My home town in Australia is one of those places where the main street is the center of the world.

‘Doing a few laps’ on a Saturday morning is a ritual for locals, and the only way to find out what is going on in town, who is home, who is sick, how many tons of fish came in last night, and what the council are doing about fixing up the old cannery buildings.

You talk about nothing, and everything.

This is how small towns like this function — it is an essential part of their survival.

We might know this as “the grapevine”, but this type of interaction has been a key feature of all the best cities throughout history.

In ancient Rome and Greece these were the plazas and squares, where conferences were held, as were floggings.

Town squares were the center of the social world too, where citizens went to mix, which led to conversation, the sharing of ideas and information, and to philosophy.

All of this promoted an understanding of ones immediate environment which is not a feature of how we live today.

For whatever reason, common areas like these have in the recent past been largely forgotten by modern town planners.

Whereas older, more traditionally planned cities like Issaquah are blessed with a ‘naturally’ occurring plaza, the main street, newer cities which are developed along the modern strip mall concept offer little in the way of pedestrian, social interaction. It is hard to shoot the breeze, or share a common experience, at 40 mph.

So I was pleased to hear about the plans for the Sammamish Town Center, a development which will hopefully provide not only further opportunities for the expansion of commerce but also fields of common public experience.

Its planners have been inspired by those ancient plazas, which fostered societies of unparalleled philosophic query, and advanced art and culture in a time when the spoken word was weighty, and the written word could only be disseminated as far as one could pass it from hand to hand.

As I visit the Sammamish Commons, or sit down for lunch at Jak’s, I see that people around here have not forgotten the importance of ‘the grapevine’.

I am a believer in the concept of communities being measured by the vibrancy of their communications – the ability of citizens to stay connected to what concerns their neighbors, and to understand and contribute to the discussions in the plaza which might determine their futures.

In the absence of a plaza big enough to hold every citizen, community newspapers provide the forum for comment, criticism, projection and rally.

You can judge the strength of a community paper by the size of its “Letters to the Editor” section.

It shows that the locals understand that in many ways they own the paper, and that without their investment ours is a hollow and unimportant job. By that measure The Reporter has some growing to do. Perhaps, as relative newcomers to the area, we have not yet tuned in truly to the pulse of the city and it’s citizens.

As the editor one of my missions is to encourage all residents to use the pages of this paper as their plaza — the place to go to get on the soapbox and have a dig, to praise, or to promote.

We are increasingly removed from the older concepts of society, physically and culturally, by highways and cars and digital advancements.

But these plazas and forums and town squares still exist, in the pages of community newspapers.

I encourage anyone who wants to stay connected to their city and their community to join me, here in the Letters to the Editor pages. It is where we should go to spark the kind of conversations that energize communities.