it turned out to be a consultation exercise on the future of Burgess Park. The vast majority of the 60-odd people attending had no direct involvement with the Park and it seems to me it would have been more efficient to consult users of the Park and local residents.

After people had been divided into groups, we were taken for a site visit of an area of the park with the instruction to put ourselves in the boots of a type of user. We walked around the area, we took pictures and registered our impressions of the park. Back to our base, we had to find words to describe the experience. Later on, we had to make a collage with pictures cut out from magazines showing our vision for the Park in 2025.

That was more or less what the event was about. Because of our lack of knowledge about the park and the ares, the points we made were and had to be quite general and obvious. I can't see what help it would be to the members of the Trust about to be created to take ownership of the Park.

No chance to discuss community cohesion at strategic level as I had expected. No chance to make the points I alluded to in my previous post. I suppose the positive point is that the poofs had been invited for once.

I was in the dog walkers group...
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Comments

  1. anticant11/13/2007 6:32 pm

    I hope your input left them in no doubt about the amenities required by park-trotting poofs.

    ReplyDelete
  2. zefrog11/13/2007 8:09 pm

    Alas, we did not get a chance to go into that many details either...

    ReplyDelete

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