In the same spirit as my last post I’d like to change the focus from local individuals to local corporations. There are two in particular I’ll be focusing on, but the treatment the city gets is more or less the same from all of its corporate citizens. When the tornado ripped through my neighborhood in
The headline of Richard Florida’s most recent essay on City Lab could just as easily read: “People Who Can Live Anywhere Like Living Near Cool Stuff” or “Rich People Like to Have Stuff to Spend Their Money On Nearby” or even “Poor People Can’t Afford to Live in the Same Places Rich People Want to
I spent a few hours watching and re-watching a debate between Modernists and Traditionalists in the realm of architecture. I found it both enlightening and frustrating. The arguments that the three supporters of Modernism gave were compelling and well-reasoned with the only caveat being, well, this: Architecture doesn’t only exist in the world of theories
As I’ve exposed myself more consistently to conservative and right wing media I’ve been amused by just how much there is an open distaste for cities. It doesn’t just take the guise of articles detailing how violent and unlivable urban nodes like Baltimore and Chicago have become, but also in immediate responses to any apparent
Carol Coletta was, quite literally, one of the first urbanist voices I ever heard. I was an early adopter of the Internet, using it for research for a weekend radio program I hosted and produced; a friend hooked me up to do research using an old Mac and a modem (“Whatever that is”) and the
Criticism of the way in which local media covers various topics in Springfield in particular, and regarding urban places more broadly has diminished here because, for the most part, I’ve had my say and gotten it out of my system. Death Race 2016 was an enormous part of that; actually documenting as it happened just
Malls had begun to kill downtown before I was conscious of either. As I wandered through the streets and alleys of Springfield’s core as a “tween” I couldn’t see the evidence of decline because I had never seen what it had been like when it was truly healthy. In retrospect I was witness to the
Until last Tuesday I had never met Chris Martenson nor had I ever met anyone in the area who knew of him; A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country after all. When I contemplate the different forms of resilience capital, as Chris and Adam Taggart explain it, the most ephemeral is
As I read the story of the Wisconsin Girl Scouts murdered by a pickup truck careening off the road and into a ditch where the girls were picking up trash I was startled by this quote: Not an unsafe area. Hard to imagine anywhere less safe if you are a human not clothed in an
In Springfield you can play a game called “count the sidewalks”, and the number you get from 0-2 tells you when that street was developed. Two sidewalks narrows it down to a nearly 300 year window from 1636 to the early 1900’s* one sidewalk is from that time into the early post war period, and