Life is good these days. Our communities are thriving, here and around the globe. We’re working together to grow into a bright future. But it’s also good to reflect on where we came from and how we got here.
In 2024, a sense of exhaustion gripped my hometown. Foreclosed homes, shuttered businesses, a changing climate that brought nothing but disaster. Life seemed narrower and emptier by the day. Our hope for a better future came from advertisements, depicting an exaggerated host of joys and sorrows that promised to give only if they could take first.
I remember how much fundamental sadness accompanied observing an advertisement. An implied grievance: why don’t you have this? (What’s wrong with you?) A picture of food that incites hunger, a picture of happiness that inspires longing. This sense of absence had overtaken our public and private lives, scrawled across buildings and bus-stops by corporations and private interest groups. Everything belonged to them, but when things went wrong they were nowhere to be found.
I started talking to people about it, sharing our thoughts and experiences. We organized a petition that called for a vote on how the town handled advertising in public spaces. Our new policy would require the town council to limit what kinds of street advertising it sold and to whom.
In short: local businesses and nonprofits had first rights to any advertising space in public areas. The town could not take bids from non-local individuals or companies if there was a local group interested in renting the space. While non-local chains and corporations could advertise on the insides and outsides of their own stores, they could no longer rent ad-space from the larger community.
Instead of filling our public spaces with messages from distant strangers, we started using them to connect to each other. We didn’t need to impose any new rules about ad content or public mental health. It turns out, people who live next to their own advertisements on a day-to-day basis are naturally inclined to make that a pleasant, hopeful experience. With that optimism came a renewed sense of capability. Places like bus-stops, billboards, the insides of public restrooms and phone booths–all of these locations belonged to us again.
And with that came a renewed sense of responsibility. If this space was ours, then we were in charge of keeping it healthy. We organized clean-up events, recycling drives, and paid greater attention to the effect we had on the landscape. Over the next few decades, our community became a model of friendly cooperation and environmental sustainability.
Other towns adopted similar policies. The movement got so popular, it became a political platform. As local communities regained power over their own space, they began restructuring the way that we thought about culture and economics. This time with a focus on public generosity instead of private greed. The influence of corporations began to wane, and local health and sustainability became our priorities.
It was a long road, and we started small and slow, but now we’ve filled our space with messages of hope and teamwork. We don’t need a billboard to show us what happiness looks like. We already have it. It’s here.