Which town?

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Today, near the end of 2017, we have a roundabout, the first roundabout of the town, and we are unable to decide, since more than a year already, how to dress it, edge and border it, animate it, decorate it and inhabit it: it remains dull and unappealing, a raised circle covered with crushed stone, planted in its middle with a pale metal mast atop which, at dusk, a large light comes on; this circular space is surrounded first with a sloped band of pavers which is in turn flanked with short vertical markers and we all are enjoined to obediently circulate around it on the levelled way. Perhaps the obligation to present a common front of efficient maturity on the occasion of the commemorations that await around the corner of the coming year – to celebrate the first 50 years of existence of the city – will achieve what all the graciously imported methods and techniques of participatory democracy have failed to accomplish, and we shall see... a solution residing in our roundabout...! (see note) As solutions go, the very concept of a roundabout was indeed found without us, an elegant solution open to an infinity of expressions, which has helped resolve in numerous public places in several western countries the problem of traffic-jams. But our “Road Service”, for the construction of this first fated roundabout, had deemed judicious to edge it with a fairly abrupt slope so as to discourage motorists and cyclists from driving too close to it and oblige them to approach this new circulatory experience with circumspection. Then it was that our Council for Internal Affairs judged this slope to be dangerous, particularly on rainy days, and ordered the introduction of these vertical markers at short intervals on its outer circumference. In the meantime, the “art installation”, as one is expected to call it nowadays, which had temporarily been held there as a proposal, was dismantled and the population was invited to suggest a more permanent expression – materials, forms, arrangement. This invitation triggered such a shower of contradictory or heteroclite suggestions and varied arguments that all attempt at a final selection was paralysed, for fear of being either partial, arrogant or unimaginative.

And there we remained.

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