One of my good friends who majored in urban planning sent me a blog article from an organization named Strong Towns some time ago. I had always planned to read it so now is that time, I suppose. The time is good because I'm currently brainstorming about how faith and real-world concerns can be integrated. As an engineer myself, I've had the nagging thought of whether my current profession is contributing a net good to the world. I worked on a project in graduate school which involved sustainable, environment-friendly materials and structures but now I work in the private sector, far removed from that type of arena or way of thinking. That's a story that I'll expand upon later. In the meantime, beginning to read this blog has given me a bit of perspective on how one can practically serve communities in need, being a source of that aforementioned net positiveness.
Strong Towns is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that is geared toward helping municipalities to become sustainable and resilient, from an infrastructure point of view. One can read more about their mission here: https://www.strongtowns.org/about. One of my major concerns about much of the U.S. infrastructure over the years is that it's been steadily degrading without much concern from politicians. It's astonishing that we're more concerned with protecting oil repositories in other nations and pushing through egregious tax breaks for billionaires at home while crises like that of Flint and many others go unaddressed. My hope is to become educated as to the nature of these problems and how one may go about solving them so as to help the most vulnerable and under-served in our nation.
The first blog post I'm reading is one of a seven part series on how one civil engineer's mindset was fundamentally changed to one that encompassed service and the promotion of sustainability toward communities. It's titled My Journey from Free Market Ideologue to Strong Towns Advocate. Some salient quotes:
Strong Towns is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that is geared toward helping municipalities to become sustainable and resilient, from an infrastructure point of view. One can read more about their mission here: https://www.strongtowns.org/about. One of my major concerns about much of the U.S. infrastructure over the years is that it's been steadily degrading without much concern from politicians. It's astonishing that we're more concerned with protecting oil repositories in other nations and pushing through egregious tax breaks for billionaires at home while crises like that of Flint and many others go unaddressed. My hope is to become educated as to the nature of these problems and how one may go about solving them so as to help the most vulnerable and under-served in our nation.
The first blog post I'm reading is one of a seven part series on how one civil engineer's mindset was fundamentally changed to one that encompassed service and the promotion of sustainability toward communities. It's titled My Journey from Free Market Ideologue to Strong Towns Advocate. Some salient quotes:
The small towns and rural areas I worked in exposed me to extreme cases of systemic problems. I think it took those extremes to get me to question my core beliefs, but even then the cognitive dissonance took a long time to manifest as intellectual pain.and
Without the continued, ongoing benevolence of the state and federal governments, Remer would cease to exist, at least in any modern, civilized sense of the word. I had taken a financially fragile city and, to solve a short-term problem, made its long-term crisis even more unsolvable.I point out the first quote because free market ideologists are mainly concerned with raising the maximum amount of capital possible, which gives rise to the potentiality for extreme financial loss as well as the exploitation of labor. In addition, environmental regulation becomes lax under that philosophy as well. I'm interested to hear someone's account of how they emerged from that way of thinking. The second quote highlights the futility of attempting to harmoniously merge free market ideology with beneficence towards every day people. More on the blog posts later.
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