Daniel Pereira, on writing about small towns.
Independent urban planner, Holyoke, on a quarterly that runs alongside the consulting practice.
My background
I am an urban planner. I read for my undergraduate degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (geography and history, dual major), my master's at MIT (city planning, with a focus on historic preservation), and my doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania (city and regional planning, on small-city downtowns of the upper South). I have practised in the Pioneer Valley since 2011, principally as a consultant to small-town comprehensive-plan committees in New England and the upper Midwest.
Why small towns
Most American urban planning, at the academic and the practitioner level, is about big cities. The literature on towns of under twenty-five thousand people is sparse — a small academic sub-field, a handful of practitioner journals, the occasional New Urbanist case study. The towns themselves contain, between them, most of the country's surviving pre-automobile urban fabric and almost a quarter of its population. The mismatch between the importance of the towns and the attention they receive is the project this quarterly tries to redress, in a small way.
What this is
Five long pieces per issue, four issues per year, on towns I have spent time in either as a planner-consultant or as a private visitor. Each piece is a close urbanistic reading — what the town's three blocks are doing, what the recent committee decisions have meant, what the next twenty years will likely look like. The pieces are written for general readers with an urbanistic interest, not for planners only.
What this is not
It is not a consulting newsletter. The towns I write about in the quarterly are, with rare exceptions, not clients of mine — and when they are, I disclose. It is not a marketing channel for my practice. The quarterly is, in plain terms, what I do on weekends because I love the small-town fabric and want to write about it.
On the consulting practice
I run a small one-person planning consultancy out of my house in Holyoke. The work pays the bills and funds the writing. The two are kept separate; this site does not list services, does not solicit clients, and does not function as a sales channel.
On reader funding
The quarterly is reader-funded through a small mailing of long-time readers who send a yearly contribution by post, which currently supports a single research week per year in a town that the readers vote for. There is no online subscription, no membership form, and no commerce on the site itself; the reader-mailing operates entirely outside this domain.
Towns of under twenty-five thousand people contain, between them, most of the country's surviving pre-automobile urban fabric and almost a quarter of its population.
— D. P., Holyoke, Massachusetts