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Urban Community Web Research
A Brief History of Capitol East in Washington D.C. 4/6/2003 (126) Sam Smith - Article: Here is a demonstration of how a perceptive local newspaperman can help a community understand itself. It's about Capitol East in Washington D.C. The Democratic City of the Future 2/21/2003 (249) Ed Knudson - Article : A new Democratic majority is emerging uniting city and suburb against still Republican rural areas according to authors John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. |
Urban Community Section
Everyone lives in a local community. In this section we are going to focus particularly on urban communities both conceptually and in terms of local politics and organizing. By local community we mean a sub-state region or city or neighborhood or county. The concept of local community is discussed in the articles on the left. Let us know if you want your city, neighborhood, county or regional entity discussed here. The earliest traditions of Social Democracy included concern for decentralizing and democratizing large-scale political and economic structures. Later Social Democracy became associated with national centralized planning. There continues to be a need for more rational state planning processes in the United States. Much of that already occurs, but it happens outside popular vigilance or politics, is not very democratically accountable, and thus serves business interests often to the detriment of the whole society. So one of the goals of a "New" Social Democracy is to re-focus on the local dimension. In general, we believe that power should be as much as possible devolved to local communities so that a genuine local politics and media can be developed, so that local communities have much more capacity to determine economically what happens in their communities, and so that new and surprising local cultural initiatives can be encouraged and enjoyed. The "free society" is the fullness of life that develops primarily in local communities. Government at other levels should seek to serve local communities rather than control them. (Photo at top is the skyline of Tacoma, Washington from the end of the Theo Foss Waterway.) |