Ten important places

Here’s a nice way to measure your neighborhood: Do you have ten interesting places? I’ve just begun The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Placemaking by Jay Walljasper — a concise and uplifting guide to making a neighborhood not only worth living in, but worth envying.  (I have added it to my “Further reading” [...]

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The Watershed School: local interest vs. local access

I may be heading to some kind of Pedestrian Hell: I have enrolled my daughter, a first-grader-to-be, in a charter school. Actually, The Watershed School, which opens this fall, has a component that should make pedestrian-types long to send their kids there: it focuses on “place-based” education, in which students focus on their local communities [...]

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Distinct local character versus individuality?

A thorny question has arisen at Discontinuous Permafrost: what does it mean for a place to have local character, or for people to have local character? I want to live in a place with a distinctive character, not someplace that looks like everywhere else. (On this theme, I heartily recommend James Howard Kunstler’s Geography of [...]

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