Corrosion of Community: Impossible standards as an excuse for inaction
Community fascinates me. Not just the idea of it, but the dynamics, and how those dynamics end up stoking or choking our collective efforts to be together. Having worked in a lot of different places, I’ve had opportunity to study community in action, at both its strongest and weakest, in all different contexts — economic,…
Read MorePublic Process and the Perils of Dismissive Engagement
“What would you like to see here?” And there it is. Perhaps the most inane question ever posed in the course of a public design process. And posed it is, constantly. “We’re doing a master plan for downtown. What would you like to see here?” It’s crazy. In one sweeping question, practitioners not only set…
Read MoreNext Urbanism Lab 04: Dare to live outdoors
As we re-populate our downtowns, and watch the crime statistics drop, people are seeing safety in numbers. Jane Jacobs was right about eyes on the street reducing crime. With the sense that it’s indeed safe to be in cities again, it appears that citizens are re-learning how to be connected in an urban context. Downtown’s…
Read MoreWe’re All Connected: Too bad more is not necessarily the same as better
Roughly two hundred years ago, working in a little Bavarian workshop, Samuel Soemmering created a crude device that, refined by others, would revolutionize communications for the emerging industrial age: the telegraph. A hundred years thereafter, post-Victorians began to ponder its evolution — wireless telegraphy — in which individuals would receive telegraph messages, printed out on…
Read MoreThe End is Near, Part II: Leveraging imminent doom as ‘Grand Strategy’
This is maybe one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for moments. But I’m spinning it upside all the way. In one previous post, I griped about planning’s synaptic delay dilemma. When it comes to the really big issues of our time, the time lapse between doing stupid stuff and suffering the consequences is too great to dissuade us…
Read MoreBackyard Chickens: WWI-Era Solution to Almost Everything
Over the course of the past six or eight decades, certain things have come to define, in part, our modern existence: Making a living out of your home has been increasingly restricted, especially in predominantly residential areas; the production of goods has fallen to fewer and larger hands; and we’ve now heard just about all…
Read MoreRural Preservation: One more reason to care about cities
We talk a lot on PlaceShakers about urbanism, but less about one of our big drivers: rural preservation. Compact development patterns could have dramatically decreased the 41 million acres of rural land that the US lost to development from 1982 to 2007. That’s almost the size of the State of Washington. Clearly, we can’t keep…
Read MoreSeven Placemaking Wishes for 2013
With the dawning of 2013, the interwebs are awash in lists detailing exactly what to watch out for in the coming year and, in a way, this is one more of those. But not exactly. Though firmly rooted in placemaking trends that have gained notable traction over the past year, this list contains not so…
Read MoreGathering Places: Providers of comfort and joy
To wish you the happiest of holidays, I’d like to share some recent thoughts about the importance of gathering places both in the public and private realm, particularly as it relates to children, solace, and song. In celebration of the season, those places — when well planned and cultivated — become particularly poignant. Take private…
Read MoreSolid Buildings Last: A tale of public housing, reborn
Earlier this month, as Hazel mentioned in her city-as-running-buddy post last week, our travels took us to Wilmington, North Carolina, where we were doing some long-term master planning for a neighboring town. Part of that job involved a tour around the area, scoping out different models and precedents, and that’s when we stumbled into South…
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