“We had better get together on this or we’re going to die.”
People talk a lot about community these days. How we’ve lost whatever sense of it we might have once had. How we don’t really know each other much anymore. How we yearn for more intimacy, with connection that transcends the typically weak ties of social media.
We talk about it in the abstract, not fully understanding the whole of what it really means, as though we were recalling some endearing product feature lost to time. Like we’re asking, “Remember that little bongk sound from Pong, the original home video game? Boy. You just don’t experience sounds like that anymore.
Oh, well. Back to life in the now.”
Half-way through our family’s relocation to the woods for the month of August, placeshakers have been asking me for town planning lessons learned. It’s challenging to encapsulate a place as extraordinary as Victoria Beach, with its 101-year history of car-free summers and an elegant street grid of dirt roads that are tremendously kid-friendly. I’ve been blogging about the plan 
The places we inhabit are rarely if ever arbitrary. They’re the products of intention. Personal. Economic. Environmental. Religious. We choose for ourselves, individually and collectively, the kind of places we want and — through leadership, policy, investment, advocacy, action and, at times, inaction — those places begin to take form.
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.
, environmental factors have joined the economic mainstream as well, sparking a whole new breed of 
