Neighbors Project

October 25, 2006 at 9:14 am | In the Commons, humanize, Chicago, links |

Via west north is the Neighbors Project here in Chicago. An excerpt from their Neighbor’s Manifesto:

I call on the urban generation to fearlessly pursue our passions and principles in order to inspire and engage the rest of the country to come out of isolation and rejoin the local and national conversations. This manifesto is the embodiment of my hope in a cultural evolution towards an urban future.

I’ve been expressing for a while now that I think the future of humanity is in the cities.  I have some close friends that espouse a kind of “back to the land” philosophy that seems to take them to rural, or semi-rural places.  While I do see that we need to have a more intimate connection with the natural world (hence my involvement with the Chicago Conservation Corps), that natural world, including food production, is also right here in the city.  It’s close-by and doesn’t require burning fossil fuels to get to it.

2 Comments

  1. I agree. I think a true back-to-rural phiosophy entails human depopulation. (Which is sort of self-contradictory, since agrarian societies depend on having large families.) It doesn’t work to have 6.5 billion humans on this planet without cities.

    Comment by John Stoner — October 25, 2006 #

  2. My friends aren’t about everyone moving back to the land, just them. Maybe they’re trying to isolate themselves from what they see as imminent social upheaval. I’m completely opposite, figuring that we’ll be better off in cities when that happens.

    Comment by ted — October 25, 2006 #

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