Connor Murphy

I started working as a city planner in 1972 and retired after 25 years of working in the field. Then, I returned to school and earned three teaching credentials and a certificate that qualifies me to teach literacy. After nine years of teaching, I again retired and moved on to helping citizen activists participate in the local planning process—work that uses both my city planning and literacy skills to explain the workings of government. My city planning books are written for ordinary folks who want to become knowledgeable participate in the governance of their own local communities. The goal of my books is to teach ordinary folks how they can work together to recover some of the most cherished parts of Americana that have been lost to globalization over the past 50 years, including our loss of local color and the sense of place—we are longing for home, why can’t we get it instead of the lookalike cardboard cities nameless, faceless, bureaucrats offer us. In creating the global village, we’ve inadvertently transformed our local village heritage into the “placeless” village, where the internet has become our reality and where Walmart is our village’s general store. I was born in 1939. My memory goes back to the Second World War. We are not the same nation now, we were then. Nearly 50 years ago, America entered a spiral of decline that works to the advantage of avarice and greed at the expense of the common good. My hope is the most cherished parts of Americana that we have lost to globalization can yet be salvaged by recreating government that works for the betterment of everyone, and where real people live in spiritually satisfying places of their own making.