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” page.)  [...]

Read Full Post »

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 to [...]

Read Full Post »

San Francisco reflections (part two)

This post continues “San Francisco reflections (part one)“.

I’d like to show a few of my photos of San Francisco, and to discuss some relevant points about city planning and public spaces.
Perhaps the first thing is a peculiar attitude among many Fairbanksans: that living in close proximity to others is somehow undignified.  I say: Oh, nonsense.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Fairbanks Pedestrian on Energy-Wise (Fairbanks AM radio)

Just a week ago, I got my first radio interview: I talked for 20 minutes with Marielle Smith, the producer of Energy-Wise.  The short segment played Monday morning on Newsradio 970 KFBX (and perhaps the other local Clear Channel stations).  We covered:

Our denied pedestrian right;
The social aspects of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods and cities;
The need for and [...]

Read Full Post »

Neighborhood clean-up, Saturday, September 13

Good news, city-dwelling neighborhood-lovers!
Weed & Seed is organizing a fall Clean-Up Day, next Saturday, Sepetmber 13.  This is a great chance to make our neighborhoods look great before the snow falls.
According to their Fall newsletter (pdf, about 1.45 MB):
Weed & Seed partners are hosting a Gathering of Neighbors for the first annual Community-wide Fall Cleanup [...]

Read Full Post »

“Fairbanks after $10-per-gallon gasoline” — Clucking Blossom report

I reported a week and a half ago that I’d be giving a workshop at the fourth annual Clucking Blossom festival, on the future of city planning and neighborhoods in Fairbanks after $10-per-gallon gasoline. I’m happy to report that the workshop was well attended, and that my audience gave lots of participation.
Following is a [...]

Read Full Post »

A pedestrian pocket

I recently visited a friend on Fairbanks Street, in an area I haven’t regarded too highly in the past. I discovered some of its hidden virtues that make it one of Fairbanks’s pockets of pedestrian-friendliness.
This is something I think about often: What will we do when gasoline becomes so horrendously expensive that it’s no [...]

Read Full Post »

What to do during TV Turnoff Week?

As you may have learned from the News-Miner or elsewhere, it is currently TV Turnoff Week (April 21-27) — a chance for us to power down the tube and do something a little healthier or more creative. But what to do?
Based on the readers of this blog whom I know, turning off the television [...]

Read Full Post »

What’s going on in your neighborhood? How would you find out?

One of the drawbacks of newspapers, except in the smallest of towns, is that their coverage of neighborhood events — things of concern primarily or only to those in your neighborhood — is necessarily limited. Newspapers have to cover things that interest a large part of their readership. While some of the events [...]

Read Full Post »

On the benefits of neighborhoods

Many members of my religious body love to talk about the spiritual uplift they get from nature. (In this context, nature means something like “the outdoors”, places where they do not see the touch of humanity.) Among people for whom care of the earth is a religious calling, such a sentiment is common. [...]

Read Full Post »