If you’ve been following our work here, you know we have a soft spot for Katrina Cottages and the neighborhood design movement they inspired. And you also know some of us — okay, me — have been grumpy about the way Tiny House talk has sucked oxygen out of the discussion of small scale homes in small scale neighborhoods. So it was great to see last week’s “Public Square” Q&A with two of the design pioneers behind Katrina Cottages, Marianne Cusato and Bruce Tolar.
March 7, 2017 | 5:26 pm
Small Goes Big: The Katrina Cottage Connection
February 28, 2017 | 1:29 pm
Placemaking: Geek niche or the root of pretty much everything?
When I first developed my interest in placemaking twenty years ago it was driven by design. I was a brand advertising person which, by necessity, involves the study of behavior. Not just of people but of their context.
Where and how people choose to live, I learned, provided a lot of insight into the kinds of things advertisers care about. Circumstances. Values. Aspirations. The things people choose to buy to get through their everyday lives.
It doesn’t tell you everything, of course, and for every broad stroke there’s no shortage of individuals who defy the generalization. But still, when you’re observing people in the aggregate, there’s a lot of content there.
February 21, 2017 | 8:26 am
Want to Improve Your City? Start taking pictures
In Chuck Wolfe’s absorbing new book, Seeing the Better City, he encourages readers to think with our eyes and communicate with visual imagery in order to improve our cities. With the proliferation of smartphone cameras and an endless array of easily accessible, web-based platforms on which to display them, virtually everyone is now a photographer. And, with cities on the ascendance, many of them confronting both excitement and worries about growth and development, more people than ever want to make them as hospitable as possible. It’s time to put those trends together, argues Wolfe, and use our eyes and our cameras “to explore, observe, and improve urban space,” to quote the book’s subtitle.
January 31, 2017 | 12:19 am
The Trifecta: Urbanism, architecture, and nature
We often blog on the benefits of nature integrated into urbanism and wellbeing outcomes of walkability. The real trifecta is when walkable urbanism, human-scale architecture, and nature come together via placemaking. A recent study from the University of Warwick points out that a scenic view delivers equal health benefits to access to nature: “Cohesion of architecture and design boosts people’s health and happiness, not just the number of parks and trees.”
January 24, 2017 | 1:50 pm
Hey, Buddy: Adult friendships and the future of our communities
David Roberts over at Vox posted a new piece recently — “How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult” — that really got me thinking.
In it, he builds upon ideas previously explored in The Atlantic and makes a compelling case that forging new relationships as an adult — the ones we characterize as genuine friendships — is simply more difficult in places that aren’t particularly walkable and where participation in one’s surroundings requires a car most of the time.
January 17, 2017 | 3:14 am
Nature Cities: Wellness and public space
The idea of rewilding started out as a movement to conserve, restore, and reconnect natural areas, and has expanded to how we reintegrate ancient practices into our modern lives. From a flat-footed squat to full emersion in nature to structured programs like ReWild Portland, the idea of letting go of some of our domestication to reconnect with nature is compelling. From a city planning perspective, the human rewilding ideas that interest me the most are the inspiration of cities, towns and villages that are making nature more accessible to our everyday habits. And the paybacks for those efforts. When nature is integrated into urbanism, wellness surges.
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December 20, 2016 | 12:40 pm
Nature’s Healing Ways
The other day while walking my dog, I was trying to count the ways nature makes us healthier, as a means of distracting myself from the fact that the temperature was -40, with wind chill. That’s the point where Celsius and Fahrenheit converge. However, since this is my 9th winter in my beloved Winnipeg – one of the three coldest big cities on earth – I was dressed for the occasion and was keeping to the sidewalks in the active core. Here tight setbacks and street trees provide shelter from the wind, neighbourhood shops and cafés offer places to stop in and warm up, and short blocks provide plenty of places to turn around when the time is right.
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December 7, 2016 | 2:01 pm
Achieving Community: Let’s get real
Not so long ago, Kristen Jeffers (who blogs as the Black Urbanist) shared an article over at Afropunk called “The Caucasian’s Guide to Black Neighborhoods.” It’s very, very funny, and particularly useful reading for anyone who’s more interested in our ability to build meaningful communities than in the more prevalent discussion of who, in any particular place, does or does not belong.
November 8, 2016 | 1:03 pm
NIMBY, I Hardly Knew Ye
Last week I stepped back in time a bit to revisit the idea of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard opponents to development) and consider anew whether their tenacious aversions earn them the lauding of heroes or the disdain we reserve for villains and scoundrels.
As I said then, in many cases, NIMBYs have kept the world from becoming a worse place, and that’s no small feat. But they’ve also kept the world from becoming a better place because their reactionary nature can’t seem to tell the difference between bad change and good.
October 25, 2016 | 12:52 pm
The City as NORC: It’s the people thing
When The New York Times used my wife and me as examples in a story about retirees’ growing preferences for urban life, it was a chance to literally walk the talk.
I’ve been writing about my Baby Boomer cohort for all my career, first in the ‘60s alternative press, then in newspaper and magazine stories as we aged through what is probably the longest adolescence in world history. The chance we’ll grow up before we die? Even money. But here’s something you can bet on:
The generation that moved markets at every stage of our lives is likely to have something left for a finale. And maybe it’s a walk-off nudge in the direction of neighborhood and community design.
