One Party, Fifteen Years in the Making
How Emmy Heikamp - van het Erve Helped Her Street Feel Like a Village
Laura Aston, January 2026
After years of passing greetings, Emmy Heikamp - van het Erve invited her neighbours to a street party in her front garden. The response showed just how wired we are for easy, local connection.
On the night of the party, the street was abuzz. Neighbours who had lived side by side for years were finally learning each other’s names. Some moved existing plans so they could be there, staying well after dark because it felt good to linger, just a few steps from home.
Emmy spends her weekdays helping families and organisations choose cargo bikes, but the thread that runs through her life is not about bikes, it is about people connecting and supporting one another. Walking the Great Ocean Walk recently, Emmy was reminded how deeply humans crave simple, everyday connection. Emmy walked in parallel to strangers who, over eight days, quietly turned into a kind of temporary village: sharing meals, sunsets, and tired legs. Back home on her suburban street, neighbours slipped from car to front door, and her butterfly‑filled nature strip drew sideward glances. Moments to meet and forge neighbourly ties were lacking. This story follows what happened when she decided to create one of those moments: a front yard street party, and the ways it continues to change how people live together there.
Fifteen years of almost‑neighbours
Emmy and her family have lived on the same street for fifteen years, in a part of town shaped by wind, water and the rhythms of nearby primary‑school drop‑offs. In all that time, there were waves and brief chats, but not much that could honestly be called community life. “During Covid, Halloween was one of the only times we all came out at once - it felt so good to see people,” she recalls. “But as soon as restrictions eased, everyone went straight back into their bubble.”
Her observations will feel familiar to many. “We’re used to doing everything online, so why would we do it face to face?” she says. “Covid upped the ante on convenience; people are almost afraid to open up again.” Even her nature strip - planted as a small haven for butterflies and insects - became a kind of mirror of this tension, loved by some neighbours and quietly judged by others as untidy, a breach of the unspoken rule that a ‘good’ street is tidy, private and contained.
If not me, who?
For years, Emmy waited for someone else to organise a street gathering. “We’d lived on this street for fifteen years, always half‑hoping someone would organise a party,” she says. “At some point I realised: if I want that village feeling, I have to be the one to try.”
The Great Ocean Walk had already given her a kind of proof of concept. “On the Great Ocean Walk, we were a random group of people who didn’t know each other, walking at different paces,” she says. “By the last night everyone was asking, ‘What time are we having dinner?’ Of course we would sit together to watch the sunset. We’re pack animals.” If strangers on a hiking track could quietly turn themselves into a temporary village, surely a street of neighbours could do the same with one afternoon of food and conversation.
So she stopped waiting. Emmy became friendly with one neighbour who had a dog and who knew more people further up and down the street. Together they wrote a simple invitation and hand‑delivered it to letterboxes, asking people to bring a plate and drop by the garden on a particular afternoon. There was no grand agenda, just a hunch that if she created the opening, others would step into it.
A street that feels different now
On the day, Emmy’s hunch was confirmed. “People moved other plans so they could come,” she says. “They stayed until long after dark. Kids picked up babysitting jobs. It was such a simple thing, but it showed me how strong the wish for connection still is.” Parents discovered they shared similar work pressures or family stories, older neighbours found new people to check in with, and children began to see the street as populated not just by houses but by people who knew their names.
The change since has been subtle but real. Walking down the street now takes longer, in the best possible way: more waves, more small stops, a quick chat at the fence or over the garden. There is a sense that knocking on a door would be welcome, not intrusive, because there is at least one shared memory to fall back on - that evening in the garden when everyone stayed out after dark together.
This reflects Emmy’s deeper interest in community development. She cares about safer, more human‑scaled street life, but her starting question is always, “How do we get people back together in ways that feel natural and low‑pressure?” For her, that looks less like sweeping plans and more like small, practical acts: planting a butterfly verge even if it unsettles ideas of tidiness, inviting mixed ages to the same table, designing bike education and everyday experiences that help people feel they belong in public space.
Part of a wider movement back to each other
Urbanists and community workers often talk about how modern life has pulled us away from shared spaces and everyday commons. Emmy’s story does not try to solve that at a policy level; it simply shows what can shift when one person experiments with bringing a bit of that campfire, hiking‑trail togetherness back to an ordinary street. The temporary village of the Great Ocean Walk becomes, in a small way, a more lasting village on a suburban cul‑de‑sac.
An invitation for your own street
If you recognise yourself in this story, consider choosing one simple moment this season to bring people together on your street. It might be a note in a letterbox, a shared cuppa on the verge, or an afternoon where you invite neighbours to watch the sunset together.
The wish for connection is often already there. Sometimes it just needs one person, one invitation, and one evening in the garden to come into view.