Hey, where’s the freshness?
Hi, there. Thanks for dropping by. If you’re here seeking your weekly dose of community perspective, we’ve got some news for you. It’s become increasingly apparent to us here at PlaceShakers that our Friday publishing schedule is a bit counter-intuitive. After all, here we are at the end of the week, trying to gear up…
Read MorePunk Rock and the New Urbanism: Getting back to basics
By the early to mid 1970s, something was wrong with rock and roll. It no longer fought the system. Worse than that, it had become the system. Bloated. Detached. Pretentious. Performer and audience, once fused in a mutual quest to stick it to the man, now existed on separate planes — an increasingly complacent generation…
Read MoreOn the Street: The DNA of place and the ROI of movement
The corporate culture of our government has been a carte blanche to keep doing what we’ve been doing. This culture implies that what we’ve been doing works. In business, last year’s income statement is a major driver in this year’s action plan. If a product or service was profitable, then it’s nurtured and grown this…
Read MorePolitics & Public Process: The Half-Life of Anger
Maybe it’s like the argument that given enough time, a chimp with a keyboard would eventually hammer out Hamlet, but I’m thinking the messy GOP presidential campaign is inching its way towards clarity. Not that the process will produce outcomes extreme partisans will like. Disappointment is often the byproduct of a clarifying experience, especially if…
Read MoreRolling with Ever-Changing Gas Prices: Lessons from my dumb luck
The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Op-Ed pages took on the subject of gas prices this week, devoting a good fifty column inches to a discussion that could otherwise be summarized like this: The price of gas might increase by anywhere from a few pennies to a dollar this year. It might also go down, but then…
Read MorePlaying Tea Party: Planning and Agenda 21
2011 is over, but not forgotten. Indeed, in the planning world, it will be remembered as the year when many planners across the country began fielding smart growth policy objections from Tea Party supporters and those concerned about the U.N’s Agenda 21. No shortage of articles and blog posts, written in tones that drip with…
Read MoreThe Next Urbanism
‘Tis the season to rejoice and enjoy the brotherhood of all mankind, as well as that of our in-laws… As we ease into 2012, I am officially announcing a New Urbanism victory across North America, as we recently witnessed the end of building suburbia and its physically isolated, segregated lifestyle. Proof? Just this week, the…
Read MoreRetail: When it bends the rules and breaks the law.
Getting ready for a TEDx talk in a few weeks, I’ve once again been noticing how the places that I love the most usually break the law. The contemporary development codes and bylaws, that is, which are geared to the car, not to the pedestrian and cyclist. Then last week’s urban retail SmartCode tweetchat with…
Read MoreGetting Beyond ‘Mad as Hell’: Here’s hoping for a civic afterlife
On December 14, Time magazine announced its 2011 “Person of the Year.” And as it’s occasionally done in the past (Remember the choice of “You” in 2006?), the mag opted for a broad zeitgeist capture as opposed to settling on just one person. This time around it’s The Protester. “Is there a global tipping point…
Read MoreResilience: It’s who ya know.
If there’s one thing the 20th century gave us, it’s the luxury of not needing each other. It so defines our culture that it’s physically embodied in our sprawling, disconnected landscapes. That alone begs a classic, chicken-n-egg question: Did the leisurely lure of the suburbs kill our sense of community? Were our social ties unwittingly…
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