Palo Alto and Menlo Park sit on either side of San Francisquito Creek, in two counties, with two city halls about two miles apart. Each is a somewhere: a city with its own streets, its own quarrels and its own […]
This follows a discussion at a recent meeting. In Sometown, in the Bay Area, two commission members are at odds about why they’re there. One holds that a commission exists to help the administrative government get its work done. The […]
There is a habit of treating liberty and democracy as one thing with two names. Hold elections and freedom follows; where freedom is missing, elections are the cure. The last thirty-five years have been hard on that habit. […]
In 1976 a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūleʻa sailed from Maui to Tahiti, about 2,500 miles, without a compass, a chart, or a sextant. Its navigator was Mau Piailug, from Satawal, a coral island in Micronesia about a mile long with […]
Murray Bookchin died in 2006, believing his politics had mostly failed to find an audience. Twenty years later his idea, that free people should govern themselves in face-to-face assemblies and federate their towns instead of submitting to a state, has […]
There is a painting in the Prado's collection, hung for years in Spain's Congress of Deputies, that shows three men about to die. Antonio Gisbert painted it in 1860. Juan de Padilla stands at the center, calm, his hand on […]
Most arguments about land start from the same assumption, even when they end in opposite places. If land is important enough, the government should hold it. Parks, forests, wetlands, watersheds, and lately housing, are all treated this way: once something […]
In California's housing arguments, two words get used as if they were interchangeable. A politician who wants more homes calls themselves pro-housing, and one who wants to permit more projects of every kind calls themselves the same thing. Opponents of […]
Before it was Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley had another name. Promoters in the early twentieth century called it the Valley of Heart's Delight: miles of prune, apricot, peach, and cherry orchards between the bay and the hills, among […]
Historic events usually don't arrive on a date. The numerals Europe counts with didn't have a launch day. Leonardo of Pisa, the mathematician later called Fibonacci, brought the Hindu-Arabic system to Italian merchants in his Liber Abaci in 1202, and […]
Follow one town's actual attention for a season and the allocation stops making sense. A parks department commissions two hazard assessments on a single oak […]
Five Centuries Under One Crown laid out the mechanism in the abstract: once a municipality commissions a hazard report on a tree, the report itself becomes the […]
Somewhere in the American South, or on a chaparral hillside in California, there is very likely a live oak — one of a handful of evergreen Quercus species that share the name for their wide, low, spreading crowns — that […]
The Municipal Trilemma worked through pickleball as the cleanest small-stakes instance of the boundary problem this site keeps finding at every scale: a court's value to the players and its cost to the neighbors are both real, both large, and […]
Swap out the council, the mayor, the party in charge of a given town, and three problems stay exactly where they were. They aren't failures of any particular administration's competence or good faith. They're built into what a municipality is[…]
Our federalism pieces have spent months on a single recurring question: at what altitude should a given decision actually be made. Splitting the Atom of Sovereignty described a constitutional design that keeps that question open and arguable rather than settling […]
Social Liberty
