by Michael Greaney

Created on: May 13, 2009

The Honorable Alvin Parks, mayor of East St. Louis, Illinois, has what could optimistically be described as a tough row to hoe. His city has been largely written off by virtually everyone, even to the extent that the Simpsons' mythical hometown of Springfield has been rated higher (Number 299) on the list of "Three-Hundred Worst Places to Live in America." As Comic Book Guy snidely remarked on what might be called Southern Illinois' Worst Episode Ever, "Take that, East St. Louis."

Friends of mine who have (in their words) been "forced" to argue cases in the federal courthouse in East St. Louis charitably describe the area as "worse than Hiroshima." The badly-polluted area is afflicted with "brownfield" problems, the stockyards (the largest outside of Chicago) are deserted, and the biggest local industry is a floating gambling casino that provides a small number of minimum-wage jobs in exchange for draining badly-needed consumption income out of the community.

In short, the area is pretty much a basket case as far as American cities are concerned. Nevertheless, there is hope . . . and if there is hope for East St. Louis, there can be hope everywhere.

Mayor Parks, while projecting optimism and what seems like boundless enthusiasm, is not an impractical Don Quixote, meaninglessly tilting at windmills that are not only not giants, they're not even there as windmills. With the mayors of ten of the surrounding communities, all of which are pretty much in the same boat as East St. Louis, Mr. Parks has taken on the task of bringing East St. Louis into the twenty-first century via a revolutionary land development proposal called the "Metro East Citizens' Land Cooperative," or "MECLC." The MECLC combines the work of design-science innovator R. Buckminster Fuller, the "binary economics" of Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler, the social justice concepts of Reverend William J. Ferree, and the vision of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. into a synergistic whole that holds the promise for bringing the city back to life and for providing an exemplar model for cities and towns across the United States and, eventually, the world.

Fuller, who lived in the area and who first developed a plan to revive the city, is probably best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome. His work, however, is much more profound and far-reaching than a construction design. His idea, which he called "ephemeralization," is that humanity is continually engaged in the process of "doing more with

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