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. …

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…

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…