A Follow-up

David Sucher comments on something I said in my post the other day about development in my town. Basically, he wants to clarify that his book City Comforts isn't actually a series of proposals of new ideas of his own creation, but rather a series of observations he's made of urban environments with inviting atmospheres. I didn't mean to suggest, in my original post, that someone in Orchard Park read his book and said "A-ha! Let's do all this! Make Mr. Sucher's positions so!" But I probably wasn't clear enough on that point. I was simply struck by seeing a lot of the ideas I saw in Mr. Sucher's book "in play" in a town that has been trying to redesign its environment in the last two or three years. It was more of a "Wow, he was on to something in that book!" moment than a "Cool, someone's read that book!" moment.

I'm pretty new, and not very well-read, to the area of urban renewal and development, so City Comforts is really the only place I've seen these kinds of ideas and observations laid out, with any analysis of just why they work, so when I indicated "Mr. Sucher's ideas", that's because to me, they in a sense are Mr. Sucher's ideas. This is meant in pretty much the same way that we might describe a set of political opinions as "My Uncle Joe's ideas", even though it's pretty obvious that they didn't actually begin in the mind of Uncle Joe, but rather because that's where we first encountered them. Thus, when I say "Mr. Sucher's ideas", I'm really employing a bit of linguistic shorthand, because it would be too cumbersome to employ a disclaimer each time out.

Additionally, there is something to be said for "synthesis" of already-existing ideas as being at least sometimes as important as actual conception of new ideas. If Mr. Sucher has gathered a bunch of disparate elements of city design into a single package, then in my mind that constitutes something of a "new idea", even if it's not made out of whole cloth.