Sunday, August 31, 2008

Obama the urban planner

Here's a clip of Obama in Toledo, Ohio responding to a question about rebuilding cities.

I believe this is the closest I've heard Obama speak to this particular subject...not too shabby!

I'd imagine that his days of being a community organizer in Chicago, and dealing with the city on such related matters, exposed his brain to many issues that crossed over into the planning realm. S


1 comment:

Kim said...

Hey, thanks for following me and adding me to your sidebar. You are right, us Tucsonan's have to support each other...thanks!

This video just made me fall in love with Obama even more. That is so awesome that he has read Jane Jacobs. We need him to be president, and I have never been so sure.

So, I'm sitting here reading about the Panarchy Theory for school and was wondering if you have heard of it. Here's a little excerpt:

"The Panarchy is a representation of the ways in which a healthy social-ecological system can invent and experiment, benefiting from inventions that create opportunity while it is kept safe from those that destabilize the system because of their nature of excessive exuberence."

"Modern democratic societies are clearly vulnerable to the same process but they have invented ways to diffuse large episodes of creative destruction by creating smaller cycles of renewal and change through periodic politcal elections. So long as there is an attentive and literate citizenry, the painful lessons learned from eposodic collapses of the whole societal panarchies can be transferred to faster learning at smaller scales."

Anyway, though it might interest you....