With today's blog post, I'm going to be wrapping up my series on Urban Terrapsychology and Creative Placemaking for the foreseeable future. 

In my last post I discussed how the people of the Upper Mississippi Valley became aware that the 1854 Grand Excursion went awry in some ways that were evident at that time, but in other ways that weren't evident until our own time.  The problem recognized in 1854 was Saint Paul's failure to exhibit appropriate hospitality to visitors.  The…

In my last post I related how I discovered the story of the Grand Excursion of 1854 and determined that it was an event that I had intuitively been seeking for years - an event that could be repeated in some sense during its 150th anniversary in 2004 as a way both to celebrate ten years of riverfront revitalization and heal some deep wounds to the psyche of the city of Saint Paul. And indeed, as soon as I made that proposal, it was immediately embraced by city leaders all the way up to the…

I began the year 1994 with a sense of anticipation.  To summarize items discussed in my previous blog posts: After three years of learning from mentors to think terrapsychologically, I found myself with -

* An awareness that my city of Saint Paul, MN was strong on neighborhood-focused soul, but weak on having a strong sense of itself as a centered city with a healthy ego. (Thanks to Robert Sardello for that insight.)

* Recognition that Saint Paul's inwardness stemmed in part from…

My previous posts have discussed various elements that provided me with terrapsychological insight during the early 1990s.  Today I will outline an experience that was more unusual than those I've previously recounted - a relationship with a kind of meditative mandala that seemed to open my consciousness to archetypal dimensions of the region where I live.  And synchronistically, it was this mandala that led to my most successful and influential project as a city planner, which I will…

As the year 1994 began I was prepared to translate the lessons I had learned from depth psychology into my work as a city planner in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  Perhaps the single most important lesson I had learned was to reframe the question that city planners first ask when embarking on a project.  That question had already evolved during the course of my lifetime in a positive way.  (Warning: Huge generalization coming.)  In my youth the question typically had been "What do experts think is…

In 2014 the posts for this blog focused on the ways in which I began to view the world from a terrapsychological perspective, with my last post describing a 1993 conference entitled "What Makes a City: Myth and Maps" which my wife and I organized to begin community-wide discussions of this perspective.  In 1994, our work gained national attention and also led to an idea for a project that would apply the perspective to issues of riverfront development in the Upper Mississippi River…

My last blog post described the 1993 "What Makes a City" conference in Saint Paul that featured Gail Thomas of the Dallas Institute and my spouse, Elizabeth VanderSchaaf, as co-keynote speakers.  Together they provoked reflection in the Twin Cities community about how to discern the myth (deeply true story) of a city, and how to perceive landscape patterns that manifest that myth. 

One objective of this conference was to prepare the way for launching an institute similar to the…

1993 would be my final year of collaboration with the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.  But what an eventful and fruitful year it would turn out to be!

The 1992 Saint Paul Neighborhood Forum, described in my previous post, whetted the appetite in my community for approaching the city archetypally.  So later that year I began exploring opportunities to expand both the audience and the scope of the discussion.  I was able to find allies at a local Catholic women's…

In early 1992 I had the opportunity to bring the insights I learned from the Dallas Institute into the life of Saint Paul, the city where I was working as a planner.  Several images and ideas were inspiring me at that time: the need for cities to advance culture but avoid the traps of imperialistic "civilization," the importance of having places of soul but also a strong civic spirit to bring a broader identify into focus, attentiveness to seven generations back and seven generations…

For the last two weeks my blog has described how my emerging terrapsychological perspective in 1991 was enriched by mentoring from Robert Sardello of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.  He provided me with important insights about how cities should be centers of culture, nor civilization, but also how it is necessary for cities to have both strong souls (typically rooted in neighborhoods) and strong spirits (typically centered in downtowns).

I had another important…