Politics

Photo: cityofmanor’s photostream on Flickr

I am a proud resident of a small town. I live in Bethel, Vermont, with approximately 1900 other people and about as many cows, four restaurants, two markets, one school and no stop lights. Most of my neighbors get their news in the local paper and share their views at the dump on Saturday mornings.

Still, Bethel is actually pretty progressive, as far as rural, small town technology goes. We don’t have a Twitter feed or a Facebook page, but the Town does have a basic website, kept up to date with phone numbers for the town offices and PDF files of Select Board minutes.

Still, I can’t help feeling a little tech envy when I read about places that are exploring high-tech ways to open up government, provide people with access to all sorts of municipal data and resources, and make it easier than ever for elected officials to involve and communicate with their citizens:

• NeighborworksAmerica reported on seven new ways that social media is improving neighborhoods: from neighborsforneighbors.org, a Boston non-profit that created social networks for every neighborhood in the City, to thisweknow.org, which makes it easy to compare data between cities.
   
• New York City just concluded its Big Apps competition, making reams of municipal data available to citizens and inviting them to create applications using it. The winners make it easier for New Yorkers to find a subway entrance, rate taxis and learn about their schools.
   
• Cities from New Haven to San Francisco are jumping aboard SeeClickFix or using 311 lines and iPhone apps (like this one in DC), enabling citizens to quickly report issues like potholes and crime hotspots, and enabling governments to quickly take action.

You’ve likely read the many remembrances of Stewart Udall, conservationist, former secretary of the interior, and the last surviving member of President Kennedy’s cabinet. Udall died March 20^th in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age of 90.

For many westerners, Stewart Udall earned elevated status as a favorite “son” who did well by and for the West. As Interior Secretary in both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Udall played a significant role in the preservation of 3.85 million acres of public lands, which included the creation of 50 new national wildlife refuges, eight national seashores and four national parks—Canyonlands in Utah, North Cascades in Washington, Redwood in California and Guadalupe Mountains in Texas—not to mention 20 historic sites, including the now famous cultural hub, Carnegie Hall.

Photo: © Pedro Meyer, 1997

Just the other night I was casting around for some blog post inspiration. We all work so hard in the trenches and in our heads that sometimes it’s hard to get out of the present and think a little more broadly.

So there I am reading my local weekly paper and out jumps an essay about Plato. That is one of the attributes of living in a college town: professors will share their musings, often “dumbed down” for us mere mortals. In this particular article, Professor Victor Nuovo discusses “Laws,” a less well known work of Plato’s, and reminds us of the role of individuals:

“[I]f the rule of law is to accomplish [peace], it cannot be imposed upon a people from the outside or from above. It must operate within each individual member of society....” (Addison County Independent, March 11, 2010 p 17A).

In Millbridge, Maine, a local non-profit won federal funding to build housing for immigrant laborers. But local residents circled a petition and approved a moratorium on multifamily housing in order to keep immigrants out.

In Brooklyn, New York this fall, a local Hasidic community objected to safety issues and immodest clothing among cyclists on its neighborhood bike lanes. The Department of Transportation sandblasted the lanes—which guerrilla bicycle activists promptly painted back on.

And in Katy, Texas, when a local Muslim community purchased a piece of land and planned to build a mosque and school, one citizen responded by running pig races next door on Friday evenings, the holiest day of the week for Muslims (see Jon Stewart’s coverage on The Daily Show, below).

The late urbanist, writer and activist Jane Jacobs lives on through the work she accomplished in life. Most know her “as the ultimate champion of cities” and for opposing neighborhood demolition. In her landmark work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs saw urban “improvement” projects for what they really were: urban emasculation projects that left entire districts barren. And now, three years since her death and a year plus into the economic downturn, people are taking another look at her economic ideas.

I was reading some old back issues of National Geographic recently and came across articles about some bizarre yet interesting places—Ski Dubai, an enormous indoor ski area, a beach in Paris that the City constructs along the Seine each year, and Disney’s beloved and reviled playground, Orlando. The stories of these places reminded me of Lyman Orton’s disgust upon hearing of a proposal to build a wildlife park on the side of a mountain in Weston, Vermont, which the local Planning Commission discovered was, in fact, permitted under the zoning bylaws at that time and which the Commission was powerless to prevent.

Francis Moore Lappe published a pointed piece in The Huffington Post defending the community organizing principles of Saul Alinsky, also considered “the godfather of community organizing.” She clarifies the core principle of Alinsky’s legacy: “building the power of regular citizens to gain a seat at the negotiating table.” Why the need to clarify? The subtitle of the article is “Don’t Let the Far Right Malign ‘Community Organizing’.”