Dimensions Reconsidered

Earlier I described the ways that Enclave fills two roles introduced by Josh Marshall. Upon further reflection, I feel the need to add two more that Marshall did not consider.

In the first place, my hyperlocal efforts are intended to play a supportive role for my neighborhood association, for Salemtown, and for broader North-By-Northwest Nashville. One of my designs is to have Enclave promote urban living in the North End as a means to enhance the quality of life for all residents and for my family in particular. If neighbors do not assertively promote and defend their neighborhood, no one else will. I intend for Enclave to play an important communication and coordination role for my neighbors who share my commitments.

Enclave is but one among many different ways that I support my own. However, even as the focus is on North End living, other people from other neighborhoods in other areas of Nashville contact me on a regular basis to say that my support for my neighborhood has helped them as they seek to support their own. So, a focus on a particular hyperlocality may have very significant affects outside that hyperlocality.

Secondly, I hope that Enclave has significant research potential and historical value. I blog each day with the desire that the document I leave behind provides present and future readers with a montage of scenes from the North End at a particular time in history. On so many occasions I have wished that people would have had the means over the last 150 years to do something like blog their experiences in the area on a daily basis and I have wished that those means would be as easily researched in seconds as Googling "North Nashville." Local history is a fascinating read for me, but so many times I have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks between the few monographs and piecemeal newspaper reports on North Nashville. Enclave addresses my wishes while saving the reader's imagination for other important projects.

Enclave has been used by parties to find out what is going on here for the now tens of thousands of reasons that they are interested. I hope that, even after I stop writing Enclave, it will continue to be of service to those who are so interested. It is my contribution to my community.