- [Announcer] Generous support for the following program provided by the Bible Family Fund of the Denver Foundation and the O'Bannon Foundation, a fund of the Indianapolis Foundation.

(bright music) - [Judy] As an 88-year resident of planet Earth, I'm constantly amazed by the infinite variety of activity I see going on around me.

The complexity of it all, the way it all works together.

Every animal, every vegetable, every mineral, every solid, liquid and gas, each its own unique contribution, just like us to the bigger picture, the vast, infinite, interdependent, interconnected web of all creation.

I admit it's a lot for me to process, more than I can handle on my own, which is why I reached out to these people.

- I exist because you exist.

- [Judy] Some of my most thoughtful and most thought provoking fellow Hoosiers to help me sort it all out.

- I see this connectedness in my community where pieces fit together.

- If we kind of allow science to inform our social understanding and whatnot, it's that we really are connected.

- [Judy] If there really is a true back and forth connection between everything and everyone, what does it mean?

How does it affect or maybe how should it affect the way we live our lives, how we think and feel and believe and behave?

Good questions in search of good answers, which I hope we can get a little closer to as we explore the connections that exist between you and me, everyone and everything everywhere.

(bright music) (gentle music) - So this is a visual representation of the connectedness between various companies and industries in Columbus and Bartholomew County over the past 200 years.

- [Judy] I'm on a mission today to find out more about the connections that make possible a vibrant forward-thinking city in the middle of Middle America.

(bright music) I'm talking about Columbus, Indiana.

The four people you're about to meet represent the thousands of people who find connection through the love and respect they share for this place they call home.

Please welcome Cindy Frey, President of the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce.

Britt Brewer, Former Community Engagement Coordinator and Faculty Member of Indiana University's J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program.

Richard McCoy, Executive Director of the Landmark Columbus Foundation, and Dr. Tamara Stone Iorio, author, historian and pediatrician.

- Some of our very early industry included an agricultural implements firm, a contracting and ironworks company that built buildings, including courthouses and state houses all over the country.

And a tannery that at one point was the largest tannery in the United States.

These companies formed the basis for our civic-minded and community-minded business leaders, in that they realized early on the value of a good place to live.

- This was a crossroads for human culture long before the 1820s, when White people came here, the Indians came here before.

The confluence of two rivers is an important point in the natural landscape.

This is also an important point in the landscape because it's as far south as the glaciers came.

And so, they didn't push into the southern, particularly the southwest portion of the county.

So we do have some hills and we are akin to some of the adjacent counties where the glaciers did not pull that far, but where the glaciers did come down and created the glacial till as you mentioned, we have the rich agricultural land and we have the rivers that flood to make it.

And so, this was a great place in that we had water power.

We had a way to build a canal and to power industry that was here.

We had agriculture that was adjacent to it, we had clean water.

And so, this was a very good place to stop.

And it proved itself and we know it proved itself when the Reeves family started their manufacturing here, and they of course, started that cycle of manufacturing to support the same agriculture that surrounded them.

The Reeves Pulley Company made agricultural equipment and that was at the heart of what the manufacturing piece was here.

And of course, that same family is the one who employed the people like Clessie Cummins, who learned from Reeves and went on to make the larger manufacturing companies, which now sustain the community in which Mr. Miller shepherded for so long, Cummins Diesel.

- Well, there was an industrialist or a philanthropist, a business guy, a community guy in town named J. Irwin Miller.

And he and his wife, Xenia Miller, were really remarkable people, Renaissance people.

And one of the things they believed in was the power of design to shape our aspirations.

And we see it in so many iconic buildings here from First Christian Church, the first international modern building in the United States, to the former Irwin Union Bank, to City hall.

- Very simply, Mr. Miller was trying to make a small Indiana community where his company was headquartered attractive to the high level of executives and engineers that he wanted to attract here.

And in order to do that, he paid attention to their most precious resource, their children.

How are they going to be educated?

How are these people going to develop rich lives?

How does he compete with a Chicago or a New York or a Los Angeles, or even in Atlanta, or a Charlotte or a Cincinnati to get executives to come live here?

And so, he started with the schools.

And the first Cummins Foundation building for the Schmitt School done by Harry Weese was to improve the school buildings.

The idea being that if he had a very good architect, the architect would do a better school.

And if there was a better school, the children got a better education and it was a better use of dollars.

As he used to say, mediocre architecture is expensive.

- And so, it was about architecture, landscape architecture, public art and graphic design.

And so, graphic design, it's usually sort of the first thing that enters the room that allows people to talk about what's happening.

And so in this case, the way that it comes is J. Irwin Miller was hiring a graphic designer to make a new logo for the company that he was running.

Cummins Diesel Engine Company is what it was called at the time, now it's just Cummins Inc.

But Cummins needed a new logo and I think what Miller's idea was is to always hire the best, is that it's actually more affordable and more efficient to strive for excellence in everything you do.

It's inefficient if you get a mediocre designer or a mediocre thinker because you end up doing it twice or it takes longer.

Go for the best.

And so, the idea that have a great graphic designer really starts with this kind of ethos that's in Columbus from the 1940s and it starts to emerge in the '50s and the '60s.

And it's just as much about design as it is a quest for excellence.

- If you look at the statistics that go along with communities of the size of Columbus in Indiana from post-war to now, you will see how the choices that were made in this community, which include the choices that resulted in the wonderful architecture, have made Columbus very much as Mr. Miller hoped it would, the best city of its size in America.

And architecture is a component of the social determinants of health.

If you do not have a place to live, if you are homeless, your health is endangered.

If you have a home, you can be more productive.

You are safer, you are healthier and you're more productive.

So in that sense, you're meeting the basic shelter needs.

But for architecture, of course, we go beyond shelter.

How do we also inspire?

And that's the question, how do we step up to that?

Of course, we originally did that through cathedrals and our large community buildings that we did.

But of course, we do it now in all of our buildings and including our homes.

And so, with our students reaching out to the community, they're learning from the community, they're serving the community and reaching out to them.

We have another story that I learned here when I came to town, which relates to the legal environment, and our courthouse, like many, has been modified to give it greater capacity because of course we don't use buildings the same way we did in 1876 when it was built.

And the two large original courtrooms that it had, one remains the way it originally was when the building was built in 1876 and it's a majestic and beautiful room.

You walk in and you can feel the meaning of the law and you can feel the meaning of the rule of law.

And it commands respect and it commands awe and it's a wonderful room to go into.

And so, it's a perfect room for a court proceeding and to hold someone accountable to the law.

The one across the hallway has been cut in half horizontally.

So that's now two very squishy rooms.

And the rooms are packed tight and they have lay-in tile ceilings and the ornamented ceilings of the larger courtroom is lost.

And a few years ago, right when I came here in 2018, there was a gentleman, he was in trouble with the law for something and I don't remember what it was, but he was being sentenced and I think he was sentenced to 10 months in jail.

The man on trial was upset at his sentence and got so upset, he stood up and started throwing chairs at the judge and throwing chairs across the courtroom.

And of course, he was quickly subdued and ultimately had to come back for more charges on that incident.

And ultimately, instead of going to jail for 10 months, he went to jail for 10 years.

And I argue though that if he had been in a room where his trial and where he would not have been sloughed off into a room that was made to make due to hold trials rather than the room across the hall where it was built to communicate and command respect for the rule of law, that this wouldn't have happened.

I think that we need to design rooms and pay attention to our investments in our built environment so that they support our values.

- I love the concept of social infrastructure because we think about, in a city, we think about the civic infrastructure, how out in the streets we have water lines, electrical lines, gas lines.

We all understand infrastructure, we understand highways, these things that allow us to move around and to live in a society.

But the unseen thing, the social infrastructure, our ability to work together as a community is really what is at stake in today's societies.

And I think that our built environment is a place that if it's built in the right way or shaped in the right way, it can lead for new ways for us to connect as humans.

And I think in today's era where Facebook and a variety of online platforms have reduced our interest in connecting one-on-one to humans, all of the social media, it's a big part of where society is changing.

We have less community groups gathering.

You think about even high school reunions to Kiwanis clubs, to Rotary, to all the fraternal organizations, many of those, they're declining in memberships, religious institutions, mainline religious institutions.

You think about the way society is shifting and I think that's in part because of the digital revolution we're in.

And so, if we think about cities as the centers of our humanity, then our public spaces should be those that encourage social infrastructure, encourage us and support us as ways to get together, to make new societies, to make new communities.

I think we talk a lot about the word diversity and we elevate its significance and that's really appropriate, but if you just unpack a little bit, what do we mean by a diversity of perspectives?

We're all in a sense looking at the same thing.

But as humans, if we're allowed to empathize with someone else and to see how they're seeing the world, it allows us to become stronger and to see the world in a more interesting way.

And I think in some real baseline human level, we really want that.

I think it can be scary sometimes because people have these different ideas and different opinions and different perspectives and, oh, man, I don't want to deal with all of that.

But when we really embrace it as humans and try to empathize and understand how someone else is seeing the world, I think that's when we find ourselves at our most significant.

And I think in the end that we all want it in a certain way, even when it's frightening.

It's most frightening when you feel like you are the other.

There's a lot of people in that room and I'm the other.

That can be the most frightening.

And I think where you're seeing cities today that are successful, it's when they're able to move past that and to break down that sense of otherness.

And that otherness is what we were talking about in a certain way about thinking about folks who are in a rural spot versus an urban spot, being from an international destination or local.

We otherize each other and I think that's a little bit out of fear, but what we really want is to celebrate how we all have our own unique lens on the world.

- [Judy] You are a pediatrician.

- That is correct.

- [Judy] And you have an active practice?

- Correct.

- Well now, all that I'm seeing today is a connection with history.

It's a lot of research, a lot of envisioning how this would be taught to other people and of interest.

Connect for me why a pediatrician finds connection with history.

- So for me, it started as a personal hobby and interest.

I have always enjoyed history.

When we traveled with my family growing up, we often visited museums and I always enjoyed learning more about the history of the places we visited.

As an adult, I began as a postcard collector, collecting historic and vintage postcards from Bartholomew County.

Once I came back to town, I got involved in our local historical society and my love of research really started by researching the postcards I had collected.

I would find a historic photo on a postcard and decide I wanted to know more about that place or the people who lived or worked in that place.

As you develop a hobby, especially a collection, it becomes much more interesting when you're able to share that hobby with other people.

As a pediatrician, I've always been interested in education.

And so, it was a natural outreach to me to begin to speak at local schools and share snippets of our local history to help get the kids excited about where they live and where they came from and hopefully to inspire them to also be interested in learning more about their world.

- [Judy] How do you connect health, how our health and our history just really connect in ways we just, as layman, would never think of it?

- I think that an argument can be made for the quality of life as important to our basic health.

And so, while at its very basic level, our physical needs must come first, and that includes your needs for food and shelter, but there are certainly other needs above and beyond those physical needs that also are important, including that sense of community for those people around us, our family, friends, coworkers, fellow students.

And I think you can take that a step further into the appreciation of other things that contribute to the quality of life, including art and literature.

In a place like Columbus, we are well aware that architecture creates and contributes to our quality of life here.

The fact that we can so easily travel around the world is really highlighted.

The fact that the pandemic spread more quickly than most anyone thought, and even countries that were really shut down weren't really able to keep it out.

So we are connected in our travel, we are connected in our food supply, we are connected in our natural resources and we are connected in our manufacturing of products that everyone uses.

I have patients who are French, I have patients whose families come from Argentina, from Brazil, from Poland, and more places than I can even come up with right now, from China.

And so, I feel a connection to them that then translates to a connection to where they're from.

There are surely people in Columbus and in Indiana who would say they don't have a connection with anybody on the other side of the world, but those connections happen.

If you drive a car and you fill up your car with gas or if you shop in the grocery store, you are buying things and using things that have connections with other people in other places, whether or not you realize that every time.

- Well, I do believe we're connected.

And when I think about my community, I think about this ecosystem.

And my work is all about ensuring that the ecosystem creates the right environment for businesses to grow and for our community to thrive.

So a community is a network of networks.

So an ecosystem is interdependent.

It means that all the parts are working together to create some outcome.

I see evidence of connectedness in Columbus all the time.

We have a way of solving problems when we see that something is particularly complicated and involves multiple sectors.

Say it involves government and business and education and healthcare, we have a way of getting the entire system into the room.

So everyone is coming together with their own perspective around that problem.

So whether it is childcare access and affordability, quality education, connecting students to well-paying jobs, eliminating substance abuse or homelessness or food insecurity, all very complicated issues, we find that when you get all of the players in the room, everyone who has some role to play in solving or addressing that problem, solutions become apparent, resources can be pooled and problems can begin to be solved.

It takes a long time, it takes a lot of trust, but once you get that whole interdependent system around a single table, you can start to map your way to resolution of the problem.

Being connected has tremendous value and you can really quantify that in a place like Columbus where we are able to create stronger schools or better social systems to support people in need.

I think it's very difficult to blame someone for being in poverty when you actually are connected to someone.

I think the same is true, whether it's someone who has a different sexual orientation or gender identity or someone who comes from a different racial background than you, to know someone is to erase the differences and see only the connections, how we're all very much the same.

So when a community can have its residents colliding with one another more consistently, you're more likely to be a place that empathizes and cares about fellow residents than one that just wants to stay in your opposite corners.

- From the folks in Columbus, Indiana, we've heard the story of the roots of their community, a community that thrives from its geographic location, its citizens' needs and skills and a deep commitment to social involvement.

Cindy Frey, Britt Brewer, Richard McCoy and Dr. Tamara Stone Iorio, embracing culture to advance development.

The fortunate results?

An international way of life right here in Middle America.

How are you involved in your local community?

Are you looking and seeking an expansion of how you see your home place as a global living room, unique and at the same time all connected, universally connected?

I'm Judy O' Bannon.

Thank you for watching.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Generous support provided by the Bible Family Fund of the Denver Foundation and the O'Bannon Foundation, a fund of the Indianapolis Foundation.