A Mustard Seed
This 2021 post elsewhere had a link to the desktop wallpaper I was using at the time and there was also a draft on that site titled Tentative New Wallpaper with a date from 2023. The post talks about viewing local, small town development in the context of the larger region and even global sustainability and gives a little bit of background on my personal exposure to planning and development case studies.
I reread that piece today and did a few edits because I finally finished the archive for that site today and I'm still cleaning up some formatting issues on older posts that were already listed in the log when the log was first created. I'm reminded of a piece I wrote recently somewhere else that also ends up talking about my personal journey in developing my ideas about what I want to do work-wise and with regards to community development work.
I still don't have a crystal clear idea for how to sum up what I had in mind, but some bullet points:
1. My father grew up on a farm in the US. My mother grew up in a cosmopolitan city in Europe. I grew up on kind of the edge of town with woods behind the house and development in the other direction where I could walk to some things even as a child even though I was in the suburbs.
I remember walking to a donut place with my sister as a little kid. I was maybe seven and it was a long walk for me and it was a walk-up window, which used to be more common.
2. Because of my husband's military career, I lived in Europe and several smaller municipalities in the US. I tend to like small towns, in part because of my expectation of greenery where I live. Big cities tend to lack greenery.
3. I had firsthand experience living in or near several important places, such as Richland, Washington which was a town of a few hundred people that mushroomed to 25,000 in two years due to nuclear development by the Federal government during World War II and I lived in Fairfield, California next door to Suisun City which is a famous case study of dramatic successful redevelopment that gets shot down every time I mention it because the law changed and the funding method used cannot be replicated.
4. I joined TAGMAX, an online support group for homeschoolers, because I lived in the middle of nowhere and there were terrible schools there. I couldn't find local in person support groups and couldn't arrange another physical school for my kids when the local public schools were failing them.
5. I similarly joined Cyburbia because I was a student wanting to become an urban planner and was still a homeschooling mom with health problems and couldn't figure out how to get connected in person, though I was attending planning meetings open to the public where I lived. I wasn't ALREADY a professional planner and ended up starting a Citizen Planners subforum (and later a Reddit by the same name) and being active in the student part of the site.
6. I failed to get a planning job while divorcing and worked in health insurance while working on my health. I stopped participating on Cyburbia and instead invested my time in Hacker News, a discussion forum aimed at programmers and business people and the funnel for a tech venture capital firm.
7. So I have Eclogiselle and other websites where I write about planning and development for small communities and citizens concerned about their community with an eye towards environmental sustainability and economic sustainability and economic stability.
That's not really a comprehensive list or good explanation, but Eclogiselle -- which I had HOPED at one time would become a profitable business paying my bills -- is an amalgamation of those experiences:
1. TAGMAX: No matter how remote your physical location, the Internet can be used to get support and information.
2. Cyburbia: No matter how socially isolated you are or not a professional planner, citizen planners and others can get useful information online.
3. Hacker News: That's potentially a business model for a tech company serving small towns and people doing grassroots stuff or the like.
I don't know how to monetize it and Y Combinator, the tech VC company behind Hacker News, has a poor track record in the city development area.
But it's NOT a broken mental model. It's an emergent mental model that's MAYBE slowly coming together.