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Archive for the 'cities' Category

Road warriors

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

The other day I saw a car with New Hampshire license plates and a school sticker from a nearby private school parked in my neighborhood. I surmised that the driver, an attractive early-40s woman who was fiddling with her phone, was in all likelihood the parent of a student at the well-regarded school. The school […]

Plans for Salem’s Harbor Power Station: Realpolitik or Missed Opportunity?

Monday, July 9th, 2012

The Salem Harbor Power Station will close in June 2014. Initially, the field looked wide open for exciting new redevelopments, but now it appears that the site might see another power plant. Strike one for Realpolitik, zero for vision? Green Drinks invited Jan Schlichtmann, Lori Ehrlich, et al., to debate on June 26, 2012.

City of villages

Monday, December 19th, 2011

A city of villages: that’s what they call Portland, and it’s true. Clustered along most major corridors, it seems, nodes of vibrant market activity suddenly appear – and if the shops are indies, they look to be thriving and attracting lots of customers. I wrote previously (here and here) that the city strikes me as […]

Should downtown parking be (partly) free?

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

I’ve been harboring a heretical thought in the wake of spending some time in the Bay Area this June: maybe cities of a certain size do better if they make at least some free parking available for downtown shoppers. Stopping in Palo Alto often during my Bay Area visit, I finally figured out that Palo […]

Soundscape in San Jose

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Short discussion on what works in San Jose’s Cesar Chavez Plaza, a great public space that draws a diverse community together for play and recreation.

Worse than Katrina? Anti-density bombs over Detroit

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

Caught a Sept.23 post by David Byrne today, Don’t Forget the Motor City (found via a tweet by Richard Florida). Byrne writes: This is a city that still has an infrastructure, or some of it, for 2 million people, and now only 800,000 remain. One rides down majestic boulevards with only a few cars on […]

Dirty Wall Project: slums and cities

Friday, September 24th, 2010

I saw an amazing photograph in the temporary gallery Ryan Kane of the Dirty Wall Project has set up on Fort Street. The photo is one of many that Kane is selling to raise funds for his venture: it’s a flat, saturated, picture-edge-to-picture-edge frontal view of one small piece of a slum in Saki Naka […]

Cougar (in Victoria)

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Late Monday night, my next-door neighbor spotted a cougar on the patch of lawn in front of the townhouse across the street from us on Rockland Avenue. She had intended to move her vehicle from her property to my street (Pentrelew) around the corner, but the cougar – which did not appear frightened by the […]

On re-reading Biophilic Design: Taking Love to the Street

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Since I’m fuming in a conversation over on Facebook about the City of Victoria’s Department of Engineering (which seems to me benighted), I was reminded of my 2007 article, Biophilic Design: Taking Love to the Street (the link goes to the Scribd version). Not to sound too much like I’m tooting my own horn, but […]

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