Tag: Guest Shaker Tuesday
To Those Proud and Exuberant Promoters of Town, City and State: I say thank you!
In this extended holiday essay, explorer / spelunker / observer John Watts delivers an everyman's take on Chesterton's oft-noted adage: Places don't become loved because they are great; they become great because they are loved. Does your town invite "word-of-mouth walking?"
I am always profoundly moved and impacted... Continue Reading
Category Community Development, Experience
Urban Happiness Index, Expanded
Hazel Borys’ ideas on the Healthy Places Index yesterday brought to mind some of my own thoughts on the matter -- thoughts in excess of what might reasonably be tolerated in the comments section. Thanks to PlaceMakers for providing me the opportunity to share them here.
On Saturday at a used bookstore, I picked up... Continue Reading
New Urban Development: Too risky, too costly. Not.
I just heard from a colleague who had a developer tell him something along the lines of: "New Urbanism is too risky and too expensive because, you know, Kentlands failed." That’s not an uncommon belief. What is uncommon, however, for anyone on the receiving end of such broad brush generalizations, is an easy response... Continue Reading
Category Development, Sales and Marketing
An Ode to Old Towns
PlaceShakers takes a very literal step off our comfortably beaten paths of urban design, zoning reform and community resiliency today to focus on, as the software industry calls it, the "end-user experience." Despite, or perhaps because of, having no vocational connection to placemaking at all, explorer / spelunker / observer... Continue Reading
Category Experience
A Municipal Planner’s Call to Arms (and Legs, Hearts and Lungs)
The obesity epidemic isn’t really “news” anymore (thank you, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution) yet when I question my friends who work outside the fields of design and planning on why Americans are so fat, they tie everything back to poor food choices. But what about exercise? They reply that if you want to exercise,... Continue Reading
Category Planning and Design, Public Policy