I can't believe it's already been 6 weeks. . . I've made so many new friends and learned so many new acronyms and opened so many new doors and feel my life is suddenly full of so many new possibilities to be almost paralyzing.
Some Things I Learned During The 2010 [IN] City
Introduction To Sustainable Cities Program
1. Density is everything.
2. Groucho Marx wrote a letter to the chairman of Chrysler in the early 50's asking if there wasn't something that could be done about all the pollution his automobiles caused.
3. If all the people in the Bay Area (7 million) lived at the same level of density as all the people in Hong Kong (7 million) we would fit in an area of land the size of Sausalito.
4. There are 27 distinct grids in San Francisco, one of which is the old Spanish highway that follows the direct path of the BART.
5. The annual subsidy for off-street "free" parking is roughly the size of our national defense budget.
6. Jaime Lerner is amazing.
7. Detroit is in the process of rising from the ashes of the domestic automobile industry by shrinking its city boundaries and is fast becoming the first "green" city in the country.
8. Top Dog's Louisiana Hot Links are one amazing cure-all.
9. Urban planning is infinitely easier and so much more complex than I ever could have expected.
10. I can fucking do this.
The next steps for me now are to find an internship, figure out a personal statement, write my old professors for some letters of recommendation, read about 20 books, take the GRE in October and apply for Berkeley and PSU (and possibly UCLA) come December! Wish me luck!!!
