I started my Master’s program in Urban and Regional Planning at UW Madison today. If you’re wondering what the hell URPL is, my hope is that it has less to do with “Urban”, “Regional”, or even “Planning” so much as making places to live that don’t suck. That is, don’t degrade the basic qualities of life, but instead encourage them.

Where is Madison? Madison is in Wisconsin — I trust you can find that on a map. Madison is a small- to mid-size city (200,000 people) in the upper midwest — aka the “Frost Belt” (or the “NPR” belt”, I suppose). Why did I choose to come to grad school in Madison? Isn’t San Francisco just about the perfect place to live? In no particular order: Madison is cheap, it’s new to me, it doesn’t have any traffic to speak of, it has a very vibrant sense of local culture (don’t laugh, left-coasters, more on that later), it has a great university, a good planning program, a strong tradition of land use planning (more on that later too, but you can start with Aldo Leopold), and well, most importantly, this is where Megan and I felt we’d both be happy and productive.

So, I went to college today for the first time in ten or eleven years… I’m taking four courses: Intro to Regional Planning, a seminar on Transportation Planning, an accelerated introduction to Economics (micro- and macro- in one semester), and intensive Portugese (the first 3 semesters compressed into one). I also landed an assisstantship with a place called the Midwest Regional University Transportation Center (MRUTC) — outside of academia, this would be known as a part-time job, except that it comes with the added benefit of a tuition waiver (quite significant, for an out-of-state grad student).

What else goes on here? I’m sharing a house with a couple of other grad students… It’s in a neighborhood known as Dudgeon-Monroe just to the south-west of campus. I’m planning on doing a bit of ice boating as soon as I can figure out how to get on a boat. Megan and I have taken a couple of drives out into the surrounding countryside — one west to Talesin (Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate) and the “Driftless Area”, and another to the south towards the Illinois state line. It’s already become apparent that Wisconsin has a fascinating natural history (for an introduction, see Leopold’s book), and a great deal of interesting areas to explore.

Reading: just finished the already-mentioned book by Leopold, as well as The Ecology of Commerce, by Paul Hawken – a truly visonary, in-depth discussion of how our economy can be adjusted to account for the true cost of goods. Now I’m reading Fields Without Dreams, by Victor Davis Hanson, a Greek scholor and raisin grower.