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Placemaking: Preserve, repair, intensify

By PlaceMakers | October 10, 2014 | 5

Placemaking often comes down to preserving, repairing, or intensifying urban or rural landscapes with public spaces at the heart of each neighborhood. Creative placemaking can take that to another level, helping to tease out the character of a place and celebrate it in an unusually insightful and invigorating way. A way that reaches deeper into…

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Little Free Winnipeg Libraries

By PlaceMakers | July 17, 2014 | 2

Enjoying the multiple conversations that Monday’s piece started about Little Free Libraries, I can’t help but share the two that our family has been enjoying this summer. In doing so, there’s a striking difference between the development pattern of Monday’s neighbourhood in Kansas versus this 100-year-old Winnipeg neighbourhood in which I live. Do those development…

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Celebrating Public Art: Chicago in the summer

By PlaceMakers | July 7, 2014 | 3

A recent trip to Chicago on the first weekend of summer reinforced the importance of great public art. After a particularly harsh winter, the welcoming parks, squares, and plazas of the city were burgeoning with people soaking in the sunshine. Coming home to talk with my husband, who happens to be an art museum director,…

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Tea Party Taps Hippie Wisdom: How’s that working out?

By PlaceMakers | May 12, 2014 | 3

So I’m sitting in one of those community meetings we’ve all become familiar with of late. A local Tea Party type is making a passionate pitch for what his group considers Constitutional guarantees against government planning, and I get this deju vu tug. I’ve been here before. I’VE BEEN THIS BEFORE.

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Getting Stuff Done: The whole point of planning, no?

By PlaceMakers | February 17, 2014 | 4

High on my list of must-read columnists is James Surowiecki of The New Yorker. His “Twilight of the Brands” piece in the February 17-24 edition provides a good example of how he takes apart outworn axioms of business success, then, from the wreckage, assembles a model better suited for the here and now.

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Old School Strategies for Connectivity (Hint: Batteries not required)

By PlaceMakers | August 5, 2013 | 1

For years, I’ve been jotting down inverse relationships as they crop up in my professional and personal life. Here, for instance, is one from my previous career as a journalist: The quality of reporting at any event is inversely proportional to the number of reporters covering it. Think Super Bowls, political conventions and the birth…

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Sustainability: What’s in a word?

By PlaceMakers | August 1, 2013 | 6

The places we inhabit are rarely if ever arbitrary. They’re the products of intention. Personal. Economic. Environmental. Religious. We choose for ourselves, individually and collectively, the kind of places we want and — through leadership, policy, investment, advocacy, action and, at times, inaction — those places begin to take form. It’s a complicated dance of…

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Zoning Our Way to HOA Insanity

By PlaceMakers | June 20, 2013 | 18

I’m big on local. Not because I hate Walmart and 3,000 mile Caesar salads but because, as I see it, communities built on human-scaled, interdependent systems are better suited to taking on the challenges and opportunities presented by time. That’s why, when it comes to the decisions that most directly impact day-to-day quality of life,…

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Comp Planning Off the Beaten Path

By PlaceMakers | May 20, 2013 | 1

I tend to take the road less traveled. For whatever reason, conventional approaches have never interested me. And the process I came up with for my city’s comp plan was no different. Why? Well, first off, conventionalism leads to….. “BORING!” (Yell it out like no one can hear you!)

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The Pendulum Shifts: Expertise is now suspect

By PlaceMakers | May 6, 2013 | 13

Slow and steady progress is built on an ongoing series of course corrections. Subtle variations in direction based on new variables, new challenges, and new innovations. As times and circumstances change, some things inevitably become less productive. Or effective. Or conducive to contemporary sensibilities. So, we make changes. Historically, they’ve been made by a matter…

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