I care deeply about ideas, concepts, and philosophies. I enjoy discussing things in abstract and perhaps even Platonic ways. But in the end I am a philosophical materialist in the sense that I view things as bound up with and constrained by reality; the ability to dream it does not confer the ability to do
I was watching a lecture by an evolutionary biologist in which he was attempting to explain the existence of romantic love in the human species. His hypothesis was that while upgrading in terms of spouse might be rational for the individual doing the upgrading, the offspring would be endangered by the transition; either through neglect
The recent Strong Towns’ series on Cobb County, Georgia touched upon many of the issues endemic to the American Post War development pattern and the Growth Ponzi Scheme, but the financing of a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves was mentioned repeatedly as emblematic and symptomatic of the mistakes communities fall into as they chase
To create an exhaustive list of everything just in the downtown which desperately needs rehabilitation would be exhausting, and I’m lazy. I don’t mean to imply that everything could or should look like Main Street, just that even the most basic and functional places and spaces can reflect the humanity which in some way they
35 years ago I met a guy from Redding, California. He and I were both living in Spain at the time; estadounidenses from very different parts of the Estados Unidos. It is really just for that reason that I’ve had some notion as to the sort of community Redding was. Was. In the intervening decades
I was 12 years old when my mom decided that she should get a part time job. The Leprechaun Shop had two outlets, one at the Eastfield Mall, and the other at Baystate West. There was usually money for bus fare somewhere in the house and I was free to use it to either go
I am going to reveal my biases at the outset. Springfield is considered a “Gateway City” in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because it is one of a dozen or so communities which tend to be the first home of immigrants in the Bay State. When you add to this the significance of the Puerto Rican
Yesterday. I saw a man dressed in a white shirt and dress pants with a coffee enter a mid-block crosswalk barely glancing left or right before crossing the street. Even more bizarrely, TWO cars, one traveling north, and the other south, had each ALREADY stopped, assuming the man would continue. Again, it was a mid
It’s like the Project for Public Spaces and every artist’s rendering of every project ever dreamed up had a baby, and that baby threw up all over downtown Springfield. My wife and I walked down to Main Street for lunch yesterday and there were people everywhere. I decided to venture out today and take some
I’ve seen it written that cycling infrastructure causes cyclists to appear. It is the sort of thing I half believed, but with nothing more than a passing interest in the topic I’d always left it at that. Recently however, Springfield has gone a bit crazy with advancing a great deal of minimalist nods to the