Posts Tagged ‘Scott Doyon’
American Makeover Debut:
“Seaside: The City of Ideas”
Following up on their debut episode, “Sprawlanta,” the good folks at First + Main Media have unveiled the latest installment in their “American Makeover” documentary series: “Seaside: The City of Ideas.” (Disclosure: PlaceMakers is a sponsor of the series.) In it, town designer Andrés Duany leads a guided tour through New Urbanism’s most iconic project,…
Read MoreThe Pendulum Shifts: Expertise is now suspect
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…
Read MoreI Just Live Here: Welcome to the suburbs, deconstructed
Taking shots at the suburbs is like playing bass in a garage band: Easy to do, but hard to do well. After all, their original intent — an idyllic melding of town and country, with all the advantages of both — implied a tranquil, family-friendly promise that, over time, has proven notoriously unfulfilled. Surely that’s…
Read MorePlacemaking Gets Freaky
I’m a freak magnet. For reasons unknown, the more, err, colorful characters of the public realm seem to find my personal space especially attractive. If I go to a midday matinée and another patron — let’s say an agitated mumbler in a trench coat with shoes crudely fashioned out of car wash sponges — joins…
Read MoreChoosing to Overlook the Obvious
I live in an old house that overlooks a single-track CSX rail line. Between my front gate and the train is a two-lane, neighborhood-edge thoroughfare with a speed limit of 35 mph and an average speed closer to 40. Though it functions as an in-town, city street, it’s classified as a state highway by the…
Read MorePlanning for People
It wasn’t intentional but a look back at the past few weeks of PlaceShakers reveals that we’ve been working a bit of a theme. It began when I wrote about the failure of planners to ask meaningful questions, and how that not only sets the stage for unmet community expectations, but devalues the art and…
Read MoreGet to Know the Awkwardly-Named “Terminated Vista”
I’ll admit it: I wish there was a more user-friendly way to say “terminated vista.” Perhaps I’m more sensitive to it because, as regular readers here know, I’m not an urban designer. I just work with them. That means I’m more inclined to scratch my head like any other layperson when I hear wonky expressions…
Read MoreCorrosion 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 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…
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