Activists have a Peter Pan mentality: they often think that if we just believe, it’ll come true. This is a nice idea but it is totally incorrect: “The Berkshires are really on the cusp of breaking into a more sustainable economy, via local foods and agriculture,” she said. The result is not just an invigorated [...]

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I’m finding terrific websites for my old, and former, neighborhood, including SE5 Forum for Camberwell. Odd, isn’t it that Great Barrington has nothing like this? Maybe not: Great Barrington has a year-round population of only 7,700, where Camberwell has 37,000. Demographics matter. Density creates new possibilities and provides what we used to talk about a [...]

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Isn’t this just an upmarket variation on the package holiday, rather than anything one can really call community? . . . they have a ready-made social life waiting for them. There is dinner in the local osteria with 15 families they have got to know well, or wine tastings and music festivals, to the entire [...]

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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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