Public Spaces and the Common Weal

Every now and then I find myself recalling a long-ago morning in the midsized German city I once called home. My girlfriend and I lived in the section of town that housed students, artists, pensioners and foreign “guest workers.” On that morning I sat on our tiny balcony and watched repairs being done to the street below. It was a cobblestone street, and a stone mason was replacing a section of it. He was using differently sized stones, placing them at variable angles to create a floral pattern that spread around the sidewalk corner. I watched him kneeling there, painstakingly tapping stones a centimeter this way, a centimeter that way, to get the pattern just right.

I was astonished, even a bit mesmerized. Such attention to detail!  Back in the States you’d only find this level of care, design, and craftsmanship – and expenditure – at a private club, or at the homes of the wealthy. Yet here it was, a public street in the poorer part of town. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Such was the case in Germany generally, with its immaculate parks and train stations, its crowded but tidy town squares and gleaming public conveyances. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, was a country that nurtured the common weal with well-appointed, well-run, and well-maintained places and amenities.

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