The Good City and the Good Life

by Daniel Kemmis

Book Overview

Daniel Kemmis is a successful politician, former Montana state legislator, and current second-term mayor of Missoula, Montana. He is rare among elected officials as a thoughtful interpreter of and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039568630X
• ISBN13: 9780395686300
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A Montana Mayor Looks at the Interconnectedness of City Life

Currently a senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana, the author wrote this book in 1994 when he was serving as Mayor of Missoula, Montana after having served as a state legislator, Democratic Minority Leader, Speaker of the House, and city councilman in Missoula. Before I read this book, I doubt that I had ever heard of Missoula. Not only does the author make Missoula live in the reader's mind as functioning, healing city, but without hype or boosterism, he makes Missoula stand as an example of the interconnectedness of all things human that interact with cities. This book has various important themes. One is the decline of politics. "(O)ur prevailing politics is steadily dehumanizing us,...and we seem incapable of making it serve us better....a politics beyond the politics of universal anger and mistrust." He believes more people should be engaged and active citizens, instead of just proclaimed taxpayers. He points out that evil totalitarian governments have taxpayers, but only democracies have citizens. A second theme is the rise of cities as agents of economic growth, healers of public distrust and cynicism, and enablers of world peace and world trade. An active participant in the sister cities movement, he vigorously argues for layers of relationships--schools with similar schools, hospitals with similar hospitals, professions with similar professions,etc.--to make the sister city relationships part of the daily lives of both communities. As Mayor, he developed sister city relationships with Date, Japan and Neckargemund, Germany around the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. He also developed a "sister-in-law" relationship with Evian, France, Neckargemund's other sister city. He estimates that there should be about 50,000 such relationships in the early 21st Century. He credits President Eisenhower with beginning the sister cities movement. His language of praise is both eloquent and imprecise. "The key to it all," he says, "is that there is such a thing as the self-contained identity of your own city and the identity of another, which, although it can never be fully known in part because it can never be fully realized, still exists as that which gives a city its unique personality, and within which its citizens seek and occasionally achieve their own identity and whatever they will achieve of their own human wholeness. "It is," he says, "in this complex subtle process of achieving greater human integration and wholeness through knowing and celebrating the wholeness of human communities that the world-healing work of the city-to-city movement continues."` Third, beyond the sister cities movement is the healthy cities movement, pioneered by Dr. Leonard Duhl, an architect of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. This, too, has become an international movement, pushed by both the National Civic League and the World Health Organization. This has roots in the past as w