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
Thank you John for once again showing us all the beauty all around in small and ordinary places. What a gift you are to me from the past and now in the present.
Peace. Stanley K.
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I just returned from a walk with Milou and we can relate with similar pictures on our walks. Nature abounds, especially after a nice rain today. Didn’t see a swan but many different birds were chirping and flying about.
Kaye
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And where does time go most people ask frequently. Lived in Elkhart 49 years? I can hardly believe it, where does time go?
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