Archive for May, 2009

Am I a Socialist?

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | Essay, Trends | No Comments

I’ve long held that I believe in the markets of ideas and the power of people to make decisions given the right access to information and tools.  It’s what motivates my work at PlaceMatters.  My reading list includes books like Wikinomics, Here Comes Everybody, and The Wisdom of Crowds.  As a belief system, it is fairly independent of politics, and grounded mostly in both emerging trends and history.  I’ve shied away from ever calling myself a socialist, given the pejorative way in which it is used in politics.  As it has emerged again as a meme on every pundit’s show and in the chambers of Congress, it has been washed over with new realities.  Kevin Kelly aptly describes the new realities of digital socialism in his latest Wired article (The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online) that I’ll explore briefly here.

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | Planning, Transit | 4 Comments

For the past two weeks, I’ve been traveling a lot for business and pleasure and I realized that I’ve utilized a healthy mix of transportation options: light rail in Minneapolis, planes between Denver and Minneapolis and Philadelphia, commuter rail in Philadelphia, automobiles in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and good old fashioned walking.  What has been great about this trip, is that I’ve used each of these methods as part of a transportation system–a network of options.  This seems like an obvious observation, but what troubles me is that too many discussions on transportation seem to separate out the various modes (cars, trains, planes and bike/ped) into warring camps.

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