PLACEMAKER
There’s one thing that small, rural communities, slowly fading from heydays
long past, seem to understand equally. Brain drain. That discomforting certainty
that their best and brightest are destined to leave and not come back.
It’s an inevitability felt so strongly that according to Patrick Carr and Maria
Kefalas in their book, Hollowing Out the Middle, we actually help it along. We
actively encourage our youth with the greatest potential to seek their fortunes
elsewhere.
There is perhaps no better argument for why place matters. And as Christopher
Coes has come to realize, that puts livability — those community attributes
that add up to an envious quality of life — at the center of importance for
placemaking.
Christopher himself was viewed as a foreseeable case of brain drain. Brought
up in a family with more than a century’s worth of history in the area, through
Harper Elementary, MacIntyre Park Middle and Thomasville High. He was a
student of government and international relations, active with Providence
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