How Would You Make Creve Coeur More 'Loveable'?

Cities do many things for residents thanks to taxpayer dollars. Services like trash collection, police protection and other things come to mind. But should cities feel like more than a sum of services to residents? 

That was the thrust of a Saturday morning workshop at the Creve Coeur Government Center featuring Peter Kageyama, author of the book, For The Love of Cities.

Kageyama led a group of approximately 50 residents and city staff through a series of exercises designed to tap into the participants' own creativity, while showing examples from cities around the country where people found something worth rallying around and did it. 

There's more to this than just a feel good group hug. Kageyama suggested the results can make for happier cities where people spend money on top of  feeling civic pride.

While some of the examples from other cities were born out of devastation and a need for a community to rebuild, Creve Coeur comes from a different perspective. "Things are good here," Kageyama observed.

"You don't want to see your house blown down and that become the reason why you get engaged in your community, not that's a pretty harsh lesson to have to learn," he said. "What you'd like to do is show people, 'hey this is cool, this can be fun this doesn't have to be super hard tortuous contentious work.' No, community-building, city-making can be fun and it doesn't have to be terribly hard." While some of the concepts may at times stretch conventional rules and regulations, they need not necessarily be expensive either.

Over the next few days, Patch will share examples from each of the exercises, everything from a design for a Creve Coeur T-shirt and a city tradition to highlight, to what you'd do with $500 and the goal of making Creve Coeur a more loveable place. The ideas were visualized on a "Wall of Love" which started as something of a blank canvass and was updated by Brentwood artist Dulle.

If you attended the event, tell us what you thought. If you want to share your ideas, why don't you do it in a Patch blog?