Peter Spear

Peter Spear 

Came to Hudson: 2002

Mad Passion: his daughter and Future Hudson

What he’s reading now: Geography of Nowhere and Du iz Tak

An Early Midlife Crisis

As Peter Spear likes to tell it, an early midlife crisis brought him to Hudson. He’d been living in San Francisco when he decided to join some friends in importing antiques from India. One of the friends had a base in Hudson, so that’s where the containers of antiques arrived. Peter packed up his life in California and moved to Hudson with his dog and belongings in 2002. He and his partners opened a store at 314 Warren and made a few more trips to India. 

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Peter says with some wry irony. The antique shop closed after a few years, but like many of us who came for one reason that might not have turned out as planned, he found great reasons to stay here.

“I like neighborhood living and Hudson’s like a neighborhood. I like that feeling of being in a place where you know people.” 

After the antiques store closed Peter rebuilt his freelance business doing qualitative market research and brand strategy consulting. But as he settled into life here he began to pursue other creative projects such as documenting the quirky back alleys of Hudson in a series of photographs.

After a few years here, he saw that discussions around urban issues in the city were circular, especially when it came to the location of a state truck route running right through town. “Hudson keeps having the same conversation with itself over and over again.”

A Dangerous Crossing

A turning point came when he and his partner became parents. “Just becoming a father, honestly, and having a daughter and walking around town, I just got sensitized to some of the street and pedestrian issues. Third and Warren just became a glaring example of dangerously bad design and I didn’t know why there was no one talking about it.” As he explored ways to make some change at that intersection he saw how many issues in Hudson were up in the air at the same time, and how far Hudson was from any kind of comprehensive plan for the present or the future. He discovered that the last official Comprehensive Plan for Hudson dated to when he’d first arrived in town and there was no evidence of any real follow-through. What began as a personal issue of a dangerous street crossing grew into something larger. “You peek at this small thing then all of a sudden you see this whole mess.” 

He was reluctant at first to get involved in political matters in town but he began to see how small issues mattered not just for his family but for everyone living here.

“I just felt when I had a kid, my sense of responsibility expanded whether I wanted to or not. And that intersection is unacceptable. This should be different. It should be safer.”

Future Hudson Begins 

While searching for more information about how to solve the problem of the dangerous intersection he came across a YouTube talk by Hudson resident Matthew Frederick called Future Hudson: an urban designers imaginings.

“I loved the name, and I really wanted to talk to him and about what he was doing. I really had an AHA moment. Watching him talk was like the lightening strike for me. It was the application of professional creativity to Hudson’s problems. You get a little bolt of fresh perspective or just creativity buzz and all of a sudden the world opens up with a whole new set of possibilities. I want everybody to have more of those experiences because I think there is a habit or tendency in Hudson—that somehow we can’t do things. We’re feeling defeatist.”

From this encounter Peter began to conceive of a series of talks on urban design and planning that might inspire residents to see the possibilities of Future Hudson. “It’s like we’re not stopping to have conversations about root causes or strategic visions. We’re just trying to solve immediate problems as best we can. Hudson is not alone in struggling with a lot of these issues as a small town that had a manufacturing base and now we’re in a new financial reality.”

Peter formed a Future Hudson group of design and urban planning professionals and developed an event series so the community could learn about urban issues together. “That’s been the goal—to have us all experience the possibilities of Hudson in an interesting way.”

Peter points out the challenges of trying to create a new kind of conversation about our city, one that can be enlightening and respectful. Because Hudson hasn’t updated its Comprehensive Plan there has been no shared vision, leading to alienation and division. Peter hopes to create a space where we can publicly discuss priorities.

“I don’t think the structures that are in place were designed for the culture that we are in today. I feel like we need to explore new ways of to being together as a community. It’s civics, not political, and not binary, and not oppositional. We’ve got to level up a little bit into a place where we are saying: we going to be here together and see what’s possible and maybe listen to somebody from outside. We’re in a crisis of trust. So I think the first step is: how do we sit next to each other in a room and think about Hudson?

For Peter, the goal is to create an environment where non-professionals can learn about and appreciate the field of urban design, which most of us know little about.

“Design is a functional discipline that is based on science and human behavior and its application to real problems,” Peter says, whether that problem is a crosswalk or the larger decisions around a town’s evolution. “So, there’s a professional that should make these decisions at the end but we want to be as public and community-minded as possible. Bring it down to the ground.”

One on-the-ground example of better urban design is the concept of Complete Streets, which, as Peter points out “flips the entire dynamic of that space from being car-centric to being human-centric.” The object of Complete Streets is to design for all ages and abilities. By addressing the needs of the most vulnerable people such as children, pedestrians, and disabled persons everyone can be safer.

“All streets in America were pretty much designed to move cars and trucks from point A to B as fast as possible,” Peter says. “But that’s no longer enough because we’re all expecting more from our streets. A lot of the thinking about this issue is kind of ‘de-suburbanifying’ and improving quality of life.” Peter hopes that the Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) plans for creating Complete Streets at our waterfront can be a model for the rest of Hudson.

After the initial series of Future Hudson talks are over, Peter hopes that Future Hudson 2.0 will create opportunities for further cross-pollination, community conversation, and interaction that have been implemented in other towns facing challenges like Hudson. For example, Pittsfield, Massachusetts started “listening circles” to create a space where people can come together to get to know neighbors, share concerns, and do respectful listening. Too often we allow the national decline of civil discourse to pollute our local interactions but Peter hopes that Future Hudson can be an opportunity to reverse that trend and discover the benefits of working together towards the common goal of improving life here in Hudson.

To Learn More about Future Hudson and Community Building

To learn more about FUTURE HUDSON, check out this website with a schedule 

https://www.instagram.com/futurehudson/

Below are a few of Peter’s inspirations for improving conversation in communities. If you have more questions for Peter Spear about these ideas, you can find him at the links above.

—The work of More in Common and their recent report, “The Perception Gap:

“It is deeply worrying that Americans now have so little understanding of their political adversaries. It is downright disturbing that the very institutions that ought to help us become better informed may actually be deepening our mutual incomprehension.”

“More in Common is a new international initiative, set up in 2017 to build communities and societies that are stronger, more united and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarization and social division.

Our approach is to:

• Develop and deploy positive narratives that tell a new story of ‘us’, celebrating what we all have in common rather than what divides us

• Connect people on a large scale and across lines of difference, through events and campaigns.”

Solutions Journalism Network and the piece Complicating the Narrative and a short video 

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism highlighted work by a Sacramento radio station to bring the community together to talk about housing, using concepts Peter would like to import to Hudson: the Radical Hospitality of  Deep Listening Events.

The WSJ wrote about the work of Lenfest not long ago - in a piece about the crisis in local news and journalism. 

Work by Sam Ford and the Civic Assembly: “Polarization Doesn’t Have to Be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.”