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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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 [...]

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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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Fairbanks Pedestrian at Clucking Blossom this Saturday (tomorrow)!

This Saturday (May 17), join me at Clucking Blossom for a discussion on the future of neighborhoods and city planning amid rising gasoline prices. Clucking Blossom is an annual festival of music, art, and ideas. It is absolutely free of charge — in fact, no cash is allowed to change hands on the day of [...]

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Quotations for the day

As you may know, I’ve been reading Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. (In fact, I’ve been reading it for months. Now that I’ve started biking to and from work rather than riding the bus, it’s taking me [...]

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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 [...]

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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 in your [...]

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Who loves drunk driving? We do! or, Why every neighborhood should have a tavern

Usually, I try to present my own thoughts and words here. But in The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg so beautifully implicates us in our drunken-driving fatalities that I’ll just quote him here: Many middle-class Americans escape the boredom of their neighborhoods in various kinds of drinking establishments that must be reached by automobile. [...]

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More lessons from school than those within the walls

Edited 2 April 2008 My wife and I have been confronted with a choice — one that is available mostly to those in our privileged social condition, but a difficult one: where should we send our children to school? Just a few years ago, we wouldn’t have had this difficulty. We’d have sent the kids [...]

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