Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
"On the level of North America as a whole, what major city do you feel has the most cultural and economic influence on your area overall?"
This is the question that colors the US map with zones of major city influence. (Click map for a magnified view--pretty cool!) Maybe it would be easy for you to say what city you idenitify with--a place that shapes your expectations for news, entertainment, and political focus.
Maybe that is what makes small, isolated towns like Floyd so unique. I'm thinking that for many Floydians, they'd have a hard time saying that any major city holds much sway or influence over them or this area. Maybe folks in our kind of setting identify more with our immediate surroundings, less with urban headlines, hurry and energy that comes from humans in aggregate. I dunno.
But it's an interesting study, early in data gathering, and perhaps will someday tell us more about how we should design cities, towns, villages and neighborhoods of the future--because we ARE going to have to be more proactive and less urban-flighty in the future, you know, if we're going to maingain an ever-growing population and at the same time maintain productive farmland, provide adequate water and other resources and live within our energy budget in a belt-tightening future world. Cities must be sustainable-- a word my students will never hear again (many apparently had never heard it before) without thinking of old 'fessor First.