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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Butts and more butts: clean-up day, 2009

I went out this Saturday morning with my daughter for Cleanup Day. We decided to work on our immediate neighborhood rather than on one of the main streets.  Our neighborhood needed it badly. (For those not in Fairbanks, Cleanup Day is an annual ritual here, where hundreds — if not thousands — of Fairbanksans — [...]

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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: [...]

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“Third place” review: Big Daddy’s BBQ

I don’t do restaurant reviews, per se: they’re usually largely focused on the quality of the food, and this is not a “food” blog.  However, this is a “public space” blog, so I may, from time to time, review retail establishments (including food service) to discuss how they do at creating good meeting places. Big [...]

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Crowding — sweet, sweet crowding

One of the pleasures I’ve had since resuming bus ridership a couple of weeks ago is seeing the buses so full. Last winter, I took the bus to work every day.  Usually, there were no more than five people on the bus at any one time, including me and the driver.  On the ride home, [...]

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Home insecurity system

My wife, my daughters, and I went a couple of weekends ago to a birthday party for another friend’s child — and it’s got me all down about the place where I live. We live in the upper floor of a two-story house downtown, renting out the basement apartment.  Not counting our deck or the [...]

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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 [...]

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Misanthropes in our midst

I often think that, in Fairbanks, I must be seen as some kind of pervert. At a recent work meeting about re-visioning our reference services, we were asked to describe our ideal reference service.  I suggested that we should offer, in one place, all the things students would want to hunker down and study: not [...]

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Why do we hate teenagers?

Why do we hate teenagers so much? What made them an acceptable target for disenfranchisement? On one of my professional e-mail lists, somebody brought up a problem with teenage skateboarders: they love to use the covered walkway in front of a facility frequented by senior citizens with visual and mobility challenges. Too often (I presume) [...]

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The bench test

My travels sometimes take me to Anchorage — often enough, by car. It was on one of those trips, in the past year or two, that I devised a simple measure of a place’s pedestrian-friendliness: the bench test. I drove in on the George Parks Highway, entered the city at Muldoon Road, and turned west [...]

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