"The lack of a sustainable, planned vision for our area on the part of decades of leaders has left a developer-led landscape of mind numbing sprawl. Linear "shopping strips" and placeless big-box retail are lined up along noisy, dangerous, congested and poorly designed thoroughfares that disappear over the horizon. There are few centers, little expression of regional identity, and fewer places where communities can congregate and share ideas, or even accidentally encounter neighbors and friends (like real cities have)."
"On blogs and Web sites across our region, folks are collaborating and sharing and developing ideas on how to turn our area around - and it's just a question of time before some of these folks enter the local political scene."
"Many of these citizen activists are merely the spear tip of what has been coined locally as the "the creative diaspora." This diaspora involves locals who've grown up here, tired of the status quo, have relocated to more progressive cities such as Portland, Austin, San Francisco, D.C., Seattle, Boston, just about anywhere."
"These folks have learned the lessons from these real cities, have returned to our area, and they're now working hard to implement those new ideas."
