Enrique Penalosa Podcast
Planetizen has a fascinating podcast with Enrique Penalosa talking about public spaces in cities. Penalosa was the mayor of Begota, Colombia where he started a very successful bus system and biking structure.
Listen to his speech and turn the meaning towards libraries. He believes in looking at what the ideal city would be and using time to create that vision. First, we have to clarify what an ideal library is for our community. Then we have to realize that our goal is really to create happiness. How does that change your vision of the perfect library? If we focus on creating a public space that generates happiness, that immediately focuses our attention on the customer and their experience in our libraries.
He also speaks about the inherent contradiction in cities between people-friendliness and car-friendliness. We have the same sort of contradiction in libraries between people, technology and books. How do we address it? I believe we have to embrace the contradiction and balance between them, not losing books for technology, not closing our eyes to technology to focus on our book collections, and never forgetting that the people we serve are at the heart of it all.
It certainly got my mind going this morning. Inspiring stuff!