Wow, didn’t know you moved to Baltimore!

South Philly has a similar dog feces problem (can’t vouch for the rest of Philly), but I feel like it’s in transition. I feel like 2/3 of the people do pick up their dog excrement, so I’m seeing the bag half full, not half empty. But that 1/3 does make it yucky for everyone else.

How about a “Baltimore, Get Your Shit Together” campaign?

There are some good people in B-more, and they just added 1 more to their ranks when you moved there. Welcome to the Mid Atlantic.

I do think that it all boils down to shared story, though, because until we all share a common mental model about how we all relate to one another, we will be lost. We need to be working towards the same goals, even if we occupy different roles in the system.

City politicians are mostly an impediment at the moment. That could change. The bigger issue is getting the state and the feds to start to think strategically about investment in cities, and stop subsidizing suburban sprawl. We need to wait for some of the current elder leadership to shuffle off, in some cases, because their worldview about cities is so shaped by the past.

Winnipeg, like Baltimore, is a city of flux. Winnipeg was pretty unruly 100 years ago and was a gateway to the west and other mining and speculative enterprises in Canada. A member of my wife’s family got mixed up in a criminal conspiracy in Winnipeg in 1912 and studying that has been very interesting. He was run out of town and went to Baltimore (to Govans, in fact).

Baltimore is somewhat schizophrenic partially because we sit on the fall line between the piedmont and the Atlantic coastal plain. That led to the development of manufacturing as well as coastal industries like shipbuilding. The B&O and other railroads were also other early cataracts that shaped the city. Our peculiar geography has had a lot to do with how the city has developed. Particularly the dysfunctions surrounding the Jones Falls, Gwynns Falls, and the railroad infrastructure. We’ve never been about just one thing, and it’s constantly changing with difficult geographic constraints.

It’s no wonder we do not yet have a shared story. When we do, I’ll be there’ll be less shit on the streets. And by the way Justin, emotionally invest. It matters that you do, and yes, others are paying attention.

One of the biggest problems in Winnipeg has been the meth society. I could not appropriately address this without writing a book. Which, sadly, I could do easily.

The laws aren’t harsh here, it’s just that the culture of these areas – northern, remote communities, and their exports into the bigger metros – is ripe for anything that makes people feel, even temporarily, powerful in their own lives. Some of us are doing work to change this, but it’s never – ever – enough. Not yet, anyway.

Dave: I’m sure the dog shit and the murders aren’t directly linked, but it all scales back to perception and intent. People who care about their environment also preserve it. People who don’t care about their environment, or who resent it openly but don’t have the funds or gumption to leave, allow it to erode or destroy it outright. That’s as true for the sanctity of the sidewalks as it is for the sanctity of life.

As for convincing our politicians of anything, I’m less faithful that our politicians will ever be anything more than obstacles to Baltimore’s future success. That’s not a Baltimore problem, that’s a failure of the system. If we *really* want to convince the politicians of anything, we’d do better to jump-start the economy ourselves, individually, and use our independent success as leverage against the lobbyists who can currently out-buy our votes.

However, I do think that you hit on an important point. First, Randolph Roth’s comment about the lack of a “shared story about how we all hang together” is spot on. There are at least three different Baltimores, all equally real. There’s rich/professional Baltimore, which is doing quite nicely. There’s poor working class Baltimore, which has been in decline for years. And then there’s shadow economy Baltimore, built around the drug game. And each of those groups has different ideas about how and why we got to where we are. The conflict between the reality of the first and last group is the most stark, and the machinations of the last group leads to 99% of the violence we see.

To go back to Paris, however, they are facing many of the same issues, only with less guns. Arab youth in the suburbs feel disenfranchised and excluded from the bourgois wealth so celebrated in the city center. So they burn cars, destroy bicycles, and act out their aggression. Precious little difference from what we see here, just different gameboard and pieces.

This all comes back around to urban design. Cities are efficient and if we want to get serious about competing in the world, we need to fix ours. Design is a reflection of perception, and that means if we want to have an effective urban design in Baltimore or anywhere else, we need to get all of our stakeholders onto the same page (or at least into the same book) and agree on a mental model (or a shared story, if you will) of what our city is about. About how we got here, and where we’re going. Once that is achieved, and we can convince the politicians that our cities really are our best hope for renewed economic strength, we can achieve anything.

Baltimore is well situated, has countless assets, and is ideally suited for competing in the 21st century. We just need to get the fools and charlatans out of the way.

I live in an are of Winnipeg mostly devoted to hipsters, Osborne Village. You want to talk oppressively beautiful? In much of the city, there’s a sense of either pride or scrutiny. Here? Tolerance. Sadly, it’s a negative tolerance that means this is, sadly, the most highly drug trafficked thirty blocks in North America. Should we wonder why Winnipeg was the murder capital of Canada three out of the last ten years?

I couldn’t say word one about dogs, though. Deathly allergic.