- David Harvey. The Right to the City (2008)

Source: notquitenative

Posted by Stowe Boyd 8 May 2013 28 adhocratic Permalink

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Lily Tomlin

I have spent the past few years downshifting.

Much less travel. Moved to a small city 65 miles north of NYC, and slowly 30 plus years of living in exurbia has evaporated, leaving me grounded on the Hudson river, at the foot of Mount Beacon.

I walk everywhere, and hardly ever drive. I train into New York regularly, and ride the subways when there. Nearly everyone visits New York, so I am now more often being visited than being the visitor.

We put in a large vegetable garden — in fact, we are slowly converting much of our double-lot yard into food bearing purposes, like the onions along the side of the house on both sides of the wrought iron fence that frames our property. I just finished painting that fence, and soon I’ll be painting the front porch, and working on a new patio with my son and wife. 

We intentionally avoid buying things, we buy local eggs and produce, and we had spinach and kale from our hoop house all winter. Soon, we’ll be raising our own chickens: we have the corner picked out in the yard, behind the garden.

I worked with some other locals and got a grant to paint sharrows on Main Street. Those are chevron-shaped street marking to indicate the roadway is to be shared with bicyclists. They were completed last week. My next goal is to convert Main Street to a true ‘shared space’, where you remove the curbs, traffic signs, and road markings, and where the cars have to slow to a crawl to move through an area shared with people and bikes: where the drivers have to make eye contact, and the demarcations between road, parking, and sidewalks are eliminated. Could take years.

I am working regularly, but I stopped hustling consulting gigs with startups. I have moved to media work almost exclusively: writing, speaking, executive briefings, reports, interview series, conferences.

I’d like to teach, perhaps, but otherwise, I am content to weed the garden, write about technology’s reshaping of the human psyche, and try to describe what’s coming next to a skeptical, distracted, and forgetful world.

There may still be a race, out there, but I am just working on handicapping it, making odds, and not being one of the rats.

(via stoweboyd)

Posted by Stowe Boyd 8 May 2013 19 stoweboyd Permalink