Both of you seemed to make the observation that it was the experience of contrast – in Elizabeth’s case contrast that moved into her world, and in David’s case contrast that he observed in traveling – that helped you divine the nature of your respective places and your relationships with them.

My experience growing up was one that had a lot of spatial diversity and so I had a lot of intuitive questions, but I didn’t know how to ask them. For example, I wondered why it was that busses came so frequently downtown in Toronto but not so much in Mississauga – no one ever explained to me that suburbs were new, and predicated by the assumption of automobile ownership, so the municipality wasn’t as concerned about bussing at that phase of its development.

From my perspective, it seemed like ambient friction was frustrating my movement through the transportation network with no logic. It made downtown-Toronto seem much more friendly to movement and much more logical with respect to movement, while the suburbs were much less so in both cases. Of course, without the automotive perspective it’s the opinion that I was bound to have. While not being a car, the understanding of those planning principles would have gone a long way to making my pre-automotive experience intelligible.

I think that understanding simple stuff like that could really help young people start to ask the right kinds of questions about the world and their place in it.

There is much blame to go around regarding our current fiscal crisis (from policy makers to mortgage brokers and wall st. managers), but people with basic financial educations (even if they are very highly educated by academic standards) have fared much better of late. They are not caught in crazy mortgages or increasing consumer debt loads and they have savings set aside for times like this.

BTW, I grew up in some great suburbs and learned about where/how live when we went into Chicago to attend black hawks games. Also, when I lived in Japan I got a very different, but just as enlightening lesson in density/space etc.