Dar Williams is known for her music. But she’s also something of an urban planner.
After years of being a touring musician, Williams started to wonder why some towns thrive and others don’t. She set out to answer that question in her new book, "What I Found in a Thousand Towns: A Traveling Musician's Guide to Rebuilding America's Communities — One Coffee Shop, Dog Run, and Open-Mike Night at a Time."
The key is something Williams calls "positive proximity."
"There is this thing that I’m seeing in certain places where people have sort of made this decision amongst themselves, collectively, unconsciously, that being in proximity to one another is just essentially a positive, mobilizing, constructive force," Williams told "The Larry Meiller Show."
"Anyone who’s been to a place over and over again over a number of years ... will know this thing called 'positive proximity,'" she said.
Williams has been a touring musician for more than two decades. She grew up in a very small town herself, Chappaqua, New York (which is famous for being home to Hillary and Bill Clinton). Her fascination with what makes small towns thrive was born out of years of going through them.
Although her assessment is by no means scientific, urban planners and scientists have given her good feedback, Williams said.
"Somebody came up to me at a concert, and she said, 'I’m an urban planner and I’m all about infrastructure, but the truth is, it’s people! It’s people, people, people,'" Williams said.
"I thought they (urban planners) were gonna say, 'Where are your charts? Where are your graphs?' I am the chart and graph. I’m the one who’s going out into the field and saying, 'This is what you’ve been writing about, and this is the data that you’ve been collecting about how we need to rebuild our neighborhoods,'" she said.
In her field observations, Williams came to notice that thriving towns tend to have spaces conducive to having conversations, projects that connect residents with the place they live, and locally focused media.
Examples of community-centric spaces that encourage conversations include coffee shops — "the kind with the big bulletin board," she said — dog runs and sports fields.
Williams' primary example of projects that connect people to their town’s identity were history-focused "projects that will draw you into the identity of your town," she said.
And deeply local-centric media that celebrates even the smallest successes of a town is also crucial, Williams said. She calls this "translation."
Williams' book is divided into three sections focusing on towns that have achieved good conversational spaces, identity-based projects and translation.
For Williams, a flourishing, community-focused town is all about teamwork; everyone contributes something different, though they may not agree on everything. Her book opens with a rhetorical story of wanting to turn a hill into a sledding hill.
First, you ask a neighbor to mow the hill. The guy with the lawnmower knows someone with a plow who can tamp down the snow in the winter and make it safe for sledding. The first day it snows, you show up with your children, and the lawnmower’s and plower’s kids are there too. Soon, there are 20 children there, and their parents chat with one another. A woman on the PTA suggests selling hot chocolate for a donation to fund PTA programs, and everyone gets to talking.
"By the next year, the sledding hill is the place to go. People bake for the PTA table, and a local farm is the milk sponsor. The PTA has accumulated a fleet of volunteers who work at the school. The woman from the PTA is dating the guy with the mower. The library and school are coordinating events…" Williams writes.
Building a connected community isn’t about everyone agreeing, Williams said, it’s about collaboration.
