I have to confess, I have far too many blogs. Wordpress, Tumblr, social media feeds...all of them still standing and hardly any updated with any frequency. For the most part, this problem can be chalked up to a shift in interest. In the past three years I have gone from a focus on elections and politics, to a focus on cities and communities. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is simple frustration. To be a true politics wonk, you need to be an activist or a policy maven; or else be content to observe and report on the movements of a heard of angry cats you have no hope of controlling. At any rate, there are few areas of politics that aren't resistant to innovation and experimentation, and none more so than electoral systems. If your area of interest is electoral systems, you'd better be happy to theorize. As it turns out, I'm not.
Thankfully, I get just as big a kick out of urbanism and planning. Cities are increasingly the gravitational center around which society coalesces. They are the engines of the information economy. They are the laboratories in which answers to the problems of climate change, economic resilience, social and economic justice are being sought. And it is currently a very dynamic space. Cities are now more open to innovation and disruption than perhaps at any time in the last century. To be involved in urban planning and development, is to be involved in shaping policy responses to some of the most pressing challenges we face as a nation.
With this new, new blog, I'm hoping to create a repository for ideas I find compelling enough to share. As I go through the process of graduate school (did I mention I'll be entering the Community Development and Planning program at Clark University in a couple of months), network with practitioners and get introduced to new ideas, I hope I can use this site as a place to share, digest and expand on what I'm learning. Or, at the very least, to finally use one of my blogs efficiently.
No comments:
Post a Comment