There are times to be a cheerleader. As a teacher, a coach, a parent sometimes your job is to just give others a sense that they can accomplish what they’ve set forth to do. But being all “rah, rah, sis, boom, bah” can have its downside as well. Telling someone that they can “if they
My youthful preference for cities was sociological and aesthetic with a soupçon of Club of Rome Limits to Growth. That was enough to make me fertile soil for Chuck Marohn’s message of the suburban Ponzi scheme in the Curbside Chat; sprawl didn’t pay for itself but traditional development did. With that a farm boy from
The 70’s were a testament to the triumph of engineering over artistry. It’s not just that Main Street was ugly; parks were ugly for goodness sake. Even a child could see that decisions were being made expeditiously, and practically, but with no thought whatsoever given to aesthetics. Chain link fence was the order of the
Yesterday my morning started, as weekends often do, with a little writing, some coffee, and then a conversation with my wife. Usually I bore her a bit with the topics which have sprung to mind as I write and then we turn to discussions of family, friends, finances, and our plans for the weekend. Yesterday
Definitions in the world of urbanism are amorphous at best. The word “city” itself is a very good example. We make judgements based on the population, economic output, crime, and numerous other things relative to the boundaries of a given city. These are the numerators, if you will. But these cities range in geographic size
I was the Community Liaison for the Armoury-Quadrangle Civic Association and we were engaged in an effort to beautify the neighborhood. I spent a lot of hours picking up trash in parks and on sidewalks and our executive board leveraged some services from the park department and the Business Improvement District to hang baskets of
You’ve probably noticed something of a trend in my recent essays. I’ve never had much patience for dogma. To me, flip-flopping, or in other words changing strategies when the old ones aren’t working, just makes sense. I’ve spent much of the last 40 years not just thinking about, but working towards improving what has become
What do you call it if you feel schadenfreude for yourself? Suischadenfreude? Years ago I was reading on all of the usual platforms the celebration of the Great Inversion: America’s return to the city. I wrote a piece on how my anecdotal evidence showed no such transition; Millennials, my former students, were all posting pictures
As compensation for spending time at the beach my wife and I will make sure to hit a used book store nearby. Down on the Connecticut shoreline the best one is the Book Barn in Niantic; a house, a few outbuildings, dozens of kiosks, a basketball hoop, animals, some benches and a huge collection of
I often tell my students as they prepare to attend college to be ready, if they meet students from Hispano America, to hear very strong opinions expressed about the United States. This often catches young people by surprise as they have gone about their everyday lives and given very little thought to Bolovia, Perú, Nicaragua,