Big and Small

Landscape Posting:
In Ilmenau, there is a division between the town and the university. A person has to walk a bit to go from one place to the next. If a person were not motivated, he or she could completely avoid the town. However, that is not a good idea: I like the winding main street of Ilmenau: it is a very human size, and it is pretty and comfortable. The same division is true of the Clifton campus of the University of Cincinnati. A person has to make an effort to leave the campus. That division of "people at the university" and "people NOT at the university" is very clear. At the Krogers, it is a meeting of these two populations in the grocery store. I suppose one could say Krogres is the Geneva of Clifton. On the other hand, the Blue Ash Campus of the University of Cincinnat, really is separated, all by itself. Because it is a commuter campus, however, there is no town/gown division: we are all part of the community, like it or not. I like that feeling of mutual belonging.

When I first came to Cincinnati, I had no idea what to expect! I found a television show called WKRP in Cincinnati, but the only view of the city on that show was the skyline. The rest of the sitcom took place inside. So when I came over the hill from Kentucky on 75 north, I was astounded by the skyline. When I began to live in the city, I was unprepared for the rigid neighborhoods. If you were Westside, you did not go Eastside, and vice versa. Today, I find that I do live in a narrow perspective of the city. I don't go out of my local neighborhood much. That makes the big city a small town.

I think what is American about Cincinnati is the way it fragments into small towns. Americans do not travel much, in this part of the country, and I think that there is a tendency to emphasize neighborhood localities. Philadelphia does the same thing. It is always interesting how human beings need to create a manageable community. Even in New York, you identify yourself by neighborhood, but only in the company of New Yorkers. With people from out of state, you just say "New York". I also found this way of making things too big be smaller in England. So I wonder to myself, is this way of turning a big city into a small town the same in Germany? Is Ilmenau divided into neighborhoods? It seems too small for that to me, but maybe I am just familiar with bigger places. However, Leverett, my tiny hometown, does not subdivide further into smaller neighborhoods because it is already quite small.

So I conclude that human beings prefer a small economy of scale. We seem to prefer to belong to smaller communities, and if the community we belong to is too big, then we make it smaller ourselves.