Community fascinates me. Not just the idea of it, but the dynamics, and how those dynamics end up stoking or choking our collective efforts to be together. Having worked in a lot of different places, I’ve had opportunity to study community in action, at both its strongest and weakest, in all different contexts — economic, political, cultural — and have tried to identify patterns that lead to results.
January 28, 2013 | 9:46 am
Corrosion of Community: Impossible standards as an excuse for inaction
January 17, 2013 | 12:01 am
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 ticker tape, via personal antenna.
And what was their take on such innovation? Did they savor the prospect of a new age of enlightenment, empowered by ever-improving access to information and to each other?
December 3, 2012 | 9:13 am
Walmart 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 immediately begin projecting their own principles; or their beliefs; their biases; their satisfactions; their frustrations.
October 29, 2012 | 12:01 am
Can Cities Help You Forget Your Troubles? C’mon, Get Happy!
In most physical and policy planning, triple bottom line benchmarks focus on environment and economy, and tend to skim over the subject of society. That’s probably because urban design impacts are much easier to measure with respect to profit and planet than they are with respect to people.
Any good MBA professor preaches, “What gets measured gets done.” For several generations, we’ve been proving that point with our relentless focus on measuring our collective success via a host of global economic indicators. Since An Inconvenient Truth
October 4, 2012 | 12:01 am
Seven Keys to Stronger Community
In sustainability’s triple bottom line of profits, planet and people, it’s people that tend to get the shaft. There’s an entire industry surrounding environmental advocacy and we can always count on business interests to fight for stable economies, but what about the social resilience of our communities?
Personally, I consider the social leg to be the most critical, as I’m unconvinced that we’ll ever be able to effectively handle the challenges of the other two — especially at the local level in times of turmoil and change — in the absence of the rich social interdependencies that used to define us.
Get reconnected first. Then save the planet and the economy.
September 13, 2012 | 12:20 am
Places that Pay: Benefits of placemaking
When we updated and republished the Codes Study last week, I was deeply encouraged by all of you who expressed support. Thank you! From Rome to Finland to the UAE and across North America, I enjoyed the conversations and online exchanges regarding this group of towns and cities that are using character-based land use laws to guide proactive, locally-driven efforts to improve quality-of-life and become more economically competitive.
Others of you were asking for insights for how to get this change rolling at home, looking for value capture. Many reports quantify the value of the sorts of livable, walkable places that a form-based code generates. Here is a selection of studies that help make the case for walkability.
July 30, 2012 | 12:01 am
Dogs vs. SUVs, and other silly distractions
While it’s admittedly dated in relation to internet time, this recent Upworthy post resurrects a 2009 New Scientist article comparing the environmental footprints of household pets vs. those of various vehicles. Its soundbite takeaway? Your medium-sized dog has roughly twice the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser.
Guess it’s time to issue some formal letters of apology to the owners of plus-sized roadsters and start setting up euthanasia camps for our former furry friends and their silent agenda to destroy the earth, right?
December 2, 2011 | 12:01 am
Resilience: 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 severed by the meandering disconnection of subdivisions and strip malls or was sprawl just a symptom of something larger? After all, for all their rewards, meaningful relationships take a lot of work. Perhaps, once the modern world elevated our prospects for personal independence, we cut those ties ourselves, willingly, lest our happy motoring be weighted down with excess baggage.
Sprawl: form following function.
April 15, 2011 | 9:00 am
“Sustainability” is so ten years ago — Let’s talk “Resilience”
Deep in an April 14 New York Times story on the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was mention of an iPhone app called Yurekuru that gives warning of an impending quake. The name, said the Times, translates into English roughly as, “the shaking is coming.”
Before the March 11 quake, the app attracted 100,000 users. Now: 1.5 million.
In a sense, living organisms could always be fairly certain that a shaking of some kind was on the way. Life on earth has been shaped by violence, by sudden upheavals and reversals of fortune for one hapless population or another. Foreboding is written into the human psyche. It’s only recently that we’ve felt entitled to be spared.
