Okay, so we’re shaking off the shock therapy of 2017 and ready to move on, right?
Let’s start with admitting some of the stuff a lot of us got wrong about challenges and solutions in municipal and regional planning. Such as: Our misplaced overconfidence in the stability of basic institutions, especially those requiring democratic processes.
In this week’s post, PlaceMaker Susan Henderson offers a deep dive into the instructive charms of Savannah, Georgia. Click below to launch.
Tonight I was thinking back through all of the places I’ve lived, correlating the physical form of the places to the size of my circle of friends. While completely an anecdote of a sample size of one, I noticed that when I lived in more walkable locations, I certainly had a much more engaged urban tribe. Just out of university, I moved into a flat on High Street. Most every morning, I’d go for a run with a friend, then meet up at the coffee shop with three or four friends before work. Saturday mornings at the farmers’ market with a larger circle were a weekly standard. Some of those friends are still close today, despite the long distances between us. I had more social capital paid in before 8 a.m. than I did all day that time I lived in the suburbs, where I only lasted two and a quarter years. Continue Reading
As the year draws to a close, reflection is an important rite of passage: celebrating, mourning, learning, and letting go. 2017 has not been the sort of year in which gratitude is the obvious emotion of choice on many levels. Yet the act of searching for what is beneficial, transformative, and noteworthy helps process through troubling challenges. Year end is a time of accounting for profits and losses, and making sense of what went right and what didn’t. In the city and town planning realm that we discuss here, that often comes down to comparing if our words line up with our actions. Continue Reading
Sometimes all the right people seem to be at the table, all singing from similar hymnals, and all seemingly focused on transcending growth-as-usual and yet, still, the results fall flat.
Today we look at one of those times.
First a review:
In a post last month, I made a pitch for organizing community storytelling around getting stuff done. I acknowledged how hard it is to do that in the current political environment, which is increasingly an arena of competing tribal identities and mutually exclusive convictions:
A community that has struggled to identify and assert shared values and hopes for the future isn’t likely to provide a great context for storytelling, especially when it comes to big, ambitious ideas. Chances are, people with their own stories of disappointment and frustration, buttressed by the experience of past efforts, will have a hard time imagining their roles in a new story or see the ambitions it describes as realistic.
As much as we’re grateful for our loved ones, we’re equally grateful for good places in which to share their company. Here’s to another year working towards a built environment as rewarding to the human spirit as the people who populate our lives.
See you next week.
“Reconciliation is making peace with reality, our ideals, and the gap in between,” via Her Honour, Janice C. Filmon, Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba. Much of our work here at PlaceMakers is about redirecting the trajectory of where we are headed with the targets needed to ensure the wellness of our environment, equity, and economy, so that stopgap measures are kept to a minimum. The studies that quantify how the form of our cities, towns, villages, and hamlets effects this wellness is essential to building the political will to make change. Listed below are the 65 key works I’m most likely to quote, to make the case for developing the city and town planning tools we need to make a difference for the resilience of people, planet and profit. Continue Reading
In my last post, I looked at the difficulty of getting things — like walking and biking infrastructure — done and how the manner in which we measure our accomplishments makes all the difference. Not just towards building momentum but towards building community.
In short, it’s all about baby steps.
But let’s say you’ve now taken some of those baby steps. Using my previous example, let’s say you got a bike lane installed. My guess is that, among your most ardent champions and supporters, no one’s looking to stop there. You’re looking for more. More routes, more options.
That’s where things start to get tricky.
In a coming post I’ll be addressing the long crawl towards walkability, and towards communities where the promise of meaningful transportation choice becomes increasingly realized. Long story short, the process, already difficult, can become harder rather than easier over time for reasons I’ll explain. But first, let’s revisit the struggles of just getting started with this post from several years back. Because before you can work your way into the deep end, you gotta get in the pool.
Community fascinates me. Not just the idea of it, but the dynamics, and how those dynamics end up stoking or choking our collective efforts to be together. Having worked in a lot of different places, I’ve had opportunity to study community in action, at both its strongest and weakest, in all different contexts — economic, political, cultural — and have tried to identify patterns that lead to results.
