The Teeny Tiny Summit, a gathering of community leaders of all stripes to talk about “community and economic development ideas that work for small places” was held in Picton this year.

That’s what we are in the scheme of things, I learned. Teeny Tiny. The County is about 1000 square kilometers and 27,000 people.

That’s 24 people per square kilometer.

For reference, some of the more populous neighbourhoods in downtown Toronto exceed 16,000 people per square km. The dynamic neighbourhood at Church and Wellesley houses 24,500 people, almost the entire population of the County, per square kilometer.

The tonier areas of the city have lower density, which means more space for trees and grass and driveways. Forest Hill has a density of 5500 people per km. Rosedale 3000. The Bridle Path, where Drake lives, has 445. The mansions there are comically huge. Prince had one. Cabbagetown and the Annex, a couple of the most desirable neighbourhoods in the center of the city, house 8-10,000 people per square kilometer in mostly genteel circumstances.

Density can be a very good thing. Jane Jacobs called it the first requirement for neighbourhoods that thrive, full of life and variety and, yes, a sense of community. More practically, density means not just the tax base for affordable housing, but the workforce to build it. It brings more services, and funds more amenities, such as parks and pools and skating rinks.

Those at the summit seemed to take it as a given that growth, as well as density, were good things.

The perspectives were, in other words, a bit foreign to many in the County. The inspiring keynote, by the legendary Australian community builder Peter Kenyon, was called, “Growing Community while your Community Grows.” It featured story after story of impoverished, fading, slowly shuttering communities, deep in some wheat belt of Western Australia, desperate for a grocery store. Never mind some steady jobs. Some traffic. Some, dare I say it, newcomers.

For a while now in the County much of the public conversation has been about stopping growth. Forgetting new infrastructure. Clean water? Pshaw, we say. Who needs it. New people? We have more than enough of those already. Rental apartments? Too much hassle. New roads? Are you kidding me? We can’t take care of the ones we already have.

I have to tell you, that kind of talk could not be further from Mr. Kenyon’s approach to community. He stresses bringing people in. Involving them in solutions to the stresses of growth, and in that way not just keeping, but enhancing the sense of community even while the population expands.

It’s true, nobody wants growth that just creates a mindless suburban swathe. You need intentional growth, and that requires a shared vision. People working together create a place they want to live in.

There’s just one problem. As long as we are stuck, here in the County, between the yes and no sides to the development battle, the all or the nothing, we can’t get to the place where we get to talk about what that development could, would, or should look like.

And that might be the fun part.

How development should proceed is a conversation we really do need to be having. Not no growth, but what kind of growth. “Master planned” might suggest a dream opportunity for cohesive design rather than sprawling blight on the landscape. Community conversations need to consider where, for whom, when, how much, who benefits, and, crucially, what it is going to look like. Basics. Start there, and already we have a really engaging series of community conversations.

Such conversations could have been happening alongside the Comprehensive Zoning By-Law Revision, which has been ongoing for close to two years now, pretty much unnoticed and unremarked. It’s not that the opportunities have not been there for public input, but that residents have not been properly engaged in a conversation about what zoning is about.

It may look boring, but the Zoning By-Law is how the primarily agricultural — and environmentally protected — land around the Waring’s Creek watershed got set aside for “Future Development.” Once that zoning was in place, never mind once the developers moved in, it was very, very hard to claw it back.

The rationale was that zoning land in town, along the Loyalist Parkway, for housing, means land outside town can stay agricultural. Keeping housing projects to lands in and around Picton, Wellington, and Bloomfield is a way to protect the County’s diminishing supply of prime ag from fragmentation and piecemeal development.

Once a rationale like this is understood, a bigger pattern gets pulled into view. Things get more interesting. The stakes come into clearer focus. It’s not yes or no, but where, how much, what. More interesting and engaging, and maybe even less divisive, questions.

Making things more transparent in this way also means contradictions and exceptions get pulled into view. Fine, you might say, we sacrificed Waring’s Creek for housing because it is in town — so why might shorelands currently being farmed, far from any town or village, be targeted for a new resort? Zoning, that’s why. Zoning that is under discussion.

The ability to hold one piece of the puzzle up against another gives us agency — and challenges sometimes opaque and often contradictory planning rationales.

We need to move from fighting about whether we grow to a community conversation about what that growth could be and do.  How will it address the demands of climate change, and incorporate green energy? Can good design encourage new ways of living in the country, and prioritize both transit and walking and cycling — and e-biking — not just along the Millennium Trail, but everywhere? How will we ensure amenities like playgrounds and schools and markets are within our new neighbourhoods? How will we get, not just “open space,” or what gets called “parkland” — some leftover bits in a master-planned community — but civic gathering places, town squares, as a matter of right, in every single new development?

The developers are here. Peter Kenyon would call that very, very good news. But it’s more than time we started to work with them. Let’s ask for a seat at their table, and have our say.