Community Development
We’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 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 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…
Read MoreTo 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 by those special strangers I’ve had the…
Read MoreHomelessness: Testing the boundaries of “health, safety and welfare”
Homelessness is an everyday issue that gets a little additional attention during the holidays. A recent HUD report estimated that, on a single night, 633,782 people are homeless across the United States. What surprised me and others, however, was the fact that, after New York and Los Angeles, it’s San Diego, our 8th largest city…
Read MoreWalmart and the Quest for a Better Mousetrap
“I don’t shop at Walmart.” Talk about a loaded phrase. Five simple words, but issue them collectively and you effectively open a Pandora’s Box of suggestion: Where you stand economically. Where you stand politically. How you feel about the environment. Or localism. Or capitalism. It’s like erecting a giant movie screen upon which other people…
Read MoreMunicipal Placemaking Mistakes 03: The importance of a meaningful vision
In our last post in this series, we covered the three steps of placemaking. The first of these steps, crafting a meaningful vision, is the most straightforward, yet it is also the most underleveraged. It is underleveraged because communities do not understand its political implications. As a result they do not adequately invest in getting…
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Creative Placemaking:
From here until now
We’ve been talking for the last few weeks about how happiness and health are generated or depleted by the way our neighbourhoods, towns, cities, and rural landscapes are developed – here, here, and here. We’ve been discussing these ideas in national terms, looking at indices and trends. During this study, I couldn’t help but reflect…
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