I put up this blog a few years ago, determined to try to force myself into getting my now nearly-one-decade-old hopes of writing a book on mid-sized cities off the ground. That didn't happen--so now I want to reconfigure things, and and attempt a relaunch of this particular organizational effort. Part of that effort is to dismiss the thematic tags I'd originally developed, and try to use this space both more frequently and also more organically. Basically, I think I need to stop holding back and stretching out and excessively molding those theoretical reflections of mine which occur to me in connection with my home of Wichita, all so as to make them "fit" with whatever theme I associate with "mittelpolitanism," and instead to write about my city as I see fit, and see what I can discover about mittelpolitanism through whatever patterns emerge. Of course, that means I need to produce more content; the mystic can only discern patterns among the tossed chicken bones when sufficient bones have been tossed. So this will require both a certain degree of discipline, as well as the ability to be undisciplined in my approach. We'll see if it works.
By relaunching this website with the title "Wichita and the Mittelpolitan," I am hoping to accustom myself to this perspective; it's a hack, in other words. If I have anything to say about Wichita and its environs, its politics, its people, its culture and arts and more, I'm going to put it here, whether or not I can draw any kind of theoretically mittelpolitan insights from those comments. I'm also going to attempt to regularly review, update, and rethink what I've written before about mittelpolitan concepts, and urban issues pertaining to scale, governance, sustainability, identity, and more which attend them. The data in the early posts here is nearly 10 years old; hopefully, by the end of 2023, that won't be the case any longer. If I am at all successful with making this blog a more regular contributor to the discourse about Wichita and cities like it, then maybe in time I'll actually have some readers who will appreciate seeing that updated information. If not, well, at least I'll be maintaining a place to pull it up when I need to find it. Okay, onward!
