Justice
How To Talk About Cities Without Ticking Off Folks Who Don't Live There
Because “smart growth” can sound like code for “the rest of you are dumb.”
Mitchell Silver spends a lot of time traveling the country in his role as the president of the American Planning Association. In that time, he has learned that there are certain words you just don’t use with audiences outside of the urban core. For instance: urban.
“The minute I open about ‘urban,’ they say it’s time for me to leave,” Silver says, referring to crowds in smaller towns and rural communities. “When we say ‘urban,’ they hear it as ‘anti-rural.’”