John Poldinec in Resilient Communities: Law of Community Momentum Revisited

Remember back in high school physics when your teacher droned on about “a body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay at rest.” This past week as I was looking at some data relating to migration away from cities, I remembered an older post I wrote – about something I called the Law of Community Momentum. I developed the concept that a variation of Newton’s Law of Conservation of Momentum might help explain Mayor Riley’s “Law.”

I stated the Law as “A community’s trajectory will not change unless some force changes its path.” This says that if a community property has some sort of clear trend (e.g., loss of population, economic growth) that it will continue that trend unless or until some change occurs to alter the community’s path. This means that if the community is on a downward trend, then a negative force is likely to accelerate the trend, and its converse. In this context, a “force” may be a natural event (e.g., a hurricane) or an intentional human action (e.g., investing in the community, making policy changes). Certainly the pandemic and the concomitant social unrest have exerted tremendous force on all of our lives. They are accelerating change across our communities.

Read the full article here.