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NEXT AMERICAN CITY

Travel Chronicles is an editorial feature for wejetset’s online magazine. Through an open and casual conversation it highlights how travel has shaped the talents, perspectives and experiences of creative and business professionals worldwide. This edition features Diana Lind.

Diana is editor and publisher of Next American City, a Philadelphia-based national magazine about urban sustainability. Prior to working at the magazine she was a freelance writer for Architectural Record and authored the book Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. We visited the offices of Next American City to talk with Diana about her work, travel in America and what makes a city great.

The focus of Next American City is essentially promoting environmentally, economically and socially sustainable cities. So we’re looking at responsible planning, good public policy, interesting arts and culture, ways of keeping people in cities and making cities more prosperous. I started about a year ago working on just the content and then this year I’ve really been working on improving our foundational support. We’re a non-profit organization and so in addition to publishing the magazine we have a lot of events around the country and we’re trying to connect people in different cities around the country who are grassroots activists. People who are interested in improving their city, whether they’re working on transportation ideas or they’re trying to improve job opportunities. And so we have these events to bring people out to discuss pressing issues in their city. Next American City is trying to serve as a hub for that. Increasingly I’m wearing a couple different hats, working on the editorial which is growing a lot more from just the magazine and going on the website, and also trying to grow this networking aspect of the organization.

I think it’s the critical mass of cultural institutions that are the tipping point for changing a city. I can say from having lived in Brooklyn for awhile, there’s a very similar phenomenon that happened there. What was the tipping point for Brooklyn was when people started to prefer Brooklyn to Manhattan. That was when it became ‘Brooklyn has arrived’ as a cultural center. I think that when people start living in Philadelphia by choice- not because they’re in school here or they grew up here- but it’s really the choice to live in that city- that’s the tipping point. And I think a lot of it has to do with bringing in a lot of institutions whether it’s cultural or government think tanks proving that Philadelphia is a place where all these things can happen.

One of the most unforgettable travel experiences was when I went on assignment to a house in Chile. It was this coastal house just north of Concepción which is the second largest city in Chile. It was a house on a beautiful spot facing the Pacific ocean and you couldn’t see any other houses around. I was there with a close friend of mine and two architects who were a young married couple. They invited us in for a weekend just to spend time at the house and there was nothing really to do other than look out on the Pacific ocean and be among the wild vegetation that grew on the rocks. We would just kind of go sit on a rock and stare out and I think that was really unique in that it’s not the kind of vacation that you can actually buy. It was something created by these people for our entertainment for the weekend. It was really beautiful.