Breaking rank and explaining it like to a five year old.
Remember the anxiety you felt in senior year; the defeat you experienced from that rejection letter and your parents’ disappointment in you? You can blame the military for it. A little known fact is that the SATs were created in 1926 to test future college students in the same way those tests had done with soldiers before.
Research & Development made by, and for the Military, gave us faster engines, better airplanes, smoother tires and roads. It gave us the Internet, Call Of Duty and Mario Kart, and even those dumb facial recognition apps that give you puppy ears and a tongue.
Those innovations ensured folks could keep working from home during the pandemic, too. They also helped a mindset based on hierarchy, predictability and compliance to make inroads into how society is organized. You can read more about that in my latest piece for Proud Places, “A City Is Not A Platoon”.
This time I write to you with a different kind of conversation topic. Looking at how the built environment influences our physical and mental wellbeing I found a rabbit hole where the reasons for our cities, buildings and public spaces feel so alienating.
I could tell you about that for hours but I’d rather ask you a question. There are so many areas of knowledge related to cities and their economy, their people and their wellbeing that we have not understood well enough to be able to make sense of them and communicate our ideas to fix many recurring urban problems. I gotta thank Chuck Marohn here because as I listened to one of his podcast episodes he asked his guest to define something that I thought everyone should know. The truth is not everyone knows everything. It is the same with many other aspects of our practice in urban issues.
So, here’s the big idea, that you will start receiving on your inbox soon. I’ve taken the task to write short 500-word explanations of various urban issues that I don’t necessarily know about but will read and try to understand and make sense in a short text. I will then send weekly emails that I hope you enjoy and comment.
I know it may be redundant to many who have in-depth knowledge of all things urban so please indulge me as I try to understand them better by becoming better at explaining them in a simple manner, as I would do to my five-year-old son.
Let me know what you think. I’ll be delighted to talk this over and, as always, if you feel that it will be too invasive on your inbox or simply don’t have the time, you can use the unsubscribe link to not get any of my emails. I’ll be sad to see you go but you can come back anytime later.
Thank you and have happy and safe holidays.