Cogitation 25 Saturday 23 June 2018   What makes a city likable, livable, laudable?

Certainly, common factors include a sense of home, safety, opportunity, community pride, and heritage. The overall picture includes jobs, schools, health care, quality of life matters that include recreation, entertainment, food security, and social fabric that promotes diversity, choice, freedom, community, and wider engagement with the region and world.

Defined even further, such a city provides for walkability and bikeability, along with safe , traffic-calming streets.

One area, though, that may not get as much attention involves urban forestry. From tree-lined streets to clusters of human-free forested and river areas, where wildlife can thrive in an urban context, that’s my dream of a notable city.

I’m selecting photographs I took this week around the City of Elkhart to illustrate my thoughts on what makes a city likeable, livable, and laudable.

Likable: Wildlife

 

Livable: Beauty

 

Laudable: Remembering 

 

Thank you

I end with a word of gratitude for those who have gone before in building a residential, manufacturing, entrepreneurial, educational, commercial, health and other services, artistic, historic- and civic-minded, recreational, diverse, safety-net, and spiritual-choice community for individuals, families and groups. Gratitude, too, for those charged with carrying the torch on behalf of all and everything, including wildlife and trees, today and tomorrow.

–John