As I write a book I describe as a tale of two villages, Camberwell and Great Barrington, I am glad to have yet a third village to use as another point of reference. And this one is actually called a village, though it’s even more urban than Camberwell, my London neighborhood. Over the past few [...]

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I belonged to a community garden as a teenager in Palo Alto and had an allotment in London, so it’s easy for me to see the story behind this story in the New York Times. Things don’t always work perfectly between people, even in the garden. (Remember that the Biblical creation story is set in [...]

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Not only a matter of environmental concern (think of the resource demands, and the waste), but an alarming outlook in terms of social connections and community: More than half of China’s existing residential structures will be demolished and rebuilt in the coming 20 years, according to a senior researcher from the Ministry of Housing and [...]

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One of the challenges of community I need to be reminded of, living as I do now in a town where we don’t lock our doors, is the simple one of safer streets. Here’s a story about a program called National Night Out, creating “a greater sense of belonging here, there’s a greater sense of [...]

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I spotted the book How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood School Renaissance at BookExpo last year. It’s the story of urban school revived by a group of committed parents, not a book about the importance of walking to school. I like both ideas. The challenge of improving rural schools is quite different [...]

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