Sociolinguistics has always been interesting to me, how language shapes culture and its relative sense of the world. Finnish and Estonian are very similar, a unique language family. So in these cases words are often insight into how humans parse the world around them.

My dinner partner was Ailan, an Estonian event curator and designer, he like many in placemaking and urbanist advocacy is a quirky creative person. One has to be seen as a bit mad to be making interventions and activism for something different from the status quo. I wonder if Nietzsche would have avoided being put in an asylum if he had Twitter and was able to see that a small but significant number of people totally understood what he was talking about. It’s important that we connect and have dialogue with each other, to refuel and refocus our collective imaginations, our radical dreams.

A lot of attention and work in urban art and creative placemaking all too often isn’t human-centered in its approach to place and so ends up at best being entertainment or edutainment. We were talking about this, how business people often only see the surface of the deeper cultural workings going on. So questions about how to get beyond the mass fixation with entertainment and make projects that bring people into newer consciousness was part of this dinner chat. One of several ongoing themes I want to keep talking about.