The Pen and Pencil Club, the country’s oldest surviving private press association, welcomed me onto its board of governors as one of its youngest members last February. This month, I am proud to say I was voted on to remain there.
Here is some background on the famous private club and my own goals for being part of its board again.
I like cities and I like transit.
Continue reading 5 transit ideas I want all cities to embrace
[Thanks for the love r/Philadelphia and Zagat and Reddit again]
Update: I presented some of my favorite hacks at Ignite Philly. Watch the presentation below and find the slides here:
Any city worth its existence has enough culture that exists there that small quirks exist that can help you get by.
In my short nine years living in Philadelphia, a few lifehacks have become pretty common to me but are perhaps worth sharing.
Here are a bunch. I’d love to hear yours:
Continue reading Lifehacks for living in Philly (and probably other cities too)
We care a lot when someone is running for public office as the first [insert quality or background]. I can summon two meaningful reasons why, but I’m sure there are others.
Cities want to attract and retain young educated talent to fuel their knowledge economies, drive a tax base and create a community that can continue to grow by welcoming more new people in the future. Modern markets are insatiable and indefinitely incomplete.
That’s the clearest, simplest mission I can glean from all the chirping about celebrating gains Philadelphia has made in its old brain drain problem.
But last week at a Knight Foundation session with the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, I wanted to push that thinking forward in two ways that I don’t think I hear often enough in that conversation: (a) the idea that too much change can in effect take away what is distinctive about a city and (b) that any real success would improve the lives of existing Philadelphians too, not just push them out like in other cities.
The annual State of Young Philly event series from Young Involved Philadelphia featured two economy-focused events at which I spoke.
One was a series of lightning presentations last week and a second was a panel discussion Tuesday night that was followed by breakout groups.
Some takeaways below.
Boston was built by Puritans, who celebrated civic power and class authority. Philadelphia was built by Quakers, who championed equality and deference.
Two hundred fifty years later, though considerably fewer people in those cities consider themselves a member of either group, their impact is still chiefly responsible for Boston outperforming and Philadelphia underperforming in their contributions to the greater world.
That’s the chief argument of the dense, heavily-researched, 500-page, 1979 academic classic Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, written by University of Pennsylvania sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (1915–1996). The core of the book is said to be based on some 300 interviews with Proper Philadelphians and Brahmin Bostonians, and part of a decades-long research focus that Baltzell had on his Protestant brethren — he has been sometimes credited with popularizing the “WASP” term.
This is a book that is a fabulous read for understanding Philadelphia and Boston, but it is also a treasure for those who love new perspectives on American culture, U.S. history and the development of cities.
Continue reading Puritan Boston, Quaker Philadelphia: notes on 1979 research from E. Digby Baltzell
Visiting the freshly renovated Hawthorne Park in South Philadelphia recently had me reading casual references to this city’s celebrated, half-century old One Percent for Art Ordinance. Though I’ve come to know it and it’s often called a major reason for this city’s reputation for public art, I haven’t been able to find much writing of its roots.
Since so many other cities have followed this trend, I thought it was worth sussing out where the idea originated.
If we are to build cities based in the so-called knowledge economy, one of the primary methods for judging its success should be very familiar: net exports.
In culture, ideas, concepts, general intellectual capital and, yes, even businesses and organizations, it may be worth questioning whether your city is mostly taking from others or mostly giving to others. Indeed, one wouldn’t only want to export knowledge — we always want to take ideas from others to get better — but a good sign of the success of a healthy region is the clustering of smart, creative people and their creating ideas, projects, businesses, ideas that are worth being shared elsewhere.
In most regions across the country, cultural assets are shared widely but problems aren’t. It’s a mindset we should try to change.
This perspective came up at an event I helped organize a couple months ago, and it’s still rattling around in my head as I try to work out its meaning.
Continue reading Why are city assets shared by a region but not problems (and solutions)?
