Tag: Steve Mouzon
The Passion of Place
David Byrne noted in last Sunday's NY Times that people get hooked on cycling because of pleasure, not health, money, or carbon footprint. "Emotional gratification trumps reason."
Ben Brown agrees, using Byrne's "Stop Making Sense" as a blog title on the subject of community engagement and how special interest groups... Continue Reading
Get Your Garden Room Right
It's that time of year here in central New Mexico when I start eating lunch in my courtyard so I can watch the tomatoes turn red. I’m reminded while sitting here of a visit from Steve Mouzon of the Original Green who was lecturing at the University of New Mexico.
(more…) Continue Reading
Building a Custom, Multi-Century House for Under $80 a Square Foot
Affordability is a tough nut to crack. For decades, the production housing industry has operated under a simple premise: Americans value space above all else. If you want to make a house more affordable, you build the same house with lower quality materials and cheaper details.
Goodbye four-sides brick, hello one-side... Continue Reading
Entice, Don’t Coerce: The pleasures of green by design
Living in a century home with passive air and choosing cycling as my primary mode of transportation during this unusually warm summer may sound like hardcore Greenie behavior, but it’s been particularly satisfying.
This enjoyment of a modernized take on methods that have worked for generations has made me pick up... Continue Reading
CNU 19: The Uprising
Like my anniversary, family birthdays and selected holidays, the Congress for the New Urbanism is an annual ceremony that I faithfully attend. My lovely wife would confirm that I never question the necessary time and money spent to participate in the congresses. And, as expected, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at CNU 19... Continue Reading
The Future of Planning: Going meta
“In a world where the peddlers of invention dominate progressive discourse, a willingness to acknowledge--let alone heed--the lessons of history and tradition is a truly radical act.” --Scott Doyon
Check the wiki-hip Urban Dictionary (or watch an episode of Community on NBC) and you’ll find the term meta’s common... Continue Reading
Category Planning and Design, Public Policy
Form-Based Codes? A picture’s worth a thousand words
If the attendees list of Placemaking@Work, my monthly webinar series, is any indicator, we’re increasingly united in our desire to improve the places we call home, wherever those places might be. Last month, I had participants from Hawaii to Russia, from British Columbia to Saudi Arabia, and many points in between.
The... Continue Reading
Gettin’ Paid: Placemaking and the Importance of Compensation
Over a decade ago Andres Duany of DPZ taught me that, more times than not, NIMBY opposition stems from a sense that proposed development is not of equal or greater value to what would be lost.
Tony Nelessen, the inventor of the Visual Preference Survey, confirmed this lesson a few years later when he came to my town... Continue Reading
Dancing with Urban Agriculture
My lovely wife of eight years enjoys really bad television. For better or worse, last night she tricked me into watching a segment of 'Dancing with the Stars.' Coyly, she asked me to name the movies in which the dancing ‘star’ had ‘starred’.
Having no idea and starting my way back upstairs, I heard her mimicking... Continue Reading
Today’s “Eco-Warriors”: Giving Them Something Worth Fighting For
This week I’d like to share a few thoughts on infill and sustainability that coalesced while preparing this week for another Pecha Kucha presentation on Retrofitting Suburbia.
I’ll begin with a little background. My daughter came home from her International Baccalaureate Elementary School with a new sticker in her... Continue Reading