Caroline writes in…

My name is Caroline and I am putting on the this event and it would be great if you could get information in the paper about the event, it is for the Girl Scout Gold Award that I am working on.

Saturday August 4th from 1:30-3:30 at the Decatur Public Library in the Meeting Room, girl scout troop 22342 will be holding a cultural event highlighting the cultural aspects and diversity of the students at Global Village School. There will be various stations containing arts and crafts, traditional dress, food, and facts on countries that are represented. The public is invited to learn about the 4 countries that will be highlighted at this event.

From the DeKalb Public Library website…

The renowned Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser visits us to discuss his eagerly awaited new book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. It’s a book that faces up to the bad rap America’s cities get: they’re dirty, poor, crime-ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly. Glaeser shatters these myths and demonstrates that cities are actually the healthier, greenest and richest — in cultural and economic terms — places to live. Glaeser is the Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard who studies the economics of cities, segregation, crime and innovation.

Glaeser will speak at the Decatur Library on Tuesday, February 22nd from 7:15p – 9:00p.

What might he be discussing?  Here’s are of his more interesting arguments mentioned in the recent New York Times’ review of the book…

[Glaeser] chastises city planners in Paris and Mumbai, making a passionate argument for building up — and up and up.

Though he admires Jane Jacobs’s insights into the virtues of mixing residential and retail together, he thinks her prescription for small-scale neighborhoods is wrongheaded. He’d much rather see neighborhoods of skyscrapers than acres of suburban developments.

…Glaeser is scathing in denouncing local conservationists for their devotion to “leafy suburbs,” which he sees as being at odds with true environmentalism. Reminding us that even Thoreau benefited from association with a circle of urban intellectuals, he insists that suburbanization is producing an ecological disaster.