Kaid Benfield returns to his popular blog at the NRDC's Switchboard site after a three-week hiatus, with thoughts on the purpose of his writings and how "overly familiar vocabulary can lead to overly familiar thinking."
Returning from a restorative, and introspective, break from writing, Benfield muses on the role of our common vocabulary, and his role in particular, in advancing (or obfuscating) a professional discourse. Diving into this summer's simmering debate over the use of the term "vibrant," Benfield swears off his own use of the term, and promises to retire "urbanism," as well, for good measure.
"While I am definitely pro-city," writes Benfield, "my first problem with urbanism
is that in some circles it has taken on the air of a cult, providing a
verbal badge of identification....I would rather discuss what
makes a particular solution appropriate to a particular situation than
apply a formula... I also
believe that, just as the principles of smart growth have gotten stale,
so have the overlapping principles of urbanism."
"I want this blog – this is post number 1,125 – to be not about
advocating any script or preset system of belief but instead about
thought, the pursuit of truth and, yes, sometimes about finding a balance
among the various competing interests – planetary health, local
environmental health, individual aspirations, community, solitude,
economy, equity, the whole messy gumbo – that, pretend as we may, cannot always be aligned when it comes to
cities, neighborhoods or the environment. "Isms" of any sort can get in
the way of those objectives."
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