In a recent post I opined that three things made Columbia (and by extension Howard County) the kind of place it was and (to a greater or lesser degree) still is: It was a “better suburb,” relative to other suburbs. It had a more socially diverse and inclusive environment, again relative to other suburbs. It had a prosperous economy driven by steadily growing government spending. No sooner had I done that post than the Columbia 2.0 blog quoted Jim Rouse on the first goal of Columbia: ““To provide a real City—not just a better suburb” [emphasis added]. It was as if Rouse himself had risen from the grave to contradict me. (And wildelakemike further reinforced the point in his comment on my post.) ...

So far I’ve written two posts discussing whether Columbia and Howard County have (or could have) a true “sense of place,” and I really haven’t defined what I mean by that term. In a comment 0bject (of Patapsco Holler fame) attempted to help me out by giving some factors that help create a sense of place: Uniqueness & desirability—the latter of which is going to be different for different people. . . . ...

I see the issue of anonymous commenters is heating up again, with Wordbones’s decision to require commenters to have a valid userid with Google or another service. (This isn’t how Wordbones presented the decision, but due to the limitations of Blogspot that’s how it ended up working in practice.) As HoCo Rising noted, we also had a conversation on this at the HoCo Blogtail party last night. I was particularly shocked to hear during that conversation that in the past some local bloggers have deliberately outed anonymous or pseudonymous commenters who offended them for some reason; I think such behavior constitutes a major breach of trust between a blogger and his or her readers. HoCo Hayduke also posted a link to past blog posts on this general topic. ...

Thanks to all those who showed up at tonight’s HoCo Blogtail meetup at Pure Wine Café. Blogs represented included Annethologie (more active recently as @Annathema on Twitter), ChrisBachmann.com, Columbia Compass, Do I Amuse You, HoCo Rising, Hometown Columbia, and Patapsco Holler. We had some fun conversations about Howard County politics and related issues, though I have to say I’m a bit leery of going down that particular rabbit hole. To be high-minded, I’d prefer to maintain a beginner’s mind as much as possible. To be low-minded, ignorance makes it easier and more fun to blog since I can put forward semi-informed opinions and don’t have to worry about the nuance inherent in the real world. ...

In a recent post I questioned whether Howard County and Columbia had a true “sense of place” and, if not, whether there were anything that we as residents of Howard County could do about it. This post and the next contain my tentative answers. As I wrote before, there’s nothing profound here, it’s basically me thinking out loud in a blue sky-ish sort of way. To answer the first question: I don’t think Howard County or even Columbia proper have a true sense of place. To some degree it’s the sort of question that if you have to ask it then you can be sure the answer is no. But, you might say, what about Jim Rouse’s vision? What about Columbia as a “shining example of . . . a well-planned community,” as Alan Klein recently put it? ...

I should have mentioned this earlier, but better late than never: I’m co-hosting (with Jessie X) a blogger meetup this Wednesday evening, June 2, at Pure Wine Café in downtown Ellicott City, from 6:15 pm to 7:45 pm. I went to Pure Wine Café a while back, liked it, and tried to co-host a previous meetup only to mess it up through my own stupidity. (If you’re planning to meet somewhere you should call ahead and verify it’s open.) ...

My apologies, I was going to work on my next post about a sense of place in Howard County, but got distracted by something I read in Alan Klein’s announcement of his candidacy for county council (as reported by HoCo Rising): I also join the residents of this district in . . . requiring that certain services, such as a basic grocery store be considered required elements in a Columbia village center. . . . ...

A little over a year ago the Howard County Chamber of Commerce and other local organizations sponsored a presentation by Richard Florida of “creative class” fame. Florida has had his share of critics over the years, and I came across one of the more pointed criticisms in a recent blog post by Adam Greenfield, a frequent writer on issues relating to technology and urbanism: I believe there’s a single factor that makes one or another region more attractive to the kinds of people and investment that apparently now signify above all others. . . . It’s a factor I think of as organic sense of place. ...

I meant my last post to be my final word on voter referendums, ballot initiatives, and other forms of direct democracy. However I found something interesting in my researches that I can’t recall ever reading about in the whole debate about Columbia Town Center redevelopment and the proposed initiative to repeal the Howard County council’s approval of (a slightly modified version of) the proposal put forth by General Growth Partners. It turns out that this is not the only zoning referendum controversy that GGP has been involved in. In particular, several years ago in Glendale, California, GGP tried to play the referendum game to its own advantage in a dispute with fellow retail developer Caruso Affiliated. To quote from the Glendale News Press story marking the final chapter in the story: ...

I’ve probably already spent too much time on the proposed Howard County Taxpayer Protection Initiative, but there was one point brought up by an anonymous commenter on Wordbones’s blog post that I thought was worth addressing. Briefly, the commenter’s argument was that ballot initiatives and other forms of direct democracy were a perfectly valid way to counter a “government that did not heed the word of the people,” and that anyone who thought differently should hold their tongue until they educated themselves by reading the US Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and DeTocqueville, and taking some university courses on the subject. ...