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Well, you are smart. Further, you're dedicated and don't just spend the time to maintain and expand the knowledge-base of your site, but you also put up with a lot of direct critique and contradiction, not to mention a lot of trolling from persons best left un-named who I frequently see in my shaving mirror.

But of course I must qualify my remarks by suggesting that if you were to take an editorial line a bit more along the lines of the Washington Post reporter V Dion Haynes, I might think of you less as a cheerleader for the Urban Planning community.

Look, we all do "thought experiments", along the lines of "what if Wheaton actually had a genuine renaissance". Science fiction is a good vehicle for exploring possible futures, but it's good to remember that writing stories about ridiculous things (as of the time of writing) such as internet-connected cellphones each with a computing capacity approximately 20 times that of global computing capabilities at the time the USA landed men on the moon. Totally ridiculous stuff; but it could happen... just not exactly the way you or I or anyone might envision it. Yet seek the vision and express it! You might actually get a revisioning of grid alignments through downtown Wheaton, or for that matter, sleek Yuppie Convenience Towers of transit-centric mixed-use high-density development could yet rise over Beautiful Downtown Glenmont.

Yet other questions abound: How will this be powered? Where will we get the water just for sanitary needs, much less for drinking and "off plan" uses? More to the point yet outside the scope of articles such as this one, where will we grow the food for the residents, and how can we power delivery to the consumers? What economics may be in place to justify delivery of that food to those people by such means... considering that by 2040 or so when such places are built and occupied, we could be living in a world with as many as 12 billion people all trying to live at the same levels of consumption as modern Americans. Urban Planning depends on all other aspects of Futurism. You might want to follow that link and read some of the footnoted sources. The science about fishery and water resources are particularly worrisome.

Such worrisome science leads to thinking which is very cautious. If we wish to see Growth as inevitable -- and I would say that it's not -- under which modes can we make it more desirable than otherwise? -meaning, shall we grow for the sake of Growth, or shall it happen because it generates profits (and for whom, and is that desirable?), shall we Grow because it's best to bow to the inevitable rather than taking up tools to make the "inevitable" to be the "controllable"? It's easy to drink the kool-aid, to succumb to pollyanism, to see only the glorious vistas which could or may lie in the future... if everything always only ever goes right, and outside influences don't throw monkey wrenches into the best laid plans.

Bold visions are great: keep pumping them out please, we need good ideas about things we might like.

But please, in the same way most of us type with the spellchecker activated, keep the realitychecker activated. Posting drawbacks and stumbling-blocks along with the positive press, that would be good.

And it will only ever make you look better informed and as more of a genuinely thoughtful person who considers bad as well as good.

My best advice to you and such as you, before I can type no more until I learn to live with 100-percent cataracts, is to get and read as much as you can of Gibbons's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", or at least the first 5 major chapters. He remains the best known formal stylist in the English language and is the standard to which all must rightly aspire. I also recommend study of the Formal Fallacies of Rhetoric as it formalizes the instinctual tendency towards logic and rationality, providing an established framework along which natural intelligence can easily glide without having to re-invent the wheel at every step. Additionally you might find Jared Diamond's (admittedly difficult) "Collapse" to be useful, and any readings in recent Peter Heather might provide additional food for thought.

Regards, and peace out,

by Thomas Hardman on Aug 17, 2010 10:43 pm • link • report